RMP:
«Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame. Good as a noun rather than an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn't a noun or an adjective, but if you had to reduce the Metaphysics of Quality to one sentence, that would be it»
Hi Rick and other Good Guys...
I've been following this discussion with interest, and I hope I can offer a diverse angle....
The point is that I'm not English, and that in my language Good is NOT a noun. Never, but few rare usages. Granted! (Andrea is my witness). We have two different terms:
*Buono* is the adjective
*Bene* is the noun.
Nice, isn't it? Try to imagine my face when I read first Lila (in Italian) and discovered that the whole book was to be reduced to a nonsensical sentence. Well, maybe it helped me to find a different solution....
*Buono* is a noun.... ??? Of course, I saw that it was a criticism to the concept of substance, but actually it was already well clear that Pirsig does not love substance.... So, what else? Re-reading the following passage, I found that "Good as a noun RATHER THAN an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about". My focus shifted to that "rather than"... and I interpreted it as "Good is NOT an adjective... " or at least, "Good SHOULD NOT be an adjective". Or actually, according to my language: "The adjective is misleading: don't think to *Buono* as a property of something else, just imagine that things are manifestations of *Bene*".
That was my interpretation. Then, when finally I read it in English, I saw that actually to state that Good is a Noun is not a nonsense, as, as Rick says, [in English] Good has always been both an adjective and a noun. But I'm still convinced that maybe RMP should have written:
"Good is not an adjective".
That is like to say...
You are not good People, you are Good, in form of people...
Be Good,
Marco
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