To John,
JOHN B:
I'm getting the feeling from your last post on this topic that you
are jumping levels to evade my responses.
ROG:
Sorry. I think we are just missing each other a bit on this one (not seeing
eye-to-eye or whatever)
As for the "path to quality" concern, feel free to insert "path to *higher*
quality," as that is what I meant.
JOHN:
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?
ROG:
I think you are unnecessarily complicating the issue. You are right that
something can be lower quality and higher quality at the same time (based
upon the pattern or level in question); however, my point is that higher
quality is not destructive (other than for reconstructive purposes) for the
pattern or level in question. Of course you know that my belief is that the
HIGHEST quality is where we have high quality and minimal destruction across
the greatest depth and span (across the most levels and patterns within the
levels).
Make sense, or are we still missing each other?
Rog
PS -- Just to clarify, my belief DOES NOT agree completely with Pirsig, in
case anyone is wondering (I believe the MOQ is morally inadequate)
PPS -- And I still believe the MOQ (and this thread) is an attempt to define
a portion of quality -- static quality
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