From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sat Aug 16 2003 - 19:33:23 BST
Hi Scott
> Paul:
> OK, but what do we gain from replacing Quality with Intelligence as a
> central mystic reality?
Scott:
I don't want to replace it, I want to add it. This stems from my reading
of
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, who describes two Realizations. The first was
the
usual mystical one that Pirsig refers to in Lila, that of experiencing
pure
DQ, that is, of having "blown out" all patterns. Merrell-Wolff thought
that
that experience was IT, but was surprised a month later by having a
second
Realization, which he tentatively labelled that of High Indifference,
which
went beyond the first. From the vantage point of the second, he realized
that the first, though deserving of the all the superlatives ascribed to
it,
was still incomplete in that it entailed the absence, or denial, of the
world, that is, of SQ.
Paul:
Interesting, are you familiar with Kakuan's addition of the 9th and 10th
stages to the Zen Buddhist ox-herding poem?
Stage 9 (Returning to the source) seems analogous to the "high
indifference" stated above. Kakuan writes:
"The water flows of itself and the flowers are naturally red."
This seems to me to refer to the pre-intellectual aesthetic apprehension
of Quality, the empirical experience directly perceived.
Scott:
Now Pirsig does not "deny" SQ, as is obvious from it being static
*Quality*.
However, there is a tendency to treat DQ as superior to SQ, and that is
what
I want to counter with emphazing that God is Intelligence *as well as*
Quality. Intelligence has in its etymology the concept of "cutting",
i.e.,
differentiation, that Quality does not.
Paul:
I also think that Quality should be considered as static quality and
Dynamic Quality together, differentiated and undifferentiated. I also
think the emphasis on Dynamic Quality you detect amongst fans of Pirsig
may be a Dynamic backlash against the western denial of its existence
when it is something we all experience and "know of" already. For
instance, it is impossible to describe the beauty of something we have
all experienced, such as a sunset, in terms of particles which we have
never seen or ever will see. Yet our culture would have us believe that
particles are more real than beauty!
> > Paul:
> > I would say that the intellectual level put one together based on a
> > pre-intellectual aesthetic evaluation of alternatives.
>
> Scott:
> Where did the pre-intellectual aesthetic evaluation of alternatives
come
> from?
>
> Paul:
> Dynamic Quality.
Scott:
But DQ is "pure" -- no alternatives, no differentiation, and hence no
reality, no world, no nothing.
Paul:
I disagree, "Dynamic Quality" is used as a term to throw off
connotations of "nothing" and is very much "reality", it seems like
nothing because it cannot be arrived at theoretically, which is the
western pre-occupation, taken to an extreme by logical positivists. So
the logic goes, if we cannot define it in order to verify its existence
empirically, it can't be real. The MOQ turns this on its head and says
that it is the ineffable that is the empirical source of what the
definitions are defining!
> Paul:
> Pirsig's explanation denies an inherent conceptual structure, to use a
> recently used passage again:
>
> "What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that
> this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the
> communications that we have with other men we receive from them
> ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not
> come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of
their
> harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these
> reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may
> infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we;
thus
> it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this harmony, this
> quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we
can
> ever know" ZMM Ch22
>
> Which is why I think that Quality provides a better term for
fundamental
> reality than Intelligence.
Scott:
I think Pirsig swings too far toward "blank slate" epistemology here.
While
it is the case that different cultures and different eons will
experience
differently, as long as we are biological and physical beings there is a
limit to these differences.
Paul:
I agree, biological quality, especially sensation and basic needs are
common to us as a species and the quality track selects a universe of
awareness fitting to those senses and needs. However, social quality
provides freedom from those limited biological patterns and intellect
provides freedom from those limited social patterns and Dynamic Quality
provides freedom from those limited intellectual patterns. So there is
no blank slate, just no fixed pattern of experience to describe and no
set of rules for us to discover; rather I think there is a collection of
cultural and individual analogues of the same ultimate reality that make
up our symbolic universe of thought.
Scott:
By adding Intelligence, one can accept primodial
Ideas into one's epistemology, even if we can't expect our sublunary
reason
not to distort them to some extent.
Paul:
This seems to me to be a very Platonic conception of reality.
>
> Scott:
> However, that value and conceptual structure includes more than what
> we see. Or rather, what we see is that value and conceptual structure
> projected into spacetime. Quantum mechanics makes this pretty clear.
> Particles and waves are two different projections into spacetime of
> something that can't be confined to spacetime measures.
>
> Paul:
> Yes, the projection into "spacetime" is a harmonious conceptual
> organisation of experience. However, remember that particles and waves
> are two deduced entities which explain different patterns of data;
they
> have never been empirically experienced.
Scott:
You are losing me, I think because you are not distinguishing between
figuration and alpha-thinking. I would say that figuration produces
particle-like and wave-like sense-data, while alpha-thinking deduces an
intellectual pattern to explain that sense-data. I would also say that
that
alpha-thinking would never get to first base unless there is structure
*before* the empirical experience. Our (alpha-thinking) concepts are the
same kind of thing as that structure.
Paul:
Something before the empirical experience? Like an "object"?
> Paul:
> In the MOQ, experience (as synonymous with Quality) is undivided, any
> intellectual distinctions logically come after; thus I think it is
more
> a matter of common sense that "experience comes to us in S/O form"
> rather than an empirical experience.
Scott:
Is experience synonymous with Quality?
Paul:
In the MOQ it is.
Scott:
I would say it synonymous with the
division. Otherwise there is only an unknowable Pleroma. The Pleroma
undergoes withdrawal from itself *in order that* it can experience
itself.
Paul:
Sorry, I've lost you.
> In Lila's Child p505, Pirsig and Dan Glover are discussing
intellectual
> patterns as being "a rational voice inside our heads", Pirsig states:
>
> "It seems loudest [the rational voice - static intellectual patterns]
> when new things are happening that need explanation. Soto Zen
meditation
> is a carefully contrived situation where as little as possible is
> happening and this rational voice tends to run down like an alarm
clock
> that nobody is winding. When it stops completely enlightenment can
> happen." [My brackets]
>
> This is what I mean by "explanation" in the sense that I have used it
> above.
Scott:
I suppose one can call enlightenment the ultimate in explanation, but
I'm
not inclined to do so. I think in belongs in S/O: there is an object
that a
subject explains.
Paul:
That isn't what I mean, enlightenment would be the absence of what I
mean by explanation, not the ultimate. What I mean is basically
synonymous with Barfield's figuration.
Cheers
Paul
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Aug 16 2003 - 19:35:05 BST