Angus and others,
I have been intrigued by this thread as it seems to have brought to the
surface some of the fundamental differences between people in this group,
yet in a thoroughly confusing way.
Platt started the ball rolling, by asking "Can the MOQ help straighten out
the moral authority mess? Does the MOQ have any moral authority itself? Is
it
possible to have a "rational morality" as the MOQ claims?"
His own position seems to be that moral authority is external. For example,
he comments, "Who to follow? That is the question."
You say, Angus, "There is a current on this site of extremists who believe
in the 'authority of MOQ'". I take it that it is this search for a moral
authority outside oneself that you are attacking. You go on to say, "I
believe that Pirsig does not believe in "transference" to the almighty MOQ."
You say that Pirsig gets some things right, including that morality will be
(hu)man centred, active rather than passive, self-created, value centred,
and respect facts. It will include liberty (with the option to be
degenerate) and progress (creating social change).
So far I follow what you say, but you then totally loses me with your
"IDEALS, people like LILA who embody his IDEAL-TYPE: she has no external
authority other than herself, and in and of that, she is a moral figure."
Clear as mud to me, though it sounds like a rewrite of Nietzsche. Please
explain, Angus.
You go on with an interesting suggestion from Auguste Comte. "He notes 3
stages: theology (god is dead), metaphysics (Victorianism), positivism
(Dynamic meaning). We have been through the first 2 and are now on the
doorstep on positivism. I think ZAMM and LILA are both calls for a
positivist morality. A morality that is created by man through love and
actively implemented in the world today. Reverting to a metaphysics is a
failure, a regression to Victorian morality"
While I agree with this, in as much as I understand it, I think Pirsig is
much more interested in a metaphysics than a positivist morality, and that
you are reading this into Lila, Angus. I see much more of this 'positivist
morality' in ZAMM, actually, and I see Lila as a backward step, a retreat
from active involvement in relationships to a thinking about morals, a
metaphysics. This is clearest in the early part of the book where Pirsig
talks about trying to talk to the Indians, failing, and going off to read
anthropology for months instead. Out of this comes another huge struggle
with ideas, and a crystallisation of the MOQ. Pirsig seems quite emphatic
that his aim in Lila was to write a metaphysics, and to me the story line
has always felt contrived and remote. Put simply, he was more concerned with
his filing system than with Lila Blewitt.
In another post you say "Morality needs an ideal to POSIT, and in Pirsig's
case
it is LILA". Is this Lila the person in the story, or the metaphysics of the
book, or what? Anyway, you go on to talk about "a paraconsistent logic: a
logic that is open to spatial logic as well as temporal logic (static and
Dynamic quality respectively)", and later, "Temporal logic is the world of
"show" and spatial logic is the world of "say."" Here you lose me again. I
take it that some post-modern writer has generated the spatial and temporal
metaphors, but they fail to connect with anything real for me. 'Show' and
'say' likewise.
Later you elaborate thus, "The spatial logic of "know thyself" is logical.
The temporal logic is an action, and that action is love." "Dynamic love is
an unabashed surrender into the flow of the moment. It has no object as a
valuing
would." In another post you suggest that "you look at LILA as a book of
Revelation about Pirsig, a witnessing of his Dynamic Quality". "DQ is
indefinable BUT describable. LILA is Pirsig's description of DQ for him."
Again I suggest that you are reading more into this than is really there.
When you say that "It's a whole book of him trying to explain to himself
that it's ok to have a 1 night stand", I wonder if we have read the same
book. We agree that half the book is a metaphysics (well, 80% I would say).
The other half, in my view, is nothing to do with whether it's ok to have a
one night stand. Pirsig seems quite unfussed by this. What does interest him
is the question "do you ... believe that Lila Blewitt has quality?" (Lila Ch
6) In fact Rigel asks him the question three times, and Pirsig returns to
the theme over and over. At the end of the novel the idol, who is, like
Pirsig, "sarcastic, cynical. Almost vicious" (Lila Ch 32) says that Pirsig
has been freed from Lila's clutches by his "moral act" of attributing value
to Lila. She goes off to parasitise Rigel, while Pirsig gets off free.
Sarcastic and cynical indeed.
Then you become equally cynical "LILA is a sort of performance art joke:
create a metaphysics that poor sops (me included) can't understand and watch
them worship it on the internet." While I half agree that this is what has
happened, I doubt this was ever Pirsig's intent. He seems to me to truly
believe in his own creation. Read SODV, or his recent comments on cracking
the champagne that the MOQ would survive without him. Bo and others
certainly come across to me as 'true believers', and it seems to me a very
intellectual belief at that. I have been arguing the limitations of the
intellect in this forum for some time, in response to this, not because I am
a crazy mystic, because I am all too sadly aware that I am not, but because
I have mined the intellect for what it is worth, and find it is an
inadequate substitute for life. I suspect we agree at that level.
Finally, my take on moral authority is very different from Platt's, and
seems different in important respects from yours. I argue that authority
resides in the situation. "Let the situation dictate." But, and this is
crucial, it is the situation as it is that dictates, not the situation that
I fantasise exists, or that I would like to exist, or that I interpret
through the coloured lenses of my ideology or metaphysics. You are quite
right to reject the MOQ as itself a moral authority.
Pirsig argues that we all know quality when we see it. I think this is
totally naive. (Even his own examples of teaching in Bozeman support my
argument. He argues that most people agree on which writing has quality, but
inevitably there are those who disagree. If quality was so obvious, why the
disagreement?) Pirsig argues that we see quality differently because we all
have different backgrounds, different experiences. I see this as a partial
truth. Pirsig is quite correct to point to the primacy of the experience of
quality as prior to subjects and objects. He is also right in suggesting
that there can be more than one version of quality (for example, in the
appreciation of art). What he totally ignores is the bias and distortion
that our own egoic development brings to our actual perception. His view is
naive. While he accepts that our view of what is, is shaped by culture and
language, he ignores the most fundamental influence, that of the ego. In
fact he trivialises the ego.
So when I say the situation dictates, I mean that as I become to free to
experience what is, rather than what my ego wants to believe is, then I
encounter value, (quality, authority,) directly. This is not simple and
obvious, as Pirsig would have it, but the outcome of a long developmental
path (or sometimes, rarely, of a sudden transformative experience, typically
a near death experience). In this path the realm of ideas is not
unimportant, but must be transcended if immediacy is to be allowed. Platt is
correct in pointing to art as embodying something of the fundamental quality
in which moral authority resides, just because in art we encounter to some
degree value that is free of intellect and previous judgements. There can be
a degree of immediacy in an encounter with art that points to a more
fundamental potential, that of an immediate encounter with all reality, not
just that which has been contrived by the artist.
That's my credo, anyway.
Regards,
John B
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