Hi again Elephant
> About your latest response, I have two points to make.
>
> 1. You dispute my acount of Pirsig as claiming that something he calls
> quality, and later comes to call dynamic quality, is an undifferentiated
> aesthetic continuum. I just don't know why you do this. It is so obvious
> and black and white to me what RMP is saying that this is an angle of
> criticism that I simply hadn't anticipated. How can you tell me boldly as
> you do, in effect, that the romanitic/classic split talked of in ZMM is
> *nothing to do with* the DQ/SQ splif formulated in Lila?
Well, *nothing to do with* may be bold, both are still supposed to be *a*
first split of Quality, but it's not the same one.
> Here is the relevant passage from ZMM:
>
> > These terms "theoretic" and "esthetic" correspond to what Ph3Ž4drus later
> > called classic and romantic modes of reality and probably shaped these terms
> > in his mind more than he ever knew. The difference is that the classic reality
> > is primarily theoretic but has its own esthetics too. The romantic reality is
> > primarily esthetic, but has its theory too. The theoretic and esthetic split
> > is between components of a single world. The classic and romantic split is
> > between two separate worlds. The philosophy book, which is called The Meeting
> > of East and West, by F. S. C. Northrop, suggests that greater cognizance be
> > made of the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" from which the theoretic
> > arises. Ph3Ž4drus didn't understand this, but after arriving in Seattle, and
> > his discharge from the Army, he sat in his hotel room for two whole weeks,
> > eating enormous Washington apples, and thinking, and eating more apples, and
> > thinking some more, and then as a result of all these fragments, and thinking,
> > returned to the University to study philosophy. His lateral drift was ended.
>
> Compare from Lila:
>
> > The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called
> > "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality
> > doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of
> > definition. Quality is direct experience independant of and prior to
> > intellectual abstractions.
> > Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is
> > a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things.
>
> Now, how about that? A quality that is undefinable, unknowable (but a
> subject) as a distinct thing (object) and above all *indivisible* - what
> does that remind you of? An "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum"? No?
Yes, *Quality* is beyond definition. That hasn't changed from ZMM to Lila,
but don't confuse Quality with DQ. And I wouldn't even call Quality an
"undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" even if that sounds far from a strict
definition, it's still a restriction of what Quality might be.
Pirsig is quite clear on his transition from the romantic/classic split to the
DQ/SQ split in Lila. In ch 9, he writes:
Phaedrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic and romantic aspects of the universe he'd emphasized in his first book. In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two. But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true - that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn't. For example, American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world's classic intellectual form. It is something else.
He then goes on to the brujo example and lays the groundwork for the DQ/SQ split.
> I try again:
>
> > Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal
> > starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time.
> > Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual
> > patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> How does that fit my talk of SQ patterns relating to DQ as a diary to a
> life? Badly, OK, or pretty well?
>
> How does it fit with your talk of our ordinary and scientific language "as
> the mapping between the intellectual patterns and the patterns they
> represent"? Not well. Pirsig clearly says that the patterns are in the
> description, not in what is represented:
I disagree, I think it fits very well with my view. He writes *intellectual*
patterns. It's the intellectual patterns that describe, or represent, reality.
He only mentions the intellectual patterns, but the reality he talks about
is all kinds of patterns including intellectual ones. Why else would there be
any other kinds of patterns? Why would the MoQ include inorganic, biological,
social and intellectual patterns but only really use intellectual patterns?
Isn't that what you're saying?
What he says is that science is only the intellectual description of how
other types of patterns behave and interact with each other. The other types
of patterns is the reality that the intellectual ones describes. But
intellectual patterns can also be used to describe how intellectual patterns
interact, this is called computer science.
> > science is a set of static intellectual
> > patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> OK, may be this thing that is so obvious to me doesn't leap out at you. But
> let me give you my expansion of the point anyway. RMP hasn't changed his
> mind, or started talking about something different, between the two books,
> ZMM and Lila. He's still talking about his one life-long concern, the
> relationship between the aesthetic and the theoretical. Lila is a shot at
> an accomodation between the two, a theory of the aesthetic, and how it comes
> to be described and codified into static quality, theories. The first thing
> he does is to devide off Dynamic Quality, which is "indivisible" and "ahead
> of definition", from Static Quality, which is just the opposite. This split
> maps very neatly on to his earlier concerns with the division between the
> aesthetic (value, which is supposes to be undifferentiated and continuous),
> and the theoretic (practical reason, aristotle and so on). The development
> between ZMM and Lila lies entirely in this, that RMP attempts to show how
> the Subject - Object metaphysics that corresponds to the classical reasoning
> of ZMM can, in fact, be accomodated, explained, by a Metaphysics of Quality.
> That classical form of reasoning invloved in science is, it turns out (and
> althought it forgets this), an attempt to describe Dynamic Quality, just as
> all art is. But in describing it, it necessarily freezes it, binds it up in
> number and discrete objects and distinctions and so on: such is the
> staticity of static quality.
>
> > science is a set of static intellectual
> > patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> Well, I've said enough on that point to give you a moment to think, I hope,
> an encouragement to read RMP again and not take him for granted as saying,
> as you *apparently* think he says, that DQ isn't a continuum, and that SQ
> isn't just a description of reality, but reality.
I won't budge there. I have given this a great deal of thought over the past
four years and I'm quite certain that the static patterns of the four levels
are just as real as DQ is.
Doesn't your view mean that intellectual patterns just popped up one day from
nowhere? According to the MoQ, higher level patterns are dependent on lower
level patterns, which means that social, biological and inorganic patterns
must have existed before intellectual patterns turned up to describe them.
No Elephant, as I said before, I won't give up on reality. I won't just
raise my hands to reality and accept that it's incomprehensible. And that's
what I think your view represents. I'm in this game for much more than
that.
> 2.
> You have a problem with language:
>
> > Regarding 2, according to my understanding of MoQ, objects, subjects and
> > events does exist prior to language. Language to me, regardless of whether
> > it reports or pictures the world, is simply intellectual patterns representing
> > other patterns. Or rather, language is the mapping between the intellectual
> > patterns and the patterns they represent. Anyway, I truly believe the world,
> > (i.e. objects, subjects and events) exists even without language.
>
> But the world, reality, *isn't* objects, subjects and events. I thought
> that was the *whole point* of the MOQ! Of course reality exists even
> without language, but reality is Dynamic Quality, not objects subjects and
> events. Objects and subjects and events are the stuff of SOM, which of
> course the MOQ *explains* and gives good title to exist under the name
> "static quality". But you mustn't go confusing SQ explained stuff with
> *what is really out there*. SQ is another way of saying 'conventional
> evaluations' - what we, individuals or scientists or society *say* is
> Quality, "define" as Quality.
Reality is more than Dynamic Quality. That's what the DQ/SQ split means.
Reality is DQ + SQ.
> > the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> That makes it as clear as day. Before the descriptions there are no
> patterns - the patterns *are* the descriptions.
Yes, the *intellectual* patterns are the description... *of* the other
patterns.
> > the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> I don't want to sound like a stuck record - but this is RMP I'm repeating
> here.
But you're leaving out *intellectual*.
> Now look, you think that there are two sets of patterns, that the SQ
> patterns are *separate* from the the describing patterns, separate from our
> deployment of language:
>
> > language is the mapping between the intellectual
> > patterns and the patterns they represent
>
> But I would have concluded, from the above passages of Pirsig, that the
> patterns are just the intellectual patterns, since, because reality
> apparently is not the patterns, someone, some intellect, has to be
> responsible for the created patterns:
>
> > the patterns are *not* the reality they
> > describe.
>
> That makes out patterns to be descriptions doesn't it?
Come on Elephant. The phrase "the patterns are *not* the reality they describe"
doesn't mean anything else than just that the patterns, and those are the intellectual
patterns that science consists of, are *not* the reality they describe.
It does not mean that intellectual patterns can not be a part of reality,
and neither does it mean that other types of patterns can not be a part
of reality. It simply means that the set of intellectual patterns that
are "science", is not the actual patterns they represent.
And one other, quite important point if you ask me. Isn't science also
a very substantial part of our reality? Take it away and see what happens.
It's not the same reality anymore. This means that science, i.e. the
set of intellectual patterns, is a part of reality. So Pirsig's words
when he described what science was, is also an intellectual description,
but a description of a set of intellectual patterns that is a part of
our reality.
> OK, last point. The picture of language you set out:
>
> > Regarding 2, according to my understanding of MoQ, objects, subjects and
> > events does exist prior to language. Language to me, regardless of whether
> > it reports or pictures the world, is simply intellectual patterns representing
> > other patterns. Or rather, language is the mapping between the intellectual
> > patterns and the patterns they represent. Anyway, I truly believe the world,
> > (i.e. objects, subjects and events) exists even without language.
>
> - well this is obviously common sense. But it just happens that common
> sense makes no sense at all here. How can language be defined as a
> "mapping" between the representation and the represented, as if this mapping
> were a third thing, besides the represented and the representation? A map
> *is* a representation! If you think that there is some relation between two
> seperate things, one called the represented, and the other called the
> representation, then the name for that relation cannot be 'a kind of
> representation'. That is just too hamster-wheel-turning for words.
>
> I'll offer you a way out of this confusion. We could say that what we are
> trying to represent is Dynamic Quality. Does that strike you as right?
> Well, it it is DQ we are trying to represent, then the question of some
> relation between the represented and the representation just doesn't arise:
> there couldn't be any such relation, because since DQ isn't an object, there
> could never be a second term on the other end of this two-place relation.
> No *thing* is related to, DQ is not a thing. Linguistic descriprions of DQ
> are not in some *relation* with DQ. So then representation is something
> else, something other than a relation with DQ. What then? Can I make a
> suggestion? I suggest that we say that linguistic expression satisties a
> need we have, a basic need, for static landmarks by which to steer our
> course. Dynamism is all very well, but on it's own experience of it won't
> help you to predict the coming of the planting season. You need a theory,
> you need language. You need to invent a model and test it. This testing is
> not done by seeing whether it corresponds to some model already existing in
> dynamic quality reality - because if such models did exist we wouldn't need
> to invent our hypothesis in the first place. No, the way we test it is
> simply to see whether it is any *good*, whether it helps us to do what we
> want to do with it, ie plant out at the right time and get bigger harvests.
> So then with language we invents us a way of looking at the world and that
> way of looking then has value to us, more or less, in terms of how it can be
> put to work for us, and *that's* how we judge our representations. We do
> *not* go about checking some imaginary relation between a represented thing
> and the representation. No such relation exists. Nor would it be checkable
> if it did (since to be checkable it would have to be *in* the world, rather
> than a relation *to* the world). What's represented, the Static
> Quality-pattern, that represented thing *is* the representation. There's no
> gulf for language to cross, no relation to explain. It's all quite simple.
>
> Or so it seems to me.
Sorry, but I'm not confused regarding language so I don't need your way out.
I'll repeat: Higher level patterns are dependent on lower level patterns.
So, since intellectual patterns are dependent on language, then language is
a social pattern. Doesn't *that* strike you as logical? I mean, to say that
language is a very integral part of every society is hardly something that
sticks out?
Magnus
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