Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Fri, 22 Aug 1997 21:51:11 +0100
Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> Pirsig describes static quality as an agent that "works behind" the dynamic
> forces and tries to preserve what they create. Using this idea on the levels
> of quality seems to imply that 100 million years ago (during the reign of the
> dinosaurs, long before the arrival of man (or even our ancestors, the great
> apes)) there the levels of social and intellectual quality did not yet exist.
> I'm less certain on whether it means that entirely different levels of quality
> might have arisen in their place had the dinosaurs not died out.
Now there's an interesting idea. Either completely different levels of
quality would have arisen, or the four levels that we have would have
arisen anyway. In this case the dinosaurs would have formed increasingly
elaborate social systems and then developed intellectual quality. I
wonder if they would have invented the internet;-)
My understanding of Lila is that the higher levels originate in the
lower levels though, Pirsig says that a couple of times. Therefore they
didn't exist millions of years ago. Maybe you could argue that the
potential for them existed though. If intellectual quality sprang from
social quality then its potential has been around for as long as social
quality has and even as far back as inorganic quality.
>Would you say that the levels of quality are really continuous, and that
>the levels are just terms applied to static quality by humans, but not really
>present in that quality by itself?
I think they are definitely discrete patterns as they operate
independently of each other (and often in conflict with each other). But
they are also continuations of each other. A child is a continuation of
its parents, but it is also a discrete entity.
Diana
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