Hi Rick, Erin,
I'm having fun too!
RICK:
You've hit on one of the more difficult consequences of
'Pirsig's Law' that a thing that has no value does not exist. That
consequence being of course that if a thing that has no value does not
exist, then anything that exists must have value. And since
Value=Good=Quality everything that exists not only has value, but is
Good/Quality
MARCO:
Is it so difficult? I figure out this that you call 'the Pirsig's Law' like
the Warm/Cold concept. Actually it is well useful to say that "Ice is cold",
but we also know that we can also rule out the (adjective) term "cold" and
use only the (noun) term "warmth". It is actually more correct to state that
a (inorganic) thing that has no warmth does not exist, that is like to say
"warmth is a noun" (is it hairsplitting? maybe, but then physics is
hairsplitting too). Likewise, according to the MOQ, it is more correct to
say that Good as noun, instead of discussing if things are good or bad.
[I think Erin was saying something similar about words and their opposite]
MARCO (previous):
It is not the man who is good or bad, it is the process of quality seeking
that creates a pattern
of behavior we know as the man.
RICK:
If I understand what you're getting at... this seems like hairsplitting to
me. If it's the pattern of behavior that we know as the man, and the
pattern of behavior can be described as good or bad... then what could it
mean to say 'It is not the man who is good or bad...."??? Is this to
suggest that man is a moral 'tabla rosa' before he behaves?
MARCO:
No, I was not pointing to that. I'm not describing the pattern of behavior
as good or bad. And no "tabula rasa": the "bad guy" is the first
responsible. At the contrary I'm saying that if he (in his social context)
has decided to act that way, it is because he thought it was Good in that
time and that place. Taking such a decision (I will be a terrorist) is a
Dynamic Quality Event, something that changes a personal situation. In that
event, the terrorist is the result of an interaction, a relation of people,
interests, events... where, I repeat, we can find even that we had a role.
After that, the condition of terrorist is a static pattern of value and it
will hard to be changed. In this process, there is no difference of
mechanism between Gandhi and Osama; or between the (sort of) biological
decisions to become a mammal or a reptile.
On the other hand, I'm not saying that the two decisions are equivalent, of
course. We are inclined to say it is good (adjective) what is closer to our
model, and (that's the problem!) to say that it is bad what's not fitting
within our own model. This leads to never ending conflicts. The MOQ is not a
model according to which everything is reduced to a relative value. The
MOQish way to state if something is more or less good is to pragmatically
look at the effective results.
RICK:
... But I suspect that rather than show us how the word "good" sheds light
on the '?' --- Pirsig has stripped 'good' of its meaning so that the word
itself has become a '?'. And since one '?' resembles another... it can seem
as though he's shown how an undefined something (the '?') is like a defined
something (Good); When in fact, all he may have done is show how an
undefined something (the '?') is like another undefined something (a
definitionless 'Good').
MARCO:
That's right. In one of my first posts to MF more than two years ago I wrote
that this is the "Koan of Quality. Quality in undefinable, but we must
define it". Using a (defined) term to indicate something undefinable helps
to grasp the big "?" , but has also the
by-effect to make the term more confused. In the end, the big '?' remains a
'?', just maybe we have a useful map for our journey. This is what the MOQ
can be for us. A good (!) map.
Ciao,
Marco
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