Platt,
Whilst whole-heartedly sharing your suspicous attitude of any proposed
entity which turns out to be indefinable, such a "fields", I should point
out that Steve Brand wasn't actually referring to such nebulous entities; he
was actually referring to quite specific entities, but was primarily
interested (in this particular observation) in the similarity between
specific processes occurring within quite reasonably defined fields. The
observation that humans use metaphors of this nature at quite a fundamental
level, to understand the world, is potentially enormously iluminating. The
"as above, so below" - type of observation may be related to a very general,
potent-but-flawed, conceptual tool which humans use because of a basic
propensity to form the type of neorological connection-system which relies
on this sort of comparison. If I'm right, it is primarily responsible for
our ability to make sense of the world at an absurdly impossible
developmental stage on the one hand, and is the source of very many
wrong-headed notions and unquestioned preconceptions on the other; two sides
of the same coin, really.
Nevertheless, the basic thrust of what you were saying here holds good for
me; as a psychologist, I am deeply indebted to the Gestalt psychologists for
their illuminating perspective which came out of a reaction against the
highly mechanical view of human perception espoused by the behaviourists.
But I still haven't a bloody clue how one may define the rather abstract,
ephemeral concepts they proposed - I've no idea what they were talking
about! (well, I'm exaggerating a bit).
But the point here is that ALL concepts should be treated with such
suspicion. I know this sounds like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but
what I'm getting at is simply that prescriptive dogma is just that, whether
it is of the sort which we might find palatable, or the opposite. And
anything which is declared as "True" is automatically elevated to the
category of "prescriptive".
And in this sense, "Quality", (capilatisation and all), may have more in
common with, say, "Nazism" than most of us would care to admit!
And my personal estimation of what Pirsig was trying to get at when atacking
the sacred cow of "science" was exactly this similar point: that "science"
as a world-view may well have proved to be jolly usefull, but we shouldn't
let that fool us into thinking that such utility 'proves' that it is
therefore "absolutely true". this in turn can be taken as an argument
against empiricism ('radical' or other); but only if one is stipulating that
'proof' is that which establishes the 'proved' as ABSOLUTE. So if one does
away with the 'absolute' as a useful concept, one does indeed seem to be
left with vague, pop-science-type "field-thingies", or wishy-washy "anything
might be right / all things are equal" relative-type non-judgements....
Unless one draws the line somewhere, and says something to the effect of
"that way lies the abyss, so I'm going to dig in and treat some particular
level of concept as 'effectively absolute', and I shall strive to have
absolute faith in it, and treat it as concrete". My feeling is that the
whole of Pirsig's intellectual fireworks were dedicated to addressing this
very dichotomy; in proposing "quality" as the fundamental bedrock of the
universe, he was actually proposing a vague, indefinable "something" or
"field", which is by its very nature scientifically un-disprovable.
Now, OF COURSE one would have to step outside science to make such a
proposal, and of course therefore one is implicitly curtailing the capacity
of a scientific world-view to provide comprehensive explanation of the
universe, and of course this may just offend those who identify closely with
the scientific professions ( I'd remind us all of George Bernard Shaw's : "
..every profession is a conspiracy against the laiety"). But the fact
remains that science's main claim to comprehensivety lies with the notion
that, as it were, 'all may eventually be explicable by dint of assiduous
application of scientific method'. In other words, empirical PROOF of the
efficacy of scientific thinking lies in the future. Which amounts to
mysticism as surely as self-avowed mysticism!
So, we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't; either way, we end up
relying on SOMETHING which is vague and indefinable.
Personally, I prefer the vague "quality" to some of the alternatives, in
terms of perceived utility; moral, practical and aesthetic. By the same
token, though, I have to admit that I could not possibly elevate this
concept to some sort of "universal objective truth", only to a level of
"objective-with-respect-to-me".
In this way, I can believe in something 'objectively true' but not
necessarily 'absolutely true'.
And this sidesteps the quandaries engendered in 2-and-a-half thousand years
of western cosmological thinking, which quandaries Pirsig ( or at least
Phaedrus) was railing against.
But, when push comes to shove, 'absolutely' proving OR disproving the notion
of DQ remains logically impossible, (Struan's sterling efforts
notwithstanding), and so surely we are left with a concept of "Quality" -
(and its reciprocal: the perception of quality), as a concept which has the
status of "an attitude" rather than a 'stuff', or 'process', or
'relationship'?
You can actually boil this own a bit further, and call an atttude a 'belief'
or even 'faith', or, in the economical parlance of science, a 'method'.
Which is how techniques such as meditation are sometimes described by
proponents.
Either way, we seem to come back, albeit unwillingly, to a sort of
mysticism, but not one which argues against science per se, merely against
the inclusivety of the scientific viewpoint. But what scientist worth their
salt ever argued for an all-inclusive capability on behalf of science? -
science never pretended to address love, or music (my own field of side
interest), art,, feelings, subjectivety, etc., etc. So various persons'
interpretations of Pirsig's intentions as 'inimical to science' may not be
all that useful, in the long run.
On the other hand, "quality" is no less vague than various other entities.
Use it when it's useful, and discard it when its not...?
cheers,
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
tel: (0114) 2661509
e-mail: peter@lennox01.freeserve.co.uk
or:- ppl100@york.ac.uk
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