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From: "John Beasley" <beasley@qld.cc>
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Diana and other MFers,
I found Diana's thoughts on this months topic generally acceptable, but
would like to look
more closely at her closing paragraph, which read
>*Who completely denies the existence of Quality?*
>I've left this till last because it's the most important point. Many people
>may know the SOM is flawed, but few Western philosophers believe in Quality
>and our mythos certainly denies its existence. And Quality, not the SOM, is
>the main subject of the book. LILA wasn't written primarily to argue
>against the SOM, it was written to argue IN FAVOUR of the MOQ. Pirsig isn't
>just trying to diss the SOM, he's trying to offer something better.
"Few Western philosophers believe in Quality and our mythos certainly
denies its existence."
I would raise modest objections to both halves of this statement. To deal
with the latter, our
mythos, which is bigger than just our society's philosophical obsessions,
does not so much
deny quality as prostitute it. Quality is just another good to be owned. If
I own a 'quality' car
then my status is improved. The value of a person is measured not just in
the number of his
or her possessions, but also in their quality. One of Australia's 1980's
magnates spent
multiple millions of dollars to buy a Van Gogh painting, a record price at
that time. I don't
know if he truly appreciated the quality of the artwork (though I suspect
he didn't), but there is
little doubt he was buying 'quality'. The quality he paid for, though, was
the quality attributed
to the artwork by the culture - and has a lot to do with fashion, rarity,
and so on. Had he been
able to get his hands on the Kohinor diamond it could quite probably have
made a very
acceptable substitute. Whereas the quality Pirsig describes is encountered
in experience,
and its reality is independant of its monetary value. In this sense
capitalism subverts quality
by pretending that the market can decide value better than our experience.
That "few Western philosophers believe in Quality" is undoubtedly true, but
that is beside the
point. The two issues that concern me here are the suggestion that quality
is a matter for
belief, and that this is belief in "Quality", where the capital Q indicates
Pirsig's ambiguous
term. I have argued before that the word "God" could be substituted for the
word "Quality" in
many of Pirsig's expressions, without significant change. I have also
argued that Pirsig was
simply wrong to assert that quality cannot be defined - I see this as quite
simply a huge cop-
out. Pirsig was at his best, in my view, when he was exploring quality in
ZMM. I think there is
value in his static-dynamic discrimination, though in my view it is far
more complex than he
pretends, and there is some value in his four level hierarchy, though it
seems to me much
less than is usually assumed, and quite misleading at the intellectual
level. So while I
generally concur with Diana that in promoting quality Pirsig was doing us a
favour, I would
also argue that his metaphysics is seriously flawed. Insofar as his appeal
is to the primacy of
value in lived experience, he deserves our congratulations.
Other people are saying this in different ways. Robert Fritz explores how
it is creative people
achieve so much quality in their lives. Most forms of therapy are posited
on an assumption
that many people live low quality lives that are capable of being improved.
The term 'quality
of life' has become a stock phrase trotted out when we examine issues such
as aging and
illness and euthanasia. There is a huge movement within the ranks of main
stream scientists
to explore purpose and value and such like terms. While subject object
thinking is still the
norm, I agree, there is ferment everywhere. The simplistic denial of values
that characterised
much of the twentieth century's thinking about science and philosophy never
did stand up,
and increasingly it is in retreat. The various forms of postmodern thought
that have largely
replaced the likes of Gilbert Ryle are no less noxious, but Pirsig seems
not to be interested in
them. Philosophers such as Pols are struggling towards ways of 'grounding'
philosophy, and
in this respect are close to Pirsig.
What worries me is when Pirsig becomes the saviour, the giver of the new
paradigm, who
must be believed rather than understood, debated and used as a resource.
Which is one
reason I seldom use the capital Q for quality. It's simply reifying
something good, and turning
it into an idol. If Pirsig is correct, there is nothing to fear from open
and even irreverent
discussion of his ideas; some of the attempts to defend the purity of his
MOQ in this forum
are therefore, I suggest, misguided and even harmful. I didn't join a cult,
but a discussion
group, or at least that's what I thought.
So yes, subject object thinking is alive and well in western society, and
to that extent is not
just a straw man. But quality has never been without its defenders, and
Pirsig has, perhaps
ineptly in philosophical terms, given a great impetus to clarifying what is
meant by quality and
how we encounter it. That some of the outworking of his thought is
misguided or wrong is
hardly surprising, and will be corrected in the fullness of time as better
quality solutions
evolve. At least that's the core message for me, and together with that I
would appeal (with
Pirsig) to my immediate experience of quality as more fundamental than any
dogma.
John B
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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