Hullo Roger,
Back to a million emails, and among them your response to my latest venture
into destruction.
But first, scientism. (Since you asked.)
"This entire Right Hand imperialism, which in so many ways has been the
hallmark of Western modernity, is known generally as scientism, which, as I
would define it, is the belief that the entire world can be fully explained
in it-language. It is the assumption that all subjective and intersubjective
spaces can be reduced, without remainder, to the behavior of objective
processes, that human and nonhuman interiors alike can be thoroughly
accounted for as holistic systems of dynamically interwoven its." Ken
Wilber, 'The Eye of Spirit' p 21.
Which fits with Whitehead's view of the modern scientific worldview, "a dull
affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material,
endlessly, meaninglessly." To which he added, "Thereby, modern philosophy
has been ruined."
ROGER: "destructiveness (as opposed to reconstructiveness) is NOT the path
to quality"
JOHN B: I'm getting the feeling from your last post on this topic that you
are jumping levels to evade my responses. So when I criticise a statement of
yours you counter by saying "It was just an argument for the defense against
my point. I was trying to argue the other side a bit to feel a void." So
let's be clear. I have no real problems with the general position you have
been putting in your summaries on this topic. I remain uncomfortable with
the statement of yours above.
I really am nervous about a phrase such as "the path to quality". The
original question was "What do the patterns of higher quality have that
those of destruction, decay and disorder don't?" Here you use the term
'higher quality' which implies a quality spectrum, while the phrase "the
path to quality" seems to assume an idealised quality. This may seem like
hair splitting, but I suspect our disagreement over whether destruction can
be good will be found to be embedded in just such subtle distinctions.
There seems to me a need to get back to basics on quality. My understanding
of Pirsig's position is that quality is experienced, it is our primary
reality. 'We' emerge out of experiences of quality. In the hot stove
example, negative or low quality characterises the experience. But this is
still quality! It is possible to argue that the low quality experience of
sitting on a hot stove is 'good' for us, in that the effect of experiencing
this undeniably low quality is to get us moved from even greater harm. This
fits with your assertion that "in every case people were either confusing
destruction with flexibility and adaptiveness, or they were citing examples
of circular processes where destruction was leading to reconstruction, and
that it was the reconstruction which they saw as good." On this reading the
hurtful experience is good because it gets me off the stove, where I might
otherwise suffer extreme damage to my posterior, but the goodness is in the
prevention of greater harm, not the experience itself, which is 'bad'.
In your version 3 summary then, you indicate my position thus "JOHN, who
argued that death, destruction and decay CAN be of high quality." I'm not
sure how you interpret the word 'high' in this statement. Probably this is
where the argument is focussed, since Pirsig clearly views quality as
extending from low to high, but strangely without a middle, since his view
implies that a neutral quality (one with no value - Ch 8) is no quality at
all.
What emerges from all this is that quality can be defined in two (or three)
rather different ways. The most fundamental experience of quality can be
positive or negative. Both are equally forms of quality. But we can
construct a meta-quality, in which we can legitimately ask "Is this quality
experience of value to me?" Here the value in the experience of quality is
not the experience itself (primary quality) but rather its utility in
meeting my needs. In this version, 'high quality' patterns are those which
have a relationship to human needs, physical, social or intellectual.
(Pirsig seems to confuse these levels. He ends his book with "Good is a
noun", yet quality does not equate with good in the hot stove example.)
So destruction can be 'good' if it furthers my needs. The breaking down of
food in the gut is destructive of many complex molecules, but the resulting
by-products are then made available to me as nutrients. From the point of
view of the bean sprout I have swallowed whole, the experience of being
eaten and destructured is of very low quality indeed. From my experience it
is of high quality. Now we have to bring in a meta-meta-quality that argues
that since I am a more highly evolved organism than a bean sprout, my good
is better than its good.
I fear that Pirsig's nice simple understanding of quality is getting
complex, and for good reason, since a nice simple understanding of quality
doesn't work. And I will hazard a guess that we will never agree over
whether destruction can be good while good can refer to so many levels of
quality. So while the topic of destruction is an 'offshoot' of the major
inquiry, it has exposed the fundamental inadequacies of Pirsig's
'non-definition' of quality.
What do you think?
John B
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