Hi John B:
> 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.
I resolve the issues you raise by conflating immediate experience and
moral judgments. They occur simultaneously. They're inseparable. They
co-exist. So I question your statement that "by dynamic quality we
mean only the givenness of immediate experience" if by that statement
you mean to exclude from immediate experience an immediate,
unthinking determination of the betterness, worseness or neutralness of
the situation. Recall in the hot stove example that the low quality is
ascertained and responded to instantly, prior to thought patterns.
Lest we think Pirsig is the only one to suggest experience might better
be called "experivalue," a paper by Richard C. Vitzhum entitled
"Philosophical Materialism" supports the view that indeed moral
judgments are concurrent with perception. Here's the pertinent section
of his paper:
"The reductionist takes a similar approach to a second objection raised
by non-reductionists. Moral concepts, they say, are not reducible to
natural process and physical law. In contrast, the reductionist,
convinced that all life is a product of natural selection, sees morality as
fundamentally the result of evolutionary survival. Social cooperation, love
of one's mate, offspring, relatives or tribe, repugnance to the murder of
one's own species, and the like are the reverse side of the coin of
virtues like social competition, hatred of one's enemies, successful
prosecution of war and the killing of one's own species and the like.
They are essentially the residue of human experience on the face of the
planet, as are the invention of gods, of creation myths, of apocalyptic
destructions of the world. Furthermore, the reductionist equates moral
discrimination with sense discrimination. That is, the ability to sense a
difference between heat and cold, light and dark, acid and alkaline is
indistinguishable from the ability to decide whether this thing or place or
experience is better or worse that that thing, place or experience.
Physical sensing and moral judgment have from the start been
simultaneous and identical processes, and even the most refined and
abstruse moral reason is rooted in the slime and grit of earth's natural
history."
When a materialist and mystic philosopher hold the same opinion, I'm
impressed. The genius of Pirsig is expanding this basic notion of
instinctive judgmentalism to an all-inclusive metaphysics, something no
one else has ever done.
Data collection in science, like everything else is value-based.
Determinations of what data is to be sought and what data is to be
taken into account are "judgment calls" no matter how "objective"
science claims to be. As for mystics, they judge their mystic
experiences to be desirable. This means that while in the thralls of a
mystic revelation, they must be sensing something "good."
The point of all this is simply that Pirsig doesn't "make a shift from
quality as experience to quality as betterness" as you assert. They're
joined at the hip. In this case, distinction does not mean separation.
Perhaps it helps to think of experience as a single coin with data on one
side and evaluation on the other. That's how I see it anyway.
> 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!
I agree, but suggest that reactions to everyday experience depend on
established patterns of thought in order to behave appropriately. Living
for us humans requires thinking. We are not equipped like animals to
survive on instinct.
As I've indicated before, for me art can serve to shatter patterns so that
the immediate beauty of the "all" shines through. In fact, art has great
potential for moral guidance, IMO, except what passes for art today is
bringing us down to biological levels instead of lifting us to transcendent
excellence. But I digress.
> 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.
I agree. Again, I would emphasize we need to construct world views to
survive in the world.
> 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.
No doubt about it. Spiritual practice is quite apart from spiritual
guidance, and Pirsig gives precious little of the latter except through the
artistic element intrinsic in his novels. What always impressed me (and
I've mentioned this to you before) was Wilber's last chapter "Always
Already" in his early work, "The Spectrum of Consciousness." Besides
quoting numerous Zen masters to the effect that "If you search for the
Void you can never reach it, nor can you run away from it--you are it,"
Wilber says:
"Put simply, that in your right now which knows, which sees, which
read this--that is the Godhead, Mind, Brahman, and it cannot be seen or
known as an object, just as an eye cannot see itself."
Perhaps more than anyone you recognize this point of view, so I don't
need to expand on it. Suffice it to say it satisfies me, but others will
surely find it empty of value. That's OK, because as the masters have
taught, everyone's path is different.
Thanks, John, for inviting me to sound off. I look forward to your
response.
Platt
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