From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 10 2002 - 00:14:07 GMT
Platt, Sam, Steve, Peter, Rick, all
When I got home from work on Friday, I had planned on writing a new post
for the list. I had spent the day thinking about ZMM and Lila and it
occured to me that it would seem that Quality is different between ZMM and
Lila, which would lead to varying interpretations, depending on which book
one leaned on. I was trying to set aside some time when a very lucky
occurence happened: one of the threads had begun discussing some of the
points I was going to bring up. This makes it much easier for me to broach
the subject and it helped refine what I thought was going on. On further
reflection its not that Quality so much changes between ZMM and Lila, its
that if you conceive of "absolute Quality," the absolute moves.
In ZMM, Pirsig's conception of Quality is that you can't miss it. Its all
around us, we all experience it. He developed the idea in relation to his
teaching of rhetoric. His answer to his students was that we all know what
has Quality and he demonstrated it by asking the class to rate students'
papers and they usually ended up agreeing with him. This conception of
Quality leads one to think that Quality is absolute. That a person who
voted for a losing paper in a Quality-vote was simply wrong in his
impression of Quality. Why else would you say, "You already know what
Quality is," so emphatically if you didn't think this. This absolute
notion is compromised by Pirsig himself in ZMM when he describes Quality as
"what you like," and further in Rick's quote from ZMM: what you like is
defined by a series of analogues. This is the direct lead into Lila.
The more explicit answer is that people are made up of different patterns
of value. They receive these patterns of value from the culture they grow
up in. So, a Pueblo Indian living in Zuni, New Mexico is going to have
different patterns of value then a native of New York, and they're both
going to have different patterns then an Italian in Naples, a Palestinian
in the West Bank, a Russian living in Moscow in 1912, or a Mongolian from
the Steppe in 1262. People interpret things as having value based on these
patterns. Breaking away from these patterns is considered Dynamic Quality.
The indeterminancy of Dynamic Quality is what makes recognizing it so
difficult. One person's Dynamic break from a suffocating 1940s art world
is another person degenerate "bullshit art."
The question we are led to is how to interpret "absolute." Its impossible
to not identify with Quality because everything's Quality, so, in that
sense, Quality's absolute. But that answer makes absolute Quality too
innocuous and ubiquitous for it to do any real philosophical work for us,
let alone practical work. The spin on absolute that would make it do work
would be that "there is an absolute, ahistorically true conception of
Quality." This would allow us to pass judgment on actions and people in a
way that we'd be comfortable in not being wrong and accidently sending
innocent people to fry (metaphorically or literally). But this spin seems
to ignore some of the things Pirsig says about Quality. For instance, the
analogues bit and the static patterns of value bit. If we still want that
foundation, we could vary it to "there is an absolute, ahistorically true
conception of Quality at any given time and place." This may look silly,
Quality being ahistorical at any given time and place, but not so. All the
statement means is that, at any given place and time (read: for any set of
static patterns of value), there is an absolutely true conception of
Quality. For every set of alternatives, at any given place and time, there
is an absolutely better alternative then the others. This conception is
Dynamic Quality. To rephrase in more MoQ compatible language, "there is an
absolute, ahistorically good conception of Quality at any given time and
place." This makes it easier to refer to good patterns and worse patterns,
to better patterns and not better patterns, rather than true patterns. The
trump card in all evaluations of patterns is Dynamic Quality and this is
where the absoluteness in the MoQ resides.
This interpretation of absolute still has one problem: the indeterminancy
of Dynamic Quality. What good is an absolute if we can't recognize it?
The vogue of absolute Reason from the 16th Century through the present
(though its been on the decline since the 19th C.) is that all people,
using Reason, can be convinced of the Truth. If they aren't, then they're
being unreasonable, unreasonableness being a moral deficiency. The MoQ
ostensibly tosses out absolute Reason and replaces it with varying static
patterns which effect the way people reason. The absoluteness is
transferred to Dynamic Quality. But if we can't tell which alternative in
a given evaluation is Dynamic when we're making the choice, then what is
the use of calling one of the alternatives absolutely better? If referring
to an alternative as "Dynamic" can only be done post facto, what is the
use? It certainly seems a moot point to say that FDR was reacting
Dynamically to Hitler's evil when he tried to get the American people to
support US involvemet in WW II (if one were so inclined to call it
Dynamic). Saying that Copernicus was being Dynamic in his advocation of
heliocentrism seems to simply be a pat on the back, a "three cheers for
Copernicus," a term of praise.
So, to Steve's question about the ZMM episode of grading assignments,
Pirsig's answer would be that each professor grades in light of what they
themselves have read. If they've read romance novels all their lives, they
might think a philosophical treatise too dry and boring. If they've only
read Descartes and Locke, they might think V.C. Andrews trashy. If we
conceive of Dynamic Quality as having absoluteness, then there is an
absolute right or wrong answer to, "Which is better, the Monadology or that
book at the supermarket with Fabio on the front?" We just won't know it
until sufficient time has passed. Peter says as much when he says, "some
papers are better than others and that can be recognised by a sophisticated
evolved pattern of values that just happens to be a Human being with a
history of experiences of its own." This is where all the real work
happens. Our patterns that we ethnocentrically call sophisticated is how
we decide on betterness. Peter seems to retain a notion of absolute
Quality in the way I've described: undefined and utterly useless in the
making of actual decisions.
Matt
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