From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat May 21 2005 - 04:13:51 BST
Matt, Mark and all:
Matt said to Mark (IIIA):
(A suspicion only furthered by your remark that "[Pirsig] and Lao Tzu had
arrived at the same place via different routes. So, a person can believe in
the Dao without having read Lao Tzu, just as a person can believe in
Quality without having read Pirsig," which seems to create a Realm of Ideas,
just sitting out there, with some ideas being exactly the same, just called
by different names by us finite mortals. As per my own version of
intellectual progress, this is wrong.)
dmb says:
This is one of those places where you've interpreted the matter in terms of
pragamatism and Platonism. You think it looks like Platonism because
recognizing the similarities between Taoism and the MOQ somehow rests upon
"a Realm of Ideas just sitting out there". But I think this is a misreading.
And not because you have a different version of intellectual progress. See,
the thing is you and Pirsig and Sam are all attacking Modenity. Leaving
theism aside for the sake of brevity and simplity, you and Pirsig are
attacking the same enemy for different reasons and from different angles.
You, obviously, are going at it from a postmodern perspective. But Pirsig's
aim is to reconcile East and West. Buddhism and Taoism and mysticism not
only have a place in the MOQ, it is a version of those systems. And if you
will recall, in LILA Pirsig goes out of his way to assert the provisionality
and context-dependence of our truths, to reject the correspondence theory of
truth, scientific objectivity and he rejects Plato's "fixed and eternal
ideas" way back in ZAMM.
"Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each
generation, moving onward and upward toward the 'one'. Aristotle is the
eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the 'many'. I myself am pretty much
Aristotelian in this sense, prefering to find the Buddha in the quality of
the facts around me, but Phaedrus was clearly a Platonist by temperment and
when the classes shifted to Plato he was greatly relieved. His Quality and
Plato's Good were so similar that if it hadn't been for some notes Phaedrus
left I might have thought they were identical." ZAMM 331-2
"The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving
idea, whereas for the rhetorician it was not an idea at all. The Good was
not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, and ultimately
unkowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." ZAMM 342
Likewise, Matt also said to Mark (IIIB):
So I don't know where this leaves us, Mark. At first blush, you seem to
think that some of my arguments are about your "style," when they are all
commonly arrayed against the same set of Enlightenment-style assumptions
that let's you call _anything_ universal, anything that sets up
epistemological or metaphysical foundations. And when you want me to engage
you, you deprive me of some of the weapons I consider fundamental, basically
claiming they are just part of my "style." I don't think they are.
dmb replies:
The funny thing about your style is that it won't allow you to hook up your
vocabulary with Pirsig's. "Enlightenment-style assumptions", for example,
surely has some relation to Pirsig's critique of SOM. Why not discuss the
issue in terms we all have in common here, Pirsig's terms? If the concern is
about universals and foundations, why not discuss it in terms or Pirsig's
rejection of "a single exclusive truth"? See what I'm getting at? It seems
like you want to paint MOQers as Platonists simply for failing to use your
particular jargon and slogans. But the fact is there are a great many
critiques of Modernity and there no reason why one should be so rigid about
the terms with which we discuss it. In fact, I think your unusual dedication
to that jargon has proven to be quite a disability here. I know you think it
marks your intellectual progress, but I think its only preventing progress.
It has a way of preventing you from seeing connections and making
distinctions at the same time.
I suppose you've heard all this before and haven't yet been persuaded by it,
but I felt obligated to present my side of "dmb and me".
Basically, I think mysticism does not appear on your map and that, as a
result, you're suffering from a wicked case of the cleveland harbor effect.
Since it may be contageous, I'll ask you to keep your hands off my stick.
Thanks to all readers.
dmb
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