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Metaphysics of Quality; Motorcycles, time, evolution, and Zen
Topic Started: Jul 7 2009, 11:59 AM (80 Views)
Charles Leitz
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"I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it." --Pirsig

Robert Pirsig might have been the first modern philosopher to make an impact on me when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintnance several years ago. Although I confess I still have not read all of his major works, I feel a brief discussion of his MoQ might serve as a nice introduction to metaphysics and to philosophy in general. I plan to do little overview threads like this one for all the disciplines currently featured here, although I imagine biology may prove difficult and I'll have to shamelessly steal from better scientists.

The "Metaphysics of Quality" (MOQ) was an idea introduced by Pirsig in "Lila". "Quality" as referred to, by Pirsig, is "immediate, undivided, experience." For anyone familiar with Buddhism, it rather resembles Cittamatra Buddhism, which asserts that entities exist not as independant objects but as functional objects within a mind. Pirsig's metaphysics rejects objective external reality and suggests that science, say, is fundamentally flawed. That example in particular is significant because of a discussion in "Zen and the Art..." which has been termed Pirsig's Paradox. Talking about Scientific objectivity, “Which facts are you going to observe?” he asks, “There is an infinity of them.” "The number of rational explanations for any given event is infinite." (I should note that the great Henri Poincaré observed the same fact regarding mathematical conjectures independently of Pirsig.)

Pirsig argues that complete observation of all fact is manifestly impossible, and, foreshadowing Dewey, says that we should abandon objectivity in favour of pragmatism. He fits somewhere closer to the Cartesian rationlism than most modernists, arguing (and I shall quote at length here)

"You cannot seriously think that every little chicken, that is hatched, has to rummage through all possible theories until it lights upon the good idea of picking up something and eating it. On the contrary, you think the chicken has an innate idea of doing this; that is to say, that it can think of this, but has no faculty of thinking anything else. The chicken you say pecks by instinct. But if you are going to think every poor chicken endowed with an innate tendency toward a positive truth, why should you think that to man alone this gift is denied? If you carefully consider with an unbiased mind all the circumstances of the early history of science and all the other facts bearing on the question...I am quite sure that you must be brought to acknowledge that man's mind has a natural adaptation to imagining, correct theories about forces, without some glimmer of which he could not form social ties and consequently could not reproduce his kind. In short, the instincts conducive to reproduction, must have involved from the beginning certain tendencies to think truly about physics on the one hand, and about psychics, on the other. It is somehow more than a figure of speech to say that nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which, when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, nature."

In ZataoMM, The father tells his son that he does not believe in ghosts because "they are 'unscientific.' The contain no matter, no energy, and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in science. The son replies:

"So you don't believe in ghosts or science?"
"no, I do believe in ghosts."
"what?"
"The laws of physics and logic, the number system the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravty existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.
"Of course"
"so, before the beginning of the Earth, before people, etc., the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy, and not existing in anyone's mind."
"right"
The what has a thing to do to be nonexistent? It has just passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have, or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. I predict if you think about it long enough, you will... realize that the law of gravity did not exist before Isaac Newton.... it is a ghost!"

I don't want to launch into the philosophy of science lecture this suggests without some replies first, so I'll just say that I think Pirsig was totally wrong. Or, well, not totally wrong, but only trivially right, for while the law of gravitation may not have existed before Newton, gravity certainly did. Pirsig denies objective reality, I do not. One could almost define reality as "that which doesn't go away when you're not thinking about it."
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