From: Ray Cox (baroquenviolin@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 11:55:28 BST
Matt,
Excellent response; it corrected me on a few errors I
wasn't even aware of when writing.
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:
... 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?" ...
Matt said:
... 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).
Ray:
To this, I agree, and I will admit the labeling was
too general to be useful to my argument. To define a
person by his/her static patterns (be it biological,
social, or intellectual) is to ignore their capacity
for Dynamic Quality.
Matt said:
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 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 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.
Ray:
So then back to the original question: would our
feelings about the whole MoQ change if Pirsig appeared
to be an ugly, child-molesting, cigar smoking bold
woman? No, I still don't think it should. But rather
than abstractly concluding that social patterns should
not have an influence over intellectual patterns, I
should first and foremost make the distinction between
the human being and their thoughts, morals, actions,
past, etc., and then proceed to conclude (if
necessary) that our treatment of the MoQ should not be
blindly influenced by this "other Pirsig's" history,
but it should not be blindly disregarded when
considering his theories, either. Any thoughts?
Also for the sake of curiosity, I would like to go
back to your comments on the abstract quality of
philosophy. What if we were to discuss another
pursuit, say physics? Had Albert Einstein been
sitting on death-row when he came up with his theory
of relativity, would our dislike for the criminal
change the reception of the theory? Or art? Had Bach
been a theif or a swindler, would his music still be
taught throughout literally every Western music school
in the world?
Sincerely,
Ray
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
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 : Mon Sep 22 2003 - 11:56:41 BST