Hello John, and All.
I have just worked through your recent essay.
This is a low quality piece in my view.
Your last paragraph is particularly poor:
Yet this is not the whole story. Pirsig's agonies as he explores his past and
seeks some closenes with his son in 'Zen' can grip us in a way that makes the
sub theme of quality seem important. It is ironic that 'Zen' explores the
limits of the intellectual explorer, who encounters madness, in his obsession
with understanding, while in 'Lila', eleven thousand slips later, the same
obsession returns.
ZMM is primarily concerned with quality.
I don't know how long your essay is, but to find this statement at the end
makes one wonder if the piece is a comedy?
ZMM and Lila wrote themselves.
That is to say, DQ mediated via patterned Pirsig wrote it.
It appears your essay is very much a product of your own invention John.
Nothing important has been learnt. As an intellectual project the metaphysics
of quality is of interest to system builders.
One cannot build a system upon DQ.
DQ hates systems.
Static patterns are provisional in a scientific sense, but are explicitly
moral.
The MOQ indicates a paradigm shift from facts to values.
This is not merely interesting, it is High quality.
Yet in as much as Pirsig cares about quality, and succeeds in communicating
that concern through the artistic code of the novel, his writing does become
an authentic finger pointing to the moon of quality. The tragedy is that he
focuses his effort on the metaphysics, the intellectual structure, rather
than on the path, the educational process through which each of us might in
time find more immediate access to the dynamic quality inherent in our
existence.
You could have replaced your whole essay with this and raised the overall
quality of the experience.
Even though this last section is loaded with contradiction and confusion.
Keep it short John, keep it short.
Best wishes,
Squonk. :-)
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