To: Platt
From: Rog
Re: Pirsigian Test
Hi Platt, sorry it has taken me so long to reply. I have been a busy beaver
of late.
Before going on, I need to attach a context to my answers. And the context
was the one that you set up with the questions ....namely:
"the real test is how many of those things you say you believe you’d be
willing and able to explain and defend in conversations with others at
school, at work or among friends. I’ve found the very first question the
toughest in trying to persuade others to at least consider the MOQ."
For ease of reading, my prior quotes are labeled ROG and my current comments
are titled ROGER. With this in mind, lets take on the first three questions:
1) Morality exists outside of a social/cultural context?
2) Everything on earth emerged as the result of ethical activity?
3) The world is primarily a moral order?
ROG:
If morality means quality or value ...yes. But if that is what morality
means, then why use the word "morality?
PLATT (Quotes):
Chap. 7: To answer him you have to go all the way back to fundamental
meanings of what is meant by morality and in this culture there aren't
any fundamental meanings of morality. There are only old traditional
social and religious meanings and these don't have any real
intellectual base. They're just traditions. Because Quality is morality.
Make no mistake about it. They're identical. And if Quality is the primary
reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality
of the world.
Chap. 13: What is today conventionally called "morality" covers only one
of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-
object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to
be a minor, "subjective," physically nonexistent part of the universe. But
in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another
Dynamic morality, are not only real, they are the whole thing.
PLATT adds:
you seem to want to avoid using morality
as a synonym for Quality. I thought we agreed that in the MOQ
Quality=Morality=Good=Direct Experience. So my response to your first
question, “. . . then why use the word morality?” is why not? Belief in the
MOQ depends on accepting the extension of the word “morality”
beyond the just the social/cultural context.
ROGER:
In the context of this exercise (to explain the metapysics to an outsider), I
don't see how these quotes do anything but support my position that the words
'value' or 'quality' work much better. Certainly after 468 pages of Lila,
Pirsig does a convincing job of showing that morality is a form of quality,
and that there is quality in associating all quality as a form of morality
(because in the end the MOQ is a personal ethics). However, if you want to
start off a conversation with someone at work by saying 'Everything on earth
emerged as the result of ethical activity,' or 'The world is primarily a
moral order,' you have started out the conversation in an absurd direction
that is almost guaranteed to set off every static filter in your
acquaintance's mental arsenal.
If we go to the dictionary and look up moral we get 'Moral implies conformity
to established sanctioned codes or accepted notions of right and wrong.'
This is not what Pirsig means by his extended definition of moral, but it is
similar to what your co-worker is thinking. In other words, starting a
conversation this way is more likely to distract from the quality of the
discussion than support anything. In fact, you are likely to just repeat the
Rigel conversation. You have to first redefine morality, and only then can
you get to the point of the MOQ. I find the redefinition to be of
questionable value, though I sometimes use it in this forum, and I agree that
with OUR DEFINITIONS that Quality=Morality=Good=Direct Experience.
Q4) We possess a sense of quality that is a genuine perception?
ROG:
This one seems misleading or oversimplified. Our senses are of
quality. We are of quality.
PLATT (Quotes)
Chap. 9: If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was
following he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't
have understood what you were talking about. He was just following
some vague sense of "better-ness" that he couldn't have defined if he
had wanted to.
Chap. 15: In all sexual selection, Lila chooses, Dynamically, the
individual she wants to project into the future. If he excites her sense of
Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another generation, and
he lives on.
ROGER:
Pirsig throws off all kinds of literary phrases. I would warn you against
forming them as fundamental tenets of the MOQ, though. If you are stating
that a fundamental tenet of the MOQ is that we have some type of "quality"
sense, then I strongly disagree. I think it is much more appropriate to say
that our senses and our thoughts are based on/of quality. They are qualities
that we have developed the ability to dynamically respond to/with.
Q5) Values are a separate category from subjects or objects?
ROG:
No, subjects and objects are types of value patterns.
PLATT (Quotes)
Chap. 5: The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is
that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You
can't do it. You get all mixed up because values don't belong to either
group. They are a separate category all their own.
ROGER:
I think a more defining and central concept of the MOQ is that "Matter is
just a name for certain inorganic value patterns." And that substance is "not
some independent primary reality." Both of these are from Ch12.
Q6) Morality of the biological world is based on might makes right?
ROG:
Gross oversimplification. Quality in the biological level involves the
continuation and propagation of a living pattern. Competition and
might are high quality strategies, but so is cooperation and synergy.
PLATT(Quotes):
Chap 24: What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian
social moral codes are almost completely destroyed, isn't any new
paradise the revolutionaries hoped for, but a reversion to rule by terror,
violence and gang death-the old biological might-makes-right
morality of prehistoric brigandage that primitive societies were set up
to overcome.
ROGER:
I don't disagree with the quote here, but I find your 'tenet' to be a gross
oversimplification that goes beyond anything supported by the quote. Just
because might-makes-right is a value of biology (it is) does not mean that it
is the only value of that level. I believe it is not the only value, and if
this differs from either you or Pirsig, then I am comfortable with this. I
think I can make a very strong case.
Q7)Since the 60’s there has been a drop in intellectual and social quality?
ROG:
Of course not. In fact, some people still believed in socialism back
then, and complexity theory (let alone the MOQ) wasn't even created yet.
Certainly the evolutionary advance of both is not without some plateaus
and even temporary dips. However, overall, New York is a safer,
cleaner, wealthier, more law abiding place now than it was in Lila, and
I suspect it is just as dynamic, if not more so. If the evolutionary-
advance concepts of Lila are correct, New York will be even better in
another 100 or 200 years.
PLATT (Quotes):
Chap. 24: Today, it seemed to Phaedrus, the overall picture is one of
moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution
undermined social patterns, the Hippies undermined both static and
intellectual patterns. Nothing better has been introduced to replace
them. The result has been a drop in both social and intellectual quality.
PLATT adds:
while New York city may have improved in quality since the
sixties due to an increased enforcement of law, the general decline in
intellectual and social quality in the U.S. has been documented in
numerous books, an example being “Closing of the American Mind-
How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the
Souls of Today’s Students” by Alan Bloom. But, one needn’t read
books to know there’s been a decline. Just look at the degradation of
the American Presidency by Clinton, passively accepted by the public,
along with the general decline in popular culture as exemplified in the
Super Bowl half-time show. In viewing the American scene today I’m
reminded constantly of Pirsig’s neon sign that keeps flashing
PARADISE-PARADISE, pointing to “the same low-quality thing that he
saw everywhere but which couldn't be put into words.” Economically,
technologically things are good. But moral degeneracy and dwindling
quality is evident everywhere.
ROGER:
This is one of those questions that we could argue forever on without
reaching a consensus. It is more a test of a person's disposition than of
society. I will just say that again this is not a central tenet of the MOQ,
and if anything, it contradicts the MOQ's evolutionary advancement theory
(which IS a central tenet.) I find the world to be constantly improving --
with frequent backslides -- and that is what the MOQ predicts.
We had no fundamental issues with the other Q's other than some minor
quibbles that are related to the same issue that your tenets oversimplify.
Therefore, I have not included the other answers or quotes.
Let me know your thoughts.
Rog
PS -- I have no disagreement with Jon's position on the existence of
morality. That is not the issue of discussion, it is whether the word
morality is the most moral word to start a discusion with those that haven't
read the book. Also, i enjoyed reading the other views on the Q's and
answers, but I have no fundamental argument with any of their points.
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