From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Sep 27 2003 - 15:08:08 BST
Hi Scott,
> In tracing the argumentation of the MOQ, I see the fundamental error to
> be one that is shared with SOM, and that is nominalism.
My dictionary defines nominalism as "a theory that there are no
universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single
concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term."
My question: Is not Quality as Pirsig uses it a universal essence?
Another question: Isn't it true that we can frame no single concept or
image corresponding to Quality? If the answers are 'Yes,' then it seems
the MOQ is non-nominalism.
> With
> original participation, the perceived object was experienced as a
> representation of the spirit "behind" it. Note the word
> "representation". This means that the things perceived were perceived as
> representing something else.
Does not the MOQ say that what we first experience, regardless
of the object perceived, is value? I think of value as the spirit
"behind" all perceptions of particulars. For me, that's non-nominalism.
> With a little thought, we can recover that notion that the thing
> perceived is a representation, in that we know through physics that what
> is "really there" are a bunch of subatomic particles -- that a visual
> object has been put together by our "organization". What we do, though,
> is forget that fact when we talk about anything else, and hence we
> assume that all that we experience -- or could experience (like the
> subatomic particles) are just more things and events. Hence Kant. While
> he recognized that we put together the perceived object, he could only
> conceive that what might lie behind it (the thing-in-itself) was, well,
> another thing.
I think what Pirsig is saying that what lies behind the thing is not
another "thing" in the sense that a thing occupies a particular place
and time in space, but rather Quality or value which is the
"conceptually unknown," beyond time and space.
> Pirsig uses it in the nominalist way, as in:
>
> "For purposes of MOQ precision, let's say that the intellectual
> level is the same as mind. It is the collection and manipulation of
> symbols, created in the brain, that stand for patterns of experience."
> Here a word (or more generally, symbol) stands for patterns of
> experience. While superficially true, this hides something, namely that
> "patterns of experience" is not experience. Experience is always
> experience of particulars, but a pattern of experience is a concept.
In the MOQ, experience is never experience of particulars, but pure
value. Value itself is experience. It is an essence. Thoughts, the
particulars and the patterning, come after the value.
> For
> the non-nominalist, a particular, like a word, stands for the concept.
> Without the concept there can be no particular, for without a concept (a
> system, a pattern, a language in a more general sense than English) the
> particular cannot be picked out of chaos.
In the MOQ, particulars are picked out of Quality and become static
patterns of value. (Quality is not "chaos.").
> The nominalist, especially after the nineteenth century, would have us
> believe that concepts got tacked on to a world of particulars, a world
> that had no concepts, for the simple reason that there is physical
> evidence of a world without humans prior to a world with humans, and
> that concepts happen in human brains. If this were the case, then we
> also should not talk of patterns of experience before there were
> physical humans. The non-nominalist view is that what we call laws of
> nature, and instinct, are concepts, not just in our thinking about them,
> but as they are actually lived by inorganic and biological beings.
> Concepts, then, existed before humans walked in the world, and human
> learning is the recovery of those concepts.
Pirsig would agree. The role of DQ in evolution, long before humans
walked the planet, is clearly spelled out in LILA. We are learning,
through Pirsig, to recover the concept of Quality.
> Well, arguments can go on and on, so let me stop here and just summarize
> a non-nominalist metaphysics as it compares to the MOQ. In brief,
> instead of placing Quality as the first principle, I would place
> Intellect there instead.
"Quality" is an intellectual symbol for an essence that cannot be
intellectually described. To disallow using words to describe the
ineffable would result in not permitting any thought or talk about God.
"The Tao that can be described is not the Tao."
> To be a pattern, there has to be a change, or a
> differentiation (feel pain...jump off stove), and in combining these
> pieces into an entity, one has a concept. Also, to be static, it is
> repeatable, and that too is a property of concepts, and not of
> particulars. Hence all SP are concepts, and hence what the MOQ calls the
> intellectual level is actually all levels.
To be a pattern there has to be value first, then afterwards come the
concepts. I think you're putting the cart before the horse. And yes,
all static patterns are concepts, but it doesn't follow that the
intellectual is all levels. The Bible is a static pattern of concepts,
but that doesn't mean it's all intellectual. Symbols--the content of
the intellectual level--point to experienced value and patterns of
values but are not those values themselves. You can't satisfy your
hunger with a menu.
> Because we have to revise these as
> new particulars come into view, we assume that we are trying to
> correspond to some independently existing reality. But this is also a
> nominalist assumption.
Then Pirsig is a non-nominalist. He doesn't assume an independently
existing reality although for some purposes he sees it has high quality
intellectual value.
> Like Pirsig said
> about SOM, I see the nominalist barrier to be a "cultural immune
> system", even stronger than that of SOM, since it caught Pirsig as well.
I think I've presented sufficient evidence to show that nomialism did
NOT catch Pirsig as you suggest.
> Note to Platt:
>
> First, I agree about the existence of wordless thinking. However, I see
> that as something that fits into a non-nominalist metaphysics much
> better than the MOQ. It is where one sees concepts being born in human
> intellect (whether they are completely new, or just being discovered, I
> won't get into). It is pure thinking, or on its way there, a concept
> central to Steiner and Kuhlewind.
I think wordless thinking--or shall we say "intuition" -- fits very
well into the MOQ. We might say that wordless thinking gets you off a
hot stove before word-thinking comes into play..
> On Pirsig's objections to SOLAQI, that there are non-S/O examples of
> intellect, I responded to that at length to DMB a week or so ago. In
> brief, the objections are valid if one adopts Pirsig's restriction of
> "object" to the inorganic and biological levels, but I consider that
> restriction to do more harm than good. Rather, I would say that Bo is
> correct to see the value in thinking to lie in the distinction between
> subjective and objective. Further, though it starts with objective as
> the sensorily perceived, one of the advances thinking makes is to learn
> to treat social and intellectual SQ (to revert to MOQ) as objects as
> well.
We can treat non-nominalist essentialist concepts as objects just as
well as we can social and intellectual patterns. It depends on one's
view point, doesn't it? I can view my thoughts as objects while you can
view my thoughts as the subjective wanderings of a madman. In the
postmodernist Rorty/Fish view, all truth is subjective, ie. that which
one can get away with -- except their own truth, of course, which is
solidly, historically objective.
Platt
"To feel beauty is a better thing that to understand how we come to
feel it." --Santayana
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