Truth seekers,
I wrote:
>> The MOQ doesn't assert that the MOQ is the truth. It just asserts that
>> it's a good intellectual pattern.
Platt wrote:
>What’s your point? The MOQ asserts that “Truth is a static intellectual
>pattern within a larger entity called Quality.” (Lila, Chp. 29). Surely
>Pirsig
>thinks the MPQ is true, i.e., a static intellectual pattern, and a good
>one at
>that.
The fact that truth is a static intellectual pattern doesn't mean that all
static intellectual patterns are true. I agree Pirsig thinks the MOQ is a
static intellectual pattern. I don't think he believes it's true in the
sense of corresponding to some external fact-world.
>My point was that having made the assertion that truth is a good intellectual
>pattern, the question can be asked, “Is that assertion true?” suggesting as
>Peter Lennox pointed out that an “overall truth without edges or limits”
>exists
>as a necessary but unprovable postulate to logical thought.
I thought Peter was using overall truth as a synonym for Quality.
>Looks to me like truth as an intellectual pattern is also within a larger
>(unpatterned) entity called Truth which in turn is subsumed under Quality.
>The ancient philosophic trinity of “Beauty, Goodness and Truth” becomes in
>the MOQ the genus “Goodness” with Beauty and Truth subordinated as
>species.
When he says truth is subordinated under Quality he's talking about the
static intellectual pattern. There isn't any other intermediate realm of
truth, or at least he certainly doesn't mention any, and you'd have to
redefine the whole thing to include one.
>The existence of an overall, unpatterned Truth without limits also suggests
>that knowledge is not limited to logic and facts but that we innately possess
>a higher form of understanding. Our innate, visceral response to Quality
>suggests a similar intimate knowledge of something so much a part of us
>(reality) that we cannot put it into words.
Well I agree that understanding isn't limited to logic or words, but I
don't see the need to invent an entirely new category to explain this.
What's wrong with Pirsig's categories?
Obviously the question that has to be answered before that one can be is,
what is truth?
Can we go back a bit then and I'll have a go ...
In ZMM Pirsig says that there used to be no distinction between truth and
good. (p336) Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal
Principle, the One Truth, God is separate from appearance and from opinion.
It is here that the classical mind for the first time took leave of its
romantic origins and said, "the good and the true are not necessarily the
same."
2000 years later it seems we have two major concepts of truth.
(yes there are other concepts but I think these two are the ones we need to
discuss here)
The first is the linguistic truth which corresponds to fact. I think this
is the most common concept of truth. Snow is white. The dog is barking. The
truth corresponds to some feature of the external universe, physical or
non-physical. The language is not be the same as the fact, but it is
licensed as a valid metaphor. Truth as neutral linguistic symbols
representing an assumed external fact world. Truth as language that can
match reality.
To borrow Peter Lennox's illustration:
> we split the overall
>"everything-and-everywhere-ness" of our environment into things, and
>processes, and concepts, and relationships between all of these. (I should
>say that 'perception' is my field of study). And doing this is what we call
>'understanding' the world (as far as we can be said to do so). But it is
>important to understand that those subdivisions we choose are not the
>'units' that the world is made of -it isn't strictly a reversible process.
The correspondence truth assumes that the subdivisions we impose DO have a
factual reality. I think that's the subject-object idea of truth. But
Pirsig reduces correspondence truth to a value pattern, ie the divisions
are useful, but we shouldn't consider them fact.
The other truth would be the kind of Truth as Good, which has a profundity
that could justify a capital letter. It is not so much a fact about reality
but the condition of being in sync with reality. It is reality directly
experienced. Truth as the godhead, residing in the computer chip, and the
lotus flower.
So the Greeks split truth as corresponding fact, and truth as good, and
that caused no end of problems, and now Pirsig comes along and wants to
repair the damage done. He calls the first truth intellectual patterns and
the second truth, good or Quality.
I suppose he could have called Quality Truth, but he actually seems to be
trying very hard to avoid that. Perhaps because it would have led to too
much confusion. He would just be painting himself into a corner if he were
to say Quality is Truth because then it seems he's saying Quality is an
external fact. To solve it he leaves the first kind of truth alone, but
puts it into the context of Good. He chooses not to offer Truth as a
synonym for Good, and he specifically states that he does not believe Good
or reality to be some "Hegelian Absolute".
For those of you who don't have the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
handy, Hegel (1770-1831) was a German idealist. In his early years he was
preoccupied with the problem of a systematic philosophy, a way of
accounting for the basic categories of the natural world and for human
practical activity that would ground all such categories on commonly
presupposed and logically interrelated principles. One of his most famous
phrases is "what is actual is rational". In other words, Absolute
Knowledge, or truth, is something that can be understood completely and
rationally.
(yes obviously there is more to Hegel, but still I think this is the
Hegelian concept that Pirsig is referring to)
Ironically, though, the MOQ itself looks like the very kind of pattern
Pirsig claims cannot reflect reality. It draws a rational intellectual map
of reality and presents this map using the medium of language. The reality
it proposes isn't entirely rational, but it is still a logical outline,
albeit one that leaves room for undefined elements.
I don't really think it's a contradiction, but to see that we have to pay
attention to details and understand the context in which Pirsig presents
his theory. Did Pirsig ever say it was the truth? No, he specifically says
it's an intellectual pattern and he says that it doesn't really make sense
to ask whether it is true or not. He never claims many truths correspond to
an external fact. He admits the usefulness of reason, but he denies that
reality is rational. Did he say the MOQ was the highest moral pattern then?
No, he didn't even say that. He himself admits that reality is only
understood by direct experience. He only said one moral thing on the whole
trip remember, when he was caught by surprise and didn't have time to think
of an intellectual answer.
So we have a metaphysics that admits the limitations of metaphysics.
The big problem with intellectual truths is that they are expressed in
language and language is not value-free, although we treat it as if it
were. We try to express what we see but we get caught in all kinds of
self-referential traps. The relationships we are discussing are filtered
through words, and these words only have meaning within the context of a
huge background of fixed grammatical and conventional assumptions. This
loads up everything we say with metaphysical meaning as soon as we open our
mouths. It's a category mistake. The belief that language is a neutral tool
for classifying truths is completely bankrupt.
Even Peter Lennox's description of "everything-and-everywhere-ness" still
leaves itself open to the question, do you consider this description to be
truth?
Pirsig gets round it all by denying the existence of an external logically
consistent fact-world in the first place. Is the MOQ true? What do you mean
by true? Does it correspond to reality? No, it is not possible for language
to correspond to reality because language is not a mirror of reality, nor
can any speaker or writer separate themselves from reality. So what's the
point of the MOQ? The point is that it's good. That's all you can say.
Diana
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