Hello Platt,
--- Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com> wrote:
> Hi Patrick:
>
> Thanks for your response to my question, "Can you cite others who
> claim that morality is reality?" I haven't been able to find anyone
> other
> than Pirsig who has based a metaphysics on such an assumption, nor
> have I found any metaphysics other than MOQ with equal explanatory
> power.
Not for nothing "Inquiry into the good", by Nishida Kitaro, written
about 1910 I believe, is cited in the MOQ_discuss. Incidentally I found
the MoQ-site by searching in the web for Nishida.
I just typed in a Google search engine the words "Pirsig good Nishida"
and found what I was looking for, in the first hit. Here you see Nishida
discussed:
http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/0001/0114.html
Nishida's book has had quite an impact on me when I was reading him,
even influenced my night-time dreamworld sometimes in a very intense
way. One time I'd read Nishida just before I went to sleep. The next
morning, just before I awoke, I experienced an intense DOUBT, and I was
not I yet; and I had a rather conceptual image of the universe going
along with it. I can't analyse the reason as to what the great doubt
meant, only I knew it was triggered by Nishida's writings, and that I
was glad when I awoke and found my ordinary self in my home again.
A second dream was that I saw Einstein, resting in his life on a huge,
flat (!), solid platform, almost invisible however, and most surely for
him. That I take as a pictorial interpretation of my subconsciousness of
Nishida's proposition that what we take as an objective reality, is
really simply made of for-ever (abstract) CONSTANT features of
consciousness.
But that's all about his philosophy exposed in the first half of the
book. In the second half he discusses the self and the good: He takes
the good as the development of the self. To avoid solopsism, and
hedonistic and nihilistic philosophies, he argues against them all, and
comes surprisingly close to a formulation of 'good conduct' in
accordance with Pirsig's Quality. That is, as the hedonistic theory says
we perform good towards others only because it makes ourselves feel
better, and that we put ourselves towards tasks such as writing a
scientific article or something because of the pleasure afterwards,
Nishida argues that the quality of our conduct developing in time is not
reducible to one dimension in which there only exists quantative amounts
of 'pain' in the negative or 'pleasure' in the positive... Instead, our
feelings of struggle, beauty, and of our goals etc. are simply what they
are, and even stand in relation to an ever evolving process of the
unification of consciousness.
> As for your view that opinions are relative and not primary, the
> implication is that because opinions are relative they aren't worth
> much.
> Well, maybe not in the sense of establishing "truth." But sharing
> opinions among those seeking truth, such as occurs on this web site,
> can be fun don't you think? IMO :-), having fun is very worthwhile
> indeed.
Yea. I think I take things too seriously sometimes (as I think Pirsig in
his books does too). But you're right, having 'relative opinions' and
discussing them can indeed be fun...
Greetings, Patrick.
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