From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 14 2004 - 23:28:01 GMT
Sam Norton asked:
...in what way does the MoQ give value to people as such, rather than to the
patterns of value of which people are composed? Despite the torrent of
words, you (dmb)haven't answered that question.
Dan replied:
There seems an assumption behind the question that we (people) in some way
give (assign) objects (people, in this case) value. I think the MOQ finds
this assumption faulty. The MOQ says that people are the patterns, and that
patterns are value. So it seems to me the MOQ doesn't give value to people,
but rather the MOQ says that people ARE value.
dmb says:
Right. People ARE value. Sam began with a Pirsig quote concerning the moral
codes, the relationship between levels. Added the idea that people are
composed of patterns and then concluded that people do not count, only the
patterns. But if they are one and the same, this assertion makes no sense.
The question makes no sense within the context of the MOQ. Not to mention
the simple fact that Pirsig puts biography at the very center of things and
presents his philosophy through characters both fictional and historical. It
seems to me that there is no part of the MOQ that doesn't value persons, and
not just over germs.
I mean, consider the logic; intellectual values more important than social
values and so its better that a society die than an idea, and only living
beings can be a source of new ideas, so WE CAN KILL THOSE WITHOUT IDEAS?
Ideas are better than society so ideas are the only things that matter and
everything else can be ruthlessly destroyed? No, it simply does not follow.
Its hateful and irrational. There are plenty of other passages that point
out such destruction only undermines the higher levels, which depend on the
lower ones for their very existence. There are plenty of other passages that
spell out the life-preserving attributes of intellectual ideas such as
rights and democracy.
And as I tried to point out yesterday in the "transcendence thread, Sam's
bad question is predicated on a misunderstanding. He's taken Pirsig's
criticism of a particular conception of "self" and constued that to mean
that human beings are irrelevant or whatever. This cuts against the "man is
the measure of all things" attitude in Pirsig so profoundly that it strikes
me as an entirely manufactured objection, one wholly without merit.
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