In ZMM, Chapter 29, Pirsig tells of his encounters with the Sophists while a student at the University of Chicago. He starts the journey by tying the dialectic as a common thread running from the almost pre-historic Sophists, to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and down to our present day subject/object way of thinking. Along the way, he encounters madness, always a distinct possibility when one is traveling in the Conceptual Unknown.

The journey seems complete by his act of writing Lila, yet it is just another beginning really. What really happened with the dialectic is this...dialectic was at one time thought to be a manifestation of the One, Unity. The talking to ourselves that we do in our heads was merely a byproduct of the One, which was equated with Goodness.

By the time Plato got around to the dialectic, this inner voice that used to be only a manifestation of Goodness, became that Goodness. The inner voice was given the title of Thought and became the creator of reality. The reasons for this happening are many. First and foremost , by tying the internal discursive dialogue to 'real' thought, it was assumed we could then account for everything. By denying 'real' thinking to arise from 'outside' the mind and only inside the private voice in our heads, the scary, madness inducing Conceptual Unknown can be entirely avoided!

This is actually a brilliant stroke of genius, who's end result we are experiencing now in communicating this way. But in the act of creating a static latch, the Dynamic Quality is stifled. The MOQ allows us to transcend that static latch to a higher, more expanded viewpoint of the universe by recognizing once again the Conceptual Unknown, or Dynamic Quality.

This time however, we are well armed with 2000 more years of collective knowledge. Still, it is dangerous territory any time one sets off into the unknown. Agreements must be forged anew, old agreements transcended into new ones and discarded.

The first of these agreements is with the internal discursive dialogue. In my opinion, it is not 'true' thought. It is us telling ourselves that we are real, that we and everything we know 'exists' as real entities in the world. This is of the highest value for our survival, and results in subject/object 'thinking', but it is misnamed, simply because the Sophists were not interpreted properly over 2500 years ago. It is more properly called subject/object relational awareness.

This is precisely Neils Bohr's point in his Theory of the Complementarity. As a physicist in the early part of the century, Bohr was confident that he could tie philosophy with the descriptions of quantum mechanics, thus uniting the everyday world with the micro-world of the atom. What he said, in essence, was that the subject and the object were indespensable, yet it was the relationship between the two which contained the most value.

However, in doing so, he ran into a gigantic Platypus known as randomness. If, as Bohr suggested, the relationship was all that mattered, why did the universe seem to value certain patterns over other possible patterns, especially if it was chaotic in nature to start with? Bohr thought that the universe was moving from a state of utter chaos to that of perfect order, but if the chaos was totally random, then there were an infinite number of probable choices at all levels of the universe!

This inspired Einstein's famous quote 'God does not play dice with the universe!' as he was convinced in a causal nature in reality, which Pirsig has identified as Quality. The MOQ encompasses this platypus by stating the universe is not moving towards a goal, it is the goal. From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that Bohr was on the right track, he simply failed to make that leap from a relational viewpoint to that of a value driven viewpoint. It is not so much in the relational awareness that Quality arises, but in that relational awareness transcending subject/object thinking, or talking to oneself, to encompass the Conceptual Unknown from which the dialectic arises.

It becomes clear that 'real' thinking arises in the unknown, and that we could never have a 'new' thought if all we knew was what we told ourselves that we know. 'Real' thinking arises from the Conceptual Unknown, and we have been taught that that way lies madness. But the high country of metaphysics provides such a view, that perhaps a touch of madness is a price worth paying.