John, all
I agree you that the MoQ and Pirsig take on the issue in kind of hidden
between the lines. I'm afraid that this response to your post will raise
even further rancor from Bo's and Squonk's corner in as much as I too
will be referring to the evil W's, Wilber and Whitehead.
But first let's with Mr P.
" Life can’t exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To
cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to
cling to chaos, ...Static quality patterns are dead when they are
exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change.
But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force
to protect Dynamic progress for degeneration. Although Dynamic
quality, the Quality of Freedom, CREATES this world in which we live,
these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, PRESERVES our
world. Neither static or Dynamic Quality can survive without the other."
Lila-pp 121
So under the MoQ, Dynamic Quality creates, Static Quality preserves. So
is Pirsig a "creationist?"
Yes, if, a "creationist" is one who believes, as Whitehead put it, that
"The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty."
And as others have noted with Pirsig quote on "teleological" theories, I
don't think he would disagree when in "A Brief History of Everything"
Wilber says, ".... There is a formative drive, a telos, to the Kosmos.
It has a direction. It is going somewhere." "Somewhere", in Pirsig's
case, as others have pointed out is, paradoxically both away from, and
towards Dynamic Quality through higher, emerging levels of static quality.
No, if , again with Wilber, by "creationist" one means:
".... the fundamentalists, the "creationists," seize upon these
vacancies and in the scientific hotel [created in science by advances
like quantum and chaos theories] to pack the conference with their
delegates. They see the opening -creativity is ABSOLUTE- and they equate
that absolute with their mythic god, and they stuff this god with all
the characteristics that promotes their own egotic inclinations,
starting with the fact that if you don't believe in this particular god,
you fry in hell forever, which exactly reflects the state of mind of
those who believe this brutal notion" (A Brief History of
Everything-Wilber p27)
When Einstein in "Cosmic Religious Feeling" asks, " Now what are the
feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in
the widest sense of the word?" He answers that a hiearchy emerged, first
with a primitive "religion of fear", based on "fear of hunger, wild
beasts, sickness, death" followed by a "social or moral conception of
God",... a God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and
punishes,... according to the limits of the believer's outlook" And "In
general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally
high minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this
level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs
to all of them, even though it is rarely found in its pure form: I shall
call this cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate
this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there
is no anthorpomorphic conception of God corresponding to it..... The
religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of
religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God concieved in man's
image; so there can be no church whose central teachings are based on
it. Hence it is precisely amoung the heretics of every age that we find
men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were
in many cases, reguarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes
also as saints"
The characteristics of this third level of religious experience Einstein
says are: "The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims
and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in
nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him
as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single
significant whole."
Pirsig, Wilber, Whitehead, James, Schopenhauser,Spinoza, and many many
others, each in their own way, explore this "high country of the mind".
I think Pirsig would rightly place the first to levels of religious
experience ("religion of fear" and "moral religion") on the social
level. But as I asked DMB a while back, "Where would Pirsig put
theology?", By "theology" I mean the study of the value, the quality, of
religious experiences. I think he would qualify it as an intellectual
pattern of value, maybe one of the earliest. And of those experiences
those that rise to the cosmic, the mysic, are of the highest value. And
domain of these experiences is both somewhere beyond the intellect and
rooted in "direct everyday experience"
But I am assuredly wrong, and expect many to be kind enough to tell me
just how this is so.
3WD
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