From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 21 2003 - 21:09:50 BST
Ray,
Thanks for the kind words.
Ray said:
Picasso once said: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Maybe this says what I was trying to get at.
Matt:
I think that is a wonderful quote and it ties into something I'm going to say about poetry and the "unsayable" in a moment.
Matt said:
Do we trust the insights on morals a molester gives? Especially as Pirsig seems to endorse the idea that it does matter to a person's philosophy the way they act.
Ray said:
This is quickly turning into a loaded question. I first thought that a good idea should not be criticized according to the integrity of its creator. But now I'm not so sure. What if we rephrased the question to the following: "Would it change our feelings about the whole MoQ if Pirsig appeared to have very low social quality?" Then it sounds like we are criticizing an intellectual pattern (the MoQ) from the perspective of a social pattern (social morality); at the very least, our social patterns seem to be imposing some kind of authority on the intellectual level. And I thought that was looked upon as immoral according to the MoQ.
Matt:
I've always had trouble with the blanket categorization people use with the MoQ levels. Its no secret that I don't think too much of the ole' "discrete levels" idea. I think its muddier, but I still think there is a continuum. I think the reason I don't like the categorization of people as "he has very low social quality" or "he has very high intellectual quality" is that 1) it goes against my Sartrean instincts of not labeling people as "this" or "that" because the ego, the "I", is too fluid. I think we should reject such poor labeling because it treats us as overly static, which is something the MoQ warns us against. 2) The categorization is too abstract to be useful (for which Pirsig acknowledges when he says that the MoQ shouldn't be used to solve moral dillemmas). The monikers "high intellectual quality" and "low social quality" are the spoils of war, the people who win the argument get the prize of labeling people as high and low (which we can still do even after
accepting the Sartrean point). What we need are distinctions that are more concrete. For instance, Rorty's defence of Heidegger by saying that philosophy and politics do not cross over that much, and if it isn't blatantly obvious, we shouldn't really have reason to think that they do in any subtlely dangerous way. Philosophy is the way it is because it is abstract, and because it is abstract we can co-opt it for many different concrete things.
On this question, "Do we trust the insights on morals a molester gives?", I think we can make a concrete distinction that pans out to an abstract distinction between social and intellectual: we make a distinction between the person and their books. We can trust Lester's books on morality, but we shouldn't trust Lester around our children.
What makes the Lester the Molester case interesting in terms of the MoQ is precisely because of how it matches up with Sartre's treatment of pederasty. In a very famous passage in Being and Nothingness, Sartre says that it is bad faith to identify yourself as a pederast. Sartre thinks that identity, our ego, is a much slipperier thing to peg down, and I think Pirsig would agree. Sartre thinks that we are and are not our facticity and our transcendence. This translates to we are and are not our static patterns and our Dynamic Quality, our past and our future. We have the ability to break the chains of the past, our facticity, the static patterns of child molestation that have built up, and forge a new road. This is what Sartre means when he says, "Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play by secreting his own nothingness." Sartre thinks it possible and desired to coordinate our facticity and our transcendence, but that bad faith occurs when we waffle betw
een the two, when we identify facticity as transcendence and vice versa.
What this means for the MoQ, and this is something that Pirsig gestures towards in his passage on the death penalty, is that we shouldn't label people according to their static patterns. There is always the possiblity of Dynamic Quality. What Lila helps us see, however, is that, while we shouldn't label people according to their static patterns, this doesn't mean that we should be paralyzed from taking moral precautions because of some people's static patterns. The best coordination occurs when we maximize the greatest amount of room for people to be Dynamic, to break from their facticity, their static patterns, their contingent pasts, while remaining vigilant to the dangers of those static patterns that may persist.
Matt
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