Saving The MOQ From Being Swallowed By Its Own Intellectual Level. Or The Participation Metaphysics Devoured By Its Own Loss.

…Jun 8, 2016, An Email From Bodvar Skutvik to Henry Gurr, which In Sutvik’s own way expresses how he sees Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) is related to Pirsig’s Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM).

Henry,

….In the meantime I got hold of Barfield's "Saving the Appearances" and
have now more or less finished it. And Barfield is good - no question
about that - had I read him before Pirsig I surely would have been a
fan. Don't misunderstand I am a fan - there are parts where his
presentation of what's at stake is better than Pirsig's - but IMO he
misses one important aspect of it all .... if not I miss important parts of
what he writes.
…I hope you to allow me to be frank? But let that important point come
later, what struck me was the opening where Barfield refers to the drawing
of a cube ….- how in one instance you see it from one angle and then
suddenly your view shifts radically to the opposite direction. This is
exactly what Pirsig tries to convey with his "Copernican Revolution":
Nothing changes, yet everything changes! Not gradually, it's an
instantaneous switch.
…The book is a library copy, so I could not underline things and can't
quote much, but there were other things, for instance, about [Barfield’s] hostility
from the Loss of Participation. towards the Original Participation, characterizing it as
ignorance and superstition. Exactly as the relationship between the
intellectual and the social levels of the MOQ. But then my complaint:
Because no "cube view change" is done by Barfield (like the
Copernican Revolution by Pirsig) his participation scheme seems to
take place inside the Mind of Man. Another subjective shift!
…I may be overlooking some passage where Barfield does so, maybe
his "evolution of consciousness" - that there's no unambiguous MIND
but several minds - one corresponding to each participation "level"? If
so he and Pirsig are even closer. But will anyone grasp the importance
of this? That goes for the MOQ too. Pirsig does not help by his
assertion that the MOQ is an intellectual pattern which makes the 4th
level = mind and consequently the MOQ another subjective idea in
SOM's mind. An unending series of such (ideas) since Man "became
conscious" ... and if so one is back in SOM's quagmire.
…The quagmire is created when trying to explain a new reality from the
old reality's premises, in Pirsig's case not taking the bold step of
defining the 4th, intellectual, level as the value of the S/O (Subject-Object) distinction,
but catering for academical philosophy by making the SOM-MOQ a
gradual change of our mental cogwheels - not an instantaneous shift
to a totally new view that makes short thrift of the former.
…I believe that Barfield regarded his Participation Metaphysics as a
relief from the "Loss of Participation" stage that he (like Pirsig does the
intellectual level) regards as the Western World's Ethos. i.e. that the
relief will be the result of people adopting his system. What I try to
"sell" is that all paradoxes/platypi are caused by the 4th level's S/O
distinction erroneously having been regarded as existence's "rock
bottom" - its SOM role. With the new DQ/SQ (Dynamic Quality/Static Quality)
scheme, the paradoxes DISSOLVE!
Sincerely Bodvar

My Meeting With Robert M. Pirsig by Bodvar Skutvik of Norway.

…, Sep 27, 2016, An Email From Bodvar Skutvik to Henry Gurr

..Hi Henry.
….As promised I'll tell about my meeting with Robert Pirsig in 1993. It's no dramatic event, but one growing in importance in my magination and which I am happy to have experienced.
…I had exchanged letters with Robert Pirsig, mostly regarding his first book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (abbreviated ZAMM) but also about his second book "Lila" that had been published in 1991. And when I learned that he was to to come to Norway in connection with the ZAMM being translated into our "lingo."
…I told him I would come to Oslo and hoped I could meet him. This was 1993 and everything went well, Pirsig's wife and secretary Wendy contacted me by phone and we agreed on me coming to the hotel where they stayed.
…I had some anxiety - like the one descriibed in "Lila" with his own meeting with Robert Redford - and had shored myself up with some tranquility pills plus a few drinks so I was dead calm when I came face to face with my hero and "savior."
… I boldly asked how he pronounced his family name. It beeing of German origin I had a hunch it was more like the German "pfirzig". Well I learned that it was straightforward American and we found a table and continued our conversation. I now naturally regret not going more into the metaphysics of the Metaphysics of Quality which is introduced in "Lila," but I had not known it long enough to understand it properly and besides I was - as told - a bit overwhelmed.
…My chemically induced bravery made me ask about their crossing the Atlantic in 1980 in a small sailboat, and Pirsig willingly told about it and about their stay in Norway with the boat moored in Tananger and the longer sojourn in a port in Sweden. One question led to another so on it became a long session, including him telling about a storm so fierce that they logged 5 knots withoiut any sails - for bare masts.
…The story and evening came to an end, poor Wendy must have been dead tired but we agreed about meeting the next day. That day however day Pirsig was subdued and did not say much so my continued "trip" on pills did not bring forth any stories from him when we had a meal in an Indian restaurant. I understood that I had stressed him with all my questions the night before.
…The next day I was to return home but happened to meet Wendy in a shopping mall, and she said that he was resting at the hotel, so I understood that he was really exhausted. But she said something that brought tears to my eyes "..... Bob says that Bodvar is the only person that really understands the MOQ."
…I don't know if that "holds water" regarding the later dispute over his metaphysics, but of one thing I'm sure is that that MOQ is viable and that some time Pirsig will have his rightful position among the great philosophers, among the top rank that is, apar with Plato in my opinion, and that's no flattering. Bodvar

Letter to Bodvar Skutvik From Robert M Pirsig, September 15, 2000.

I stumbled across "Lila's Child" Click Here the other day on the internet, have now read it and am very impressed by it. It really is the third book that has been needed to follow the first two. It would have been impossible without the internet to bring together this collection of minds and interests. They have been so thorough, I don't have to say any more. Please thank Dan Glover for putting it together, and everyone involved in it - the endorsers and dissenters too.
…In keeping with the aphorism that you can learn more from your enemies than you can from your friends, I took particular interest in the negative comments. The question of "How do you justify the statement that Quality equals reality?" was the best one. The correct answer from a MOQ perspective is, "by the harmony it produces," but this answer is only for people who already understand the MOQ. Those who don't can't see the harmony and for them this answer is meaningless.
…We see that these people want rational justification, usually "objective" justification and I think that objective material examples will now advance the MOQ faster than anything else. Their idea that quality is some sort of vapid, romantic, ethereal illusion may be dispelled in part by a discussion of plain old money which, in the MOQ, is a pure and simple index of social quality. Arguments that value is unreal can be reduced to absurdity by the question, "Do you think a five dollar bill has the same value as an one dollar bill? If so, are you willing to trade some bills?" and "If not, why not? What's the difference?" If they give the standard answer that money is a convention, you can ask, "What kind of convention is a crash in the stock market?" Conventions are static, but as every good trader knows stock prices are a mixture of static and dynamic factors. This can be expanded hugely into a discussion of the stock exchange indexes whose sole purpose is the measurement of value and expanded further into the large areas of economics. Consider how many books have been written on economics that don't touch on the real meaning of value!
…Hellier's charge of "emotivism" came second. I think it may give a good picture of where opposition is coming from among the academic philosophers. All the answers to it were excellent and I think really have strengthened the understanding of the Lila Squad. My own addition might be that if the implication of "emotivism" is true - that emotion and value is identical - then banking may be considered an emotional activity. I think the MOQ would classify emotions as mere biological responses to value, not value itself.
As you know there is something about quality that makes it impossible for many to understand what you are talking about. A lot of it is persistence of the materialistic, objective, historic tradition that hopefully will be overcome in time. But also we are seeing a kind of quality blindness that musicians call a "tin ear" of singers who keep sharping and flattening notes without knowing they are doing it. Many people just do not "see" quality at the same time they are obviously seeing it, in the same way that tin- eared people do not "hear" harmony at the same time they are obviously hearing it. I think this was what you were trying to tell Hellier at the end of the Great Shoot-Out when you told him to learn more about reality. It seems that all he could see was quality as a concept, something with about the same scientific reality as hippogriffs and Jesus in Heaven and other empirically unverifiable entities. He just did not directly see what you were talking about. Anthony McWatt attended a class on ZMM where the teacher actually had the same problem. She had no grasp of what value was, only what a value judgement was.
…I had always assumed that this blockage of direct quality perception was social, but in Mexico a few years ago I talked to a neurologist who argued that it was physiological. She said that recent experiments are showing that the right side of the brain, the "artistic" side, filters all experience before it reaches the left "rational" side of the brain. This would concur with the MOQ assertion that value precedes concepts in human understanding. I have read elsewhere that the left rational side of the brain can never perceive the right brain as an object, but only receive messages from it. This would explain why everyone knows that something is better than other things but no one can define what this betterness is. All they get are the quality messages but they don't know where the quality messages are coming from. This is not to say that the right brain creates the quality, only that it filters it before passing it along to the left brain for conceptualizing.
…The neurologist's explanation also explains the finding that left- handed people, in whom the value side of the brain dominates the rational side, are more commonly found in the arts than are the general population and have a higher rate of insanity. It could even explain the excessive hostility we are seeing toward the MOQ from the academic philosophers like Strawson and Hellier who are above all "rational" in the static sense of the term. I once read a book called "Death and the Right Hand" which showed that one of the few anthropological constants found in cultures throughout the world has been fear and hatred of left-handedness. The word "sinister" originally meant left-handed. Only our modern scientific rational culture abandons this social hatred. But at deeper subliminal levels it may still be there, creating the illusion in some people that Dynamic Quality is somehow "gauche" and sinister.
…I think "Lila's Child" is exactly the conservative intellectual static latch that the MOQ has needed to counter this charge. The fact that it was not written by me makes it even stronger. I hope it will be the resource book for all the professional philosophers and anyone else who wants to dig deeper in the MOQ for years and even centuries to come.
(signature) Robert M. Pirsig

Bodvar Skutvik's Comments on “The Poverty of Scientism,” May 6, 2016.

I can hardly believe that this problem – very generally the mind/matter division – still bothers philosophy after it got its solution with Robert M. Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” (the MOQ). The problem came to the fore relatively shortly after Descartes made the subject/object split into reality’s foundation (what Pirsig calls the S/O Metaphysics (SOM) when the empiricists – Berkeley the best known – pointed out that “out there” in the physical, objective world there were only quantities so what we perceived as music is just pressure waves in the air, taste is just molecular configurations, smell likewise and vision just frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (NB maybe molecules and electro-magnetism were unknown to the sixteenth century, but that does not matter) From here comes Bill Nye’s paradox

If you drop a hammer on your foot, is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times, and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real.

Pain is just subjective an ought not “hurt” yet it is the only way we perceive the world so instead of being secondary it is primary. This led the venerable Immanuel Kant to step in and try to save common sense from what he called “Pure Reason” (Reinen Vernunft) but as the mentioned SOM also was his premise the salvation just cemented the paradox. He ended up with the Thing in Itself (das Ding an Sich) and the Thing for Us (das Ding f’ür Uns) and so great was Kant’s reputation that academy thought that this was the last word and closed the case. It took 150 years before another philosopher reopened it, namely Robert Pirsig. In his first book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (ZMM) he like Halverson here pointed to the “poverty of scientism” and its ominous reality of a material realm governed by natural laws completely indifferent to our subjective feelings. And than simultaneously that this reality only exists as a subjective theory. In that the book he also reaches the conclusion that this subject/object division that we now believes is from eternity came to be with the Geeks philosophers and only slowly came to be (our) metaphysics i.e. the hidden premise that we take for granted. In his next book “Lila, an inquiry into Qualities” he presents an alternative to SOM – the mentioned MOQ – that I am going to tell about in he next installment.

Bodvar Skutvik’s comments above are among other comments on the article
“The Poverty of Scientism” by Daniel Halverson, published by the philosophy podcast and philosophy blog The Partially Examined Life, April 12, 2016.
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….END SPECIAL STUDIES PAGE FOR BODVAR SKUTVIK.

On 260605 HSG searching old emails for PROMO’s > find Bodvar’s “My Visit With Pirsig” > MkNewSpecialStudiesPage.
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