Rich and everyone: Here are some thoughts on your June 4 post.
Referencing both books to get at questions on the nature of Quality can
be helpful, but it could just as easily confuse. I agree that Pirsig
was unhappy about the classic/romantic split and sought to resolve it,
but I think it is only related to the static/dynamic split and not "very
nearly directly transposed into these new terms", as you put it. I think
the classic/romantic split is a social and intellectual division that
has occured for historical reasons and the static/dynamic split in
Pirsig's own deliberate invention. The first is a problem and the second
is a solution. He found the first and created the second.
My impression is that the c/r split is retained in Lila in the
discussions about the origins of "right". He shows how the Sanskrit
"rht" meant being both factually correct and morally proper at the same
time. Its alot like the the ancient Greek word "techni", which meant "to
make" and it was used to describe creating art or manufacturing the
latest weapon. Both are cases of following the meaning of words back to
a time before the classic/romantic split had occured. One can see how
this begins to heal the split by showing that an artist and an engineer
ought to be one in the same person.
This kind of idea is enlarged in Lila. Not only can we respond to
Quality in ways that reconcile the split, but we also learn that the
very structure of reality is a moral order. In other words, reality's
correctness is inseperable from its' value. Form and content are the
same thing. The One is manifold. All of phenomenal reality (SQ) is an
expression of the same Quality,(DQ) like so many kinds of ice floating
in an endless ocean. Its all just different kinds of water in spite of
the apparent differences.
The maya, the world of static patterns is illusory in so far as our
intellectual maps never really penetrate their true nature. But our maps
work well enought to transplant a heart or go to the moon. The world of
the ten thousand "things" may not appear as it truly is to our highly
mediated consciousness, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it the
mystical reality. I think term is reserved for Quality as a whole or as
DQ itself. SQ is definable, however tentatively, and DQ is beyond all
words and concepts, but can be experienced directly.
The static/dynamic split is precisely a metaphysical split. It is an
intellectual map that marks the difference between "things" in the
universe and the creative source behind them all. The map is useful, but
the road trip itself is all that's real. Know what I meme?
David B.
PS Thanks for all the great posts! Glad to see Bodvar posting again!!
Roger, does it feel like you and meme against the world? Meme and my
shadow? Meme, myself and I? Say you don't meme it! Greenwich meme time.
Etc.
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