Greetings,
LITHIEN:
>that is exactly my point. but then you go on and say there is no evil only
>good and give the rather benign problem of two boys being in love with the
>same girl. lets examine true evil please. something like the intentional
>destruction of human life without a purpose or need of self-preservation.
>something like the examples i have given already: the mass extermination of
>a people based on certain criteria like ethnicity, religion or race. or a
>cold blooded act like the ambush of children in a schoolyard by other
>children, or the killing and cannibalizing of others like jeffrey dohmer.
>where does this "evil" reside? where does it come from? what is its
>nature? surely you dont deny its existence?
I deny its existence as a separate reality, but here we come to the crux of the problem in human
ethics. The clashing of goods has to be seen from a specific perspective. What is good for the
inorganic level may not be good for the organic level and so on. Within this framework there is no
such thing as absolute evil, only evil relative to perspective.
The examples you give are more complex in that you are trying to ask what the levels as a whole
consider evil to be. Or, alternatively, you are asking what evil is there that is totally outside
the levels. If one asks the latter question then one concedes that the levels are not all there is,
as Pirsig claims. If you ask the former question then you fall back into an objective, 'lets sit
outside the levels and sum it all up' mentality, which is to fall back into what Pirsig calls SOM. I
suppose you might also concede that Quality (before intellectual definition) has an evil aspect, but
then the coherence problems alluded to in my last posting apply.
This is why Pirsig makes such a pig's ear of the ethical examples in Lila and this is why the MoQ
has very little specific to say about human ethics without losing all coherence or having recourse
to claiming that one simply 'intuits' them. An entirely unsatisfactory claim for those who want to
construct any sort of argument.
PIRSIG:
"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for.
That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ballgame. Good as a noun
rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of
course, the ultimate Quality isn't a noun or an adjective or anything else
definable. but, if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a
single sentence, that would be it."
Just to point out that the chap who described the dog as a good dog, thus leading Pirsig to conclude
that good was a noun, was not using the word as a noun and must have had an Aristotelian type
framework to be able to recognise the dog as a separate entity in the first place. He would look
pretty silly throwing a stick to any old value pattern if he hadn't first intellectualised it in
such a way that the collection of patterns he did throw the stick for would bring it back. Equally
he wouldn't be able to distinguish it as good unless he had first distinguished what it was that he
was distinguishing as good. To say, "It is a good dog" presupposes the concept of 'dogness' and
'itness.' The obvious criticism of my argument here is that it may be turned round on itself to say
that they must have first known it was good in order for them to know it was a dog. Firstly the 'it'
takes priority in the sentence but more importantly it denies that there can be a bad dog. There
could be a dog good, or a cat good but no dog bad because dog is a subset of good and not bad. A
perfectly good critique, and this is the connection with the above argument about good and evil. It
demonstrates that there can be no evil in the MoQ. If everything is Quality and Quality is good and
good is a noun then everything is good because a noun is a word used to identify a class of patterns
of value and that class must, a priori, be all encompassing.
On a similar note but less seriously, can anyone explain what function the word 'dog' serves in the
sentence 'It is a good dog?' If 'good' is the noun then what is 'dog?' Surely not another noun or
the sentence makes no sense whatsoever.
Struan
------------------------------------------
Struan Hellier
< mailto:struan@clara.net>
"All our best activities involve desires which are disciplined and
purified in the process."
(Iris Murdoch)
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