Hi Struan and Group:
Struan claims that the MOQ is old hat stuff in philosophical circles,
citing several obscure graybeards like Schelling, Bradley, Kierkegaard,
Rosenzweig and Levinas as evidence. He further contends that the
MOQ is just another in a long line of worldviews based on idealism
which he says an encyclopedia defines as:
'any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared
with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as
the source of value, for example Platonic forms.'
Reality "as a source of value?" Beg your pardon. For the MOQ, reality is
not a source of value, reality IS value.
Struan has either missed the point of the MOQ or attempted to blow
smoke over his inability to peg Pirsig to a previous philosophical
doctrine. Further, to claim Pirsig follows in the footsteps of those who
attribute reality to God or an "absolute good" or a "good essence"
doesn’t begin to touch the new conceptual territory the MOQ has
plowed. Here then is a list of why the MOQ is indeed something new in
philosophical annals.
Pirsig is the first philosopher in history to:
To flatly state that reality is morality.
To declare that morality created the world.
To proclaim that evolution is a moral process.
To specify two distinct aspects of morality-static and dynamic.
To break down morality into five distinct moral levels
To explain history as clashes between moral levels
To recognize that humans embody the five moral levels
To free morality from the exclusive domain of the social/cultural
context.
To unite mind and matter, subjective and objective under the
umbrella of morality.
To see that intellect based on subject-object metaphysics is
incapable of ruling society.
To combine all of these propositions into a single metaphysics.
The last point is the most important. To refute it by trotting out a few
names of some old philosophers, many of whom never wrote a
complete metaphysics, is risible.
Further, to refute the MOQ one must invoke a moral judgment, thus
quashing the refutation by its inner affirmation of the MOQ’s central
hypothesis. That alone should give any academic philosopher reason
to open his mind to what Pirsig has to say.
Platt
P.S. I’m sure others know of more MOQ “firsts” than listed here.
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