Apr 99

I used Pirsig's quotes on this one to answer Michaelette's original question.

Here are some quotes of Pirsig, first from ZMM:

"The classic style (SOM) is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully
proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known." p. 61, Bantam paper.

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it — .He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience — .The supreme task — is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them — .

"Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge." p. 99.

"The cause of our current social crises, he [Phædrus] would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. [Maslow] But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason [SOM], handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come." p. 102.

"On the other hand is classic formalism, which insists that what isn't understood intellectually isn't understood at all. Quality in this case is unimportant because it's an emotional understanding unaccompanied by the intellectual elements of reason." p. 210.

"It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further, an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part." p. 264.

"Our Phædrus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the magnificent poetic imagery. But he's not tamed by it because he also smells in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterized as the destroyer of understanding, and Phædrus wonders if this is where the condemnation of the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably not. The tension between ancient Greek thought and emotion is described elsewhere as basic to Greek makeup and culture. Interesting though." p. 347.

And from Lila:

[Rigel on Phædrus]
"There were enough people like that, of course, but what made this all so insufferable was that here was a man who was passing himself off as an expert on "Quality," with a capital "Q." And he got away with it! It was like watching some ambulance chaser sway a jury. Once he got them emotionally on his side there wasn't much you could do about it." p. 70, Lila, Bantam hardbound 1st edition.

Pirsig discusses emotion distantly in Lila. He talks about Indians using peyote to draw emotions out. He describes sex and sexual relations as emotional in his experience with Lila. But he does not speak of emotion passionately as he did in ZMM.

So we can see emotion is closer kin to MoQ's Dynamic Quality than to its Static Quality. But MoQ needs SQ to be able to experience DQ.

So we may say, simply, in answer to our April 1999 Quantonic Question:

Emotion is one kind of direct experience SQ's Static Patterns of Value may have in their interrelationships with DQ. I.e., emotion = quanton(DQ,SQ), or emotion = DQvSQ.

Thanks for reading,

Doug.

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