Hey,
> JOHN B:
Pirsig seems muddled in Lila where
> > at times he identifies dynamic quality or just quality with the good,
and at
> > other times talks about positive and negative quality, eg the hot stove.
I
> > am sorry that he reified the term morals to mean quality, which he says
> > can't be defined. I would be much happier if he had kept the normal
usage
> > for morals, meaning what's good or bad for humans living in society.
Quality
> > undefined leaves all this up in the air!
PLATT:
> If Pirsig had taken your advice and removed morality from the MOQ he
> wouldn't have an MOQ at all. Nothing so marks the newness and
> explanatory power of the MOQ than these words from LILA, Chap.7:
>
Hmm... I'm not so sure about this Platt. Pirsig's claim for the MoQ
(or one of them anyway) is that it is primarily a METAPHYSICS. That is, a
response to the philosophical question of "What exists?" (or some question
close to that, depending on where you look up the term). From my reading of
LILA, the idea was to put forth an answer to the question more encompassing
than that provided by the SOMs (see the 3rd paragraph of chapter 9).... one
that included the Quality ideas developed in ZMM.
While Pirsig also claims that the MoQ allows us to deduce the answers to
moral questions with greater precision than before (a proposition I
personally am still not entirely sold on), this is merely one BENEFIT of the
MOQ's improved Metaphysique, a "bonus," if you will. And while it may lose
some its "newness and explanatory power" without the moral aspects, I would
hesitate to say that there would be no MOQ at all without the morality....
there would still be a metaphysics that included the Quality that the SOMs
omitted... which is what it was all supposed about in the first place.
rick
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:42 BST