Re: MD Migration towards Dynamic Quality

[Matt the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat]

Ah, yes.  Finally, cerebral tranquility!

Alright, maybe that's a little premature, but I think the issue is resolved for me.
Maybe not everyone else and I'd still love to hear the debate rage on, but it seems everyone's pointing at the same thing.  And to be honest, yesterday, before I even redefined the question, I kinda' found the answer I figured would appear: DQ is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality.

It's what everyone is telling me and, yep, I think you're all right.  In particular, I really like John's response/"argument".  Because he's right.  And Pirsig's right.  And we probably all know it, but continue to forget it sometimes:

This is a game.

This discussion, debate, argue and defend, dialectical back and forth is a game, a game that cannot be won.  But it's a game that I like to play from time to time, a game we must all like to play, else we wouldn't read the posts or even take any part in moq.org.

More specifically, it's a game I have to play while I toil in the academic establishment.  It's a game we all play when we try and explain to someone about Pirsig or Quality or the MOQ.  It's a game, as Pirsig says, that's a part of life, just as are eating, pissing, shitting, fucking, getting drunk, picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics.  It's a game where the only sure-fire way to win and lose is not to play it.  The people who don't play it say you win.  The people who do say you lose.  And right now, the people who do play the game are grading my essays and giving me my teaching certificate.  And I have to do this for 4 more years.

So, what John did was beautiful (and eloquently put, I might add, a great piece of rhetoric).  He retreated.  I say "retreated" because that's what the game-player in me calls it.  It was a retreat to indivdualistic mysticism.  And it's a move that the other half of me (the part that sees the whole picture, the part that can tell the gamer part to shut the hell up) whole-heartedly agrees with.  Because it's good.  Even a retreat needs to be a defensible retreat and that is exactly what it was.  It needs to be defensible because the gaming parts of us wouldn't have it any other way.

And so, I think that's it for me (besides whatever clarification and wrap-up stuff that may be needed).  I'm going back to lurking.  I've found what I lost.  And I'm tired.  Every time I do this, every time I enter into the arena of debate, it takes a little out of me.  Every argument I write, I also see a counter-argument.  I try to defend my exposed flank and I expose myself somewhere else.  No argument is perfect, just as there are no perfect chess openings.  After a while I'll come back, rejuvenated and fresh.  Usually sooner, if I smell weakness.

I do wonder, though, if I'll ever get tired of the game.  I can only assume I will, based on the fact that it tires me so already at the tender age of 21.  I think a lot of it has to do with the struggles that I read in Pirsig.  The greatest metaphysics I have ever seen, and no one that should listen is listening.  If Pirsig couldn't do it, how can I do it.  I ain't no Pirsig.  That's ultimately why I left Philosophy as an academic career choice.  It's just a shark orgy of blood.  And I have the scent for blood, but not quite the taste for it that others have.  I'll stick to teaching, so I can brain-wash impressionable little minds.  Or, at least brain-wash them not to be brain-washed by evil brain-washing non-thinking rhetoric that almost got me.

And that leaves me with this:

I think the greatest influence that Pirsig has had on me is as a writer.  It's almost as if Pirsig did write a book teaching Rhetoric.  Except there's two of them.  And the second one is even better than the first.

Always in the background,

Matt