Keith A. Gillette (gillette@tahc.state.tx.us)
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 04:48:57 +0100
Lila Squad,
This is my first post, so I'm apologizing in advance for making any
newbie
mistakes. Don't hesitate to point them out. The path to quality is
through
feedback and correction. :-)
To the previous pronunciation question: Like most, I think, I say Lila
with
a long "i": "Lie-luh", as that's how I've heard the female name
pronounced.
However, since reading Fritjof Capra's *The Tao of Physics*, I've
assumed
that Pirsig picked this name because in Hindu mythology *lila* means
"the
play of God", "the creative activity of the Divine" (Capra, 87), a
"rhythmic play which goes on in endless cycles, the One becoming the
many
and the many returning to the One" (Capra, 198). This seems to be what
Pirsig alludes to on page 6, when he writes, "[t]here is Lila, this
single
private person who slept beside him now, who was born and now lived and
tossed in her dreams and will soon enough die and there is someone
else--call her *lila*--who is immortal, who inhabits Lila for a while
and
then moves on." Lila Blewitt of Rochester, New York is a transient
player
with a bit part in this grand divine play, but through her performance,
we
may discover something of the meaning of the play and perhaps of the
playwrite, as well. I'm afraid I don't know how to pronounce the Hindu
*lila*, if that connection were valid. (Has anyone asked Pirsig if it
is?)
At 5:07 PM +0000 2/9/98, Diana McPartlin wrote:
>So I'd like to make a request for examples of what's wrong with the SOM.
Pirsig mentions a lot of these problems in both *ZMM* and *Lila*. He has
to, of course, otherwise he wouldn't have any reason to knock down SOM
and
try to replace it with MoQ. (That's why Bodvar's assertion on needing to
talk about SOM when explaining MoQ is often true. In modern culture,
most
of MOQ is *common sense*. One must poke some major holes in this
framework
before anybody will want to give it up.)
In this task, Pirsig has the advantage of a semi-fictional universe
under
his command, many well-written chapters of persuasive prose, and years
of
rhetoric training. He brings all of these to bear on poking holes in SOM
and in building up MoQ. I think it's far more difficult to try to
directly
convince a person of the deficiencies of SOM without these tools.
Examples
are the way to do it, of course, but even so, the examples offered to an
individual must be personally meaningful to them otherwise s/he will
likely
shrug it off with "so what". That's merely an argument for having a lot
of
examples, I guess. But we're not arguing whether we need examples or
not,
just looking for some, so here's a start ...
1. Values are subjective in SOM
This is, of course, the MoQ's primary differentiating characteristic.
For
some, of course, this is not a problem. Tell the true believers in SOM,
the
cultural and moral relativists, that SOM says there's no right and no
wrong
'except thinking makes it so' and they'll agree with you. They are happy
with this situation, so getting them to see this as a problem will take
additional work. Perhaps asking them if they think that the atrocities
of
the holocaust (or some similar abomination) should have gone unchecked
would do the trick. They'll be forced to concede that there's some
'external' value system by which actions should be judged or else be
caught
in the contradiction inherent within the relativist framework of judging
another group's actions by your standards.
Most people, however, don't operate strictly within the SOM, and have
beliefs about values that fall outside its boundaries. They either
believe
in a god who lays down moral rules or believe in some kind of human
rights,
perhaps based on some natural law theory. Arguing that SOM makes values
purely subjective (therefore arbitrary and subject to human caprice)
won't
faze them, since they don't strictly believe in SOM and think they
already
have a viable, universally valid value system to guide human actions.
These
points must be challenged on different grounds. Given this fact, the
usefulness of this "hole" in SOM in explaining MoQ is questionable.
2. Subjects are "less real" than Objects in SOM
A metaphysics of substance leads to over-reductionism, where all
phenomena
are explained by drawing causal relations between the phenomenon in
question and the lowest/most fundamental level of reality: usually the
physical world. Pirsig talks about this tendency in *Lila* where he goes
on
about explaining the behavior of the chemistry Professor in terms of
his/her chemical properties in chapter 12. A more reasonable approach
allowed by MoQ is to explain/predict phenomena in terms of the
evolutionary
level on which it occurs, and then explain the connection between that
level and the next lower level.
This is dangerous business, however. SOM's seeming insistence on
explaining
phenomenon in terms of physical properties has been *fantastically*
successful over the past 500 years or so (as Pirsig notes on page 7 of
his
"Subjects, Objects, Data and Values" paper, presented at the 1995
*Einstein
Meets Magritte* conference in Brussels). Grounding our theories in
physical
reality keeps us from flights of fancy, from continually inventing
imaginary objects like aether and phlogiston (or ESP, or the etherial
plane). When the evidence procedures for science are followed, though,
it
seems reasonable to relax the implied requirements that everything be
explained in terms of hard physical realities and allow ourselves to
explore (with rigor) the static laws that govern the interactions within
and between the "subjective" value patterns, opening up all sorts of
interesting paths in the social science fields (see *Lila* chapter 8).
If
we don't keep these strict scientific evidence procedures, however, our
imaginations produce all kinds of wild stories with no assured
correspondence to the patterns we're trying to explain, so all we end up
doing is making new myths for ourselves.
I don't know how useful an example this is in persuading another to look
at
MoQ, however. Most people aren't scientists and those who are don't
generally bother much with metaphysics. I came to a fuller appreciation
of
Pirsig's works through some systems science courses I took in college,
so
this example speaks to me, but perhaps not to many. I also fear I have
not
explained it very well.
3. Hume says it's wrong
Pirsig goes on for some time in chapter 11 of *ZMM* on Hume's attacks on
causality in the metaphysics of substance and Kant's reply to that and
how
MoQ overcomes that problem. Similar stuff may be found in chapter 8 of
*Lila*. The trouble is, who cares? Only a very few philosophologists
would
be willing to carry on a casual conversation on these lines.
4. MoQ explains problem of 'goallessness' in evolution and of
'causality' in QM
I'm not sure I completely understand all of Pirsig's arguments here, but
in
chapter 11 of *Lila*, he talks a lot about all the problems in science
that
can be eliminated by SOM. Again, not too useful when taken as individual
persuasive techniques (see #2 above).
Whew! OK, after looking at the SOM problems Pirsig points out, I can't
say
that any of them alone make very good examples to use in explaining MoQ.
It's all of these little things taken taken together that make the case.
For me three things persuade me to value MoQ above SOM: A) The overall
explanatory force of MoQ appears stronger than SOM. (Which is still a
pretty damn good way to divide up the universe--look at the practical
utility of common sense and the science and technology that have sprung
from this world-view). Even so, MoQ unifies many separate fields into an
overarching theory. B) The core tenet of MoQ, that of Dynamic Quality,
tells us that the static tenets of MoQ are just another intellectual
construction of the undefinable DQ, perhaps superior to SOM, but still
ultimately limited and flawed. Gotta like a theory that admits its own
limitations. C) Related to #1, values are placed in the primary position
in
the system, freeing morality from religious doctrine and giving it a
rational basis that's integrated with everything else. This last point,
a
sort of Nietzschean 'transvaluation' as I heard someone on USENET call
it,
is most important to me. It provides a fresh framework within which one
may
analyze moral questions.
Cheers,
Keith
P.S. Is it just me or is GeoCities PAINFULLY s l o w ?
______________________________________________________________________
gillette@tahc.state.tx.us -- <URL:http://www.detling.ml.org/gillette/>
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