Diana wrote:
----Original Message Follows----
Squad
The new program will be no 6, voting results are at the bottom.
In LILA (chapter 12) Pirsig writes:
"If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics- Inorganic, Biological,
Social, and Intellectual- nothing is left out. No "thing," that is. Only
Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent."
However, without the "encyclopedia" Pirsig speculates over in the above
quote, assigning specific patterns to one of the various levels is often
nothing more than a guessing game. In some cases, two levels may appear to
lay claim to the same pattern. And often a given moral situation seems to
allow for various interpretations of how the levels may be applied. This
problem often creates a "post-hoc MoQ" in which the levels are applied only
to justify some preordained conclusion.
If one grants to the MoQ everything it claims for itself it should function
as both a metaphysical description of reality and framework for deducing the
"solutions" to problems of value and morality. LILA gives us plenty of
information on how the levels (and DQ) should interact with each other but
its descriptions of the contents of each respective level are at best vague.
Most importantly, the MoQ doesn't even claim to give a method of "deducing"
what patterns fit where. But, without this ability the MoQ can never fulfill
either of its two primary functions.. After all, the MoQ can have no value
in moral or metaphysical thought if the thinker must always check with
Robert M. Pirsig to know if he's correctly applying the levels..
I propose that this month we scan LILA for clues and share our ideas on
whether assigning patterns to levels is an 'art' or a 'science'. and if
there's no such 'science', does this leave the MoQ open to charges of being
nothing but an elaborately veiled emotivism?
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Hello
Early Sunday morning I like to walk into town and sit a while at the
Internet Cafe, sipping coffee and catching up on my email. On my way in this
morning I took a different route than my normal one and I walked by a church
with a gravel parking lot. There was a man working there, smoothing the
gravel out with a hand rake. A large tractor stood behind him with an
end-loader attached and I assumed the man had already been over the whole
parking lot with it and now he was concerned with manicuring the few holes
he might have missed with his large machine.
I wondered if any of the parishioners would notice how smooth the parking
lot was when they pulled into church in a few hours, and I wondered if it
mattered to the man working in the parking lot whether any of them noticed.
I stopped there for a rest on a large boulder that lay beside the road
overlooking the church and watched him while I smoked a cigarette.
The man seemed totally oblivious to everything around him except for the
gravel, which he would carefully survey by kneeling down close to ground
level, then walk to the low areas he had spotted and resume his raking. He
seemed about my age. His total intent sparked something undefined and it
flickered between the man and me as I sat there smoking and watching him and
I knew exactly why he was there in the empty church parking lot on this
early Sunday morning: he simply had nowhere else to be, just like me.
Otherwise he would have been hurrying his task towards completion and it was
clear to me there was no hurry to his movements.
Let's focus for just a minute on that undefined something that flickered
between the man working in the parking lot and me as I sat watching him. It
comes as a knowing, arising from some very quiet place deep inside/outside
of me and I am very familiar with the feeling and yet at a complete loss for
words when it comes to defining it unless I have some framework in which to
reference such knowledge. The problem with such a framework begins when the
framework itself is taken for reality.
Just as soon as we begin assigning moral evolutionary static patterns
discrete values we have somewhere to go and we begin to hurry. We grow
confused. We begin to judge. The value of the MOQ, for me, is its expanded
framework, which allows a person to see how we as humans can at times become
ensconced in judgement and tend to neglect what we call "gut instinct" or
intuition. The MOQ gives us a tool to deal with the whole picture of that
evolving experience we call reality but only if we let go of some cherished
notions tending towards judgement and stasis, or what Robert Pirsig might
call SOM; a classical scientific objectivistic outlook on life.
A real knowing arises when all judgements are put aside. The intellect
clouds our sense of reality with how it believes the world to be. The MOQ
tells us there is so much more to reality and it is always happening
simultaneously, always underlying this stream of consicousness we call
awareness. All we have to do is set aside judgements concerned with ANY
framework of reality.
Wanda the waitress silently fills my cup as I pound out these words;
hen-pecking at the keys, hunched over, like the man in the church parking
lot, carefully arranging each stone in its place, surveying the scene and
rearranging until I feel everything is right, somehow, though if pressed I
cannot really say why I feel it is right. Wanda always gives me this curious
glance as she is leaving the table after refilling my cup, as if she wants
to speak but cannot find what it is she wishes to say to me. And me, I have
a propensity towards writing but I find scant little to say in the actual
presence of others at this time in my life. I have done with most of it and
sometimes it seems to me that only the dying remains to be done with and
that scares me a bit, I must admit. Perhaps that is what Wanda wishes she
could say to me: "When I was young I wished to define my path but now my
fondest wish is to die in my sleep."
As the parishioners drive into the parking lot of these words, will they
notice the care I have taken with them? Or will they simply park their cars
and go into the church, content in their worship of a framework of reality
kept in place by smoke and mirrors? Does it even matter? If I were hurrying
somewhere, yes. But I am not. All I have is my caring. And caring is about
value. That is where it all starts, and ends.
Any beginning has its own end, pre-ordained, if you will, built right into
it by very virtue of being. There is a correspondence in our perception of
what we call reality outside which no reality exists. This is illustrated in
a nice way with the chicken-or-egg-first question. It is not a matter of us
granting the MOQ anything, but rather perhaps you might say we are granted
one man's vision of how reality might be interpreted if one cares to
interpret it in the first place.
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