Hi Platt, (with a nod to Rod, Joe, Gary, Erin, Squonk)
You said "Pirsig argues that the experience of quality which connects both
art and science is the "Conceptually Unknown" which is outside the levels,
including the intellectual. It is a third category beyond subjects and
objects on which intellect depends. Also known as the "Aesthetic Continuum"
and
"Dynamic Quality." It is direct experience prior to concepts, i.e., the
knowable but ineffable, which sounds mighty like "spirituality" to me."
Yes, but the point I am making is that Pirsig conflates a number of
different, or at least discriminable things, into dynamic quality. If by
dynamic quality we mean only the givenness of immediate experience, then it
is indeed very close to what the mystics are asserting is the basis of
spirituality. But when Pirsig attempts to build a morality on this
foundation, he shifts the emphasis from quality as experience to quality as
betterness, and then starts to try to discriminate the saviours from the
degenerates, and so on. In this view of quality, saviours are high quality,
and degenerates low quality, while to the mystic this would be nonsense.
Also, as I pointed out in my previous post, Pirsig's argument that we can
only know quality - that anything else would simply not be experienced -
only works with biological quality (if there), and certainly does not seem
to apply to such matters as data collection in science.
The other issue for me is that while it might seem quite simple and
straight-forward to be able to experience 'what is', in the moment,
undistorted by what we bring from the past or project into the future, it is
actually one of the most difficult things to do. Hence the path to mysticism
is long and difficult, not because the place we are headed is distant or
somehow ethereal, since it is actually the most simple and direct experience
we can have, but because our established patterns of thought constantly
prevent us from experiencing reality directly. Pirsig's quoting of the story
of the man who wakes up in hospital after a heart attack and gazes at his
hand with awe and wonder makes just this point.
Then along comes someone like John Wren-Lewis who has a near death
experience, finds himself living quite differently afterwards, and who now
doubts that there is any path which can lead to this transformation!
Platt: "I agree with you that beauty, truth and goodness are all partly
given,
partly learned. IMO it's a priori "givens" that are "spiritual."
This fits with my sense, too. Do you not then see that Whitehead's way of
looking at quality has implications for any debate on teleology, etc? If
quality is to be known by the highest levels of its occurrance, then looking
at things in terms of evolution, of a slow climb from inorganic to organic
to social and intellectual is never going to lead anywhere. It is a sop to
received wisdom, that this is how things are, when as Pirsig points out at
other times, particularly in his SODV paper, this is just a more or less
useful hypothesis, while what we know is the immediacy of experience. In
this sense intellect and ideas just get in the way of experience. Our
constructed world-view works well enough to assist our functioning in the
'world' we have constructed, but it actually prevents our contact with 'what
is', which is independant of our ideas or theories about it.
My concern with MOQ thinking is that in most cases I sense it is not what it
purports to be, which is the direct experience of dynamic quality, but
rather it is a certain mind-set, an intellectually attractive pattern ( a
'meme', if you can tolerate the word - I find it quite useful), or in Matt's
very enlightening summary of Rorty "a persons final vocabulary". And this
brings me to my main criticism of Pirsig, which is that in giving us a
metaphysics, which points to spirituality, in the mystic sense, he has sold
us short. It's easy enough to grasp his ideas, and even to think that his
ideas are in themselves transformational. But my argument is that the ideas
remain part of the problem, part of what separates us from immediacy. This
is where I see people like Tony McWatt as having grasped the concept, but I
suspect at the cost of having further distanced themselves from what
actually attracts them. In a very real sense I see them as having taken the
'pointing finger' as the 'moon', and in so doing have reified the words,
further distancing themselves from what really 'is'. There is a term for
this in spiritual practice, which I do not remember, but it is saying that
one of the most pernicious errors is to grasp the concept or idea of
spirituality while evading the experiential level. While I cannot be sure I
am right, I suspect that when people claim to speak MOQese rather than
SOMese, they are doing just that.
I'd be interested in your response.
John B
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