Squonk,
Squonk: "Argumentation is an art that derives its value from the same
quality that generates a sunset. Looking at the argument or sunset is to
see an argument or a sunset. Pirsig invites us to look at quality behind
the argument and sunset. To suggest the quality that produces an argument
is not the same as that which produces a sunset is to miss the point.
Static filtering produces disagreement - static filtering accrued over ones
life. Matt has been working most diligently on his static patterning and
has now discovered he is unhappy. And i fear his unhappiness will increase
the more he reads, for he is mistaking what he reads for that which
produced it.
Coping with reality instead of experiencing it is a rather defeatist?"
Though you offer an interesting psychological profile of me, one I can't
say I agree completely with, you do offer the Quality insight that Pirsig
offers. Quality is what connects everything. At root, we make appraisals
and reappraisals of things based on how we value them.
Arguments tend to "force" one static pattern upon everyone else. The
purpose of arguments is to align everyone along the same static pattern; to
force them down the same dialectical path. Pirsig makes this same
discovery when the Professor asks his personal opinion about cookery. "His
mind races on and on, through the permutations of the dialectic, on and on,
hitting things, finding new branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger
at each new discovery of the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this
'art' called dialectic. ... Phaedrus' mind races on and on and then on
further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched
in himself, which pretends to try and understand love and beauty and truth
and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real
purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic--the
usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is
Good and seeking to contain it and control it." (Ch 29, 369-70)
So, naturally I acknowledge that Quality is behind arguments and sunsets.
Who here (other than the "heretics") doesn't? The question is, as it was
for Pirsig, which has more value, rhetoric or dialectic? The answer for
myself and Rorty is the same as it was for Pirsig: rhetoric is the
fountainhead from which dialectic springs. And what rhetoric plays with is
Quality.
Matt
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