In a message dated 7/30/02 8:42:48 PM GMT Daylight Time,
mpkundert@students.wisc.edu writes:
> 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
>
Hi Matt,
Are you not spinning around and chasing your own tail?
In an effort to impress friends in the forum, have you not confused yourself
into a heap?
Impress your friends a little more and provide a definition of quality for
them.
Squonk.
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