Hi Elephant:
Pirsig rejects (or is it refutes?) your “as if” theory in Lila, Chap. 5, calling
it a “degeneracy of another sort.” He says all of us pollute the mystic
reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings, not “as if”
meanings. Here’s the relevant passage.
“What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself
had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he
was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went
over this many times.
“A part of it said, “Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but trouble.
You're just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about
something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going
to make ten thousand opponents and zero friends because the
moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of
reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who've already
said reality is something else."
“The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There
was another part that kept saying, "Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting."
This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and
telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the
refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the
process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It
produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover
afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long.
Or Lila last night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What
would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is,
in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.
“But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless,
doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort.
That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to
be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only
person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed
metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born—and to
whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for
being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies
and writing metaphysics is a part of life.
“That was all he had to say to the mystic objections to a
Metaphysics of Quality. He next turned to those of logical positivism.”
Your mystic objection to the MOQ is answered.
Platt
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