The Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) is Robert Pirsig's philosophy based around the notion that quality or value is the essential force of the universe.
Pirsig postulates that everything can be assumed to be a value, but that Quality is not a thing. It is an event; one at which the subject becomes aware of the object.
And because without objects there can be no subject - because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself - Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Hot. Now he knew it was coming. This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
The notion of quality as an event would really resonate with Alfred North Whitehead and his Process philosophy who understood that the world is composed of deeply interdependent processes and events, rather than mostly independent material things or objects.
Instead of dividing everything into subjects and objects, Pirsig divides reality into Dynamic Quality and static quality. Dynamic Quality is the term he gives to "the continually changing flux of immediately-experienced reality", while static quality refers to the hardening of Dynamic Quality into a fixed pattern. In a personal letter to Anthony McWatt Pirsig asserts "Dynamic Quality refers to what Buddhists would call ‘unconditioned reality’, and static quality refers to ‘conditioned reality’ – more commonly known by the Buddhists as ‘the everyday world".
Dynamic Quality is the force of change in the universe; "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality". This is a really hard concept to get your head around as it is the essence of abstract.
Static quality is an easier concept to understand than Dynamic Quality as it is the epitome of the opposite of abstraction. It is what happens when Dynamic Quality becomes habitualised and is transformed from potentiality into actuality.
There are some significant similarities between the Metaphysics of Quality and Meaningful Participation. Pirsig's concepts of Quality, Dynamic quality and static quality map pretty cleanly onto matching core concepts in Meaningful Participation.
Quality = Value-theory = Information. Pirsig's Quality is synonymous with Meaningful Participation's concept of the Value-theory. In the same way that Pirsig says that everything is Quality, Meaningful Participation makes a similar claim about the value-theory as the fundamental "atom" of the universe.
The value-theory in turn is analogous with Information and entropy. A unit of information is a value-theory (plan) that "reconciles" the Meaning gap between a meta-affirmative need-goal and a Receptive force observation.
Dynamic Quality is