Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 04:18:22 +0100
On Tue, 10 Mar 1998, Doug Renselle wrote:
> I am not so much avenging Pirsig as I am trying to show that SOMites did
> the same thing to Pirsig by erasing his mind with electro-shock as the
> (SOMitic) Church did to Galileo and others when their intellectual
> Static Patterns of Value evolved and began to gain power.
Let's be careful about who does what to whom. It was the
psychologist who "zaped" pheadrus. Today, Doc. Shrink'em is the most
poewerful force or morality -- or at least moral enforcement. (What a
gastly claim!) A kin to the Popes of Galilao's hayday. There are certain
social/moral conventions that one must adher to in order to be granted
person-hood (To paraphrase Erving Goffman, people are things we talk to,
objects [be it the Greenland icecap or a mental patient] are things we
talk about.) Hegel calls these moral norms the "ethical substance" (and
I'll come back to that later because the point is that it is both ethical
and substantial -- that is, the solid world of stuff is the same as the
social world of normalization and person-hood... Hegel does say, the world
[social and natural alike] is constructed of ethics/morals/values.) But as
for Doc Shrink'em, consider: When Billy Bomber blows up a building and
kills inocent people, 70-100 years ago we called in the priest to explain:
Why did God allow this to happen? Now we call in the shrinks to tell us,
What made Billy do it?
The point for now is, P didn't get zaped for taking issue w/
SOM, he got zaped because he stoped responding to the outside world, sat
in a room and pissed on himself. His sin wasn't against SOM (or any other
"intellectual theory") but against society -- social value. (There are
people w/ "goofyer" metaphysical notions that P around this universities
department and I bet Antony could name one or two where he is as well, but
these people will only not be taken seriously -- they still get to be
people.)
> In legacy SOM, we of TLS know, Aristotelian
> substance/body/matter/property (the objective) reigns over the
> insubstantial/mind/immaterial/value (the subjective). We hear the
> SOMites preach, "Be objective. Your subjectivity is of low utility."
(Actually Phedrus didn't have a good understanding of Aristotle --
and frankly neither did the goof-ball "Aristotle expert" teaching the
course in ZMM -- so the "Aristotialian" label is a tad out of wack.)
I still object to this "object" = "objective" "subject" =
"subjective" move. Somebody said that they are like two different shades
of green, but still essentually the same thing... no, no, no. Let's look
at the words how they are really used:
"Be objective. Your subjectivity is of low utility." Is that
suposed to the "SOMite" (hoo-boy) moral imperative or something. Now, that
is a straw man.
I work w/in an art department, I'm now pursuing a BFA in fine art.
When you "read" a good piece it's not unlike "reading" cloudshapes.
Everyone has there own subjective little angle. But that's not attacked!
That's part of what art is. Art has no (or little) problem w/
subjectivity. (Of interpritation -- of quality? When it comes time to hand
out grades...?)
Now return w/ me to Lab-rat and Gloria in the lab. In the lab
there is a moral imperative to be objective -- well, of course! That's
what science is. But the point is that objectivity and subjectivity arn't
"things" on-to-themselves; they're *roles* -- a posture one assumes, takes
up and drops at appropriate moments. ("Damn it Lab-rat, be objective!")
(The idea [or ideal?] of Sherlock Holmes being the objective observer
every waking hour is silly stuff.)
(And by the way, this thought is Aristotialian! When we study
Aristotle we look back through this vast distorting prism of 2000 years of
Christain reiterpritation, and then end in our present point of view of
Psychology -- we unconsciously (?) psychologize everything -- we place it
inside the individual mind, on the scale of the individual. The Greeks
didn't think that way. We forget that Aristotle's *Nichomacheian Ethics*
is part 1 of a two part work on Politics. For Aristotle the moral unit
isn't the individual, it's the polis -- the city-state. The "subject" here
is most certainly not an internal psyche; it's a society. Aristotle has
been badly abused by chemistry teachers and goons like the Dept. head in
ZMM who read his books w/o looking at the context, and w/o asking, "Did a
book mean the same thing in Aristotle's Greece as it does today and here?"
[And I don't mean the meaning of a text w/in a book; I mean the medium
itself -- did writting a book mean the same thing?] It's not Aristotle
Phedrus reacts against; it's that bone-head interpreter. [And, by the
way, Aristotle was not an advocate of objective, emperical, "scientific"
observation (obviously). That role didn't even exist at the time.] And as
far as reacting against that bone-head interpritor: THAT is the Church of
Reason, not SOM. I'm writting a paper about this, as I've said, but the
argument in brief is: P never escaped the Church. He just set up a new
denomination. What the church is, is this need to pick an -ism, make it a
war cry -- select an enemy [the SOMites] and dig in to the trenches. I've
said before, I find that mantality unphilosophical and undignified. It's
the result of trying to force-fit philosophy into an achademic setting.
More later.)
Now thats where one might find "subjective" and "objective."
What about this idea of the (knowing)subject and (known)object.
In ZMM P is clear that experience is the result of the bumping
together of subject and odject. Let's walk through 3 "trancendental"
ontologies:
Lao tzu / Daoism:
Out of the Way come forth pairs of opposits. Our experience in the
field of time is always in terms of pairs of opposits (past-present,
up-down, good-bad, male-female...), but the Way has no contrast.
Kant:
Out of the Moral self comes forth (knowing) subjects and
(known)objects. These create (by bumping together) the manifold (manyness)
of experience -- IE all experience is something knowing something --
that's what it means. The Moral self is "outside" (a metaphore) the
manifold. We never experience it. We have faith in it, for it is
reasonable to do so (it cures the platipi that were bugging philosophy in
Kant's day [Hume and Decartes]).
Pirsig:
(ZMM)
Out of Quality come forth S and O (Aproximatly meaning Mind-Body)
and experience is the result of a S and an O encontering one-another. But
Quality is not *in* exp. for it, after all, gives rise *to* exp.
(LILA)
P sheds his Eastern flavor and says:
What really exists is *only* Quality. It has two states (these
are my own words): the potential and the realized (the in-itself and the
for-itself in Hegelian lingo). As his diagram in the Einstein-Magreet
artical shows (on the LS web page) he identifies inorganic, and organic
SPoV as "objects" and social and intellectual SPoV as "subjects," saying
that these insubstantial things are a higher form of value evolution than
the spacialy-extended, solid "stuff."
(Frankly I liked ZMM better.)
Does that shed light on anything or just muddle the already murky
water?
TTFN (ta-ta for now)
Donny
PS Hugo, thanks for the Schilling mail.
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