DMB responds to John B. I'm grateful for your calm voice and
substantial thoughts. Thanks.
John begins by saying....
> I've enjoyed the lively exchange on whether the MOQ provides a moral
> compass. Platt's
> message was especially interesting because he is both realistic and
> hopeful, and to me the
> real significance is not so much whether the MOQ lives up to his
> hopes, but that in hoping for
> a moral compass he is pointing to one of the factors that keeps us
> interested in the MOQ. For
> me, being told that everything is moral does nothing to change my
> situation. It is ultimately as
> unsatisfying as being told that morality is just some sort of
> unimportant epiphenomenon in my
> head. What shines through Platt's post is both that moral issues
> matter, and that we need a
> better way of resolving moral issues than the traditional ones. While
> I agree that Pirsig fails
> Jonathan's test of being easy to read and unambiguous, what he has
> achieved is no small
> thing; he has clearly identified the centrality of morality (as
> quality) in our fundamental
> experience. I am currently working on yet another article in which I
> try to identify where his
> project fails, and can perhaps suggest some better alternatives,
> though I doubt that I can
> come up with an unambiguous moral compass. What follows is a sort of
> dredging expedition
> to explore these deep and muddy waters.
>
[David Buchanan] I'm not so sure that ambiguity is such a bad
thing. I mean, crystal clear, step-by-step moral instructions would be
anti-thetical to the whole notion of an eveloving and Dynamic universe.
In fact, I think "moral compass" is the right metaphor because, like a
magnetic compass, it only shows a general direction. Its kind of
diffficult to get that little needle to stay still and it's wobbling
indicator doesn't even really point at the north pole, just some spot
near there.
On the other hand, I don't think Pirsig's MOQ fails to make some
pretty important distinctions about the nature of "Quality". He does
leave Dynamic Quality itself undefined and he explains why this must be
so, but the levels of static quality, the moral codes, the historical
analysis, the anthropology, the references to other philosophical ideas
-- all these things save Pirsig from any charges of being too vauge.
Does Lila have Quality? In answering that question, Pirsig demonstrates
what he means when says "its all Quality". Only DQ itself is refered to
as "undifferentiated", while the static patterns and the levels are very
much about making distinctions.
Don't you think?
> Returning to your post, Platt, I noticed on re-reading it that you
> speak of dynamic action as
> the morally superior of two courses of action. What is the second? If
> it is static action, then
> we need to ask what kind of strange beast is this. I am not convinced
> that Pirsig actually tells
> us to "follow a course that's Dynamic", as you put it, though I could
> be convinced, I suppose,
> by appropriate quotes. When Pirsig speaks of the dynamic, it is
> usually in relation to an
> experiential encounter, not an action. I believe he quite wrongly
> equates dynamic quality with
> "the good", even as he talks about encounters with hot stoves which
> are hardly 'good' in any
> common sense of the word. It is Pirsig's desire to keep quality simple
> that ends up costing
> him any hope of offering us a moral compass, for in my opinion quality
> is by no means
> simple. While he is quick to point out that the moral codes at each of
> the four static levels
> differ to the extent that they are often in opposition, his attempt to
> resolve this untidy situation
> (which seems to me very evident in my experience) is to suggest a
> hierarchy which is
> unconvincing in the extreme. This is the sort of nonsense that sent
> millions of men to their
> deaths in WW1, ideology triumphing over biological self interest. If
> you think WW1 was only
> about social values the hierarchy is still challenged.
>
[David Buchanan] Please excuse me for butting in here, but I
think we're all talking about the same thing. (Yahoo, a REAL
conversation!!) You're probably right about DQ being an experiential
thing rather than in the realm of behaviour or "action". Spraying a
crowd with an automatic gun may be loud and violent, but that doesn't
make it "dynamic" in the Pirsigian sense. But the main issue I'd like to
address is your suggestion that the MOQ is too simple to be useful as a
compass and the idea that the "untidy situation" involved in conflict
between the levels represents some kind of short-coming. First, the
simplicity thing...
Pirsig says there are four kinds of static quality, and that
seems pretty damn simple, but I think it just basic. The levels and
codes are as easy as one, two, three - but the entire novel is an
illustration of the various things that can be explained by the MOQ's
basic structure. He explains cities and celebrities, and mystical
experience and sexual desire, wars and revolutions, evolution and
cutting edge physics. The levels and codes provide the bare bones and
all the varied examples show us how we can put some living flesh on that
basic structure, but he does leave it up to the reader to fill in even
more detail. Its fair to expect each one of us to bring their own
knowledge and experience into the equation. I think this is what Pirsig
meant when he said that he'd only scratched the suface and the there was
still alot of work to be done. But I think he does adequately show how
the structure works in real life through his many examples. I mean, it
works for me. (I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, but I've
been able to predict American political events much more accurately
since reading Lila. And many of the things I'd learned in back in
college (Intellectual History with a thesis on Hitler '84) have become
much more clear when seen through MOQ glasses.) The main point is that
the MOQ's ontological scheme may seem simple, but its really just basic,
just the beginning of it all. And this is the stuff I thought we all
agreed on already. I mean, there's no guessing about it because its so
clear and explicit, isn't it?
The fun part, it seems to me, is precisely in bringing the
detail from our own perspectives to put even more flesh on those bare
bones.
Secondly, you describe the opposition between levels as an
"untidy situation"? I think the world is an untidy place and the levels
only show us why this is so. As far as I know, nothing explains evil
better than the MOQ. I say yea, it looks like evolutionary garbage to
me.
> Action, it seems to me, is by nature dynamic. Morally, though, it can
> be good, bad, or neutral.
> Morality only makes sense in terms of human agents. Moral agents
> choose in the sure
> knowledge that their choices have consequences, though just what these
> consequences
> might be is at best a guess, a projection from past experience. In
> Aristotle's view the most
> important moral choice was to desire the good, even though we often
> lack the knowledge to
> be sure that our choices will always result in good outcomes. Pirsig
> seems to have
> abandoned the possibility of humans being agents. They are the
> playthings of patterns of
> quality of which they are often unaware. His mocking disdain of the
> 'editor' is just a veiled
> attack on the potency of the human agent. But our existence is that of
> agents, often unaware,
> it is true, caught up in the conflict between our biological, social
> and intellectual imperatives,
> as Pirsig so rightly perceives, but for all this agents with no way of
> evading choice and
> action. The existentialists were quite right to see the human
> condition as one where we are
> thrust into a world where choices are demanded of us, no matter how
> unprepared we might
> be.
>
[David Buchanan] Uh oh, I think you've condtradicted yourself
as to the dynamism in "action", but the more interesting issue is your
view of human agency. There have been lots of voices suggesting that
Pirsig's attack on SOM ought to be construed as meaning that there is no
self and no mind; no subjectivity at all. But I don't think that's a
proper reading of the MOQ. In fact, I think anyone can see that Pirsig
is trying to put experience at the center of things. And one of his main
complaints about SOM is that it paints our experience as somehow less
than real and "merely" subjective. I think his attack on the "little
editor behind the eyeballs" is designed to get us out of that old
Cartesian trap. The MOQ is like young Chris, who removes his helmut and
stands tall on the bike and can, for the first time, finally see whats
around him and can feel the outdoors and the fresh air. Pirsig's attack
on the editor is just an attempt to bring subjectivity "outdoors", so to
speak.
[David Buchanan] I'm glad you mentioned existentialism because
it seems to me that Pirsig belongs to a class of thinkers who write
philosophy in fictional forms. In this sense he is right there with
Dostoyevsky and Camus, wouldn't you say? And its appropriate too. The
amoral objectivity Pirsig complains about had infected philosophy as
well as science. The existentialist kinda had to move to a different
venue in order to discuss what really mattered most; human agency,
morality, meaning, authenticity and a whole host of extremely human
concerns.
>
> A moral compass would need to point to the best outcome of any choice
> that faces us. But
> we can never be sure what the outcome might be. In his bleak later
> years, Mark Twain wrote
> a story called 'The Mysterious Stranger', who is actually Satan, whose
> cruel acts when
> challenged are shown to actually be the best outcome of those
> possible. Choice is in one
> sense always fantasy, since we can only predict the outcome on the
> basis of past
> experience, which is inadequate to guarantee the future outcome. Yet
> we experience shame
> and guilt when our choices are shown to be immoral.
>
[David Buchanan] I don't follow you here. But maybe its not
such a good idea to let a compass choose the destination, that part is
up to you. Twain was an anti-Victorian. I believe its best to read his
stuff with that in mind. He's Great with a capitol "G", don't you think?
> It is possible to break the law in the service of a higher good. It
> was ironic to see the female
> judge who sentenced 'Dr Death' to imprisonment for assisting
> terminally ill patients to die, at
> their request, preaching at him the necessity to obey the law, while
> forgetting that she could
> become a judge only because a previous generation of suffragettes had
> broken the unjust
> laws of their day that kept women out of the professions. The law is
> built upon past actions,
> and is inevitably static, hence is always being adjusted as dynamic
> quality is encountered
> and acted upon by people serving a higher morality. While this might
> be derived from
> intellect, as Pirsig suggests, it could as easily come from a
> comitment to beauty, or some
> imagined unity. What Pirsig does achieve is a reinstatement of quality
> to the core of our
> experience. In a strange way, we do know quality when we meet it. When
> we act, though, we
> gamble with the outcome of our choice. It is not possible to know
> quality in advance of the
> experience. Action flows in a strange parallel with science. We
> hypothesise what the 'best'
> outcome of a choice might be. It is only as we undertake the
> experiment that the quality of
> our choice is affirmed or denied. What Pirsig gives us is some
> confidence that we will know
> the quality of the outcome. What he cannot give us is some static
> system to predict this in
> advance. To that extent a practical moral compass is an impossibility.
>
[David Buchanan] I'm totally with you here. Pirsig can't give
us a precise prescription for moral behaviour and then turn around and
say that the Dynamic cutting edge, the creative process of evolution is
the highest good. I'd say that its not an impossibility to have a
"static" moral compass, but it sure would go against the grain of the
whole MOQ. His "morality" is not to be confused with any particular
society's laws and taboos. It has a much, much wider meaning than that.
The idea that the Bishop gets nervous when a Saint comes into the church
illustrates the difference between conventional morality and the kind of
evolutionary morality that Pirsig is all about.
[David Buchanan] THANKS FOR YOUR TIME.
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