3WD, Marco and Dave,
I agree with you, Dave, in that Pirsig offers a moral framework which is
just too sloppy to be effective. "This is really the central problem in the
static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the
degenerates?" (Lila Ch17) I actually wonder if a moral or ethical stance can
be produced from a metaphysics anyway, even if the metaphysics is one which
says that the world is moral at the core. There is however, a germ of value
in Pirsig's system, otherwise I would not be still looking at it. I'll come
back to that, I hope, at the end.
3WD - Yes, I have read Popper too, and agree with what you are saying,
insofar as we are talking about systems of morality. But I am not greatly
interested in developing a moral or ethical system, since I tend to see that
as largely an intellectual game. In dealing with moral issues, though,
however complex, I will agree that the intellect has a role, certainly in
clarifying what 'good' takes priority in a given situation. It is just that
I very much doubt that any system can ever be produced that will spell out
in advance what my decisions 'should' be. And in this sense Pirsig, as a
grand systematizer, also fails.
Marco - You raise the issue of the difference between morals and ethics. I
assume morals relate to discerning good from bad, or right from wrong, in
human behaviour, while ethics is about the philosophical study of moral
behaviour and the rules that govern it.
I agree that there are endless varieties of moral constructs on offer, and
many conflicts and contradictions between them. When Pirsig says we all know
quality when we meet it, it sounds like the basis for an ethical system. But
it doesn't work, at least at that level, hence my agreement with Roger's
assessment. (morally bereft)
You say "As morality, the MOQ provides few clear principia: Quality is
Reality; there a Dynamic and a static aspect in nature; the static aspect is
knowable and can be organized in four distinct levels; there's a moral
hierarchy of the four levels. Then, dozens of discussions if a single fact,
event, choice is to be considered of a certain level, or a mix." I don't
have any problem with your summary of Pirsig. But your last sentence clearly
identifies the problem. Pirsig says somewhere in Lila that there are only
the four static levels, and dynamic quality, and nothing is excluded once
they are defined. He also says they are 'discreet' (sic).Yet in the past
month on this forum there has been a total inability of intelligent people
to come to a conclusion as to whether terrorists are 'biological', hence to
be treated like germs, or social or intellectual also, or ultimately
intellectual (which is the way I read Pirsig).
Regarding my accusation of fascism in Ch 22 of Lila, I stand by it. Convince
me otherwise. Regarding the Giant, Pirsig says, "For the moment the towers
of the World Trade Center seemed to have won the race upward but those other
skyscrapers seemed not to know it. All of them together were no longer just
buildings or part of a city, but something else people didn't know they
could be. Some kind of energy and power that wasn't anything planned seemed
to constantly surprise everyone at how great it all was. No one had done
this. It had just done itself. The Giant was its own creation." (Ch 28) "In
static reality there is ... no giant that is going to devour us ... But in
Dynamic reality?" "It was spooky how it all worked with an intelligence of
its own that was way beyond the intelligence of any person." "People look
down upon the social patterns of the Giant ... [which] devours their lives
for its own purposes ... A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and
accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish
alone." "When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions
of 'man' but as higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war
and genocide and the other forms of human exploitation become more
intelligible." "This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was
creating something better than any biological organism could by itself
achieve."(Ch 16)
I see this as very poor metaphysics, and suggest you contrast it with
Wilber's Shambhala interview, Part 2, (which somebody {Wim?}gave a link to a
few days ago) which discriminates between individual and social holons,
artifacts, and heaps. (Briefly) As a social holon, a city does not have
subjective consciousness, but at best it has an intersubjective matrix of
consciousness. The social holon does not transcend and include individual
holons, but transcends and includes the previous levels of social holons.
Society is not a bigger organism, not a Leviathan. A social holon is a group
of individual holons plus artifacts. Both fascism and communism rest on a
confusion of individual and social holons. So says Wilber. It is just this
confusion we find in Pirsig.
As to "Beware the Giant", I think this comes from just one line, when as
Pirsig leaves New York he comments "this time he'd just barely slipped out
of its grasp"(Ch 27) I don't find this enough to minimise his theories which
I have briefly quoted above. To my mind this is one area where the system
building of Pirsig and Wilber are put to the test, and Wilber comes out way
ahead.
So why bother with Pirsig? Because he makes a point that I find quite
profound, which is that as human beings our primary interface with the
universe (Yes - I know this is SOM - but that's just words) is in the value
dimension. We are not objects relating to objects, or subjects relating to
objects, but we are defined, if we can be defined at all, as 'relating'
itself, and relating is about quality and value and morals, not subjects or
objects. They follow, as one way of structuring our experience, but the
expeience is prior to these categories. The mystics, as I understand them,
say that it is only through undoing the subject-object categorisation that
we developed as children that we can progess to a more inclusive
understanding of the universe.
Wilber argues that Whitehead's great insight was that the qualities that
define the world are to be discovered in the most evolved aspects of the
world, not in the building blocks with which physics deals. As a human being
who experiences value and quality and injustice and beauty, I do not need to
explain these realities in terms of science, the big error of the past few
hundred years. This is Pirsig's great insight. Wilber is a far better
theorist, in my view, but Pirsig still makes the profound point that quality
is more basic than things or ideas, which have themselves developed as
static residues of experiences of quality.
John B
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