Hi, John,
This is a short reply (I have to go) but I've wanted to discuss this
ever since you published your 'Organismic MOQ' paper. So here is the
beginning.
John Beasley wrote:
>
> Hullo MFers,
>
> The last question in this new topic seems the easiest to respond to. We would recognise any
> fifth level that emerged because of its quality, directly experienced, and because its moral
> imperatives clashed at some fundamental level with the imperatives of the intellectual level.
> This is assuming that Pirsig's structure is sound, of course.
>
> So what can we say of the intellectual imperatives implied in the MOQ? Despite last month's
> discussion, it seems to me that the intellect values what is 'true' over what is 'good', in broad
> terms. (Or perhaps this could be phrased differently as stating that the highest level of the
> good is true.)
John, I don't know how you can say this : the MOQ denies the existence
of truth. Truth in SOM terms is Completeness, is Absolute, and the MOQ
makes it clear that the only Absolute is Quality. Since Quality cannot
ultimately be defined, Truth or Quality won't be found in any
intellectual patterns. They are of a lower order than Quality. An Idea
can be intellectually Good, but it cannot be True.
> What Pirsig has done that transforms this, though, is make the intellectual truth
> subservient to the experience of the good, from which through a convoluted process our
> concepts of the good have actually emerged, with a lot of input from the mythos.
In my view the mythos is the static Intellect. Scientist live in a
scientific mythos, religious persons in a religious one. Those who try
to mix the two generally only give lip service to one or the other.
So the intellectual field isn't as socially polluted as some of us
believe.
> So there is a
> moderating effect on the truth as explored by the intellect: it can always be negated by the
> experience of dynamic quality. This pattern is essentially the same as the philosophy of
> science - something of a paradox given Pirsig's dislike of mainstream science. In science the
> negation of theory is achieved by experiment, while in the MOQ the intellect is empowered
> only as it conforms to dynamic experience.
>
Which is to say exactly the same : if an experiment repeatedly denies an
hypothesis, we've found something contrary to our expectections, that
is, DQ.
> While Pirsig has set up SOM as the enemy of quality, it is not clear to me that the corrosion
> of human values that marks this century is only about the loss of values. It is also about the
> loss of truth.
Of course since Truth had become the new God.
When Scientism was attacked by the hippies, the end result was...
nothing. Nothing else made sense any more in society. Utopy was dead,
the scientific management of society had shown its ugly face, and the
hippies mystic utopia had turned out to be nothing more than a drugged
fuck-fest (excuse my French). Where to go from there ?
> The later structuralists, and especially the deconstructionists, have argued that
> philosophy is about the pursuit of power, rather than truth. (Susan Blackmore's view of
> memes involved in a struggle for survival epitomises this view.)
Yuck, typical of the end of this century. When every ideal has been
trashed into the ground by cultural relativism, the only thing left is
the biological 'law of the jungle'.
> By conflating the term
> 'language' with formal systems, they have managed to convince themselves, and in so doing
> to substantially influence the mythos, in asserting that what is real is what belongs to the
> 'ontology' of whatever 'language' we are using. Knowledge is no longer a matter of justified
> true belief, it becomes a matter of correct, or warranted, assertibility. It is a system of
> propositions or statements or sentences (the terms become interchangeable), and the ideal
> of knowledge is to be found in the scientific community, beause in some sense scientific
> knowledge is taken to be empirically sound. Philosphy, and metaphysics, is much reduced in
> this world-view, because it ends up describing the propositions of an accepted body of
> knowledge, rather than prescribing them. Philosophy has no empirical function. More
> fundamentally, subjectivity is eliminated as irrelevant. In terms of subject/object metaphysics,
> the whole movement has been to eliminate the subject. Creativity has been replaced by
> productivity. Since everything is wrapped up in words, it is useles to try to get behind the
> words to some deeper reality; all that happens is that one enters an infinite regress. So
> outside of language there is only the ineffable. 'Reality' is no longer real, except as a word in
> a particular language.
>
That's the Idealist version of SOM : "It's all in your mind, buddy".
> What is required to counter this absolute destruction of human values is "a restorative
> access to reality" (Edward Pols, Radical Realism, p41) Pols goes only part way, but in
> stressing that we have access to 'direct knowing' of a primary kind, he points to what Pirsig
> has more amply described in the MOQ.
>
So the MOQ can be of use, after all... no ? ;)
> This detour into the philosophy that has tended to dominate the last quarter of this century is
> intended to point in two directions. On the one hand, it has further destroyed human values,
> and made the very idea of independant experience unthinkable. In that sense it is a subtle
> progression of the SOM type of thinking that Pirsig attacks. But at another level, it is an
> attack on the ability of the intellect to be anything other than a production of the mythos
> interacting with the mythos, generally for its own purposes, that is, to gain power. It is thus
> profoundly cynical. It seems to me that Pirsig's MOQ is rather vulnerable to this insidious
> doctrine, especially as Pirsig himself denigrates the 'me' as "just completely ridiculous" (Lila
> Ch 15) and replaces people with 'patterns of patterns'. While he accepts that we need real
> live people for these patterns to operate, they are simply the carriers of the memes, whose
> quality is unclear at the time, needing perhaps a hundred years for the quality assessment to
> become clear. Of course the people involved are by then 'ex-world'. People are useful
> fictions, in a sense. Their value is simply derived from the quality of the patterns they
> exemplify, and that value will not become clear until after their deaths.
>
There you go again. People aren't *fictions*, that's prejudice against
what's in your "mind". People are *also* intellectual patterns of value.
Deduced from Quality, and having existence at all four levels of
reality. What is more, they have a mystic reality. They are part of
Quality, part of God if you prefer. I don't understand why this is so
difficult to accept. The MOQ John describes is the Solipsist version of
MOQ, it isn't the Good MOQ, the Best MOQ, the one Pirsig wrote about :
The Mystic MOQ. (see my two-part spilllover into MD this month)
> In terms of why it matters, Pirsg's metaphysics seems rather a flop. And putting the intellect
> at the top of the heap is disastrous. "This has been a century of fantastic intellectual growth
> and fantastic social destruction. The only question is how long this process can go on." (Lila
> Ch 13) If Pirsig's MOQ was only the static levels, it would be soulless. It is rescued by his
> profound assertion that we have access to the reality of quality as encountered in dynamic
> experience. And this quality is value laden. Value is right there at the most basic level of
> experience. Or is it?
>
It is. It really is. Accept it. TRY.
> Where Pirsig's thinking fails us is in his failure to grasp the complexity of quality. Rather than
> accept that quality resides in and has value at all levels of the static hierarchy, he posits a
> replacement of each level of values by the emerging level.
Not a replacement, but a conflict.
> Of course he is partly correct.
> Often the levels are in conflict, and when this occurs the 'higher' level must overcome the
> 'lower' one to prevail. But there is a residue of value from each level that is essential to our
> human functioning. The intellect that totally ignores the body ends up in trouble, as Phaedrus
> found. Balance is required. Wisdom is not the same as intellect. We are holistic organisms,
> and while Pirsig has incisively demonstrated the value clashes between levels, he fails to
> adequately address the need for a fluid balance, changeable over time, that is perhaps best
> summarised in the phrase "the wisdom of the organism".
>
Well, I think that's a bit harsh, but I see where you're coming from. I
agree that in a typical intellectual fashion, Pirsig emphasizes the
Intellectual at the expense of the lower levels.
But still, remember that he said that ignoring the lower level was akin
to sawing the branch upon which we're seated. This might be too short
for your taste, but it's still there.
> The second failure of Pirsig's thought is in his failure to adequately address the complex
> issue of what is really 'real'. Any worthwhile metaphysics should be able to shed some light
> on fantasy. For it is clear to me that most people, most of the time, live not in the 'real' world,
> whatever that might mean, but in fantasy worlds constucted by their intellects. The power of
> fantasy is immense. Try this experiment. Attempt to hold your arms straight up over your
> head for the next hour or two. After ten minutes you are likely to be physically exhausted, and
> happy to tell me the exercise is physically impossible. Really? Visit your nearest hypnotist,
> and you will find that in a hypnotic 'trance' what was impossible becomes simple. (Thanks to
> Julian Jaynes for this example.) Intellect has produced huge benefits for mankind, and as
> Pirsig points out, has caused fantastic social destruction. It has also impinged on our
> physical beings in destructive ways, and the damage to our psyches has been immense too.
> The loneliness that is the underlying motif of Pirsigs books is clearly one of these impacts.
>
You lost me here. REAL world ? This is supposed to be pure Dynamic
Experience, no ? The Mystic Experience described in ZMM... That's the
*real* world, but nearly no one lives in it. You aren't living in it,
and neither am I (except if you're willing to claim Buddhahood).
> So, to return to the most difficult part of our question, I will venture that a fifth level is needed
> (Pirsig suggested a level of art, though it was unclear whether he was referring to dynamic
> quality, in general, or the specific quality of artistic creation which in my humble view is not
> the same as intellectual quality.) I will suggest that any emerging level will need to do the
> following things:
> a) provide for an appropriate balancing of the varying forms of quality,
> b) discriminate between dynamic quality and fantasies that mimic quality, and
> c) restore contact between people.
>
a) the MOQ does (or can do)
b) this is ridiculous, and SOMish, you can't define Quality. You have to
feel when it's phony, no one will do it for you. You have to decide
whether YOU like it or not. True Quality is an oxymoron.
c) the MOQ does (if you TRY)
> I don't have a one word answer for this, but I would suggest that the emergent level will be
> focussed on contact and awareness.
>
Which is what the MOQ says : be interested in the world, look for DQ.
But it's not a fifth level. It's a new metaphysics.
Be good
Denis
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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