Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 15:19:54 +0100
Doug, Platt and the LS
How 'bout this
Quality
1. Quality is reality. Quality is the ethical principle of the Good.
Thus reality is a moral order. Quality, like reality, is known to us as
awareness. As such it is impossible to define.
The Metaphysics of Quality
2. The MoQ is the intellectual path to enlightenment. It is the nature
of the intellect to define things. Thus the purpose of the MoQ is to
define reality. The MoQ pursues the intellect so that the intellect may
be transcended.
> Doug wrote:
>
> > If you read Pirsig very carefully he is saying that, "...we know what
> > Quality is AND we don't know what Quality is..." For me, this is the
> > MoQ Uncertainty Principle! This is a key concept to the evolutionary
> > stability of MoQ, IMhO.
> >
> > Pirsig, I believe, is telling us that we can define Quality AND we
> > cannot define Quality. In ZMM, he admits that this is a contradiction.
> > But it is only a contradiction if you are loyal to SOM. In the new way
> > of thinking, we admit the existence of uncertainty in everything. It is
> > there. We cannot do anything about it. So we integrate it into our
> > philosophy.
> >
> > For me, the Principles are almost there, except for this one thing.
I'm not sure if we're looking at same aspects of the same thing but
here's my interpretation of the contradiction inherent in the MOQ.Pirsig
says that we know what Quality is. We all know, we've known all our
lives -- to exist is to know what Quality is (need we ask anyone to tell
us these things?). The problem is that Quality is a mystic concept and
it can't be contained in an intellectual concept, ie a definition. Okay,
so we've been over that before.
But the crazy thing about the MoQ is that, even though it admits that we
can't define Quality, it _is_ actually an attempt to define Quality.
So the dilemma isn't that we can and can't define. It's that we can't
but we try anyway.
Pirsig admits right at the start that the MoQ won't work. His
justification for doing it is "aw go ahead anyway". Not very scientific
maybe, but what he is saying is that he can't help himself. It's his
nature to be intellectual. Telling Robert M Pirsig not to define
something is like telling a fat man to stay out of the fridge. The
subject-object metaphysics doesn't give much credit to reasoning like
this. It would say if you know with absolute certainty that you can't do
something then you should give up. But Eastern mysticism doesn't find
anything wrong at all. "Let everything be allowed to do what it
naturally does, so that it's nature will be satisfied," says the Taoist
Chuang-tzu. "In order to contract a thing, one should surely expand it
first, " says Lao Tzu. (Both from Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics chap 8)
The MoQ says that reality cannot be defined, but the purpose of the MoQ
is to define reality. This is the inherent contradiction in it, and yes
that should probably be made more explicit. But there's nothing
uncertain about it. We will always know what Quality is, we will never
define it precisely, we will always try and define it. Those are all
certainties.
>From Chap 5
"Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and
since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a
Metaphysics of Quality is essentially a contradiction in terms, a
logical absurdity"
-- Pirsig isn't saying that we can and can't define Quality. He's saying
that we can't, plain and simple, we can't.
The only sense in which we *can* define quality, is that we can say some
things about it. Quality is sort of like this and kinda like that, we
can make vague statements, define aspects of it and give examples, but
that's all.
The sense in which we *can't* is that we can't get it precisely right,
because we don't have the words.
This is not the same as the both/and nature of reality that is
demonstrated in the wave-particle nature of light. Light is not sort of
kinda something like a wave, but if we are being precise we would say
it's a particle. It is absolutely a wave and absolutely a particle. This
is a completely different paradigm from the can/can't define Quality
one.
Last sentence
"Of course, the ultimate Quality isn't a noun or an adjective or
anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics
to Quality to a single sentence, that would be it."
In other words, we can't get it precisely right, but this is the best we
can do.
Diana
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