From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Wed Jun 08 2005 - 16:11:38 BST
Matt and interested parties.
On 7 Jun 2005 you wrote:
> So I want to emphasize: I'm arguing that it is true to say that, by
> Pirsig's lights, the "notion of the static inorganic level is a good
> idea."
To what static level do you see ideas belong?
> Saying that does not commit you to the idea that language was
> around at the same time as the big bang, before humans. What it says
> is that the belief that rocks are real and physical and that when you
> see one and kick it with your bare foot you'll regret it---that's a
> good belief to have to thwart stubbed toes.
> Intellectual patterns,
> common sense, ideas, language
OK this looks like the answer. Intellect a mind-like realm and its
patterns as ideas ...etc. And most people who profess to speak
about MOQ "mindlessly" adopts this - Pirsig too at times it seems
- but the SOL says that the true MOQ opposes: mind, mental,
ideas, thoughts are all the subjective half of intellects eternal
subject/object dichomoty.
> are things we use to deal with our
> experience. Saying that a rock is a physical thing (and by that
> meaning it was around before me and will still be here after me) is a
> good belief to have to deal with that experience, just as saying that
> the distinction between subjects and objects is a bad way to begin a
> metaphysics is a good belief to have to deal with the experience of a
> person uttering the noises that make up, "The distinction between
> subjects and objects is a good way to begin a metaphysics."
This is the said inter-intellectual struggle between its objectivism
and subjectivism (with sympathy for the latter it looks) and if one
postulates the MOQ as an intellectual pattern it is drawn into this
civil war, but the MOQ it is not part of intellect. Intellect is part of
the MOQ!!!
You may not be interested in finding out, but my question was
how Pirsig (in the said annotation) avoids this IDEA logic
backfiring on himself. Later in the same "thread" in Lila's Child"
he obviously spots the danger but goes hastily on
snip ...."Except in the case of Dynamic Quality, what is
observed always an interaction with ideas that have been
previously assumed...." snip
How can it be that DQ is exempt from this logic. If gravity wasn't
before Newton, Quality (DQ included) wasn't before Pirsig.
Scientific theories grow to prominence and change our outlook.
This is intellects objective side, while to ask where theories were
before emerging is to turn to intellect's subjective side. And as
said one may as easily prove that everything is subjective as the
opposite. In the true MOQ however this frustration disappears.
Consequently I can't understand Pirsig - after having had his
great insight (that Quality creates the subject/object division by
way of intellect [in ZMM]. By the intellectual level [as it ought to
have been in LILA]) - returns to intellect's idealism as if THAT
represents MOQ.
Like this which is the first part of the above annotation.
I see today more clearly than when I wrote the SODV
paper that the key to integrating the MOQ with science is
through philosophical idealism, which says that objects
grow out of ideas, not the other way around. Since at the
most primary level the observer and the observed are
both intellectual assumptions, the paradoxes of Quantum
Theory have to be conflicts of intellectual assumption, not
just conflicts of what is observed.
ZMM and LILA are splendid, but Pirsig's later publications:
interviews, papers and comments (annotations) are dubious. I
thought that the said it SODV was his trying to reach an
audience of somists, but he seems to be serious.
> The last thing I want to say is that, while I haven't been following
> this thread at all, I did pick it up at Paul's last reply to Ham. And
> that, I think, was a first-rate piece of pragmatist philosophy doing
> full justice to Pirsig.
When you Matt approve of the said LC annotation and also find
Paul's writings "doing full justice to Pirsig" I know that I am on the
right track.
Yours frustrated
Bo
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