From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Tue Feb 17 2004 - 03:40:52 GMT
Thanks for the quotes, Paul. I think I'll do something with them - later...
(from Ant's Textbook)
"Quality can be equated with God, but I don't like to do so. 'God', to
most people, is a set of static intellectual and social patterns. Only
true religious mystics can correctly equate God with Dynamic Quality. In
the West, particularly around universities, these people are quite rare.
The others who go around saying 'God wants this,' or 'God will answer
your prayers,' are, according to the Metaphysics of Quality, engaging in
a minor form of evil. Such statements are a lower form of evolution,
intellectual patterns, attempting to contain a higher one." [Pirsig,
1994]
Pirsig in Lila chapter 30:
"He thought about how once this integration occurs and DQ is identified
with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to
what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just
low-grade "yelping about God" of course, but if you search for the
sources of it and don't take the yelps too literally a lot of
interesting things turn up."
"The idea that God can hear one's prayers can be meaningful only if one
assumes that God is a social and intellectual entity. The Buddhist
"nothingness" does not listen to prayers. It has no discernible social
or intellectual existence. Dynamic Quality also does not listen to
prayers. It also has no discernible social or intellectual existence. If
one considers the Bible to be the center of the Christian faith then it
is evident that the Christian faith is dominantly social. Attention is
sometimes drawn to various mystical statements in the Bible, but the
fact that attention has to be drawn to them indicates how rare they are.
Read any book of the Bible and count the number of lines classifiable as
mystic, the number classifiable as intellectual, and the number
classifiable as social. Then read the Tao Te Ching or the Buddhist
sutras or the Bhagavad Gita and do the same. Compare the results and I
think you will come to the conclusion that Christianity is dominantly
social and intellectual whereas these Eastern religions are dominantly
mystic." [Pirsig, 2000]
"Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric.
Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece.
That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common
sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people
to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality,
not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know." [ZMMp.391]
"Every time you discover for the first time that something is better
than something else, that is where Dynamic Quality exists. There is no
fixed static location for it." [Robert Pirsig, Letter to Ant, February
23, 1998]
"Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and on forever,
always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of this
cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories, customs
and patterns of nature. The reason there is a difference between
individual evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a
constant, these static patterns are different for everyone because each
person has a different static pattern of life history. Both the Dynamic
Quality and the static patterns influence his final judgment." [SODV p.13]
"Intellectual quality measurements are logic, fittingness to empirical
data, economy of statement, and what is sometimes called 'elegance' by
mathematicians. Social quality measurements of quality, by contrast, are
such things as conformity to social custom, popularity, ego
satisfaction, and 'reputation'. Biological standards are physical pain
and pleasure." [Pirsig, 1998]
"[T]he Metaphysics of Quality says that Dynamic Quality - the
value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious
one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is
another matter altogether. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than
static scientific truth.." [Lila p.418]
from Ant's Textbook.
"The MOQ never says that the intellectual level is just the inorganic
level in disguise. The only reason the SOM people say that, I think, is
that they are trying to prove that everything is inorganic in order to
satisfy the demands of materialism. But in the MOQ all the levels are
embedded in quality and they don't need to be embedded in each other."
(Pirsig, 2001b)
"It's clear I've been of two minds on whether subjects and objects
should be included in the MOQ. My earlier view, when I was concentrating
on the confusion of subject-object thinking, was to get rid of them
entirely to help clarify things. Later I began to see it's not necessary
to get rid of them because the MOQ can encase them neatly within its
structure-the upper two levels being subjective, and the lower two,
objective. Still later I saw that the subject-object distinction is very
useful for sharply distinguishing between biological and social levels.
If I had been more careful in my editing, I would have eliminated or
modified the earlier statements to bring them into agreement with the
latter ones. However I missed these and it's valuable that the Lila
Squad has caught them." [Lila's Child p.531]
"Scientists often forget that all scientific knowledge is subjective
knowledge based on experience, although science does not deny that this
is true." [Pirsig, Lila's Child p.178]
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