From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun May 29 2005 - 23:37:33 BST
Dearest darling focusers:
It seems there are a number of subplots surrounding our elected topic.
That's OK with me. For one of my last posts, I've taken some early quotes
from Sam and some recent quotes from Matt. It seems both of them have
misconstrued Quality, although for different reasons and with different
results. Matt thinks its the most trivial thing, the lowest common
denominator, obvious, innocuous and only a dunderhead could find it
philosophically interesting. Sam has equated with the social level
rhetoriticians and takes the following quote as expressing an
anti-intellectual stance...
Sam Norton said on Tuesday, May 10:
The Narrator then goes on to describe what Plato does with regard to arete
(excellence, aka individual worth): "Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he
asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to
destroy arete. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of
it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the
Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to
Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that has gone before." ZAMM p.342
Sam continued on the 10th:
This is a rejection of traditional metaphysics, the history of western
thought. The Narrator is objecting to the raising of dialectic over
rhetoric - and it is THIS which underlies the maxim at the beginning of the
book, 'and what is good.', because the point is that you don't need a
definition of the good in order to know what the good is.
dmb says:
As I understand it, the evil that Phaedrus sees here is not in "the raising
of dialectic over rhetoric" but rather it was Plato's attempt to make an
"ever changing, and ultimately unknowable" reality into a fixed and rigid
idea. Plato's evil here is not putting intellect over society, but in
converting the dynamic into the static. Plato's Good would have been
identical to DQ if he hadn't tried to encapsulate it. The quote Sam used
above ends with "...of all that has gone before", and continues in the next
paragraph with...
ZAMM page 342..
"That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had
seemed so close to Plato's good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the
rhetoriticians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists
who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference
was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving idea, whereas for
the rhetorician it was not an idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of
reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, and ultimately unknowable in
any kind of fixed, rigid way.".
dmb resumes:
This is where is all went wrong. This is the move that killed mysticism in
the West. This is what sent DQ underground in our culture. And I want Matt
to notice that this is also where that your dreaded metaphysical Platonism
comes from. This ever changing reality is the flux of life we know directly
and intimately like our own breath, not a static intellectual description
nor a static rhetorical description. As Anthony puts it on page 52 of his
thesis, Heidegger...
"..advanced the argument that Plato (and subsequent Western philosophers
until Nietzsche) were in error when separating SEIN from SEIENDES. According
to Northrop (1946, p.450), this is a critical separation because it is with
Plato that Dynamic Quality (given the Platonic term 'the indeterminate
dyad') was first deemed to be untrustworthy and, therefore, secondary to the
static Forms:
'Thereby, the aesthetic and emotional factors in man's nature, and in the
nature of things, were designated as mere appearances and trivial; and the
emotional and aesthetic foods which the nature of man needs for its
sustenance were deprecated and ignored. The Greek and medieval Roman
Catholic cultures had somewhat the same effect, when following Democritus
and Plato they branded the sense world as giving spurious knowledge, and
when following Plato and Aristotle they identifed the undifferentiated
aesthetic continuum [Dynamic Quality] with the principle of evil:
restricting trustworthy knowledge and the idea of the good and the divine to
the unseen theoretic component. This had the effect also of making the
cultures of East and West incompatible'."
dmb resumes:
Here I think we can see Northrop saying the same thing as Pirsig. Plato's
move to encapsulate DQ into a fixed idea was the beginning of the idea that
one's experience is "just subjective" while reality is to be found "out
there". The metaphysics of substance can be traced to this move. The
difference between Eastern and Western religions is part of the same effect.
Its huge not only in terms of historical impact, but also in getting at what
the MOQ is doing. Notice how the MOQ, as a form of philosophical mysticism,
refuses to make that move, is highly critical of that move and refuses to
define DQ. Philosophical mysticism is intellectual, to be sure, but it
insists that reality is ultimately unknowable in any static intellectual way
and asserts that DQ can only be apprehended through non-rational means. When
DQ is associated with religious mysticism, says Pirsig, it produces an
avalanche of information about Dynamic Quality.
"Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be
apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning
of history." ZAMM p.207
Hang on to that thought because it only SEEMS like we're switching topics...
Mark said:
The experience of Dynamic Quality is the same for everyone, it is only the
experiences and objects which are mentally associated with the experience
which are different. There is no difference in the liking when the liking is
independent of the things liked. Dynamic Quality is universal. No-one says
that his liking for beans is any different to someone else's liking for
carrots independently of the beans and carrots involved.
Matt said:
No one says that their "liking" for beans is any different than someone
else's "liking" for carrots, independently of the beans and carrots, because
it would be an absurd thing to say. Who cares if "liking" and "valuing" is
the same for everyone? That's the most trivial thing you could possibly
say. If that's all the "universality of Dynamic Quality" amounts to, then
it pretty much amounts to the fact that we all use the words "liking" and
"valuing" and their synonyms in the same way. Because the only way we could
know if we were all experiencing the same thing, yet independent of the
experience itself (boy, that doesn't sound very Pirsigian, does it?), would
be to say, "Hey, I like beans!" "Oh my god, I like carrots!" "Really?
Hmm. Well, we both seem to enjoy these separate experiences in basically
the same way. The lowest common denominator of our experiences must be
'liking.'"
dmb says:
I think Mark was quoting Pirsig there. In any case, I think you have very
much missed the point and that's why you see it as a trival denominator of
our experience. I would also point out that Northrop's complaint about
Platonism pretty much centers on this very kind of deprecation. (Put that on
your irony scale and weigh it, Matt. It'll probably break the springs.) But
the idea here is not to enthrone the trivial or find divinity in the lowest
common denominator, but rather to take Quality down from heaven, to rescue
it from that abstract intellectual encapsulation and otherwise bring it back
to earth.
"Quality is a word, of course, that every schlock advertiser tries to attach
to his products, but it has the advantage that it ubigutiousness, everwhere,
makes it not an esoteric, mystic term. It's a common, everyday word and I
think one of the messages of the [MOQ] is that the good life is not to be
found somewhere else, its to be found in daily life." Pirsig, as quoted on
page 59 of Ant's thesis.
Matt said:
The point is that nothing much (let alone anything philosophically
interesting) follows from the fact that we all "value," that we all
experience some things as better than others. If we take Pirsig as simply
forwarding that thesis, then we've severely hampered Pirsig's philosophical
impact. If anything, Pirsig pointing out the obvious, innocuous fact that
we all value some things over others is simply a softening up move to shake
a few dunder heads out of their sleep. I stress "a few." The really
interesting things happen after that in an argument that has to be a lot
more subtle and complex than saying, "Hey, don't you like Guinness better
than Bud Light? That's just like me liking Cezanne over Warhol!"
dmb says:
Yea, I'd definately say there's an argument after that. The basic sense of
quality, of liking and disliking, is only the beginning. From there, the MOQ
is built. In a way that reconciles East and West enlightenment with everyday
experience, the MOQ's static/Dynamic split and its evolutionary hierarchy
are like a giant spider web that has been spun out around this primary
sense....
"Northrop's name for Dynamic Quality is 'the undifferentiated aestheitc
continuum'. By 'continuum' he means that it goes on and on forever. By
'undifferentiated' he means that it is without conceptual distinctions. And
by 'aesthetic' he means that it has quality." Pirsig, on p.59 of Ant's
thesis.
"The 'nothingness' of Buddhism has nothing to do with the 'nothingness' of
physical space. That's one of the advantages of calling it 'Quality' instead
of 'nothingness'. It reduces the confusion." Pirsig, on p.60 of Ant's
thesis.
"'The Absolute' means the same as 'Dynamic Quality' and the 'nothingness' of
Buddhism, but its a poor term because of it connotations. To me it connotes
something cold, dead, empty of content and rigid. The term 'Dynamic Quality'
has oppostie connotations. It suggests warmth, life, fullness and
flexibility." Same Pirsig, same page, same thesis.
"This value is more immediate, more directly sensed that any 'self' or any
'object' to which it might be later assigned... It is the primary empirical
reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are
later intellectually constructed." Pirsig in LILA p.69
"To say that the world is nothing but value is just confusing, not
claifying. Now this vagueness is removed by sorting our values according to
levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an
inorganic patterns of value. The value that holds a nation together is a
social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other
because they are at different evolutionary levels. And they are completely
different from the biological pattern that can cause the most sceptical of
intellectuals to leap from a hot stove. These patterns have nothing in
common except the historic process that created all of them. But that
process is a process of value evoluton." Pirsig in LILA p157
dmb finally runs out of steam and so moves to a conclusion:
Its from the basic experience, the primary empirical reality that we
construct the static world. Quality is what holds that world together. Since
DQ, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, is described as ever changing,
infinite, eternal and without conceptual distinctions, it is beyond all
boundries and definitions. This is very far away from a fix, rigid idea.
This is very far away from social level rhetoric, and this is very far away
from Platonic foundationalism. Instead, we're talking about the void behind
the forms, the Buddhist no-thing-ness. in ZAMM, Phaedrus comes to realize
what Quality is only after reaching the end of his intellectual rope, after
his conflict with the Chairman, when he has to "cross that lonesome valley"
by himself...
"He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a
dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and
no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts.
Then even 'he' disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself
in it.
And the Quality, the ARETE he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for,
has NEVER betrayed, but in all that time has never one understood, now makes
itself clear to him and his soul is at rest."
For Pirsig the moment of enlightenment came as a crisis, a death of sorts.
It came suddenly when the fulitity of intellect became apparent. But this is
only one way to put those static patterns to sleep, to see the nothingness
directly again, to see the immediate flux of reality without
conceptualizations again. Its a way of stripping away all the static
interpretations that have been built up over a lifetime so the the primary
empirical reality is no longer interpreted in terms of things like subjects
and objects, nations, hot stoves and glasses of water. This the the world of
distinctions, its the maya, the illusion we all share. And when that melts
away, and, in the words of William Blake, "the doors of perception are
cleansed, we will see the world as it truely is; infinite."
Many thanks to all readers,
dmb
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