John and others,
Bringing out Pirsig's morality in comparison to Wilber
is helpful. I like to bring out Pirsig in comparison
with the history of philosophy.
Pirsig says " MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream
20th century philosophy. (419)"
"What the MOQ adds to James' pragmatism and his
radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality
from which objects and subjects spring is value.(418)"
Pragmatism says "by experience we know that acting
good will help us so you should act good in the
future." He gets this sort of line from Kant.
So, Pirsig's ethics are in line with Kant essentially:
"act as if the way you act will become the rule." This
falls in line with his views on Karma garbage. Pirsig
isn't so difficult as long as you place him in
history, in my opinion.
I think Pirsig accounts for the existential
development of man in his experiences of life, which
you say he doesn't. If the GOOD is a noun, and man has
experiences with life that shows this goodness
personally to this man, he will pragmatically act with
morality if you follow James'/Pirsig's philosophy.
You have to clear your lenses of technology, feel the
Good, and then know that is the source of how to act.
Pirsig spends most of LILA chirping about the foggy
lens'. He's bitter about the 20th century lens that
clouds everyone's mind. He's trying to refocus the
lens for all of society when in my opinion he should
just tell people to chuck the lens. We see life
through a lens whether it's SOM or MOQ, and I think
it is a mistake to replace a lens with a lens.
I agree he poorly expresses himself in LILA, he says
too much that confuses and obfuscates. But it's there,
you just need the proper LENS to extract it. And I'm
no Pirsig man as anyone here can attest.
Angus
--- John Beasley <beasley@austarnet.com.au> wrote:
> Wim and others,
>
> I have been following the discussion on the moral
> shortcomings of the MOQ,
> which culminated in your suggestion of the need to
> develop a Q-ethics. I
> totally agree with Roger that the MOQ as it stands
> is morally bereft. I am
> currently working on my own synthesis of Pirsig and
> Wilber, and find Pirsig
> actually promotes at least three different
> moralities in Lila.
>
> One I quite admire; but it is only briefly suggested
> in a couple of pages in
> Ch 32, where he talks about karmic garbage. The
> morality implied here is not
> so different to the Christian ethic, as I see it.
> There is definitely an air
> of a 'higher' good which is implemented by
> individuals who 'kill' "the
> suffering that results from clinging to the static
> patterns of the world."
> I'm sorry Pirsig has so little to say about this, as
> I suspect it is where
> we need to go.
>
> But this is only one of Pirsig's moral codes. The
> most chilling is in
> Chapter 22 of Lila, where its fascism is masked by
> the subtle presentation.
> "Kindness to children, maximum freedom, openness of
> speech, love of
> simplicity and affinity for nature" are judged
> incompatible with "a complex
> technological society", and must be replaced with
> "the finest sort of urban
> adjustment", namely punctuality, attention to detail
> and subordination to
> authority. Put so bluntly it appals, yet the meaning
> is clear. At times in
> his description of the Giant, the modern city, he
> appeals to a similar
> morality, where the city is described as the 'higher
> organism' which
> 'devours' people for its own purposes. (Lila Ch 17)
>
> And of course there is the extended and poorly
> worked out morality of the
> levels of static quality and the superiority of
> dynamic quality. Not only do
> I agree with Roger that it is unable to sort out
> real world moral issues
> with any success at all, but the longer I look at
> it, the more pathetic it
> seems. Pirsig's attempt to define the indefinable
> results in Quality = moral
> judgments = religious mysticism = perfection = value
> = undefined fitness =
> the fundamental ground-stuff of the world = a code
> of art etcetc. All this
> is getting pretty close to Ken Wilber's critique of
> metaphysics as "thought
> without evidence".
>
> Wilber develops his theoretical stance from looking
> at the systems others
> have proposed, and searching for the overarching
> structures (orienting
> generalisations) which can encompass them all, in
> broad outline, at least.
> He claims there is not one metaphysical sentence in
> the several hundred
> pages of "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality". That may be a
> bit exaggerated, but he
> certainly is indicating he comes from a very
> different basis to that of
> Pirsig.
>
> Wilber's fundamental slice of the razor is to note
> that nothing can be well
> described without incorporating elements of both
> interiority and
> exteriority. His holarchical model then asserts that
> at any level of the
> holarchy, whatever we attend to can be seen as
> complete insofar as it
> represents the outworking of the level below it in
> the holarchy. Seen from
> this level, it is as it is, drawing together the
> incomplete aspects of lower
> levels into a new emergent unity. But from the
> aspect of the next level up
> in the holarchy, it too is incomplete, and it is the
> experience of this
> incompleteness that provides the lure towards the
> next level, at which the
> incompleteness of the lower level is transformed,
> and "a whole new world of
> available stimuli becomes accessible to the new and
> emergent holon". Each
> developmental stage creates a new reality. (This is
> necessarily a cursory
> and incomplete picture of Wilber's model.)
>
> One of the strengths of Wilber's way of working is
> that he draws directly on
> moral schemas developed by others as part of the
> substructure of his
> thought. He is particularly influenced by studies in
> developmental
> psychology which explore the stages of human
> development, including moral
> and faith development (principally Kohlberg,
> Gilligan and Fowler).
> Even if there are differences in the stages defined
> by different
> researchers, they all tend to see a progressive
> development through, at the
> least, preconventional, conventional and
> postconventional levels of moral
> understanding. These patterns seem to be culturally
> universal. Now where
> there is a meeting of Wilber and Pirsig is that
> Wilber would agree that the
> more evolved patterns are qualitively 'better' than
> the lower patterns. The
> higher levels of moral development are indeed
> 'better'. Wilber reminds us
> that all quality is elitist, yet each of us is
> invited to explore higher
> quality.
>
> Whereas Pirsig tends to equate many dimensions of
> quality, Wilber
> discriminates four distinguishable aspects of
> anything we choose to examine,
> which can be described in terms of interiority or
> exteriority, and singular
> and plural forms. Morality belongs to the interior
> dimension of the plural
> (groups). Being interior, it is not directly
> accessible to science, which
> can work only with the observable and measurable
> exterior. But the
> outworking of morality does result in observable
> behaviour, and this can be
> studied 'scientifically' by ethicists and
> anthropologists. And morality, at
> lest at the lower levels, can be expressed in
> language.
>
> Where Wilber takes us miles ahead of Pirsig is in
> his detailed mapping of a
> large number of levels in the holarchy. He generally
> discriminates at least
> 13 such levels, but would agree that the number is
> somewhat arbitrary. He
> argues that there are no wholes, no parts, but only
> whole/parts, holons, and
> that each level represents a transformation of the
> holon in the level below,
> both transcending but also including it. There are
> parallels with Pirsig,
> but Wilber's vision is more detailed and more
> compelling. And critically, he
> argues that the subject/object division is inherent
> in the lower levels, and
> only transcended as we reach the higher levels of
> development. Thus for
> someone at the magic level of moral development,
> subjects and objects cannot
> be transcended, for the stimuli to do so are quite
> simply inaccessible to
> someone at this level. Experiences of a deeper unity
> may occur, in fact do
> occur constantly, but cannot be comprehended. This
> explains why drug
> experiences can act as powerful lures to deeper
> states of consciousness, but
> equally can become addictive traps at a low level of
> functioning and
> morality. They offer experiences of deeper, more
> dynamic states, but without
> the static latches of the yet to be explored
> intervening levels, cannot be
> integrated.
>
> Wilber offers a detailed map of the transpersonal
> domains, often described
> as 'religious' or 'spiritual', but this development
> is very different to the
> common use of these words when referring to the
> archaic, magic and mythic
> structures associated with religion. One of Wilber's
> strong and most
> impressive claims is that these higher levels are
> just as open to evidence
> and experiment as any science. "These spiritual
> endeavours ... are purely
> scientific in any meaningful sense of the word".
> (SES
=== message truncated ===
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