From: Steve Peterson (speterson@fast.net)
Date: Sun Nov 10 2002 - 02:00:03 GMT
Platt, Matt, all,
Steve says:
Matt, thanks for this excellent post contrasting ZMM and Lila's answer to
moral relativity.
To Platt, it seems the answer to "If, as you say, static patterns are
relative to the individual, what's to stop him from claiming anything he
does is moral?" must be, "nothing." But society won't necessarily accept
his claim. Also, if he cultivates his awareness at all four levels, he will
naturally do what most of us have come to consider "good."
The better we understand what is considered "good" and what is considered
"bad" within each level and the clearer we see the interplay between levels,
the more we can let go of the intra-level relative categories of "good" and
"bad" and the more we can embody the Good, ie DQ.
And to "If everyone's values are equally good, logically everyone's values
are equally worthless," I would say, this is true. Static patterns have
relative worth. The only morality that is worth a darn in an absolute sense
is dynamic morality.
By the way, I plan to write a post (essay?) on dynamic morality based on the
Tao Te Ching to continue the comparison of the Tao and Quality that Pirsig
began in ZMM and to focus on the dynamic morality enbodied by the Master.
Somebody please stop me before I start if this has already been done.
Steve
Matt's post on 11/9:
>
> 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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