From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 18:54:06 BST
Matt
Interesting what you say about Sartre. There is a story
that Sartre chose to go skiing on a lovely day and found
it hard to explain why half the town seemed to have made the same free
decision. He was disturbed by this and thought about it for a long time.
I think Sartre places dynamic quality at the forefront of his philosophy
to the neglect of static patterns. However, I think he is right to state
that
no matter what the static patterns human beings can overturn them.
The key thing to examine here is the unconscious. I think Rorty has said
some interesting things about this, suggesting that the reason why
the unconscious can exhibit purpose is that human beings do appear to
have multiple identities, some of which are not in contact with the
articulating self, or are just different selves. I think this
self-alienation within
the self is closely linked to SOM, as cause rather than effect. Static
patterns
or habits are clearly a move away from DQ to SQ, they repeat, they repeat
without the need for conscious attention. Consequently I think we have to
associate DQ with awareness.
regards
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2003 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: MD The Not-So-Simpleminds at play
> 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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