Benjamin F Schafer and MOQ focussers
Welcome to the "quality discussion" and thanks for a new slant to
our ongoing struggle to understanding Pirsig's ideas. You wrote:
> I do have some disturbing thoughts to share on the underlying models
> expressed throughout the threads. The thoughts, at least, are
> disturbing to me! In my reading of Robert M. Pirsig's works on the
> Metaphysics of Quality, I have not encountered any teleological
> approach by Robert M. Pirsig to answering big questions. The
> discussions' postings all seem to have a set of suppositions that the
> MOQ was developed/discovered with a purpose to define the 'next big
> thing'. I would like to suggest that this idea or MEME
> virus of the mind) is an artifact created by each of our own
> experiences.
> We want a happy ending or to be able to predict what happens next.
> Please bear with me for a few short moments and then, hopefully the
> underlying concepts that are bothering me will be exposed through the
> use of the MOQ.
Hmm. Teleological approach? (Teleology according to my
dictionary:
"Theory, teaching, belief that events and developments are
due to the purpose or design that they are serving (as
opposed to the mechanistic theory of the universe)."
No mocking, but I believe that the MOQ escapes either
classification by relegating it to the SOM which puts mechanistic
in the 'O' class and the teleological in the 'S'. As you well know,
the MOQ claims to have rejected the SO division. If you insist that
nothing can escape such an analysis you have constructed a new
metaphysics :-).
The "language" part of the message was an impressive one if only I
were sure that I understand what you mean.
> Language is the current medium of communicating and as such
> understanding it(language) presents a formidable barrier to accurate
> and clear expression of the mental processes we each undertake in the
> dialogue of the MOQ. I defer to Steven Pinker in his "The Language
> Instinct, How the mind creates language" for a much longer and very
> precise description of language and its place in the human condition.
> The short version is "Language is a site specific suborgan or system
> in the physical brain." Language does not consist of "English, or
> Spanish or Bilt!thong" but of a universal grammar that preexists the
> audible word in each brain.
This is obviously enough, except for the "universal grammar" part. I
know next to nothing about this but have heard it said that the indo-
european languages and their subject-predicate-object grammar
differ fundamentally from other language structures and create a
particular reality for the users different from other. For example the
monstrosity of "being dead".
> The language connection to
> MOQ was traversed by Robert M. Pirsig in his pursuit and use of
> rhetoric. Rhetoric is a tool with which to approach understanding of
> the MOQ but it is not without is flaws as a tool. If we confuse
> language with MOQ than examination of language with MOQ raises the
> fallacy of using a tool to build the very tool in use, not unlike
> Escher's Hand drawing a Hand sketch.
Correct, many confuse language with the MOQ in the sense that
they want the intellectual level to be language, and as they also
claim that the MOQ is an intellectual construct ..voila MOQ is
language! I agree when you assert that
> I assert that language can usefully be examined by using MOQ because MOQ
> preexists in the creation of the "mind or intellect" 'before'
> language.
....even with the "mind or intellect" bit, because I feel to have come
to grips with how the mental or mind quality came to be stuck with
the Q intellect (see my Mon.25 Oct message to Keith Gillette). I
don't know if you have followed our meanderings long enough for it
to mean anything?
I guess that it is our speculations over a fifth level that have
triggered your reaction, but a possible development beyond
intellect is no "goal" - at least not in an eschatological sense. It's
no deliverance or happy end, but merely another turn of the static
wheel. Pirsig even says that the development may be seen as
evolving "away from" rather than towards something.
> Thank you. Of course the ideas and opinions expressed here-in are the
> sole responsibility of the author.
Understood :-)
Bodvar "Bo"
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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