From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 08 2005 - 19:45:36 BST
Bo,
To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what you are reacting against. Like
Ham, you think Paul and I are postulating a "mind," an irreducible substance
that stands against "matter." But I'm not sure where you are pulling that
out of and it certainly doesn't cohere with the rest of what I take Paul to
be saying. The only way to read us as saying there is a "mind-like realm"
is by reading _any_ description of what it is humans do when we say they are
"thinking" as being a demarcation of the "mind." But that would mean that
you'd be saying we have a mind, too. So you must not mean that, but I'm not
sure what you mean.
You say that the SOL is opposed to all this, but I have no idea how. I
could ask the same silly questions of you: what has SOL? Where does it
reside? But the whole point of Pirsig's formulations is to eliminate these
substances that "have" things. What I take Paul and I to be saying is that
when Pirsig dissolves the substances of yore (like mind and matter) into
static patterns, he's saying that "things" don't have these patterns, all
there is too _things_ are patterns. A "mind" doesn't have intellectual
patterns, all the mind is is a collection of static intellectual patterns.
I'm not sure what "inter-intellectual struggle between its objectivism and
subjectivism" you think Paul and I are embroiled in that you aren't. I
mean, you sound even more idealist than Pirsig when you say, "the MOQ it is
not part of intellect. Intellect is part of the MOQ!!!" It is very hard to
interpret that proposition as not being idealist. The question that begs to
be asked is, "So, where is the MoQ?" But you don't want to be an idealist,
so what exactly are you saying?
You don't want, apparently, to interpret the Metaphysics of Quality as an
intellectual pattern. Then what is it? What are intellectual patterns that
the MoQ is not one of? As far as I can tell, there is zero problem in
saying that "Quality" and "Dynamic Quality" did not exist before Pirsig
invented them. You would take this as blasphemy, but why? We're not saying
that the _experiences_ of Quality and DQ didn't exist previously, just as we
aren't saying that rocks didn't exist before humans created the word "rock"
to deal with them. Pirsig created the terms "Quality" and "Dynamic Quality"
to deal with a set of experiences, mainly having to do with the experience
of reading philosophy. Philosophy is the generalized area of discourse
where we describe what we do, how we exist, and what the best way is to do
these things. Pirsig entered that discourse and used the terms "Quality"
and "DQ" to correct some of the problems that were being engendered by the
language, the descriptions, the tradition of philosophy was using at the
time. He did it because he saw these problems as being examples of how the
discourse of philosophy wasn't doing a very good job of helping us deal with
our experiences of life. Some of the experiences traditional philosophy
wasn't doing very well with by Pirsig's estimation were value(s), mysticism,
and insanity.
I think you might take the asking of the question, "Where/what is the MoQ?"
as being part of the SOMist problematic. But I think you've forced yourself
into such questions. It seems as though you deny everyone else the status
of being beyond SOM, but the only way to do that would be subsume
_everything_ under the MoQ, as if the MoQ were reality, which is what you
sound like you're doing when you exclaim "Intellect is part of the MoQ!!!"
But shouldn't you be able to answer questions _inside_ the MoQ, after the
shift away from SOM, questions like, "What are rocks?", "What are ideas?",
"What is the MoQ?"
And if its the case that you can (which it had better be), why don't you
interpret Paul and I as answering questions _inside_ the MoQ's compass,
post-SOM? Presumably because you don't think we are post-SOM, but, again, I
have no idea why. The only things you point to seem to be huge
misunderstandings, because the things you point to would seem to make you as
much as us a SOMist.
What exactly is going on? What are you saying?
Matt
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