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On Robert M. Pirsig’s philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974.
What’s the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape.
People rebel against this ugly commercialism by rejecting technology altogether, and Pirsig thinks this is a mistake. If we realize that value judgments (where we sense “Quality”) are fundamentally a part of experience, that they drive what what we consider “rational” (e.g. a “good” scientific explanation) in the first place, then we can stop with the hippie rebellion and more sensibly and peacefully co-exist with technology. Though the book is not about historical Zen, it is about keeping centered, connected, and in the moment.
Featuring guest David Buchanan. Read more about the topic and get the book.
End song: “Freeway” by Mark Lint and Stevie P. Read about it.
ZAMM for the age of Obama?
http://fora.tv/2009/08/04/Shop_Class_as_Soulcraft_Matthew_B_Crawford
there is a strong resonance between Pirsig on Quality and Bert Dreyfus&SDKelly on “whooshing” in All Things Shining where they implicitly tie heideggerian moodiness/affect to aristotelian arete via Bert’s work on M-Ponty and skillful expertise.
They also couldn’t account for the supposedly objective sense of Good/Beautiful without importing some notion of Presence/Being (they are more focused on works of Art than hammers). Bert and SDKelly have spelled out the background philo elsewhere but like Rorty mistakenly believed that these ideas would be more easily grasped by the public thru explicitly literary sources.
Someday here maybe we can get into why so called Narrative theories are wrong.
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/SDK-4-PHI292.html
Right, Crawford’s book is something like an homage to Pirsig but it’s totally accessible to any intelligent reader. My dad is a retired engineer and he loved it for the way it flatters people who know how to get real stuff done, unlike most philosophers and other academic types. We can’t all be scholars, you know? Somebody has to know how to build and fix the things on which we all depend, things like houses and cars. As you may recall, Pirsig became an artful mechanic only after he made a few bone-head moves and ruined a vacation or two. He began as a bit of a motorcycle idiot and it cost him.
as I said somewhere I think that Pirsig closest to Whitehead, but the point raised about Wittgenstein is a better line of inquiry, showing vs saying, aspect-dawning and such, even in his earlier phase he gets to questions of how the meta-rules of grammar cannot be put into language, these kinds of lead-ins to antifoundationalism will be good to keep in minds as we venture into structuralism and then Derrida.
http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Pulse.pdf
what’s lost in talking about the book (esp.reducing it to other books) is the experience of the journey (sorry for the newage tone of that) this is the existential point that how we really get things in ways that make a difference in how we make our way in the world (deep in our bones if you will) are not by standard academic style means (or even less formalized modes of gossip, talking about), if we can just turn every new experience into an example of something we already know than we are stuck. Rorty believed that novels could serve such ‘bildung’ purposes (and that by and large philo texts couldn’t) but I think that this gives books too much power, is too Romantic a view of the humanities.
A more hopeful friend of mine tried this experiment:
http://thecollege.syr.edu/profiles/_pdfs-other/REL/Kierkegaard%20at%20the%20APA%20copy.pdf
so for better or worse ends my live commenting of the podcast
This has really been the most polarizing episode for me so far. Reading through parts of the text felt like a reconciliation with my own estranged father. I had some difficulty getting through it for the same reason. That all said, I don’t believe this sort of extravagant minimalism that I had found is firmly settled as the end-all naturalist’s perspective, I suggest rather there is no empirical science without an accompanying materialist ontology. Its rejection works just as much only under the pragmaticist’s view, and masking their difference as such fosters the sort of ongoing political tyrrany we face today, where your personal struggles within a society can always otherwise be privately mediated as mental conflicts, and its structural faults dealt with sterile lack of concern. I see no way to start up and feeling good about our technological decimation of the world, although our understanding of the extent of this phenomena has also come a long way in the past forty years, since very many people could afford to worry themselves with the proper individual maintenance of motorcycles.
I can’t help but attribute this inexplicable inkling toward pragmaticism that I hear about so often not as simply being the preferential scientific mode of life, but rather toward a strictly American political phenomenon: we require a perverse metaphysics that will allow us to better come to terms with the vicious community we find ourselves living among. Now, when you behave in the correct, right, better, or higher quality manner, you will be met with further success than those who do not. That’s not a philosophical perspective, it’s a tautological sociological truth, at least wherein we haven’t also by now managed to mangle that even. Questioning one’s own existence is not bullshit as it was very richly put, you just might find yourself experiencing it too whilst not having pleasant cross country vacations afforded entirely by the fruits of third world labor. Well, maybe I’m precisely the type of person they had hoped to irritate in to action, but it certainly hasn’t provoked me in to adopting much of their views. At least I’d like to hope.
I also feel like virtue ethics has been done before, and sounds hysterical coming from the mouth of a self-portrayed badass.
Reading further, I’m realizing I’d have to delve in to Lila before I come to any final decisions on Pirsig, I do find this ZAMM passage toward the end of chapter 30 maddening:
“His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose.”
He beats you to the punch on the obvious critique of his own work from within the same text and leaves seemingly no further way out of it. What then was the purpose of the long narrative, if he always had this disasterous fault in mind ready to be deployed? It’s exactly as in soap operas when at the end of an episode, you are told it was all just a dream. Or if Wittgenstein had discovered early in life that by writing the Tractatus he not only was working to toss aside the ladder, but would spend all that time merely climbing it to nowhere. Maybe the obsession with quality is ironic in this sense, and so he attempts to communicate through fiction that we’re always going to be making value judgments, and formal arguments, based on the primary irrational presence of undefined qualities. This happens despite reason’s inability to resolve the value judgments we happen to make with their necessarily nonconceptual component, and the romantic’s unwillingness to even so much as confront this distinction, in doing so robbing their own value judgments of any potentially intentional quality. Given these inconsistencies, we can still at least begin to deliminate in action through regular practices the method by which we do eventually come to a deficient conceptual understanding of the absolute persistence of Quality. This moment reminds me of the way in which Heidegger abandons the totality of his original project as being unreasonable, and we’re left to try and formulate something coherent out of the untenable remnants of their combined theses.
A quality podcast thanks . David Buchanan brought many details and insights to the discussion which seemed to follow its own preferred course through the gumption traps. Nicely done.
There’s a nice metaphor that comes across better when reading the book. Early on Pirsig contrasts the experience of riding a motorcycle with driving around in a car.
People in cars are boxed in, cut off from the environment, seeing only a portion of it through the windshield, and that only in a kind of distanced way. Furthermore, they tend to take the fast, straight routes, always looking ahead to where they’re going, always overlooking where they are right now. On a couple of occasions the narrative revolves around the characters’ reactions to the deadened look of these car drivers, who look as if they are going to a funeral.
On a motorcycle, the narrator explains, there is a wider and more immersive experience of being “in” the scene, feeling the elements, being able to see all around and even the pavement moving below your feet. Pirsig talks about eschewing the straight, heavily populated routes directly connecting major cities for the leisurely and less well known side roads through the country. This is more easygoing, expansive, fresh, alive.
Elsewhere he talks about the motorcycle as a kind of physical instantiation of the “classical” mode of thinking. The way the parts are designed to work with eachother in a logical structure to bring about a desired effect is quite literally an instance of rational thought made physically manifest in a hunk of metal.
And throughout the book, Pirsig gives a “romantic” account of the aesthetics of the journey; e.g. the way this route evokes a sense of peaceful space, or the way that impending stormcloud brings on a sense of melancholy, or what have you.
Currents of tension between the “classic” and “romantic” run throughout the book. Pirsig argues that if systematized analytic thought goes unchecked, it puts one in danger of being deadened and cut off from the vital, romantic ways of encountering life (as Pirsig claims has been done in the West by Plato’s ossification and Aristotle’s subsequent metaphysical demotion of “the Good”, and as symbolized by those deadened, disconnected car drivers).
Pirsig’s companions on the early parts of the trip, the Sutherlands, react to this deadening effect by trying to disengage from the classical– for instance, by glazing over whenever a chance to learn about motorcycle maintenance arises. But of course, this disengagement from the classical is not really an option; it is all around them, in the culture, in the technology that they rely upon to have a comfortable life, in the very motorcycles they’re riding on to get their romantic kicks. They can’t get away from it, but can’t let it dominate them either. They have to learn how to synthesize it into their way of life without letting their way of life be overrun by it.
This synthesis is what is achieved by Pirsig’s character. Between the extremes of domination by and rejection of the classical, there is artful integration of the classical into a romantic outlook. This is symbolized to great effect by this image of this physical manifestation of rational, “classical” thought par excellance, the motorcycle, quite literally being the vehicle by means of which Pirsig is able to enjoy this aesthetic experience of journeying across the leisurely side routes through the countryside. And in turn, his necessarily classical maintenance of this vehicle is informed by a deep, “romantic” sensibility of artfully attending to the machine, always with a sense of peace of mind intact. So the classical supports the romantic and vice versa.
just skimmed thru but seems to be a useful resource:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/
Regarding Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ) David Buchanan (of he podcast) (DB) is a self-appointed guru who for years have dominated the “MOQ Discuss” site with his weak interpretation – after scheming to have me along with the “strong” group banned from the “… unmoderated and free-ranging” (LOL) forum. I’m Norwegian and not used to verbal English, but from what I understood from the podcast his presentation of Pirsig’s first book – “Zen and the Art …” (ZAMM) was very superficial and sounded more like a sit-com show. However, it’s when it comes to the MOQ proper that he makes it into a travesty by introducing William James philosophy. To understand one must be a bit MOQ-versed, but if anyone around they will know that MOQ’s new metaphysical split is Dynamic/Static Quality (instead of the pending Subject/Object one) but DB has managed to make this into the James-inspired “Pre-conceptual/Conceptual” as if language is the static part of MOQ’s DQ/SQ lay-out. This is not true, MOQ first (out of four) static levels is the Inorganic Universe aeons before language. By this wrong opening (in addiition to Robert Pirsig’s indescisiveness about what the 4th atatic intellectual level is) has turned this “weak” MOQ into a travesty where all static levels are “language levels” and the MOQ is dead before it can make it into the world. But the strong MOQ (gleaned from the pre-hospital Pirsig) refuses go away even if DB and the latter-day Pirsig do their best to keep it down. There’s a new MOQ discussion site – “Lila Squad” – under construction.
Bodvar “Bo” Skutvik
Hello Bodivar
I think we once corresponded some years ago on this subject of the 4th evolutionary level of Pirsig’s 4 levels of MOQ Quality patterns.
Please correct me if I misremember, but your unique observation was not that the MOQ of Lila replaced the SOM (sub/obj metaphysics) of ZAMM. Rather, the 4th level – what Pirsig loosely calls “intellectual” patterns of Quality – is in fact nothing other than the focis of subject/object metaphysics itself.
An ant is a living creature that values inorganic, biological, and cultural quality patterns whose highest values are of the social kind likely does not experience itself apart from itself – it remains pre-intellectual (sort of on not-fully-conscious autopilot). But in high-order creatures there exist varying degrees of self-awareness (most fully evident in humans), and this very subject aware of object is the essence of an intellectual Quality pattern, and it is the age old subject/object concern of anthropocentric epistemology.
Am I getting this the way you see MOQ?
Burl
Correction for clarity…
Hello Bodivar
I think we once corresponded some years ago on this subject of the 4th evolutionary level of Pirsig’s 4 levels of MOQ Quality patterns.
Please correct me if I misremember, but your unique observation was that the MOQ of Lila does not replace the SOM (sub/obj metaphysics) of ZAMM, as Pirsig said in Lila.
Rather, the 4th level – what Pirsig loosely calls “intellectual” patterns of Quality – is in fact nothing other than the central focus in subject/object metaphysics itself.
An ant is a living creature that values inorganic, biological, and cultural quality patterns, whose highest values are of the social kind. It likely does not experience itself apart from itself – it remains pre-intellectual (sort of like being on not-fully-conscious autopilot). But in high-order creatures (especially mammals), we find varying degrees of self-awareness (most fully evident in humans), and this very ‘subject aware of object’ is the essence of an intellectual Quality pattern, and it is the age old subject/object concern of anthropocentric epistemology.
This conscious ‘subject aware of object’ is a Static Quality value pattern that follows from the creative advance of pre-intellectual Dynamic Quality.
Am I getting this the way you see MOQ?
Hi Burl
Can’t say I remember, it must have been way back on the original “Lila Squad” days? Anyway you are right, the 4th level is the subject/object distinction(the (the “M” taken over by the MOQ) and that was Phaedrus original layout (if needed I can bring the whole argument) . The recuperated Pirsig who wrote the “Zen ….” book was still so near his former self that he (inadvertently or not) revealed the original ideas, but the Pirsig who wrote LILA had forgotten (wilfully or not) and the intellectually level of the MOQ he presented had become something uncannily like SOM’s “mind” and nothing was gained. I’m aghast that David Buchanan has appointed himself a MOQ expert and flaunts this travesty that has absolutely zero value and void of any explanatory power.
Yours about the lower 3 static levels sounds a bit strange at least regarding an ant. Its value repertoire is the 1st and 2nd. level (inorganic + biological). However, the “social” designation of the 3rd level is a bit misleading, it would better have been called “cultural” because it’s solely human, the insect, birds ..etc. colonies, families and even tribes when it comes to the primates, sends this level back into meaniglessness. Regarding “awareness” or “consciousness” (in the “self- …” sense) I’m a bit wary, in the MOQ there is no mind (obvious in a metaphysics out to displace the mind/matter metaphysics!) except (if you must) the one attached to all levels, an awareness of that particular value stage. You said:
” …and this very ˜subject aware of object™ is the essence of an intellectual Quality pattern …”.
It may be a subtle difference, but it’s crucial: The 4th level’s “awareness” is that of a subject fundamentally different from the object, unknown to the lower levels.
You concluded:
” …This conscious ˜subject aware of object™ is a Static Quality value pattern that follows from the creative advance of pre-intellectual Dynamic Quality. ȕ
The self-aware subject in an mindless objective world is SOM, but once SOM is made into MOQ’s 4th level (stripped of its M “rank”) it switches to the VALUE of the subject/object (mind/matter) distinction.
Bodvar
Bodvar maintains the remarkably audacious position that Pirsig has failed to fully comprehend Pirsig’s work and thereby betrayed the true Metaphysics of Quality. As you may have detected, I disagree with Bo’s position and he’s not too happy about that. Pirsig disagrees too, of course. As a matter of fact, Pirsig has explicitly and repeatedly said that Bo’s view only undermines the MOQ. In one response to Bo’s theory, for example, Pirsig said, “I’ve always thought this is incorrect because many forms of intellect do not have a subject-object construction.” Even if there weren’t comments like this from the author, I still don’t see how Bo’s position could make any sense. In the MOQ’s picture, there is no mind at all? How would that work?
I don’t think we as a community will benefit from folks rehearsing well-worn sectarian arguments, but it does raise the question of what is the best understanding/use of a book and what/who outside of the book itself is a reasonable/legitimate source of instruction/data/proof.
David M. Buchanan (DMB) says that my “strong” interpretation of the MOQ is audacious, well be it so, but at least it is the only one that gives it its legitimate explanatory power, while the one that he advocates is void of such power. Now, what made Pirsig drop his original strong definition of “intellect as subjects and objects” i.e. SOM (in ZAMM) for the no-one-knows-what-it-is 4th intellectual level in LILA will remain a mystery, but he possibly wanted to avoid the assertion that once broke his nerves and instead assume the safe position as a “mystic” who says that Reality=Quality and any “system” hereafter will be a “moq”. This however is nonsense, if SOM – that says that qualities are mere figments of our minds – prevails, nothing is gained, it’s no use that Pirsig sits cross-legged and says that SOM is really a crypto–moq. The only metaphysics that can dislodge SOM is the “strong” MOQ which makes SOM a static subset of its own, that way SOM is trapped, while the “weak” MOQ is incapable of “arresting” SOM because it is somish to the core (it takes to long to explain, but trust me). DMB’s claim that Pirsig has denounced the “strong interpretation” is not true, I have ha personal letter where he says that “if it has value it will percolate to the top”. Neither has he said that “it undermines the MOQ”, he merely said that there are intellectual patterns “without any S/O content” which is wrong … unless one defines the 4th intellectual level as “mind” (which – in a metaphysics out to reject mind/matter – is sheer poison). Or defines it as language (concepts) like the James-inspired DMB does. Many passages in LILA points to Intellect=SOM, it’s like the “particle” that keeps popping up in a physicist’s equation in spite of his efforts to make it go away. One must be pretty hell bent on NOTseeing the obvious , to deny it..
Bo
Bo
Thanks…I am now certain we did discuss this at some point.
I was sloppy with my words, and your underatanding of English is strong enough to grasp my error. (I fear it’s source is my reading too much psycho/phenomenological writings about the matter).
If I get your point, my use of ‘subjective awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ is erroneous, and I agree with you. To get back on the solid ground of Pirsig (and Whitehead), I need to say that the value-pattern of the 4th MOQ level is the ‘relationship’ between subject and object. In ZAMM, Pirsig says this relationship is ‘creative impetus’ giving rise to subject/object abstraction.
Whitehead would say this particular relationship that gives rise to abstraction, and this abstraction has an affective tone that we feel as ‘conscious experience’.
Are we closer in thought?
Burl
Correction (once again)
Whitehead would say this particular relationship that gives rise to an abstraction, and this abstraction IS the affective tone of ‘conscious experience’.
…
In more detail…In Whitehead, the abstraction comes from an occasion of entertainment of the contrast generated in an affirmation/negation proposition: Something (subject of proposition) which is (predicate of proposition) but might not be; or, Something that is not but might be.
I am so flustered.
The point of intersection between P and W in my 6:19 comment above is so potentially rich if…if only I am seeing things right.
I have tried, beyond the point of exasperation to one often of anger, to find someone on PEL to focus on the questions I have about “Whitehead’’ theory of consciousness as the affective tone of an affirmation/negation proposition” (I have OFTEN pointed out its seeming relevance to many various PEL discussions).
The quotation marked words above are a mouthful, I know. But if I – a retired professor of civil engineering – can vaguely understand the matter as I have best tried to post on PEL, surely there are contributors to this site with philosophy backgrounds able to seriously try and look into this theory of consciousness and help me with it. Please?
Or maybe provide me w/ the email and/or phone of a Whitehead-informed professor so that I can get a handle on whether my gut feeling of the importance of this stuff is valid?
The most succinct statement of W’s theory of consciousness I know of is in this relatively approachable paper from Anthony Flood’s great site:
http://www.anthonyflood.com/griffinconsciousness.htm
Please help!
Sincerely, Burl
http://whiteheadresearch.org/
Hi Burl
You said:
“Whitehead would say this particular relationship that gives rise to abstraction, and this abstraction has an affective tone that we feel as ‘conscious experience’. Are we closer in thought?
I think so, but I’ve been so long into the Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ) that I have problems to hark back to subject/object metaphysics where “consciousness” plays this great and mysterious role. It’is plain that there is no grand consciousness but mere “static stages”, consider this: All creatures sleep, thus when a fish wakes up, it must be to to some awareness differnt from oblivion. This kills the consciousness monster, but the the mind/body form of SOM has such an immensely strong grip on us that no “fact” (such as the sleep one) makes the slightest dent in it.
I took a peek at the Griffin site and was struck by this passage (on Whitehead)
All of these features of Whitehead’s position are implicit in his doctrine that consciousness is the subjective form of an intellectual feeling, which arises, if at all, only in a late phase of a moment of experience. .
This has a strong resemblance to Pirsig’s in “Zen and the Art …” (ZAMM) in the early stage of the MOQ. Where Dynamic Quality was called PRE-INTELLECTUAL, followed by Static Quality called INTELLECTUAL the latter the subject aware of an objective world. In other words he conceived the intellectual level first and this is identical to Whitehead’s above:”consciousness the subjective part of intellect”.
After this initial “intellectual level” in ZAMM Pirsig went on in LILA to create the lower – Inorganic, Biological and Social – levels and their respective “consciousnesses”, but when he came to the 4th intellectual level it changed from the correct VALUE of the subject/object dualism back to the subject’s consciousness or mind, and the MOQ had forfeited its original enormous explanatory power.
Bo
Hi, Bo,
Excuse my dimness, but I’m having a hard time understanding your position and would like to have you lay it out in a little more detail instead of just referring to some terms and pretending we’re supposed to understand you.
In the podcast, it was entirely my objection to Pirsig that he grounds his insights on phenomenology but then generalizes them to the realm of the inorganic, which phenomenologically by definition we can’t know anything about (not being inorganic ourselves). Putting the question of grounding aside, though, I’m open to considering MOQ as an all-around attempt to explain phenomena.
So on the inorganic level, Pirsig says that there’s this conflict between order and chaos, right? We’ve got entropy trying to break things up but then some group of other chemical and physical forces that bring things together, making ever more complex molecules. Of course there’s no “mind” as we understand the term, i.e. consciousness, which is very complex, and may even require language to look like anything we’d recognize.
Various philosophers, though, have tried to analogize this “conflict” to the activity of mind, to describe it as proto-consciousness, i.e. the openness of one thing to another. A Leibnizian monad would get no info from the outside, it would be closed. When two atoms chemically interact, though, you might call it an exchange of information. Fundamentally, whatever it is that eventually, given sufficient complexity, we call consciousness, has its form in this exchange of information, so linguistically, we may as well extend this talk of mind, and communication, freedom, purposes, etc. all the way down to the atomic level and below, so long as we keep in mind that the increasing complexity of the levels matters, so, e.g. people would be more “free” than atoms even though the word is in a sense not much more apt for one case than the other.
What I’ve described is common to several philosophers (Bateson, Whitehead, possibly Hegel, maybe Chalmers and/or Dennett depending on the details of the account), and was apparently explicitly affirmed by Pirsig at some point, even if you think this isn’t the best theory that can be found w/in Pirsig’s work. So, it’s certainly worth taking a look at in this context even if we decide that it’s crap.
From what I understand of your criticism, Bo, you’re seeing all this talk of “mind” as implying subject/object distinction. So if I say even as an analogy that an atom has a mind, then I’m implying that it has an experience of itself as a subject contrasting with an object. But per our Sartre episode, this doesn’t follow: even as humans, most of our conscious experience is of direct connectedness to something, i.e. our consciousness is not divided into subject and object but it IS WHOLLY the object. Sartre (following Heidegger) is making a point very similar to how we interpreted Pirsig: an atom can have “knowledge” of another atom entirely because having knowledge, i.e. having a mind, and by extension having a teleology (purposive action), doesn’t require self-reflection of the specifically human variety. From the point of view of the observer, yes, there are two entities exchanging information, but insofar as one of the participants can have experiences at all, it’s not an experience of the subject/object distinction.
Now, all this is pretty questionable for me, but if you remove it from Pirsig’s picture, what’s left? I don’t understand what you see as having so much more explanatory power until we bring this throwback-to-SOM-mental-talk into it. Can you please elaborate and/or tell me specifically where you think the above is wrong and/or misrepresents Pirsig’s “true” position.
One more thing: I really have no interest in whatever past bickering you and Dave have had over this. We invited Dave to come talk and blog about this as an enthusiast, not an expert, and his main qualification was that in discussions on this blog, he was polite, positive, and reasonable-sounding. If you can do that too, then we’d be happy to hear your point of view. If you’re going to be a troll, then I invite you to find a different place on the web to do that.
Hi, Burl,
I don’ t know what it means to say that an abstraction has an affective tone, or that conscious experience itself is an abstraction. Per the epistemology described in the Schopenhauer episode, you could say that all experience is theory-laden, i.e. it involves abstractions (otherwise I couldn’t “experience” this book in front of me as a book instead of an amorphous mass). But it involves many abstractions, not just one, and certainly not an abstraction from the general subject-object relation, which seems like an abstraction only a philosopher thinking about these things would have, not a regular person (though I may be wrong here). I’m not sure of the relation of the tone of experience to the abstractions involved… I’d have to think on that. I don’t see how it makes sense to define the tone in terms of some single abstraction: tone is moment-to-moment, abstractions (concepts) are atemporal (per Frege).
As should be more than obvious at this point, I don’t think an Internet forum, let alone one like ours that is founded around wide-ranging interests that are peculiar to a few podcasters, is the ideal place for you to flesh out your understanding of and enhancements to Whitehead’s philosophy. Clearly your goals are different from ours, and I wish you good luck in pursuing them elsewhere. Start a Facebook group, set up your own equivalent to the MOQ site, contact all the Whitehead scholars you can find to see if there’s an online course or they will offer you some freelance tutoring, create a foundation for Whitehead scholarship that will train an army of Whitehead scholars to meet the Earth’s future needs… there are many possible productive options, but getting angry on this web site is not among them.
Thanks, Bo, for being the first PEL poster to actually look at and comment on this important paper by Griffin. I have tried in vain for over 18 months to cajole posters to look at it and discuss.
The Griffin paper is clearly stated and ‘severely’ (as Romney would say) appropriate to this combox.
Alas, Mark, your 2 posts just above indicates that you – the person I was most counting on to read the paper – never did bother to read it. And remember who lured me to PEL when I was seeking help at another site.
And I am afraid my pension based on only 20 yrs of service will prevent me drom starting a foundation. I, unlike my former colleagues, sought more from a tenured professorship than money, and the ensuing events of attempting to maintain rigor in such an environment helped me to see that leaving had more Quality.
For me, the point of Pirsig is the realization that the subject/object universe we perceive is not the ‘true’ nature of reality. It is a breath of fresh air to make the perceptual shift from subjects and objects to values, morals, and quality. For Pirsig, the values come first.
All of Western civilization is grounded upon the validity of objects which have properties – among these being a subjective measure of quality. In the West, we believe objects do or do not have value. In Pirsig’s MoQ it is the other way around. The Value comes first and the objects are properties of the value.
In his second book, “Lila”, Pirsig expands upon the concepts he broached in “Zen and the Art”. He constructs a metaphysics based upon values where things do not have value as a property, but instead sees values as the primary ‘groundstuff’ of the world. Those familiar with his metaphysics are comfortable with the idea that the ‘static levels’ he constructs, which on first reading appear to correspond to an almost scientific categorization of objects, have only a superficial correspondence to a customary view of objective reality. Pirsig is not a materialist. He is a ‘Valuist’ if you will.
Hi Mark
I damn David Buchanan more like Plato damning the Sophists (no less!)
(From ZAMM):
“Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because
they are low and immoral people…there are obviously much lower and
more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns
them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the
idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.”
According to the MOQ Plato was the midwife of the 4th intellectual level which at his time strived to free itself from the 3rd social level. Plato didn’t know the Q level context, but was aghast at the Sophists undermining intellect’s holy grail OBJECTIVE TRUTH. Likewise I’m aghast at DMB who threatens MOQ’s ditto: INTELLECT AS SOM .
You said
“Excuse my dimness, but I’m having a hard time understanding your
position and would like to have you lay it out in a little more detail
instead of just referring to some terms and pretending we’re
supposed to understand you.”
I’m aware of the difficulty to grasp the MOQ. For some time I thought that Pirsig dropped the “strong interpretation” (intellect as SOM) and adopted the “weak” (intellect as mind or language) to make its entry into the academic world easier, but this is wain, Pirsig simply no longer dare to venture back to Phaedrus’ revolutionary idea. DMB however has grabbed the “weak interpretation” and I fear that this will become the MOQ for the future something that will send it into oblivion.
It’s difficult to the sort Phaedrus out from Pirsig who wrote about him, but his initial insight was “Reality as Quality”. Now, there is no doctrine or philosophy that says that Reality is not Quality, it was just SOM which says that qualities are SUBJECTIVE, thus it was SOM which must be overcome. Phaedrus understood this and in his proto-MOQ – Pre-intellect/Intellect – the latter part was SOM! Then in the full-fledged DQ/SQ MOQ – with its static levels – one would expect the intellectual level to continue as SOM? But no, it had become MIND and in a metaphysics that rejects all S/O’s, including mind/matter, this is poison.
You said
“In the podcast, it was entirely my objection to Pirsig that he grounds
his insights on phenomenology but then generalizes them to the realm
of the inorganic, which phenomenologically by definition we can’t
know anything about (not being inorganic ourselves). Putting the
question of grounding aside, though, I’m open to considering MOQ
as an all-around attempt to explain phenomena.”
I appreciate your openness Mark because it’s sorely needed. Your objections are from MOQ’s 4th level and its outlook is that we are subjects who only can see theoretical shadows of objective reality on the cave walls. Look how Plato’s SOM-as-intellect reverberates down through the centuries. But this is no longer valid, we are all levels and know their values intimately including the inorganic.
This is as much as I can manage for now, but I will deliver the rest
soon …. if I’m allowed to?.
Bo
Bo
I am still not sure what you mean by S/O value patterns. Earlier, you said:
“The self-aware subject in a mindless objective world is SOM, but once SOM is made into MOQ’s 4th level (stripped of its M “rank”) it switches to the VALUE of the subject/object (mind/matter) distinction.”
Can you give examples of what you are suggesting Phaedrus (not Pirsig) would say are 4th level static patterns of Q?
Mary,
“Pirsig is not a materialist. He is a ‘Valuist’ if you will.”
Or, perhaps P is a processualist. He sees relationship as primary and the relata as secondary. Further, he sees that there are unique modes of relatedness which are hierarchical.
He sees that there are 4 such modes of relationship, which he calls value patterns. These modes are stable habits that provide form to the dynamic flux of reality.
In short, for P, the actuality of reality is change manifested in any or all of the 4 MOQ process categories.
“Can you give examples of what you are suggesting Phaedrus (not Pirsig) would say are 4th level static patterns of Q?”
I am thinking you might say that when humans are engaged in thought along the lines of :I am a subject perceiving an object.” But I can’t think of any other. Is the 4th static value pattern also in a dog’s repertoire
Also, something you said earlier about 3rd level cultural patterns being only in the human repertoire – is this how you see it? I thought ant colonies, schooling fish (and human children), wolf packs, etc. were all examples of social/cultural animals.
social/cultural patterns.
Hi Mark (part 2)
You said
“From what I understand of your criticism, Bo, you´re seeing all this talk of “mind” as implying subject/object distinction. So if I say even as an analogy that an atom has a mind, then I´m implying that it has an experience of itself as a subject contrasting with an object. But per our Sartre episode, this doesn´t follow: even as humans, most of our conscious experience is of direct connectedness.”
You know a lot more about Western philosophy history than myself, but perhaps not as much about the MOQ and responding to your comments based on your scant knowledge (no offense please) is very difficult, so I drop it and go to the core issue that may explain my “obsession” with the MOQ and why I act so “trollish” regarding David Buchanan. I was bad off philosophically when young – as bizarre a person as young Phaedrus in ZAMM – and found no consolation with the known philosophers. Without knowing it then, what ailed me was (what Pirsig later revealed as SOM) the subject/object dichotomy (or the mind/matter chasm as I knew it as) According to it, whatever we think is merely subjective “hot air”, without the least influence on the objective world. Nor did I know that the mind/matter enigma started with Descartes, but it would not have helped, SOM says that Descartes merely DISCOVERED a fact. Anyway, we know how the empiricists (Berkeley, Hume) from Descartes’ premises concluded that all is mind. Then Kant who set out to save philosophy from what he called “pure reason”. And we also know that he cemented SOM with his “Things for Us/Things in themselves”. And Kant’s influence was so great that this became the last word on this crucial issue, after him philosophy just idled along and offered nothing for the likes of me who intuitively felt SOM’s weight. Only with Pirsig did this overwhelming problem surface again and my encounter with his ZAMM book was revelation. Suddenly this “madman” who dragged the SOM monster out in the open and had it by its jugular vein by showing that it had arrived in historical times, evolved the way it has, but was not as reality “came from the factory”! My relief was limitless and I read whole book through in one sitting..And this is what I see disappear watching the latterday Pirsig and his lieutenant David Buchanan letting the SOM monster lose again …to infect the MOQ. See. Phadrus stroke of genius was – not to drive SOM out into some metaphysical wilderness – but entomb it inside the MOQ as its 4th static intellectual level. That way we can exploit SOM’s enormous static value while discarding its metaphysical ills. OK. enough said.
Bo
Firstly, I do take offense to your classification of Hume as an idealist. Radical empiricist sure, but he doesn’t argue for being skeptical of experiments with nature just because they are any less certain than something like an untenable “distinct and certain self” to judge them against, this difference is particularly what sets him apart from Descartes and Berkeley, and also Kant. Of course, you could try and argue this point, but that would mean paying somebody other than Pirsig very much consideration.
Now, whether they’ve done a better or worse job of it, in fact I would say the past century of academic philosophy has been exactly an attempt at offering valid research programs without any reference to a cartesian dualism. So, with Heidegger you simply have intentionality instead of subjects or objects, and from there you have half a century of continental thought that attempts to remain discursively avoidant of appeals to objectivity. Conversely, with Russell all the way back at the beginning of the century, you have the laying out of the grounds for a completely objective experimental science, and the equivalent hundred year long attempted analytic obliteration of any importance for subjectivity. Of course, this is only a mildly less dismal reduction than you’ve performed. More recently in the 60s, the first neuroscience and brain studies organizations began forming and originally claimed to be entirely nonsubjective by design, decades later we’re discovering this hasty presupposition was incorrect and that Kant’s incredible rational elucidations are alive and strong as they ever were.
There really is almost not one single person today who accepts the mind/body split, except on strictly theological grounds. The problem as I see it really begins way back with Plato, who set out a realm of forms that constitutes the human understanding, in contrast with suspect perceptions as given to us always potentially in error. Descartes continued this tradition by his claim that the real world is in the mind, and we just so happen to have this hunk of junk useless body coming along with it for a very short ride. You make it out like Descartes personally instigated a five hundred year long conspiracy to throw philosophy off its rightful course. Really all he had hoped to do was rectify increasingly untenable Christian ethics with the ever more apparently deterministic and amoral universe, and this is precisely the tired tradition that Pirsig continues his work in. It clearly has nothing to do with some hysterical violent clash concerning an underlying metaphysics without any reference to affected subjects, that there are acting subjects in the first place is the only reason we should even attempt to conceive of more useful metaphysics.
So what is it that Pirsig has done that warrants such a vocal following, exactly? What is so foul about this matter is not some completely sterile theoretical notion like a “subject-object split”, but rather that western philosophy since its very inception has been willfully engaged in intellectual posturing and the propping up of fallacious Biblical claims. Call me cynical, but you don’t seem to be “cured” of anything: in these past few remarks alone you’ve spent more time discussing subject object metaphysics than almost anybody else on earth has ever paid it any attention. Unfortunately I now have to say the same for myself about Pirsig.
Hi Ryan
You said:
“Firstly, I do take offense to your classification of Hume as an idealist. Radical empiricist sure, but he doesn’t argue for being skeptical of experiments with nature just because they are any less certain than something like an untenable œdistinct and certain self to judge them against, this difference is particularly what sets him apart from Descartes and Berkeley, and also Kant. Of course, you could try and argue this point, but that would mean paying somebody other than Pirsig very much consideration.”
Bo:
You know more about the finer points of Western philosophy than me, maybe it was Berkeley who was the chief idealist – “all is mind”- proponent I am only interested in the Mind/Matter enigma that bothered philosophy so greatly (after Descartes who – according to Pirsig – had brought the Subject/Object Metaphysics [SOM] to this stage) and reached a kind of final stage with Kant. Academy was so awed by Kant that none one dared point to the even more enigmatic “Thing for Us/Thing in Itself” proposal … not until Robert M Pirsig one hundred and fifty years later who brought this paradox-creating problem (“Platypus” he calls) out in the open .
I’ve read everything you wrote and am impressed by your knowledge. You claim that philosophy continued to ponder – in the sense of avoiding – the mind/matter paradox after Kant and that science has discovered that the M/M can’t be how reality is.”assembled”, and Jeez I agree, everything points to this dichotomy being a hoax, we are wandering violations of it: We think and the bodie moves, we take some material stuff (a drink) and minds changes. According to the M/M doctrine there must be some mindmatter “interface” somewhere, but none is found and never will be. And yet, underlying our civilization looms the SOM and all efforts to break free from it falls helplessly flat on its face – first before it is discovered AS A METAPHYSICS (which was Phaedrus’ great feat) and next WITHOUT AN ALTERNATIVE (wich was P’s enormous feat).
Ryan again:
“There really is almost not one single person today who accepts the mind/body split, except on strictly theological grounds. The problem as I see it really begins way back with Plato, who set out a realm of forms that constitutes the human understanding … etc”
Bo:
YES! Spot on, no one “lives” (experiences) the mind/matter (or mind/body) chasm, but it dominates our theoretical outlook because it came to be with the Greeks – reached some milestone with Socrates & Co and then a new one with Descartes and no one before Pirsig saw its origin. But then you go on to you say that Pirsig’s is no clash with this Subject/Object Metaphysics (SOM) and I beg to differ. OK, from the David M Buchanan and the latter-day Pirsig” travesty I agree, that one is as SOMish as it comes, but I build on the original MOQ that it is possible to glean from the first book (Zen and the Art …”) ZAMM and that one is a different matter.. ₕ
Ryan again:
“So what is it that Pirsig has done that warrants such a vocal following, exactly? What is so foul about this matter is not some completely sterile theoretical notion like a subject-object split, but rather that western philosophy since its very inception has been willfully engaged in intellectual posturing and the propping up of fallacious Biblical claims. Call me cynical, but you don’t seem to be cured of anything: in these past few remarks alone you’ve spent more time discussing subject object metaphysics than almost anybody else on earth has ever paid it any attention. Unfortunately I now have to say the same for myself about Pirsig.”
Bo:
I have problems discerning your “credo”, but at least the S/O distinction as a metaphysics (i.e. the ultimate blueprint of how reality is) i s a disastrous, one thing is that experience violates it blatantly another is the bleak picture it paints of us as mindish subjects principally and irrevocably shut off from the matterish objective world that goes its way totally indifferent to our thoughts about it. Maybe you are “indifferent” to this, but there are people who are oppressed by this … I once was and am thankful … at least to young P. ₕ
Bo
Thanks for your replies, Bo.
I don’ t think either of us is going to have the patience to engage the other substantially about the details of Pirsig’s account. From my perspective, you’re still talking in short-hand, meaning that “Subject-object metaphysics = the intellectual level” is to me a slogan, not any kind of explanation, and though I think I understand what I read in Lila enough to be able to have some legitimate objections (expressed in my recent posts here), you evidently disagree. I ran into the same issue when discussing Buddhism on this site a while back: Buddhists tend to think that anyone who criticizes a doctrine just doesn’t get it.
I’m not saying that you take Pirsig uncritically (obviously you don’t given your stance on Lila and Dave) or otherwise trying to insult you, but I’m getting a vibe here, with the sectarianism and the “I only really know philosophy through Pirsig, but I know him really well and that’s enough” sentiments and your “Pirsig saved me when I was young and troubled” story that all very much smacks of a religious approach, which facilitates to a certain kind of expository communication (elaborating the doctrine), but not the type that I’m after in mucking about with this blog.
However, even if communication about the material itself is doomed, I enjoy the meta-communication and tried to get my thoughts in response to what you’re saying about that into the Lila Notes Pt. 5 post I just put up.
Best,
-Mark
Hi Mark
Only the Buddhism issue which I think you are absolute right about. Buddhism is definitely no “school” inside Western Philosophy and yet not a religion inside the Semitic monotheism tradition either. Only the MOQ can bring an understanding to both the West and the East what the other is – the twain finally meet. Back in my “Sturm und Drang” years when I browsed the philosophy shelves in the hope of finding a solution to the mind/matter enigma I also found Alan Watts’ books on Buddhism (“The Way of Zen” mainly) I sensed that he said that Buddhism resolves or reconciles mind and matter, yet couldn’t make head or tail of his explanations. Only with Pirsig did the proverbial lightbulb ignite. In my opinion the MOQ is a Western “Buddhism”, clear and crisp where the Oriental is woolly and inscrutable. But funnily enough, one Burmese (I believe) who came to the MOQ discussion opposed my contention as vehemently as DMB. Strange, the East wants to keep its mysticism and the West its SOM “illness”.
Thanks for the exchange
Bo
Bo
Can you give examples of what you are suggesting Phaedrus (not Pirsig) would say are 4th level static patterns of Q?
I am thinking you might say that when humans are engaged in thought along the lines of :I am a subject perceiving an object.” But I can’t think of any other. Is the 4th static value pattern also in a dog’s repertoire
Also, something you said earlier about 3rd level cultural patterns being only in the human repertoire – is this how you see it? I thought ant colonies, schooling fish (and human children), wolf packs, etc. were all examples of social/cultural patterns.
Hi Burl
I got so occupied with Mark that our discussion was put “on hold”
You said:
“I am still not sure what you mean by S/O value patterns. Earlier, you said: œThe self-aware subject in a mindless objective world is SOM, but once SOM is made into MOQ™s 4th level (stripped of its M œrank) it switches to the VALUE of the subject/object (mind/matter) distinction. Can you give examples of what you are suggesting Phaedrus (not Pirsig) would say are 4th level static patterns of Q?”
I have problems understanding your question, but believe that you ask where Phaedrus suggests that the 4th static intellectual level is SOM. This is in ZAMM’s tentative new Quality Metaphysics which only had one static level, namely SOM (subtitled “intellect”). His argument started with this quote
“Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.”
This “Preintellectual /Intellectual Quality (the latter=subjects and objects i.e. SOM). But between this and the the next stage the motorcycling author intervened with his motorcycle-inspired diagram. You see MCs can be theoretically split but remain whole, and his next version became “QUALITY/ Dynamic// Static Quality” and this keeps pestering the MOQ into the LILA book.
I don’t know if this answers your question, as said I’ve been so long with the MOQ that I have a hard time returning to SOM.
Bo
I think you are saying:
1) We have the SOM view, from ZAMM, of Quality as parent/source of subjects and objects.
2) We have, from ZAMM, reality is the Quality event in which preintellectual awareness of Quality gives rise to subject and object.
3) Preintellectual/intellectual = Quality/SOM.
4) In MOQ, Quality is now Dynamic Quality, and at the Quality Event, Dynamic Quality gives rise to static quality patterns of 4 distinct types, and based on 3), the 4th MOQ level – the intellectual level – is populated with S/O patterns of value.
The above is different than how Pirsig framed it, since he saw intellectual patterns as things that were symbolic abstractions of a subject, like music, math, philosophic systems, etc.
Do I understand you correctly?
If so, these are my questions:
1) What are a few different examples of 4th level S/O static quality value patterns?
2) Are 3rd and 4th level static quality patterns only in the repertoire of humans?
Hi Burl
Interesting inputs/questions, but it’s so cumbersome to write in this PEL comment “window”, come over to the …
http://groups.google.com/group/lilasquad
… place and we can discuss things more easily.
Bo
It seems to me that Pirsig’s introduction of Quality as a third metaphysical entity is unwarranted; at the time when Pirsig was experiencing the impetus to promote the metaphysical status of Quality, if only he’d read Sartre’s “Transcendence of the Ego,” he may have realized Quality is just something the non-positional consciousness of consciousness does. By Sartre’s account, our ‘unreflective’ or pure consciousness happens to have an awareness of itself such that it is presented in our minds with values. In other words, conscious perception of something is not just the collection of pixels of an image–it occurs in our consciousness with baggage such as values. The values with which consciousness of something is presented (by way of this non-positional consciousness of consiousness) is precisely the phenomenon Pirsig wants to call Quality. Thus Quality is the result of our unreflective consciousness, or more precisely it is something that this non-positional consciousness of consciousness does, so there is no need to introduce quality as an additional category to our metaphysics. Instead, this Quality is just another mode or property of whatever metaphysical status we would ascribe to the mind.
One could substitute Pirsig’s Quality with Sartre’s non-positional c-of-c and arrive at many of the same conclusions regarding the role of Quality. For example, Pirsig claims that Quality is neither objective (in the sense of being inherent to the object) or subjective (in the sense of being “whatever you like”), but is prior to the notion of subject-object entirely–it is precisely what allows for the existence of subject and object in the first place. To this, we could say that it is not Quality, but non-positional c-of-c that makes it known to us that what we are conscious of are the qualities of an external object, i.e. it just happens to be a fact of non-positional c-of-c that it is capable of making this subject-object distinction (Wes made this point in the podcast with the example of seeing a tree). When our consciousness attends to something, it prompts non-positional c-of-c to access various prior conscious states (memories) or concepts or knowledge in the mind that bear relevance to that something we are attending to, so as to inform and imbue it with values and a sense of good or bad quality.
Non-positional c-of-c not only can stand in for Quality throughout Pirsig’s account, it can also explain better the many observations he made of Quality:
1. there is commonality in our sense of Quality (consensus among students after judging essays) 2. it is dynamic and can change upon future experience (studying the subject to greater depth),
3. it is pre-intellectual (e.g. happens spontaneously and simultaneously with the conscious experience of that whose quality we are concerned)
4. there is a bifurcation of Quality into the romantic and classical
There is a commonality in individual senses of Quality because of a commonality in prior experiences, notions and knowledge that non-positional c-of-c is able to access to inform our perception of quality. Pirsig’s students came to a consensus regarding essay Quality because of a shared language/culture, a common education, and having read much of the same literature, all of which having been internalized was able to inform their judgments. Furthermore, much of the commonality in our Quality doesn’t stop at a common culture, but goes all the way down to a common genetic make-up, which in turn hardwires certain sensibilities of quality (i.e. human nature), or at least provide the necessary conditions for it (e.g. having in common the domains of sense perception and emotion). In other words, Quality is indeed “whatever you like,” but it just so happens that a great deal of “whatever you like” is similar by virtue of all this shit we have in common.
Mark made the objection that although Quality may be pre-intellectual, it can not be pre-conceptual, since much of what we make Quality judgments of require the use of concepts or prior knowledge. If we were to replace Pirsig’s Quality with the non-positional c-of-c, then there would be no contradiction here, for we can see how this non-positional c-of-c is able to inform the Quality judgment in terms of prior concepts and knowledge while still being pre-intellectual.
The bifurcation into romantic and classic Quality, I believe is due precisely to the “disposition” of our non-positional c-of-c to preferentially select which types of prior conscious states to cross reference the current state. If one is a romantic, his mind’s non-positional c-of-c will preferentially seek out prior states that are more emotionally, artistically or grooviness guided to inform his perception of Quality, whereas those preferential states are analytical, functional or materialistic for the Square. Pirsig’s beer can shim stock is a good example here.
To position this bifurcation as being caused by non-positional c-of-c makes it easier to explain
1. why we are able to experience both types of quality simultaneously in a single object,
2. how it is that we can switch between classical/romantic depending on mood,
3. the fact there is a spontaneity in what kind of Quality an object of perception will be presented with.
4. If you slip a Square some acid, his Quality judgments are going to change from classically to romantically inclined because the LSD molecules affect the disposition of his non-positional c-of-c
5. If you slip a groovy person some Adderall, his Quality judgments will change from romantically to classically inclined because the amphetamine molecules alter his non-positional c-of-c to relay more literal, analytical domains of his mind in informing perceptions of Quality.
Thus, Pirsig’s account of Quality may be correct in its Phenomenological role, but he is mistaken about the metaphysics and/or ontology–Quality does not deserve its own metaphysical category because it happens in the same category as the rest of the mind. In fact, Quality is just something the brain does for one aspect of the mind, so it doesn’t make sense to make it ontologically distinct from all of the other aspects of the mind.
I like what you’ve said here, Moses. Though, rather than saying that Pirsig’s account of Quality is “mistaken about the metaphysics and/or ontology”, it seems to me that your account says that Pirsig’s position is simply mistaken in having Quality be ontological at all. This would be right in line with Sartre’s disinclination toward any sort of metaphysics period. He’d speak of metaphysical/ontological dispositions, but refuse the notion that there is any sort of over-weaning (i.e., True) ontology/metaphysics of the world.
That said, it would seem that any way of speaking about anything involves (at least) a rough-and-ready ontology (this is my pragmatism speaking) and that one might be able to discover/articulate the ontological predisposition of one claim or another. So, in this way, Pirsig does that work for us by raising Quality to a distinct metaphysical level as a kind of third way explicitly.
Moses, please help me see your basic premise. You say non-positional consciousness of consciousness is “precisely the phenomenon Pirsig wants to call Quality”. Precisely? I don’t even see a vague resemblance, much less any basis for equating the two. Please explain what these operative terms mean to you. You’re equating two terms without explaining what either of the mean.
Also, I think we ought not take the phrase “Quality is a third entity” a bit too literally. I’m pretty sure he’s not making an ontological claim so much as denying the idea that Quality must be either subjective or objective. Saying it is a third thing is just a way of saying Quality neither physical nor psychical, that it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere under substance dualism. Later, he’ll say that Quality is not a thing or entity, that it’s an event, a process. (And this is what James says about consciousness itself, that it is a process and not a thing or entity. Does this help you understand how I might fail to see the connection?
Or, say, the bit about concepts being necessary to Quality judgements. I think that idea is fundamentally at odds with Quality as Pirsig uses the term. Remember the hot stove example, for example?
“This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. …Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow. The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here.” …It [valuation or quality] is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.” (Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig’s)
Moses-as-Sartre starts from SOM’s subjective premises where consciousness is reality’s ground, but even this meets with Godel’s Theorem in the form of there’s always is a “God’s Eye” that sees the system – here in the the form of an alleged meta-consciousness which is conscious of consciousness (his “c- of c-“) and so on in an infinite regress. But in Moses’ opinion even this meta-consciousness belongs inside the mind and thus the idealist circle is closed. Just like the materialist circle is closed if one starts from SOM’s objective premises. Inside SOM this see-saw has been going ever since the Greeks instigated it and “Plato vs the Sophists” was SOM’s first S/O clash. Right now – after the Relativism and Quantum Theory – the materialist camp is down while the idealist one is having its heyday. However when Pirsig launched his Quality Idea it was different and when his teacher colleagues asked him if Quality was subjective or objective (the dilemma) he spent much time in wrestling with the objective “horn” but went a bit lightly over the subjective one. Moses touches on this
and says that Pirsig’s Quality may be likened to his (Sartre’s) “consciousness of consciousness”, but quickly concludes that even the c.-of-c. is inside mind and thus there’s no escape from this subjective “black hole”. But Pirsig stumbles past all warning signs and passes the perimeter of SOM and from the metaphysical no-man’s-land he sees the new Quality Reality. I know this sounds a bit “religious” and I see that the good man David (Buchanan) strives to sound the level-head philosopher, but without acknowledging this Copernican Revolution or in-out-turn it’s impossible to come to grips with the MOQ
David writes:
“I think it’s important to realize the sense in which Pirsig uses the word “metaphysics”, especially as it relates to his “Metaphysics of Quality”. He’s not talking about metaphysics in the Platonic or theistic sense but rather a basic set of beliefs about reality, a picture of how everything hangs together. Everybody has to have some kind of worldview, even if it’s just common sense or, as Einstein put it, that bundle of prejudices we inherit before the age of 18. “As long as you’re inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can’t escape metaphysics,” he says.”
…and I agree profoundly. This extended metaphysics is how Pirsig starts in LILA, but then he turns the “mystic” an begins to denounce metaphysics as a menu without food … etc. and thereby back with Plato – or Aristotles – (i.e. SOM) where metaphysics is a subjective theory about objective reality. From this David hopefully sees the futility of basing the MOQ on SOM’s subjectivist premises – i.e. an IDEA in an idea-intellectual level. OK now I’m back in our age.old difference.
Bo.
Hi, Bo,
Since you’re still here, if you have the patience, I’d like to tease out what exactly you mean by subject-object metaphysics.
To me, there are several things being conflated here, or maybe just several versions of what you see as the same mistake:
1. You can be an actual Cartesian dualist, and say that there are, metaphysically, two types of substances. Almost no one does this now and hasn’t for a long time.
2. You can say that epistemically, our starting point is as a consciousness (saying nothing about what this is, or if it has a “mind” causing it or anything like that) contemplating its objects. This is very widespread, even in Sartre who denies that there is any subject that owns consciousness: it’s just a spontaneity: the form in which objects exist.
3. There’s the correspondence theory of truth which says that things we say are true if and only if they correspond to something in some sense independent of our beliefs. This is extremely common, and Pirsig himself often sounds like this: he thinks that objectively, certain statements (like the hierarchy of his levels, or whether or not my name is Joe, or whether or not it rained today) are true or false independently of what we might think about them.
4. There’s the view that acknowledges that subject/object thinking is pretty crucial to any sort of analysis we might do (or at least many sorts), but that we have to acknowledge that this is not “natural,” but the product of an analysis of experience, which itself doesn’t impose this cognitive structure, and so we wouldn’t want to say that this division is part of the fundamental ontology of the world.
Can you use the above (or amend them if you’d like) to tell me which you think Pirsig is so uniquely rejecting? To me, SOM is just #1, so you’re just arguing against a straw man. My analysis of Pirsig’s position was that he bought into #4, which then allows him a contextual acceptance of #3 and #2 (meaning, again, that he can do phenomenological analysis and talk about truth in the ordinary way so long as we keep in mind that there’s something artificial going on). Is this what you mean by relegating SOM to intellectual quality? It seemed like you were arguing for some more radical position than that, i.e. one that even rejects #4 and accepts instead a kind of mysticism wherein I am literally one with the universe so long as I understand things properly.
Thanks, -ML
Hi Mark.
I have only participated in sites where aspects of Pirsig’s ideas have been discussed and was not prepared for this where …according to Pirsig
“You can’t get anywhere because you are forced to resolve arguments every step of the way about the basic terms you are using. It’s hard enough to talk about the MOQ without having to resolve a metaphysical dispute at the end of each sentence.”
You said
“Since you’re still here, if you have the patience, I’d like to tease out what exactly you mean by subject-object metaphysics?”.
It’s in ZAMM, beginning in chapter 29 with
“One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last caveman and the first Greek philosopher was short …etc. for some pages.”
According to Pirsig SOM came to a milestone with Socrates’ “Appearance/Truth” dichotomy i.e. even if no-one agreed on what the eternal principles were, they at least agreed on a true reality different from mere appearance. (The S & O terms weren’t used by the Greeks, only some time in Medieval Ages I’m told) but the point is that Truth = Objective, Appearance = Subjective. After this the issue became what was “objective” and what was “subjective”. Plato said that Ideas were permanent while Senses betrayed us (Plato’s “ideas” had nothing to do with our mental patterns) Then Aristotles who claimed that “Substance” was eternal while “Forms” constantly shifted. ᾕ
MOQ’s claim is that the subject/object dichotomy came to be this way, then it developed in fits and starts up through the a millennium and a half really before reaching a new milestone with Descartes after whom it started to take the form of a metaphysics i.e. the view which is so deep-rooted that no one can fathom that any other has ever existed … if it did has it was sheer ignorance. SOM says that there’s a subjective and an objective aspect of reality between which there’s no bridge or interface. The fact that this is violated constantly does not make the least impact. Exactly as the Ptolemaic Cosmology were so sure about the earth-centered universe that no observation could penetrate. They continued to work out crystal spheres and circles to justify the weird planetary movement. And our present day philosophers continue to work out S/O-based “crystal theories” to account for our weird experience of no S/O schism. ᾕ
You presented 4 reasonable sounding philosophical points
and I wish I could ament something slightly so that the MOQ would fit, but it is a total break with all/any SOM (Ptolemaic) approaches. Pirsig on the other hand seems convinced that if he only can prove that value are what govern everything (his Quality=Reality postulate) there will be a smooth SOM-MOQ transition, but I harbor no such hope. There’s no metaphysics that says “Reality isn’t Quality” it just SOM that says that qualities are subjective. Therefore the MOQ’s axiom is “Reality is Dynamic/Static Quality” (where SOM is the a static subset) Again the Copernican Revolution where people one moment “saw” crystal spheres guiding the planets, the next they saw (the paradocical movements) as natural in a sun-centered system. Till now the subject/object schism has been reality’s ground, and we have searched for explation for the paradoxes it created, some day the MOQ will dissolve (not solve) all these paradoxes. They are all natural in its “cosmology” One last thing, its a metaphor not all perfect, the Ptolemaic system is now worthless, but in the MOQ the S/O distinction is its highest static level, very valuable once its metaphysical quality is stripped and taken over by the MOQ.
Any wiser?
Bo
Thanks for the reply.
I was well aware of Pirsig’s story about the development through Plato to Descartes, and I agree with that much. The thing is, far from this view becoming “so deep-rooted that no one can fathom that any other has ever existed,” the problem was historically identified right in Kant’s time (Kant is taught in class with the same metaphor: his was the Copernican Revolution that turned epistemology from a matter of knowing the objective world to a matter of us creating experience), and though Kant retained the thing in-itself as some unknowable effluvia that we must be somehow interacting with to create experience (his reason for doing this was to explain the apparent agreement between people about their experiences, and also, for him an added bonus, to allow for the possibility for the existence of God), that was pretty roundly rejected starting with Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit (which I can’t imagine Pirsig read; his comments about Hegel are all pretty evidently third-hand, though Hegel scholarship was pretty crappy pre-1970s anyway, so he can’t be blamed for that) is all about how this undifferentiated stuff (which, really, you might well call Quality) goes through different permutations of interacting with itself to create phenomena like our unreflective manipulation of objects, the development of concepts, self-consciousness, the interaction between two people (and the power relations that are immediately involved), our collective engagement with ideas to develop a culture, etc. Like Pirsig, Hegel saw these different layers of conflict, and really thought he wasn’t just giving some account from the first-person point of view but something that Pirsig would call a metaphysics.
That’s just one example, and I’m not sure I did it justice with one paragraph (we did do two episodes on it a year back if you’re interested). Contra Pirsig’s characterization, Hegel was not just “manipulating crystal spheres,” tinkering with how much subjectivity and how much objectivity there is in the sense of the conflict between Hobbes (everything is matter) and Berkeley (everything is idea). Hegel is way past that, and if one isn’t satisfied with the way he transcended that difficulty, then Heidegger and Sartre (among others) are part of that same tradition.
So I think that Pirsig’s story of the history of philosophy is just wrong; he just hadn’t read very much beyond what you might get in an intro philosophy class that goes up to Descartes and then spends only a week on Kant. He was definitely on to something in getting past this naive SOM, but he wasn’t alone, as he discovered himself when going back and reading historical pragmatism (which has a lot of ties to the phenomenological tradition of Hegel through Sartre, but it much easier to read). William James’s radical empiricism, as Dave has pointed out, includes many of the same points that Pirsig makes.
…But my point is not just to be a dick about history here. My main objection to Pirsig in my blog posts here has been his oversimplification, and from what (admittedly little) you’ve said here, it sounds like you’re affirming that oversimplification and making it worse.
In saying “SOM is intellectual quality” you’re saying something that to me doesn’t even sound like it makes grammatical sense, so I’m trying to better figure out what you mean. As you’ve said, SOM is a whole world view, and as I pointed out above, there are a number of distinct claims involved in or at least consistent with SOM, and you’ve said that Phaedrus, if not Pirsig, rejects them all.
So now let me ask you about intellectual quality. I understand that in Lila he describes this as something like excellence in ideas. So if I figure out a math or logic problem, I’m following the dictates of intellectual quality, meaning I’m following established, static principles of math or logic to find the answer. I do ethics and I figure out that slavery is wrong because intellectual quality. When I do science, I’m using intellectual quality. …Writing well requires intellectual quality. Dynamic quality may be involved in any given act of this sort, which is why we can’t just do science, or ethics, or even math (recalling his example of the invention of non-Euclidean geometries) just by looking at preestablished rules, but the only way to learn and communicate these acts of dynamic quality are to encode them in intellectual patterns. (If they then get disseminated to become social rules, which people then follow blindly, then they’ve descended to become static patterns on the lower societal level.)
Have I got that right so far? So, then, to say that SOM is intellectual quality does make sense to me insofar as any philosophy will be intellectual quality, but then so is this whole theory of static quality levels vs. dynamic quality: that, too, is a bit of intellectual quality, and when we discuss whether we think it’s plausible, we’re all reflecting on our own experience to see if it makes sense given that experience.
You said before that we know about all these levels because we experience them: (to fill in what I understood you to say:) we fall down, we have biological urges, we feel that super-ego of society, we contemplate ideas, and we have these Dynamic experiences that for Pirsig are the only occurrences of true freedom.
But it’s still a theory, i.e. a phenomenological analysis, much like carving the world into subjects and objects, to talk like Pirsig does. It’s still intellectual quality, and we then use intellectual quality principles and Dynamic judgments to decide whether it’s any good. As I’ve said (in Pt. 3, I think), I think this hierarchy is oversimplified. A lot of our experience of our sexuality, for instance, though it seems biological, is social. To give Pirsig credit, I think he realizes this epistemic problem and regards it (as when trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with Lila when she starts calling a doll her baby) as a real problem to figure what’s driving any given behavior or insight.
If you’ve studied much psychology theory, though, this is the same situation that someone like Freud is in: his theory might seem to make sense in the abstract, but it’s essentially non-falsifiable: you an always just say that the phenomena are messy and so people are hard to diagnose rather than saying that the theory is inadequate and vague.
To address a different point of yours above, “There’s no metaphysics that says “Reality isn’t Quality”,” I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. There are plenty of metaphysical systems that don’t regard anything like Quality as fundamental or even real. To say that quality is “merely subjective” is to say it isn’t actually part of your ontology at all. I don’t think this is a merely terminological disagreement: metaphysics is about what you consider fundamental, where everything else is ultimately reducible to or explainable in terms of that. To say that Quality or telos is ultimately what spawns the universe is pretty radical and interesting, and wholly distinct from merely denying that a distinction between subject and object need be fundamental. A behaviorist, e.g. denies SOM by denying the S part altogether… though it’s a pretty ridiculous position, hard to even state coherently (“you might think you’re thinking, but you’re really not.”)
Sorry for going on so long…
Again – and I really can’t stress this enough – Bodvar’s claims are not supported by the textual evidence. In fact, Mark’s objections are fully consistent with Pirsig’s statements on the issue. As a nice bonus, we also get to see Pirsig explicitly rejecting the correspondence theory of truth…
“This may sound as though a purpose of the MOQ is to trash all subject-object thought but that’s not true. Unlike SOM the MOQ does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then were permitted only one construction of things – that which corresponds to the ‘objective’ world – and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. … There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others,.. … Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler explanation.” (Lila 100)
I think it’s important to realize the sense in which Pirsig uses the word “metaphysics”, especially as it relates to his “Metaphysics of Quality”. He’s not talking about metaphysics in the Platonic or theistic sense but rather a basic set of beliefs about reality, a picture of how everything hangs together. Everybody has to have some kind of worldview, even if it’s just common sense or, as Einstein put it, that bundle of prejudices we inherit before the age of 18. “As long as you’re inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can’t escape metaphysics,” he says.
Then, it’s worth pointing out, he is careful to distinguish the world of coherent thought from experience, from the primary empirical reality. And he wants to say that Quality is empirical, that it is not a metaphysical posit or entity.
“…the reality that Phaedrus had called ‘Quality’ in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn’t any metaphysics. .. since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a “Metaphysics of Quality” is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.” (Pirsig in Lila)
As David Granger puts it, “Quality” isn’t really a concept but it serves as a focal point around which a lot of conceptual furniture gets re-arranged. That arrangement of concepts is the metaphysics and that’s nothing more than the words and ideas we find between the covers of Pirsig’s books. The Quality (or Dynamic Quality) that it talks about has to be lived directly, has to be known in experience.
Good point, Dave.
This makes Pirsig more palatable to me, though I have issues with his using “metaphysics” for this, when he could have equally gone with “world view” or maybe just “philosophy.” Metaphysics, as you say, is about “how everyTHING hangs together,” and I think the word itself implies a representation-reality distinction that he explicitly rejects.
Somewhere in Lila he quotes Einstein (I believe) in rejecting the idea of an “ultimate reality” that only a few physicists, if even they, can understand or even know. That’s what’s implied by “metaphysics:” it’s the deepest level of physics, what’s behind physics itself, whether God or Void or whatever.
Pirsig explicitly wants to reclaim the word from that esoteric use and apply it to how we make sense of the contents of our own experience: it has this structure of dynamic quality on the forefront and static layers beneath it, etc. He’s doing phenomenology, and (so as to avoid again ripping on the man himself for being too lazy to look into this) an understanding of phenomenology would be of benefit to anyone wishing to translate Pirsig-speak and perhaps deepen Pirsig’s phenomenological account.
I think on this interpretation that Pirsig would NOT be a systematic philosopher like Whitehead; he’s not doing what Whitehead would call metaphysics at all, but merely reporting on human experience and its structures.
Quality is not supposed to be a “construct” on Pirsig’s account, but a report of this fundamental experience, where substance and process are not that. I don’t agree, but I’ve already made that point…
I think the quote you have in mind, Mark, is a passage wherein he’s complaining about the complicated and exclusive jargon that’s usually used to talk about reality. (This goes for philosophers as well as physicists, I suppose.) How is it that only a handful of highly-trained specialists can know what reality really is? That’s ridiculous, Pirsig thinks.
It seems to me that he wants to shamelessly use the word metaphysics because a lot of what he’s doing is staking out his radical empiricism and otherwise pushing back against the thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance of scientific empiricism. Even more than most other pragmatists, Pirsig thinks that a hard line between facts and values is extremely problematic. The subtitles give this away as his primary mission; ZAMM is “an inquiry into values” and Lila is “an inquiry into morals”. The positivists would have none of that. This part of his attack isn’t a knock on Cartesian dualism per se, but rather “amoral scientific objectivity” or, more broadly and simply, “attitudes of objectivity”. It’s the premise that human values aren’t really part of reality, that such things are “just” subjective or “just” what you like. His “Quality” serves as an antidote to that dismissive attitude. Man is the measure of all things, not just the measurer of physical phenomena. I don’t take that as claim about our central importance in the universe so much as a statement of epistemological humility and a confession of our complicity, you know?
Also I think he uses the word because it implies a total vision of reality. The four evolutionary levels, for example, are supposed to include everything that you’d find in an ideally complete encyclopedia, supposed to include all the known facts. DQ is not included because that is an aspect of experience that has to be known first-hand. I think Pirsig uses “metaphysics” the ways Sellars’ wants to use the term “philosophy”.
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in Philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, …in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.” — Wilfrid Sellars
have you read the Myth of the Given?
I cannot see how Quality is any less a metaphysical construct than, say, substance, or process.
Traditionally, as Mark pointed out, the term “metaphysics” implies a distinction between appearances and reality. It implies that there are realities behind or beyond the world as we experience it. Plato’s Forms and God are the classic examples of metaphysical entities. These unknown entities are posited to explain what we do know. Material substance was posited to explain how the appearances hang together, it’s what makes the properties stick together, so to speak. Sub-stance. Substance stands under the appearances. As Hume pointed out, “causality” as such is not part of experience. It’s a very useful and scientifically advantageous posit, but it still counts as “metaphysical” insofar as it’s taken as an actual ontological reality. Gravity is like that too. Things fall. That is an empirical fact but gravity was invented to explain that at very certain point in history. We know the dates and everything. 🙂
Once again, I’d like to thank Mark and David for pursuing these threads in such a positive fashion.
My understanding continues to improve…and you two appear to be approaching agreement.
Keep going, please.
David, thanks for your comments…I shall try to be clearer in explaining the connection between Sartre’s non-positional consciousness of consciousness and Pirsig’s Quality. I should say I haven’t read Lila nor any of Sartre’s work yet, so all i’m going off of are the two podcasts and my reading of ZAMM.
Before Phaedrus did any philosophical work on Quality, he nevertheless had an intimate understanding of it as it was presented to him through experience. Some of the things he did know or feel of Quality by virtue of experiencing it were:
1. it was not a physical property and was not measureable–his Quality was “excellence,” “worth,” “goodness.” (p. 231)
2. Quality is so simple, immediate and direct (p. 250)
3. Quality is pre-intellectual such that “before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called quality” (p. 247).
4. Quality seems to manifest itself during the ‘time lag between the instant of vision and the instant of awareness.” This interval of time is the only reality, and is “what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality.” (247)
5. Quality events depend partly on prior experiences: “we constantly seek to find, in the quality event, analogues to our previous experiences.” (p. 249)
These are all veritable facts of our phenomenological experience, and anyone who is so inclined could make the very same observations, one of whom was probably Sartre. There is a divergence, however, in their theory of explaning these phenomenological observations. Both of them attempt to explain THE Phenomenon in which: Our awareness of something can be simultaneously accompanied by(or even experienced as) things of a particular quality, value, analogues, etc. Thus I say that this phenomenon, as Sartre would have as produced by n-p c-of-c, is *precisely* what Pirsig wants to call Quality.
At this point in Pirsig’s development of his theory of Quality, it seems that he is already so heavily invested in his idea as to make unwarranted moves to defend it, namely to say that Quality is “a third entity which is independent of the two [mind and matter]” (p. 237). This move seems fishy to me because he wasn’t really forced to make it from strong deductive or inductive grounds. In other words, there was no proof that Quality is metaphysically separate from mind/matter, it just happened to be that he couldn’t see any proof that mind/matter should include quality (i.e. if there is proof for categories A and B but no proof that C belongs to A and/or B, then is this proof that C should be its own category?) Furthermore, in making this move, he didn’t care about the metaphysical implications that Quality would have, “the fact that he had established no relationship between them didn’t bother him at first…[for] he knew the metaphysical trinity of subject, object and Quality would sooner or later have to be interrelated.” (238). If you’re going to make that bold of a move, I would think that the metaphysical implications would factor in to the rationale to make the move in the first place. But no, he was compelled to make this move solely to avoid getting beat down.
All of this is to explain my objection to making that metaphysical move. Okay, but moving past the move itself, I’m trying to understand what becomes of Quality if it is not its own metaphysical category. He says a few things on this:
1. “he was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism. Quality was the source and substance of everything.” (252) ???
2. “its indefinability freed it from the rules of metaphysics” ????
3. Quality is an event, a process.
I’m not sure what to make of 1 or 2, but I can get along with 3 in the following sense: Yes, Quality is an event or process, and it is one of the many events and processes that happen in the brain for the mind. David, if consciousness itself is a process (and not an entity), then Quality (as a process) must then be a kind of process that consciousness is capable of. In other words, a quality event is a consciousness event, though not all consciousness events are quality events. As your quote of Pirsig says, “Quality (value) itself is an experience”, or equivalently, “Quality exists only insofar as it is experienced.” Since experience is something that occurs in the mind, shouldn’t it follow that Quality must also exist only in the mind?
In any case, it doesn’t make sense to me to speak of Quality outside of the domain of the brain/mind. I hope to make it clear why this is, and do a better job at explaining why Sartre’s account of THE Phenomenon is more solid for me. First, though, I have to explain better my interpretation of Sartre’s n-p c-of-c, something I neglected to do earlier.
Our minds are capable of different “orders” or “modes” of consciousness, the obvious ones being reflective consciousness and unreflected consciousness. As the PEL bros explained, unreflected consciousness is being “in the moment,” before you are aware of the ‘in-the-moment-ness’ you are in. Examples are (from Dylan) washing the dishes or (from Wes) chasing after a street car. At the moment of chasing the street car, the contents of your experience is that ‘the streetcar must be overtaken.’ Reflective consciousness occurs after that moment at which time it takes that moment as an object to reflect upon, e.g. I felt slow in running after the street car. Note that reflective consciousness must take that moment of unreflected consciousness and place it into consciousness in order to reflect on it, thus it takes that moment of unreflected consciousness as an object.
Even though it may appear like there is a unity to this unreflected consciousness, i.e. that our experience comes as a single stream, there are actually two simultaneous processes going on that feed into this stream. The first is the intake of perceptual data, e.g. the qualia of smelling apple pie or the collection of pixels that form the image of a tree; we will call this pure consciousness. The neural activity corresponding to the incoming perceptual data will automatically go off to search for prior states of the brain/mind that have relevance to the incoming data such that various parts of the brain/mind corresponding to episodic and working memories, language centers, and centers that deal with quality (e.g. emotions, pleasures, disgust) will ‘light up’. These are then brought to consciousness simultaneously with percept itself such that our perception of the object will be accompanied by value judgments of that object. Thus our experience of the object is rich with Quality, and since we experience the object and its Quality as unity, we experience the object (as Mark said) as objectively disgusting or whatever. This second process that enriches pure consciousness is what Sartre call n-p c-of-c.
Why does Sartre call it consciousness of consciousness? This Quality enriching process is conscious of the pure perceptual data only in the sense that it “knows” what this perceptual data is of so it can find search hits in various parts of the brain/mind. If it was not conscious of the perceptual data, then it wouldn’t know what to look for. But of course this consciousness of consciousness isn’t really the same type of thing as Reflective consciousness, which is also ‘consciousness of consciousness’. This is precisely why Sartre adds “non-positional,” which was eplained to mean ‘does not take as an object’, or better yet ‘non-positing’–posit being the operative verb. Non-positing consciousness of consciousness doesn’t reflect on the perceptual data, it just goes off to find matches in the brain to enrich the data with quality(yet it must still be ‘conscious’ of what to look for. In other words, n-p c-of-c doesn’t posit anything about the incoming perceptual data, nor does it take it to be an object on which to reflect. Instead it goes about enriching the data with quality immediately, automatically, and spontaneously.
Does n-p c-of-c cause subject-object distinction in our minds? if so, how? I need to think about this some more, but it seems that the answer is yes, it is a fact about n-p c-of-c that it provides subj-obj distinction along with quality enrichment to pure consciousness.
Hopefully, you can see why I made the connection between Sartre’s n-p c-of-c and Pirsig’s Quality. Both were developed in order to explain THE Phenomenon, but n-p c-of-c does it better. Anything you could say about the functions or properties of Quality, e.g. observations 1-5, you could for n-p c-of-c as well. Additionally, with n-p c-of-c, we are given:
1. a more grounded picture of its mechanism. We are uninformed about the mechanism of Quality; saying that Quality just somehow causes subjects and objects doesn’t do.
2. a explanation of why physical/chemical/electric/biological perturbations to the brain can alter quality judgments; how does Quality account for why it is that someone with Alzheimer’s will experience a gradual change (in this case loss) of quality judgments? Does Quality become afflicted with Alzheimer’s as well?
3. the fact that quality judgments are not always pre-conceptual. As Mark said in the podcast, for the students to make a quality judgment of essays, they would need a very complex network of concepts, e.g. what an essay even is, language, sentence structure, coherence, flow, what it means to be convinced, etc. Think about how limited the entire population of pre-conceptual Qualities would be. I think only qualia are pre-conceptual, e.g. you don’t need the concept of pie to tell that freshly baked apple pie smells good, or has good quality. Anything outside of qualia, i think, would require a background of concepts to make judments of good or bad quality. Take Poncaire for example, in order to judge whether the quality of the solution to the Fuschian series was good or bad, he would need to already have the concept of high level mathematics, what it means to be a solution, and the concept that simplicity in maths is favorable.
Finally, to address the hot stove example: this is an interesting case because the sensation after touching the stove is qualia (pain), and qualia is the class of experience where n-p c-of-c does not happen, or at least doesn’t play as large of a role. When we experience qualia such as pain, we don’t need anything further to inform our experience. Everything about the Quality of the experience is contained in the sense data alone; we don’t need the secondary process of n-p c-of-c to enrich the sensation of pain with other qualities. n-p c-of-c is used by the brain in the case where the sense data is empty of Quality. Furthermore, because n-p c-of-c is responsible for subj-obj distinction, we would expect that in the case of sensing pain after touching a hot stove where n-p c-of-c doesn’t have a role, there shouldn’t be a subj obj distinction in our minds. In fact, I think this is true; when you experience pain, you are that pain, all that exists to your mind at that moment is pain, thus there is no S/O distinction: we do not say the stove is an object that has bad quality–quality of pain. In general, I believe that n-p c-of-c is used by the brain in the experience of the surroundings, and that it is not needed in the experience of the body. This makes sense because to perceive our surroundings is to perceive stuff that objectively does not have quality, our brain/mind has to ascribe qualities to the surroundings. On the other hand, our sensations of our bodies through qualia, are by definition qualitative. We are not apprehending something out there…there is a direct connection via the nervous system between body and mind so that we are able to experience the body in terms of qualities. We cannot experience the surroundings in the same way, so the brain must actively ascribe qualities to sense data.
Okay, Moses, thanks for your efforts here. If I follow what you’re saying, we can’t rightly equate Quality with Sartre’s “non-positional consciousness of consciousness”. I’d even say that the phrase itself (NPCoC) becomes contradictory or incoherent when translated into Pirsig’s (or James’s) terms. Let me unpack that…
Consciousness that does not posit cannot be consciousness of consciousness because consciousness is a posit. (Although, I’m pretty sure that Sartre says that consciousness is a nothing, much like James, who said there is no thinker apart from the thinking so that consciousness is a process and not a thing that preforms or executes the process.)
As the Stanford article on James says,..
James’s fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a ‘that’ which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…” (ERE, 46). The “whats” that pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference among these “pure experiences,” but on the relations into which they enter.”
Here is Pirsig talking about James in Lila. I’ve added the stuff in brackets:
“…he [James] meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of life [non-positional consciousness] which furnishes the material to our later reflection’ [positional consciousness]. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience [Quality] cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.” (Lila 365)
Also, I think it’s nearly impossible to talk about our two radical empiricists in terms of sense data theories or to talk as if they would endorse the brain-mind identity theories – or behaviorism for that matter. These are among the problems for which radical empiricism is a solution.
Later, and thanks again.
Dave
I agree with you on the consciousness issue, it’s one of the “crystal spheres” of SOM to explain experience from its fallacious mind/matter premises. Then you cite from a Stanford article on James.
“James’s fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories¦(snip)
Then Pirsig about James in LILA (I drop the brackets this is one moqer talking to another.
“James meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as ˜the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection ….”
I agree with this too, but don’t you see that this is a mere repetition of ZAMM’s “Pre-intellect/Intellect” proto-moq, witch had just one “level” – intellect – that consisted of subjects and objects. Thus regarding the 4th level you and Pirsig on James are right. But the MOQ has 3 more static levels and the 1st inorganic also had to be a similar product of DQ’s “immediate flux”. So had the 2nd, and the 3rd before – finally – the 4th that Phaedrus “discovered” first, but from it extrapolated the whole range. If the 3 lower levels are mere figments of the intellectual one the whole MOQ goes haywire.
Bo
Reification (fallacy)
Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.[1] In other words, it is the error of treating as a “real thing” something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea. For example: if the phrase “fighting for justice” is taken literally, justice would be reified.
Any position that can be defeated by quoting a dictionary is a very weak position indeed.
This last point about reification is important to my view.
I’ve always seen Pirsig’s four levels as analogues for the first four levels of buddhist stupa symbolism and more recently I’ve found obvious links to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
It would be tempting to try and assess which of these comes closest to the true state of things…but my feeling has been that in this realm, further speculation would always be shaped by context. The reification fallacy seems to support my reluctance to seek a definitive understanding of this hierarchy.
First a minor point: Hierarchies are very unfashionable these days and it may seem that Pirsig is a bit odd in this respect but in the broader view the flatness of scientific and philosophical physicalism looks like the weird one. Almost every other worldview had some kind of hierarchy. The great chain of being, the seven chakras, the seventh heaven and Dante’s Inferno, etc.. Having a hierarchy definitely doesn’t count as contributing an original idea.
Comparisons with Maslow and other kinds of developmental psychology makes a heck of a lot of sense, I think. That branch could just as rightly be called the psychology of personal growth or the psychology of individual evolution. It almost seems that we each recapitulate the evolution of the species in our own maturation process. But that too is beside the point at hand.
The short answer is that there is no such thing as “the true state of things”. People like Pirsig are trying to get us to get over that idea. That’s the essence of Platonism and the appearance-reality distinction and the MOQ will have none of it. I mean, we ought not take the MOQ’s levels as ontological categories or nature’s own structure. It’s just a set of concepts to arrange our concepts. It’s just one painting in the gallery of truth and the question of its truth is going to be pragmatic. We don’t ask if it represents the real reality, whatever that means, we simply ask it works. Does it have explanatory power? Can it do intellectual work for us? That sort of thing.
If this idea – the MOQ – is mistaken for reality and otherwise taken literally, it’s turned into a ridiculous, contradictory form of philosophical fundamentalism.
“‘There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing’
Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.” (Lila 365)
This is not to say that concepts are somehow outside of reality, of course. The distinction here is between experience and our mental reactions to it, between the flux of experience and the conceptual order – and neither of these are hidden realities. Neither are posited as the reality beyond or beneath appearances. They are married to each other, they complete each other. Concepts are derived from experience and they operate in experience. To the extent that concepts remain aloft and only ever come out to play with other abstractions, they’re useless. If you can’t put it to work in experience, the pragmatist says, then it’s just an intellectual toy.
David
Was the above supposed to be a reply to me, or can’t you stand even to address me properly? At least the reification argument does not apply. I showed clearly that your “Jamesian” MOQ is similar to ZAMM’s proto-moq which only consisted of the intellectual level. That’s fine, but the full-fledged MOQ has four levels and all these have the same origin in the “immediate flux” (that we know as DQ). I’m not so easily snubbed as the participants over at the MD where your were “protected” by the owner. Abstract/Concrete is an offspring of SOM and does not apply to the MOQ so that argument is nil and void. However it more than anything reveal your position.
Bo .
David and Bo,
Let’s try to take a step back from the philosophies of Pirsig, James and Sartre and re-examine why the hell we are here in the first place. What was it that compelled these guys to develop their theories in the first place? In other words, what did they see that they felt needed explaining at all? Surely, the impetus they felt to do their work did not arise out of thin air. What they thought needed explaining was the phenomenological fact (THE Phenomenon) that our experience of X is in terms of qualities despite the fact that X does not objectively possess these qualities. How can this be? Pirsig and James thought that a Copernican inversion to our metaphysics was necessary to explain this fact, namely that there must be a third entity or process that is prior to our experience of X’s qualities. For James, it is this “more fundamental stuff–pure experience,” or “the immediate flux of life” that explains THE Phenomenon, whereas for Pirsig it is his Quality. Both of these are logically coherent, metaphysically sound, and successful as explanations of the facts of our phenomenology. But Sartre would say no!, we don’t need to make a Copernican inversion in order to explain these facts of our phenomenology–we can have a similarly logical, metaphysically sound, and successful explanation entirely within the prevailing metaphysical paradigm of mind/matter. There is no need to revolutionize or invert our metaphysics to account for phenomenal facts. Note that Sartre isn’t trying to resolve the mind-body problem in his theory as James or Pirsig does; all he’s saying is that we needn’t make any radical metaphysical moves at all. It matters not how the mind-body problem (the Hard Problem of Consciousness) plays out, for Sartre’s theory will be consistent with the outcome regardless.
Hopefully, it is clear that I’m emphatically not trying to *equate* Pirsig’s Quality with Sartre’s n-p c-of-c. What I’m saying is that they are alternate explanations of the same set of phenomenological observables. The two are metaphysically and mechanistically opposed. What they have in common is their ability to account for certain facts of our phenomenal experience. My contention is that assuming Quality and n-p c-of-c are equal in logical soundness and successful in explaining The Phenomenon, n-p c-of-c is better at explaining additional facts beyond THE Phenomenon itself. I have mentioned some of these facts previously, but will repeat them here in addition to some new facts I’ve observed:
Previously mentioned:
1. Physical perturbations to the brain causally affect our experience of Quality.
2. There is a bifurcation of Quality into romantic and classical
3. Much of our experience of quality is conceptual.
4. There is a fundamental difference between the experience of our bodies through qualia and the experience of an object through its Qualities
5. Our Quality is contingent on prior experience or ‘analogues’
6. Quality is not deterministic to the experiencer, but rather spontaneous.
Newly thought of facts:
7. Quality events or *processes* are not instantaneous, but take on the order of 500 msec to happen. This interval between vision of an object and the experience of the object in terms of its qualities is measurable in the lab. Pirsig recognizes this fact as “time lag” (247) but does nothing in the way of accounting for it. Conversely, it is obvious how n-p c-of-c accounts for this 500 msec time lag, as it is a process of neural activity and neural activity takes time.
8. There are persons with synesthesia (in which musical tones/numbers are experienced as colors/smells, etc.). How does Quality account for this apparent mix-up? Why does it choose these particular people to mess with? Again, with n-p c-of-c the explanation is obvious: persons with synesthesia have mixed-up networking in the brain (as caused by genetic or developmental deviations) such that n-p c-of-c *mistakenly* enriches or supplies a particular type of experience with qualities of a different type than the rest of experience.
9. Many of our experiences are Quality-less in Pirsig’s sense (of “excellence”, “goodness”, “value”, etc.) For example, when you see a tree, our experience of that tree is not how “good” or “bad” that tree is–we just see a fucking tree. If we happen to be a tree surgeon, we will have been primed to experience the tree as “good” (healthy) or “bad” (sickly) through training involving the use of concepts (e.g. the concept that color of leaves is indicative of some state of the tree, the concept patterns and textures of the bark).
9b. Is the experience of the number “5” a Quality event?
10. There is a class of drugs known as dissociatives–ketamine in particular–that is able to abolish Quality from our experience in a dose-dependent fashion. In lay terms, the types of and the magnitude to which Quality is repressed or knocked down from the experiences of a patient is dependent on how much ketamine is in their system. There is a particular dose range of ketamine in which the patient’s visual experience is devoid of Quality such that the experience of X is constituted only by the visual image of X and not accompanied with the Quality of X. Interestingly, at this same dose, his listening to music is still experienced as Quality. In fact, the Quality of music is enhanced not only because his other Quality faculties are dimmed down, but even more so because his faculty of subject-object distinction has been abolished. Listening to music in this state is experienced not as “listening to music,” or “this music is good,” but as the notes of the music itself. He does not experience listening to music because ‘music’ is a concept; instead his experience is entirely composed of the notes themselves. Remember, he is unable to make subject object distinctions or have conceptual knowledge in this state, thus it is his implicit belief that his experience of notes is all that exists. When the song is ending or abrubtly stops, he becomes panicked that there is no longer existence (since the notes of the song are all he knows to exist.)
These are all additional facts of phenomenological experience that Pirsig’s Quality, or James’ “influx of life” will have a difficult, if not impossible, time accounting for. If you are to stick with Pirsig’s Quality or James’ account, you must be able to account for these facts. What good is a theory that doesn’t explain what we know to be true?
Finally to address the syntax and semantics of non-positional consciousness of consciousness, I agree with you (David) that n-p c-of-c is a process that is not quite in consciousness; we do not experience the Quality furnishing/enriching process or the retrieval of analogues in the experience of Quality. What we experience is the product of these processes. Thus n-p c-of-c is consciousness only insofar as we are conscious of what n-p c-of-c does, i.e. the resultant Quality. So there is ambiguity in Sartre’s word choice in naming this phenomenal process, but don’t get hung up on the words ‘non-positional consciousness of consciousness,’ focus on the process to which it refers.
ps, consciousness is not necessarily a posit. Is consciousness of pain a posit?
pps: Don’t focus solely on the semantics or formalization of these philosophers’ accounts of the phenomenal experience. The phenomenal experience is prior to our attempts to do philosophical/metaphysical work on it. All of the claims I’ve made are available to you through your own phenomenal experience. In other words, I’ve done very little logic/philosophizing/metaphysics in my posts; most of it is simply from observation, introspection, reflection and making the connections. If only you’d look inside toward your own phenomenal experience, you might find something interesting that doesn’t comport with your current argument.
Please let me know if I’ve been unclear is any of this.
Hi Moses
You opened your “essay” thus:
“Let’s try to take a step back from the philosophies of Pirsig, James and Sartre and re-examine why the hell we are here in the first place. What was it that compelled these guys to develop their theories in the first place?”
Wise words. Most people don’t give a damn about philosophy, or if they do it’s to get themselves a degree, even those who end up with philosophy as a career are just “philosophologists! and blind to new ideas. A few have been frustrated by the academical rumination of the subject/object premises and tried to break out, but without knowing any SOM and without presenting a different metaphysics they fell back into the fold – no names dropped. IMO Pirsig is the only who has succeeded here and I am so conceited that I think I understand his intentions. ₕ
Now, David Buchanan agreed that Sartre’s “c-of c-” might be likened to Dynamic Quality, but I’m reluctant, I don’t think self-consciousness has any place within the MOQ, it is SOM’s “holy grail” (matter having been imbued with mind). Listen. All creatures sleep and when – say – a fish wakes up it must be to a state different from oblivion. It does not wake up to language’s reality of “I am a fish” and yet it is AWARE of its biological reality SOM’s “self-consciousness” haunts for example the Artificial Intelligence field where the prospect of computers waking up and saying to themselves “Hey we are computers, let’s take control” looms large.
I’ve forgotten what a “posit” is (and in contrast to what) but your PS caught my attention?
“Consciousness is not necessarily a posit. Is consciousness of pain a posit?”
I don’t know how much you know about the MOQ but at least it starts with the new metaphysical dualism Dynamic/Static (Quality) supposed to replace SOM’s Subject/Object. And then its 4 static levels: Inorganic, biological, social and intellectual . I have made an (unofficial) list of each level’s “expression” (I call)
INTERACTION – SENSATION – EMOTION – REASON
and according to this “pain” is a sensation and belongs to biology and as all creatures are biology (including Homo Sapien) we know biology’s repertoire. But I do not call it “consciousness”, merely awareness of biological value. However this sensation is modified up through the value stages. The social adds emotions to pain (f.ex fright) then intellect which looks reasonably (objectively) on it. “No reason to be afraid)
Then your PPS:
“Don’t focus solely on the semantics or formalization of these philosophers’ accounts of the phenomenal experience. The phenomenal experience is prior to our attempts to do philosophical/metaphysical work on it. All of the claims I’ve made are available to you through your own phenomenal experience. In other words, I’ve done very little logic/philosophizing/metaphysics in my posts; most of it is simply from observation, introspection, reflection and making the connections. If only you’d look inside toward your own phenomenal experience, you might find something interesting that doesn’t comport with your current argument.”
What interesting things doesn’t comport with my current argument?
Nothing comports with Dave’s weak MOQ that’s for sure but the true strong MOQ is like magic wand.
In my opinion,
Bo
Bo, thanks for your reply. You have misunderstood my argument and n-p c-of-c.
1. “A few have been frustrated by the academical rumination of the subject/object premises and tried to break out, but without knowing any SOM and without presenting a different metaphysics they fell back into the fold – no names dropped. IMO Pirsig is the only who has succeeded here and I am so conceited that I think I understand his intentions.”
I agree Pirsig has succeeded in “breaking out of the S/O premise” and in “presenting a different metaphysics,” but what I am saying is that there is a way of accounting for the properties Pirsig says of Quality *without* needing to make a Copernican Inversion to our metaphysics. In other words, we can have a complete account of Quality entirely within the Mind-Matter metaphysical picture. If Pirsig’s “intentions” was to place greater emphasis on Quality, then that is well and good, but he shouldn’t appeal to Quality’s primacy or importance on metaphysical grounds. There is no evidence that Quality should be made metaphysically distinct.
2. “Now, David Buchanan agreed that Sartre’s “c-of c-” might be likened to Dynamic Quality, but I’m reluctant…”
I am not try to liken anything to anything. I am saying n-p c-of-c and Pirsig’s quality are alternate explanation of the same phenomenon, namely, that:
our experience of X is in terms of qualities despite the fact that X does not *objectively* possess those qualities (i.e. that can’t be measured by scientific instruments.)
3. “I don’t think self-consciousness has any place within the MOQ, it is SOM’s “holy grail” (matter having been imbued with mind). Listen. All creatures sleep and when – say – a fish wakes up it must be to a state different from oblivion. It does not wake up to language’s reality of “I am a fish” and yet it is AWARE of its biological reality SOM’s “self-consciousness”
You have misunderstood Sartre’s n-p c-of-c. Recall Sartre’s paradigm of consciousness, there is both reflective and non-reflective consciousness:
Reflective consciousness: provides self-consciousness, or “i am a fish”
Non-Reflective consciousness:
A. pure consciousness (e.g. sense data) + n-p c-of-c which furnishes pure consciousness with Quality, e.g. “eating insect is good quality”
or
B. Qualia. No need for n-p c-of-c to furnish Qualia with additional Quality, e.g. “OUCH! –> swim away”
Thus you are right to say that the fish does not wake up to the reality “i am a fish” because it is probably not capable of reflective consciousness. Furthermore, I agree that the fish is still AWARE of biological reality, but instead of MOQ or SOM, it is provided by unreflective consciousness. I’ve admitted to the ambiguity in Sartre’s word choice in naming this process as “non-positional consciousness of consciousness.” However, there is no ambiguity between self-consciousness and n-p c-of-c: self-consciousness is produced by reflective consciousness and is separate to n-p c-of-c, which is unreflected consciousness.
4. “and according to this “pain” is a sensation and belongs to biology and as all creatures are biology (including Homo Sapien) we know biology’s repertoire. But I do not call it “consciousness”, merely awareness of biological value. However this sensation is modified up through the value stages. The social adds emotions to pain (f.ex fright) then intellect which looks reasonably (objectively) on it. “No reason to be afraid”
Sensations such as pain is not in consciousness? How can we be aware of the biological value of pain unless through feeling it? Do you not experience pain? Do we experience “biological value? No, we say “ouch! that fucking hurt”. Hurting or pain requires consciousness to be–they are states of consciousness.
5. “What interesting things doesn’t comport with my current argument?”
Most of my observations I’ve presented in my argument are entirely available to you by examining your own phenomenological experience. For example, how can you say pain is not in consciousness when there is evidence in your experience to the contrary. Have someone kick you in the balls (or just imagine it) and tell me there is no consciousness of pain but only an awareness of biological value. Many of my other such claims of phenomenological experience can be verified in much the same way.
Finally, I kindly ask that Bo or David or anyone informed on Pirsig to please, please speak to how Pirsig’s Quality accounts for the phenomenological facts 1-10 I listed. I take back fact #2, as Pirsig does in fact account for the romantic/classical bifurcation as being chronological manifestations of Quality. But if that is too much to ask, kindly then explain how Pirsig’s Quality accounts for the phenomenon of Alzheimer’s, in which the perception of something familiar, say a family member, no longer is imbued with Quality. Would you say that the Quality event fails to occur because of neurological reasons? But you can’t say that because Quality is prior and shouldn’t need to corroborate with the physical state of the brain in order to know how Quality events should happen. In other worlds, it can’t be that Quality first takes a peak inside the patients brain to find deteriorating neural connections to then adjust the Quality event accordingly. If a theory cannot explain the facts we observe, how is one to be sympathetic to it?
I realize that Copernican Inversions are appealing, for example to say that there is something prior of mind/matter, or that there are things outside of the scientific realm and so they (Quality) don’t need to answer to such considerations. But it’s hard for me to be sympathetic to this tact because there doesn’t seem to be any *reason*, or overwhelming *evidence* to suppose that the prevailing Mind/matter is unable to account for all phenomenon and that we need to suppose a third type of thing, Quality.
Interesting side note: “Sartre” does not have the red squiggly line indicating a mispell whereas “Pirsig” does. Further evidence…haha.
Sorry, Moses, but I just follow you. I don’t see any reason why we should expect “Quality” help us explain a medical disorder. It’s like rejecting existentialism because they were no help at NASA. I think you’re evaluating a fish in terms of its ability to ride a bike or climb trees.
Brain science these days is truly fantastic but those processes are better thought of as biological responses to Quality, not Quality itself. It seems you want the idea of Quality to be able to explain the phenomena but that just another word for whatever is known in experience. Quality is not supposed to be an explanation of experience or a description of experience. The term refers to experience itself, to the phenomenal reality just as it comes. It’s not supposed to explain anything. Pirsig just wants to draw our attention to this feature of experience, draw out its importance and get us to stop ignoring it as some minor, fringe element, like support for the arts in the national budget. We’re giving it .0003% of our attention but, Pirsig says, this primary empirical reality is very central, the reality you know before you have time to think about it, the one right under your nose all the time. I mean, Pirsig stresses that this is an empirical reality repeatedly, as an event, precisely because he does NOT want Quality to be construed as some kind of metaphysical entity – but your case seems to be premised on exactly that; Quality as a third metaphysical thing. He flirted with a metaphysical trinity for five minutes when he was working through it, but that’s not where he landed.
As I already mentioned in this thread…
This emphasis on Quality as empirical is illustrated in Lila (chapter 5) with a very ordinary example, the hot stove example. The emphasis is Pirsig’s…
“Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the VALUE of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-heaed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is not a judgement about an experience. It is not a description of an experience. The value itself is an experience.”
Ok, thanks for this. I am understanding you a bit better: Quality is not an explanation of phenomenon, nor is it a third metaphysical entity. Quality is experience itself, it is a word that refers to phenomenal reality as it comes to us. If this is the case, then we are not at odds. We can have a paradigm in which you can have your Quality and speak to it, but I also can have my n-p c-of-c as an explanation for Quality. Quality is not a theory to explain phenomenal experience, it’s just a word that is capitalized in order draw our attention to phenomenal experience.
I had read in ZAMM Pirsig saying that Quality is the parent of subject object, thus I thought he was speaking of Quality as a third metaphysiccal entity and as an *explanation* for reality. You’re telling me, though, that I shouldn’t take his words literally. He is not doing metaphysics, nor is he trying to explain reality through Quality. All he is doing is calling our attention to phenomenal experience. Am i reading you correctly?
If so, theses are logical conclusions I can draw:
1. It is entirely consistent that physical states can causally affect Quality events
2. Quality events are in the mental realm
3. Speaking to Quality is not really philosophy, but cognitive science/psychology, since speaking to Quality is just speaking to experience, and those are the fields that can handle studies in experience
I mentioned alzheimer’s because it is not only a medical condition, but a Quality disorder, is it not? Thus, if we were to take Quality as an explanation, then it would be impinging of Quality, or any explanation of experience to account for the fact that physical deterioration of the brain *causes* Quality deterioration. But since you’ve admitted that Quality is not an explanation but just a word that refers to phenomenal experience, then all is good.
Two more questions for you:
Why do we capitalize Quality? we do it arbitrarily right?
If Quality is a term that refers experience, is it possible to have an experience without Quality? In other words, are Quality and experience an identity, or is Quality just one aspect of experience.
Thank you
Hi Moses
You said:
“I agree Pirsig has succeeded in “breaking out of the S/O premise” and in “presenting a different metaphysics,” but what I am saying is that there is a way of accounting for the properties Pirsig says of Quality *without* needing to make a Copernican Inversion to our metaphysics. In other words, we can have a complete account of Quality entirely within the Mind-Matter metaphysical picture. If Pirsig’s “intentions” was to place greater emphasis on Quality, then that is well and good, but he shouldn’t appeal to Quality’s primacy or importance on metaphysical grounds. There is no evidence that Quality should be made metaphysically distinct..”
Very generous of you to agree to Pirsig having succeeded … etc. but I doubt to the point of rejection that can we have “..a complete account of quality within Mind/Matter Metaphysics …” . In M/M qualities become subjective (meaning inferior compared to the objective realm). But please allow me to make one thing clear: Pirsig’s “Quality = Reality” insight and his declaring THIS to be revolution does not mean a thing. There is no doctrine that says that quality isn’t reality, IT’S JUST SOM THAT SAYS THAT QUALITY IS SUBJECTIVE (I’m not shouting at you but must emphasize this crucial point) thus it’s SOM which is the antagonist that must be overcome with a different dualism. And that dualism is the “Dynamic/Static Quality” one. However the mystic-turned Pirsig has declared that SOM isn’t important, after his grand insight SOM has become a “moq” where Quality is S/O-divided! This is a total abandoning of the MOQ and I am furious with Pirsig and David Buchanan who plays along with this nonsense. OK, Moses this was a bit un-called for, but I want you to understand my plight in defending a world view with such an enormous potential, with the “owner” and his lieutenant (David) doing their best to undermine it. Now, having had this off my chest I see that you feel at home on the Mind/Matter platform, meaning that you are oblivious of the paradoxes (enigmas) it creates, and without these bothering you the MOQ has no appeal and I will just wear myself out trying to “sell” it. SOM’s monster-riddle is how mind and matter (in the form of mind/body) interact? How do thoughts (about moving a limb) turn into the actual act? I know that signals (electric) activate muscles, but where do thoughts turn into signals? This riddle was “hot stuff” til just recently, but SOM has given up and swept it under the carpet.
Any explanation?
Bo
Thanks David for the response above on hierarchies.
You managed to state with precision, just what I was getting at.
Hi Mark!
(This thread seemed to be closed, at least I was not able to raise the “reply” button so I go down to the end of the line)
You say that the S/O problem was identified in Kant’s time and that’s true, his “Kritik …” was an effort to clear up the S and O relationship. It’s also true that it was Kant who coined the “Copernican Revolution”. However, referring to my younger days I was not relieved by Kant, the mind/matter enigma oppressed me greatly, and the complete nonsense of ourselves – subjectively – adding qualities to an alleged objective reality “out there” was only accepted because SOM looms behind our thinking.
Regarding Pirsig on Hegel you may be right, in ZAMM Pirsig says:
“… Phædrus was such a poor scholar it would have been just like him to have duplicated the commonplaces of some famous system of philosophy he hadn’t taken the trouble to look into.”
But his ignorance was so to say a prerequisite for his break with SOM However, people pointing to the likeness to Hegel obviously bothered Pirsig. I have a private letter where he mentions this: (Aug. 1998)
———————
“According to the MOQ these ‘mystical intuitions and feelings’ are SOM pejorative terms for what is in fact DQ. Both the materialist school that Hegel opposed and the idealist school that Hegel founded are subject/object schools of philosophy. It’s just that one says that the object contains the subject and the other says that subject contains the object. The MOQ says that both are high quality intellectual formulations, but notes that if they weren’t (high quality) they would not exist. What Hegel means by “spirit” could be interpreted as DQ, but his is didconnected from all wordly things as in Christian tradition. It would be hard to imagine Hegel’s spirit emerging from sitting on a hot stove. Hegel maintains that the fundamental purpose of philosophy is to overcome anomalies in experience. The MOQ agrees, but not the fundamental purpose. The fundamental one is the creation of high quality thought. There are other aspects of high quality thought than overcoming of anomalies. The first one that comes to mind is rhetoric, and this perhaps explains why Hegel’s rhetoric is so awful …”
————-
You see Pirsig regards Hegel as a SOM-based idealistic and IMO idealism is the great pitfall for all who says: “This philosopher says the same as Pirsig only much better..”. The MOQ is a break with SOM. At least it was for Pirsig of 1998, but after this he turned a bit mystic and began to undermine the MOQ, but that’s for Dave to explain. Then you ask me about intellectual quality (the 4th level)
“.. I understand that in Lila he describes this as something like excellence in ideas”.
This is the “weak interpretation” where the 4th level is an idea-compartment in which SOM is a bad idea and the MOQ a good idea on top of umpteen quadrillions ideas. This is indistinguishable from SOM’s “mind” and nothing is gained. According to the “strong” the intellectual level is SOM itself … all of it, every last bit! And – note – the term (intellect) DOES mean the ability to distinguish between whats objectively true and what’s subjective wishful thinking, but for some reason it has come to mean any “mental activity”. The reason for this is that SOM looms behind everything – even dictionaries – so when one looks up “intellect” one gets “The power of mind to …..” See, everything is the set and rigged along SOM’s lines. Anyway MOQ’s 4th intellectual level is “… The Quality of the Mind/Matter distinction”.
I would have liked to address all your points but it’s impossible
Bo
Bo
I appreciate the invite to another forum, but I am already on too many.
Still, can you say if MoQ level 3 and 4 SQ patterns are only within the experience of humans? Also, is it possible to just briefly sketch a couple of examples of 4th level SQ patterns as you see it (or by it being SOM do you mean there is only one pattern in the 4th level)?
Hi Burl
You said: “I appreciate the invite to another forum, but I am already on too many. Still, can you say if MoQ level 3 and 4 SQ patterns are only within the experience of humans?
Yes, the social level is definitely human in the sense that it was the organism called Homo Sapiens who became the “building block” of the social level (like carbon of biological level). However, but the “social” term has caused much misunderstanding as it obviously are social animals and insects galore. I would have preferred “cultural”, but OK.
You went on: “Also, is it possible to just briefly sketch a couple of examples of 4th level SQ patterns as you see it”
The chief intellectual pattern is science – physics primarily – which is most obvious in its pursuit of OBJECTIVITY and condemnation of SUBJECTIVITY, but all scientific disciplines are of the same root. Now, Burl you may remember – or have seen my favorite opponent David wield – Pirsig’s argument that there are non-S/O intellectual patterns, for instance “math”, “logic” and/or “programming languages”, but this again rests on their fallacious definition of the 4th level. Mathematics in the calculating sense is age old and if THAT is a 4th
level pattern the whole static range goes haywire. Mathematics as we know it occurred with a the Greeks who worked out theorems why so and so relationship (geometrically too) was OBJECTIVELY TRUE always, not anything we SUBJECTIVELY can alter. See S/O to the core. Logic and language – programming or not – are also age old phenomena, thinking itself is dependent on each them)
Finally you said: “By it being SOM do you mean there is only one pattern in the 4th level?”
SOM is the 4th level, but it has countless off- and off-off-springs. I’m not saying it’s you (on the contrary these questions looked most promising) but the greatest hurdle to understand the MOQ is the ingrown notion that “intellect” is a mental compartment filled with thoughts or ideas. But there is no such thing in the (true) MOQ, the 4th level is SOM (or stripped of its “M”) “The value of the S/O distinction”, no more no less. Now there is a biological computer called brain with CPU,RAM and ROM (i guess) but it isn’t “mind”, it’s progammable and worked (still does) for all levels, but only with intellect’s S/O-program did we have the mind/matter schism. But it isn’t reality’s fundament. OK, more than enough!
I understand your mail overload, I had kind of retired to the LilaSquad place, but trust old me to jump into the fray at short notice.
Bo
As I understand it, Bo is saying that the intellect level cannot escape from SOM, from that one particular set of metaphysical assumptions. (I’ve heard this from Bo for at least ten years.) There is a very good reason why this seems unintelligible. Because it is. Since the purpose of the MOQ is to replace subject-object dualism with an experiential monism, this would mean that the MOQ’s purpose is impossible to achieve. This view contradicted by much of what Pirsig says in Lila, where he lays out the MOQ, so Bo holds the audacious view that Pirsig betrayed Pirsig. It’s pure nonsense.
David old foe!
You wrote: “As I understand it, Bo is saying that the intellect level cannot escape from SOM, from that one particular set of metaphysical assumptions. (I´ve heard this from Bo for at least ten years.)” ……..snip
Phew, here’s our bone of contention. Intellect escaping SOM requires that one sees it (intellect) as a mind-like compartment where acquisitions and dropping of ideas takes place. But THAT is what the MOQ is out to conquer. First of the all, the 4th level is a subset of the MOQ and can – as such – NOT contain the MOQ. Ref. the container logic that Pirsig wielded in LILA. Next: Intellect as a static level must have a static – i.e. limited – repertoire and for those not wilfully blind its value is SOM (or the S/O distinction after it has been degraded to the 4th Q level) thus it is the MOQ that escapes the SOM..
You continued: “There is a very good reason why this seems unintelligible. Because it is. Since the purpose of the MOQ is to replace subject-object dualism with an experiential monism, this would mean that the MOQ´s purpose is impossible to achieve …. snip.
Regarding MOQ’s purpose we agree, but it can’t replace SOM by adopting SOM’s holy grail, namely “intellect” as MIND where everything exists as ideas. Rather, MOQ is the meta-level that contains the Q system … in the same sense that SOM is the meta-level that contains the S/O system.
You concluded: “This view contradicted by much of what Pirsig says in Lila, where he lays out the MOQ, so Bo holds the audacious view that Pirsig betrayed Pirsig. It´s pure nonsense”.
Agreement about contradicting, but the SOM-as-Q-intellect repeatedly pops up in LILA when Pirsig writes freely and let the MOQ flow. However to save appearances he then has to make inconsistent “ad hoc” additions at the end of those sentences. I don’t know if this audience is primed for such finer points so I leave it here.
Bo.
The MoQ controversy Part 1
The controversy surrounding the MoQ might appear to be an almost trivial one at first. Those following Pirsig rarely dispute his basic concepts and that makes it really hard for the rest of us to follow. As Pirsig sees it, there are but two types of reality – Static and Dynamic. Dynamic Quality (DQ) is undefined and can only be experienced pre-conceptually, before awareness if you will. In the moment when DQ is acknowledged it becomes Static Quality (SQ) and is no longer undefined.
Why on Earth is a metaphysics like this necessary? Don’t we have enough philosophical theories already?
Pirsig claims that since the time of the Greeks, western civilization has been trapped in a metaphysical subject-object box it cannot get out of. He says the problem is that all metaphysics since then has been some form of rearranging reality based on an underlying assumption of subjects and objects as bedrock metaphysical ground, and this is taken so much for granted that philosophers are not even aware they are doing it.
You could say that western civilization is caught up in the subject-object trees and cannot see the larger metaphysical forest.
According to Pirsig, all metaphysical systems in the west depend on this initial assumption, this first cut, if you will. There is a me in here experiencing everything else out there. There is my mind, having experiences about everything else (including my own body, other people, nature, and the universe in general) and never the two shall meet. The idea is that the entirety of western metaphysics to date, then, has been nothing so much as a variety of attempts to reconcile this mind/body, subject/object dichotomy, which is seen as the primary problem any metaphysics must overcome. Pirsig notes that all of these attempts have been unsatisfying and unsuccessful precisely because they all make this wrong metaphysical first cut at reality in the first place.
So, what does Pirsig say?
Taking mind/matter or subjects/objects as your metaphysical base leads to unsolvable problems, and, as with any problem of this sort, what you should do is back up and regroup. Check your initial conditions. If a good researcher is getting inconsistent results he will stop banging his head against the wall and step back. The problem is not with the quality of the thinkers, but with the assumptions they start with. Pirsig says the mind/matter problem is only a problem because we proceed from this false subject-object start. There are many things that simply cannot be accounted for in a subject-object metaphysics (hereafter referred to as SOM), that become crystal clear when you replace it with a Quality-based metaphysics.
What does any of this have to do with the controversy surrounding the MoQ?
The MoQ controversy Part 2
Now that you have a little background, we can proceed to talk about Static Quality, which is where the controversy lies. Pirsig says Dynamic Quality (DQ) is undefined. That leaves us with nothing to talk about there, since any claims you make about DQ are going to turn it into Static Quality (SQ) – which is the only kind of Quality that can be defined. A pretty neat metaphysical trick I’d say. If you attempt to define DQ, then you’ve defined it in relation to something else, which starts to beg the question of where DQ came from. This is a rabbit hole Pirsig neatly avoids by leaving DQ undefined.
SQ or Static Quality, on the other hand is quite well defined by Pirsig in Lila. He does a much better job of it than I can ever hope to in a comment, but I’ll give it a try for the benefit of those who haven’t read the book. The first and most important thing to know about it is that SQ does not correspond to things, objects, subjects, matter, mind, or anything else. SQ represents degrees of – or layers of – if it suits you, what are called SPOVs (Static Patterns of Value). Pirsig explains that all that exists is Static Quality and that every last thing there is, every thought there is, every occurrence there is, is not the things, thoughts, or occurrences themselves, but is a Static expression of Dynamic Quality. Another way to put this is that the fundamental groundstuff of the universe is not mind/matter or subjects/objects as all of western civilization assumes, but is Quality, Values, and Morals. These three are synonymous and are reality.
For Pirsig, objects do not have a property called quality as we would normally understand it. For instance, we would say a good book is a book that has quality. Pirsig would say that Quality has the good book.
As I said, Values, Morals, and Quality are all synonymous for Pirsig, and he constructs a Static Moral hierarchy representing groups of like Static Patterns of Value (SPOVs) that all value the same thing. He arranges the Moral hierarchy as Inorganic, Biological, Social, and Intellectual levels of Static Quality, where each successive level is morally superior to the level below, while at the same time being dependent on it for its own survival.
The levels of SQ have a relationship with each other that is pretty complex. Each higher level sprang from the values of the level below. At the point where some new set of values based on the existing ones starts to value something new and different from its parent, you have a new level. A rough analogy for this relationship might be your school years. When you were in jr. high, you valued certain things, but as you got older and went on to high school you began to value other things and looked down on the things that were important to you before. Thing is, you would never have made it to high school at all if you hadn’t done well at valuing the things of jr. high first, and if you start to ignore or forget some of the basics from jr. high, your high school career will suffer. So, you end up with a weird relationship with jr. high. You may look down on it and want to dominate those now in it, yet very much depend on its existence so you can get to high school.
What do the levels value?
If the 4 levels are seen as sets of static patterns of value (SPOVs), you need to ask what each level values. This turns out to be pretty important for making sense of SQ because of this parent/child relationship they have with each other. If you say that the values of a level are one thing, the relationship either will or will not make any sense – and finally now we have arrived at the crux of the argument about the values of the Intellectual level.
We know that the values at each level have to be different and, because of their parent/child relationship with each other, we know that you have to be able to show how the values of a higher level could possibly have sprung from the values of the lower.
So, to define what the Intellectual level values you must first define what the Social level (its parent) values, and the hierarchy you come up with has to make sense.
The MoQ controversy Part 3
A useful starting point in any argument about the Intellectual level is to define the distinction you make between it and the Social level. If you can’t do that, you haven’t proven your position. If you claim that the difference is something nebulous and indistinct, then you have to explain why the Intellectual is even its own level at all and not just a variant of the Social.
These questions are important because Pirsig frames his Static moral hierarchy on the relationship between the values of each level and makes it clear that you must be able to show how a higher level could have logically emerged from a lower. You cannot claim that anything is more moral than anything else if both things rely on the same set of values. If the values are equivalent the morals are equivalent. Further, you cannot claim that anything emerged from anything else if there is no logical way for that to have occurred.
What does the Social level value?
Pirsig provides a number of examples in his book, Lila, in an effort to lay this out. He places all religions squarely in the Social level but, he also includes many types of human societal organizations. At first, you think it has to do with political structures and social organization – and it does, but it includes social structures of many types that we normally would not lump together, and throws in religion and even Victorian era social morals. To keep this brief I’ll say that after reading Pirsig many times I’ve come to the conclusion that you can characterize the values of the Social level as those in support of one thing – celebrity.
I’m not talking exclusively about the celebrities we can read about on TMZ, though certainly those are included. Think about it like this. In Pirsig’s hierarchy God is also a celebrity. Any figure who acquires status from birth-right, achievement, force, reverence, or tradition is an authority/celebrity figure. For the Social level, truth with a capital T inheres in the status of the individual within the group. This is not objectively verified authority but, rather, authority by acclamation. At the Social level, if I am king, Truth is what I say it is, and this applies for religions.
Prior to the advent of the Intellectual level, we acquired our understanding of how the world works from those above us who told us what it was. In the days of ancient Greece, for instance, people believed they operated at the whim of capricious gods who had the power to make crops flourish or fail based on their own desires. There was no objective reality, only a capricious one. If the gods were satisfied all was well but reverence was required to make sure this happened.
What does the Intellectual level value?
As Pirsig explains, the advent of the objective thinkers in ancient Greece marked a radically new way of thinking about the world in which we lived. Truth with a capital T was no longer solely within the purview of the gods. Through careful experimentation and observation we could hope to understand the real Truth of our reality. Beginning with the Greeks, for the first time in human history we were freed from the shackles of celebrity tyranny and were able to learn, explore, question, and think for ourselves. This marked the beginning of the Intellectual level.
Readings of Pirsig have led me to the conclusion that at the Social level Truth inheres in authority while at the Intellectual level it inheres in objective observation. At the Intellectual level, we see ourselves as separate and apart from the world around us. We are subjects experiencing and forming conclusions about a separate, objective reality. We believe in this. We believe we can learn the true nature of reality if only we experiment, study, and observe assiduously enough. At the Intellectual level the Truth is there for the finding by our subjective selves and this represents the highest calling of subject/object humanity. If the Intellectual has reverence for anything, it is this at the expense of all else.
There is disagreement about this.
I’ll leave it to those on the other side to make their own case, but the problem seems to stem from some later-day statements Pirsig himself made which tend to muddy the waters. To paraphrase, he has said that the Intellectual level can be characterized as “thinking itself” or “symbol manipulation”. I tend to think he used these phrases as shorthand for larger ideas since it is plain that thinking itself had to have been occurring as far back as the Biological level, and certainly no church or king could have operated without more than a little symbol manipulation going on.
The controversy, then, stems from those who take Pirsig’s later words in light of his earlier and view his statements as analogy versus those who take a literal interpretation.
So what’s all the fuss? Why does this matter?
If you take Pirsig’s later statements literally and play with them for a while, you will eventually arrive at the conclusion that Pirsig intended for the Intellectual level to represent “mind”, as in the mind/matter dichotomy discussed earlier. This is what is known as the “weak” interpretation of the MoQ and, as discussed in Part 1, leads one right back into the same set of unsolvable conundrums as all other subject-object based metaphysics. Worse, it provides no clear distinction between the Social and Intellectual levels. One if left with only vague reasons to explain the differing values between these two levels. It would seem that an adherent of this position could be happy doing away with the Intellectual level all together since it represents no clearly differing set of values from the Social.
On the other hand, if you adopt the “strong” interpretation, the distinction between the values of the Social and those of the Intellectual are readily apparent and logically consistent. They bring clarity to an understanding of the differing Values at each level and adhere to Pirsig’s original intent, which was to find an alternative to the subject-object basis for all prior metaphysics in the west.
One of Pirsig’s original goals was to find a way to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western philosophies. The “strong” interpretation puts the West’s focus on the “mind/matter” problem to rest and offers a bridge to Eastern philosophy.
I would enjoy having someone explain how I am wrong, but to do that they must be able to articulate the difference in SPOVs between the Social and Intellectual.
All.
Mary’s posts left me speechless (almost). As she so correctly puts it the MOQ stands and falls with the 4th static level. The “weak interpretation” – as mind or thinking, or Pirsig’s last effort: as manipulation of symbols (language) – leaves the MOQ without any explanatory power – just another academic dee-da-dum. But Dave seems hell bent on standing by Pirsig, who for some reason left his original insight, and that’s a tragedy. As Mary also points out there is no correspondence with the tenet of the upper/lower level conflict in the “weak” one. How can manipulation of symbols upset the social level? While the 4th level as SOM opens up a new and revealing insight in what has been going on in the world since its (intellect’s) advent.
Then Dave’s of Feb.23. where he keeps refuting straw issues.
“Again “ and I really can’t stress this enough – Bodvar’s claims are not supported by the textual evidence. In fact, Mark’s objections are fully consistent with Pirsig’s statements on the issue. As a nice bonus, we also get to see Pirsig explicitly rejecting the correspondence theory of truth”
I fully agree with “rejecting the correspondence …etc” SOMs first form was “Truth as opposed to Appearance”, this developed into “Object(ivity) as opposed to Subject(ivity)” and finally into “Matter (objects) vs Mind (subjects)”. Now, the MOQ rejects this S/O in all forms to be reality’s ground and by this it also rejects the aforementioned correspondence theory, that’s elementary Dr. Buchanan. But it does NOT reject truth as a static good, repeatedly Pirsig stresses this. Where he however mess things up is where to place ruth, and/or has forgotten his own placement (in ZAMM) AS INTELLECT!!!
Then Dave cites LILA.:
“This may sound as though a purpose of the MOQ is to trash all subject-object thought but that’s not true…snip”
Course not but the MOQ trashes the thought of the S/O dualism as metaphysically valid.
Ctd:
” Unlike SOM the MOQ does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then were permitted only one construction of things – that which corresponds to the ‘objective’ world – and all other constructions are unreal …snip.
Yes, SOM harbors this conviction, but SOM as the 4th Q level is under MOQ’s auspices and knows that its S/O premise only is a static subset, and will not terrorize us metaphysically any more.
Ctd:
“But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. … There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others,.. … snip.
Right, but the mess here is due to his viewing the MOQ as another intellectual (idea) pattern. But it is of course no a part of any of its own static levels, rather the meta-level from where the Quality context is seen.
Ctd.
“Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler explanation.” (Lila 100)
See, Pirsig sees both (SOM and MOQ) as intellectual patterns and thereby he promotes the 4th level the role as the interpreter of reality (the thinking facility) while it really is another static stage that interprets reality along its S/O matrix. Then Pirsig starts on the map coordinate metaphor but that’s another discussion.
Bo
Mary and Bo,
I just got back from an overnite RV trip to get a quick dose of nature for us and the dogs. Both of y’ alls latest posts are quite interesting and clarify what Bo has been saying quite a bit.
Mary, you described Pirsig as a Valuist in your 1st post, and I thought the word processualist was better (looking at MoQ’s emergentism, for one thing). Also, I always think pf Quality as a relationship, as in Pirsig’s words in ZAMM “relationship between sub and obj”; however, holding Quality as Value as you say, Mary, does also fit Pirsig’s words as “Quality is the continuous stimulus our environment places upon us to create”.
Is Q as relationship SQ, while Q as value/moral is DQ? This would be an insight for me.
I am ever-vigilence against anthropocentrism (which is why I am so skeptical of so much philosophical over-rationalizations, esp. in analytic and phenomenological writers). Pirsig often comes off as overly focused on human experience, as well. The experiences of all entities at all levels of reality must be considered in an ‘Adequate’ philosophy .
Celebrity is akin to top lion or wolf in a pack. Subjective valuation of objectivity is what a trapped mother dog is doing when looking for the way out of a kennel to get to her pups that have been suddenly removed.
I argue against anthropocentrism. Counters, please.
By counters, I really mean discussion.
Bo and Mary (and David)
A few more examples. In an any colony, the celebrity-like status of the queen-ant seems evident by the label itself. Also, in process thought, the many societies of the human body – its organs and various systems of blood arteries and nerves – are all in service to the regnant organ, the brain, which is responsible for knowing experience.
It always seemed to me that by social patterns, Pirsig meant the various means by which individuated living entities interact in an ecosystem. Cukture seems to be abstraction of knowing experience, so it is an intellectual construct – but one that must gain social ‘approval’ before being socially useful. Wolves leaving the woods to take up with humans seems a good example.
I am definitely sympathetic to the 4th level as knowing experience via S/O glasses. The fact that Pirsig did not hold to this view – or hold it steadfast – should not discredit it as an absurdity.
Wholesale acceptance of a philosophical work, or oppositely, wholesale avoidance are both anathema to honest philosophy.
I’m saddened, frustrated and running very low on patience. Look, it’s simple.
Bo claims that intellect is inescapably stuck with subject-object dualism.
The existence of intellectual systems that aren’t stuck with subject-object dualism proves that this claim is false.
What’s absurd is maintaining a position in the face of contrary evidence. If you know anything about the history of philosophy, you should know that it’s simply not true. There is a mountain of textual evidence to show this – from James, Dewey and Pirsig, as well as many others. To maintain a view in the face of all that evidence to the contrary is absurdly ignorant in both senses of the word.
It’s like claiming that all rocks are sandstone even while you’re surrounded by rocks that aren’t sandstone. That’s what’s absurd. Asserting the claim in such a circumstance will only make you look blind and foolish.
Dave.
You are at least committed to the MOQ and open to arguments from its premises. At at least I thought so, but this starts to look like your familiar smokescreen tactics of how inconsiderate and disloyal I am. However, my loyalty lies with the MOQ and it’s a fact that the that the latter-day Pirsig has done his best to undermine his magnificent creation.
Listen, intellect isn’t stuck with SOM, IT IS SOM, but this is MOQ’s 4th static level whose repertoire has to be well defined like the rest of the static range, not the mind-like article of ideas. Jog your intelligence. If there comes an idea (that lodges on top of the MOQ-idea) that says that the MOQ is hogwash, will that idea still be a Q-intellectual pattern? Don’t you see the nonsense of your “weak” interpretation?
You ask me to look to philosophy history to find proof for the strong interpretation being false. No doubt, philosophy in the academical form is a facet of SOM and began simultaneously with it in Greece. It has merely worked out ever finer systems based on the S/O premise. I know you want to house-train the MOQ for academy, but that is its sure demise.
I guess its useless to grind your nose into MOQ’s tenets, you don’t dare venture into that field, you just continue your exasperated tone over my “audacity”. But the true MOQ is out of the bottle and won’t be forced back again.
Bo
Bo
Could you address my concern that it is anthropocentric to limit two levels of trality to humans.sm
Hi Burl
You said:
“Could you address my concern that it is anthropocentric to limit two levels of trality to humans.sm”
I guess you mean reality not triviality 😉 Now, to serious matter. The MOQ says that a pattern of the lower level became the building block of the upper. Pirsig only talks about the inorganic-biological shift where the carbon atom became life’s building block and left it for us to speculate about the bio.- socio. and socio. – intellectual transitions. However IMO it was the biological organism called “mankind” that became the social “brick”. Insect colonies, animal packs, even primate (ape) tribes …etc. are merely social value still in biology’s service. Then, if the social level has mankind as its biological “brick” it’s obvious that the “brick” of intellect isn’t humankind, but a social pattern.. agree? And no-one has ever arrived at what this 3rd level pattern is. And the reason is people like David Buchanan’s misunderstanding of the 4th level as some sudden jump to a subjective idea-plane. Yes, I even accuse Pirsig of this total break with MOQ’s tenets when it comes to the 4th level. According to its tenets there is no subjective or objective aspect to the Q levels, except that the subject/object distinction is the 4th level’s value. So you see Burl, there’s nothing human-centric about the MOQ, the human being only appears as a mere biological organism.
Bo
Thanks. I am legally blind and do lots of typos. I will study this last post of yours as it appears to be a luring line of thought. As I said, I get your 4th level as valuing the S/O distinction, and that there is no mind in MOQ.
I will not mix Whitehead in here except to say he felt strongly that the big nut that 2500 yrs of Western philosophy cannot crack is that of ‘the many and the one.’ Perhaps Pirsig would say the SQ and the DQ.
Question: you say “Insect colonies, animal packs, even primate (ape) tribes …etc. are merely social value still in biology’s service.” I was under the idea that a higher level (social) could not be subordinate to a lower. Is ot not more correct to say these biological creatures are valuing social/communal modes of existing and evolving?
Burl, Mary and all interested..
Burl said:
“Question: you say insect colonies, animal packs, even primate (ape) tribes …etc. are merely social value still in biology’s service.” I was under the idea that a higher level (social) could not be subordinate to a lower. Is ot not more correct to say these biological creatures are valuing social/communal modes of existing and evolving?”
Good point and question. I tried to find where Pirsig treats this in LILA but did not hit the correct search word. However (speaking about the 2nd – 3rd level issue) the former began with the most simple organisms, but even bacteria form colonies – cultures even – without these having any Q-social content. The same goes for bee-hives, ant-hills, fish shoals and such, only when it comes to primates – apes – does it start to resemble the true article, but it’s still “living with its parent”, i.e. in biological survival service. But allow me to make some general comments regarding the 3rd social level
Mary said:
“What does the Social level value? Pirsig provides a number of examples in his book, Lila, in an effort to lay this out. He places all religions squarely in the Social level but, he also includes many types of human societal organizations. At first, you think it has to do with political structures and social organization – and it does, but it includes social structures of many types that we normally would not lump together, and throws in religion and even Victorian era social morals. To keep this brief I’ll say that after reading Pirsig many times I’ve come to the conclusion that you can characterize the values of the Social level as those in support of one thing – celebrity.”
Mary ends up with “celebrity” (fame and fortune) as a major social value pattern and I don’t disagree – far from it – but the part about “placing religions squarely in the social level ..” is very interesting. I don’t want to change the “social” designation, but the 3rd level is something far more advanced than mere communal behavior. IMO the 3rd level left its 2nd level home when the advanced biological species (mankind called) “discovered” life and death. Further I believe that this discovery was a result of language, animals may understand that a body is dead and mourn, but language’s “to be” created the notion of an existence AS DEAD and this spelt a whole new reality – the social one. Around ancestor worship a pattern (we call) Myth formed and this created a much wider social cohesion than the local families, klans and such. Whole regions were bound together, the Norse Myth incorporated the whole of Northern Europe and the Greek Myth spread to the whole Mediterranenan region. And as Myth changed into its ultimate form – monotheist type religion – the cohesion (loyalty) increased (Muslim fanaticism) and so did its sphere of influence, now world-wide OK, again a bit uncalled for but this is important for finding the social pattern that Dynamic Quality “hijacked” to form the intellectual level.
Bo
We are all close, I think. Perhaps we could get more philosophically inclined PEL folk involved by noting that Pirsig explicitly stated that the teleology of Quality was satisfied with the work of Derrida
Seriously, though, Bo and Mary, it occurred as I read Bo’s latest post that a better word for celebrity might be ‘hero’. Earnest Becker, in either _ The Birth and Death of Meaning _ or _ Denial of Death _ spoke of the main role of culture was to provide the opportunity to individuals to feel heroic in the face of the existential realization of mortality.
As far as I now know (from reading and observing), animals are aware that they can die. Whethet or not the social patterns that form their specific umvelt is mainly driven by enamling one to be heroic – I dunno.
Myth and religion is obviously in service as hero-enabling. I suspect rudimentary forms of myth – perhaps in the form of ignorant knowledge – is present in all animal experience, and perhaps shapes the herd behavior in ways that evolution can alter as their understanding of their umvelt improves.
Whatever the 4th level is, it is certainly evident in the experience of all higher order creatures. Note that one can convey concepts withoud an involving an ipad and email address. Ethology is providing insights into the real experiences of our non-English/Norwegian speaking neighbors.
I would submit that in any SQ level, there are a manifold of patterns that are instances of all 4 pattern categories to be found at all levels of reality – from quark to quack to Quine.
Burl
You said:
“We are all close, I think. Perhaps we could get more philosophically inclined PEL folk involved by noting that Pirsig explicitly stated that the teleology of Quality was satisfied with the work of Derrida ?”
About Pirsig and Derrida I’ve never heard and re. involving philosophy inclined people you see what happens. They withdraw in bewilderment, there is no counterargument once MOQ’s axiom is accepted. If the current subject/object ( mind/matter) metaphysics’ paradoxes don’t bother a person the MOQ has no appeal, and my experience is that it seldom does. Most people don’t even know about the mind/matter enigma or it is dear to them …. I’ve compared it to the film about a mad scientist having been robbed of a vial of a virus and begs on his knees, “Please, let me keep my illness”.
Regarding social value Mary suggested “celebrity” and you “hero-(ism)”, I understand the Becker argument,however it smacks of SOM: Life is a meaningless process that ends with death so an illusion pops up for mankind to feel heroic (feeling – emotion – something subjective and illusory ) Now, I’m sympathetic to both celebrity and heroism, but as my wont is I like to to coin a common denominator, and I’ve landed on “Our Cause”. This clearly is what transcends biology – in the sense of “upsetting it” – which is an important MOQ tenet. This is why David’s 4th level as “manipulation of symbols” fails, it’s clearly SOM which “upsets” social value the most
About animals awareness of death. Maybe regarding the higher species, but not in any metaphysical sense or to the degree of developing a mythology or even “religion” ;-). No, this is mankind realm. Again, there’s no stronger social bond than religion or anything that spites biology more. Was it Abraham who was willing to kill his son when Javeh told him to? And Muslim mothers gladly sending their sons to suicide bomb “schools”.
Bo
Clarification of last point…
I would submit that in each SQ level, there are a manifold of patterns that are instances of the that specific SQ level. Some may be dimly corresponding to others, but nevertheless they are legitimately identified as a SQ pattern of a specific level. And all 4 pattern categories may be found at all levels of reality – from quark to quack to Quine.
Hi Burl.
You said:
“I would submit that in each SQ level, there are a manifold of patterns that are instances of the that specific SQ level. Some may be dimly corresponding to others, but nevertheless they are legitimately identified as a SQ pattern of a specific level”.
I wholly agree about there being a multitude of patterns to each level and even if “dimly corresponding to each other” they nevertheless are of the same level. This is behind MOQ’s phenomenal explanatory power, for instance even if the “Semitic” type religions have different faiths – and hate each other like the plague (the Jews and Muslims) – hey are of the same (social) level. And and – NB – they both hate even more the intellectual level’s skepticism that deem their faiths to be “superstition”. This is my favorite issue. How the MOQ explains why for instance Christendom became divided along the social/intellectual fault line with its New-/Old Testaments and yet has to find its equilibrium. But enough about this
However your last sentence:
“And all 4 pattern categories may be found at all levels of reality – from quark to quack to Quine.
I don’t know what “Quine” is, but if you mean that all levels are at all levels I disagree.
Bo
“I don’t know what “Quine” is, but if you mean that all levels are at all levels I disagree.”
Sorry about the name drop: W V O Quine was a famous analytic philosopher at Harvard considered brilliant. As I recall, he told his students to quit looking at the structure of language and go help science do its work. I only used his name because ot started with a ‘q’.
Btw, I was joking about Derrida and P.
As for my quote above, I was not clear. There are grades of species complexity throughout reality. Any specific individual entity found could fall into a category that I represent as of either the species energetic (quark), affective (quacking duck, and Quine), or of the higher species of affective with keen abstraction capability (Quine). All I meant to say is that the activity of quarks involves at least analogues of all 4 MoQ levels of SQ, a duck’s repertoir includes all 4 (with limited S/O abstracting abilities), and then us with a robust repertoir of all 4 SQ patterns.
Bo, I am pretty sure you will not agree, but interest in Pirsig ultimately influenced me to embrace Whitehead’s work as a more robust body of philosophical and scientific work. P and W are quite similar as emergentist process thinkers, with P being easier to read. But W is different w/r the ‘levels’ and the ontology of Quality.