Hi Gary,
I looked at your essay and found it a bit long!
Will have to look into it more carefully.
For now i just wish to say this and welcome comments from all MOQers:
1. The handful of sand analogy.
The 'world from which' the handful is taken is Quality.
The handful of sand itself appears to represent Romantic quality.
Classic quality is a sorting of this handful.
2. The schematic p. 252.
Here Romantic quality and Classic quality are split into two worlds.
Both are derived from Quality.
My concern has been to clarify weather the Romantic/Classical (C/R)
distinction is dualism in a parallel sense or dualism in a linear sense?
Does the C/R split exist side by side or does Classic quality emerge or
condense out of Romantic quality?
Much that Pirsig says suggests an ambiguity here, but we have:
3. The Train analogy.
Quality is the track.
Romantic quality is the leading edge of the train, Forms capable of change.
Classic quality is the engine/coaches.
The entity 'Train' can be viewed as Romantic or Classic.
Classic is here identified as Static.
Romantic is identified as Dynamic.
Quality is left alone but we are left in little doubt as to it being the
source of both Static and Dynamic.
Harmonising these analogies we have:
1. Quality. Track. World.
2. Romantic. Leading surface. Handful.
3. Classic. Engine/coaches. Sorting.
This does not quite fit in my view, but i do not feel it should be expected
to either.
Rather like Plato's three similes in his Republic, it is not at all
straightforwardly a matter of harmonising elements within each of them.
However, Romantic quality in the Train analogy is more than sense perception?
Here, the leading edge selects from infinite possibility the best hypothesis
for the mathematician (Poincare), and the best place to put the word for the
artist (Phaedrus)?
Formula and books are static.
Mathematicians and Rhetoricians are Dynamic.
I feel if we follow this we have to come to a point where visual and aural
experiences would have to be regarded as epistemic independent of human
observers; public memory.
Objects of art may be considered to be just as much a part of memory as one's
shopping list?
Just because the leading edge deposits static knowledge in individuals, this
may not exclude statues, symphonies, novels, RAM's and other social memory
from Classic quality.
After all, even mechanics consult the workshop manual now and again?
In this case, Classic quality has to some extent left the human, which would
appear to require a new definition of human in a technological society?
Romantic quality, the 'form capable of change'' appears to be silting up
reality with entities that exist longer than individual humans. For this
reason, i feel confused about the difference between Quality and Romantic
quality, for one may wish to ask the question, 'If that which is responding
to Quality is different from Quality and Classic quality, and if Classic
quality exists beyond humans in social artefacts, can Romantic quality also
exist beyond humans and still respond to Quality?
All the best,
Squonk.
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