Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 06:09:12 +0100
Dear Platt, Dave and squad
Platt wrote:
> Morality
> Morality is a synonym for Quality. A phenomenon is considered more moral,
> or of higher Quality, to the extent that it supports and advances freedom.
>
> Your "perpetuates freedom" sounds a bit too "static" for my liking.
And Dave said:
> Morality
> Morality is a synonym for Quality. An phenomenon is considered moral, right,
> or good to the extent that it enhances freedom. (or promotes freedom,
> perpetuates feels static)
.. perpetuates, supports, advances, enhances, promotes? The only thing
I'm worried about is that we might be saying that supporting freedom is
more moral than freedom itself. I think I would go for "advances
freedom" as it seems to include freedom as well as anything that helps
us reach for more freedom.
> I sympathize with your problem with low and high quality in that it implies
> there is another way to split reality other than Dynamic/static. I
> struggled with that, too. It seems Pirsig wants to have it both ways.
> Here's my solution (rationalization?)
<<snipped solution (rationalization?)>>
For what it's worth my solution to the hot stove example was to say that
it's not that he perceives the hot stove as low quality, it's that he
perceives that getting off the stove is high quality. In other words the
urge to get off the stove is the Dynamic Quality. But I backtracked on
that because Pirsig also says that Dynamic Quality can be negative.
I need to take a little more time to go over your solution. I
sidestepped the hi-lo problem the first time I noticed it and now it's
come back with a vengeance.
My first impression is that your solution says two different things. One
is that both Dynamic and static quality have hi and lo divisions within
them. But that can't be right. Dynamic Quality shouldn't have any
divisions. And this doesn't account for hi-quality combinations of DQ
and SQ.
The other is that there is a hi-lo split in the universe that is
completely separate from the Dynamic-static split.That may be so, but it
creates all kinds of problems. The thing that makes the Dynamic-static
split more moral than the subject-object split is that the
Dynamic-static split contains the subject-object split within it (as a
static pattern). If the Dynamic-static split is to be better than the
hi-lo one then it should encompass it too. But it doesn't. The very fact
that we've said "The *best* way to split Quality" implies that we've
made the hi-lo split first and put the D-S split inside it. On the other
hand the MoQ is an intellectual pattern so our "best" means the highest
quality intellectual pattern.
As you can see I'm not clear about this at all. >:|
Diana
-- post message - mailto:lilasqd@hkg.com unsubscribe/queries - mailto:diana@asiantravel.com homepage - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4670
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:42:39 CEST