From: Case (Case@iSpots.com)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 17:53:20 BST
> [Arlo]
> I suggest you, Platt, read that whole thing again. But, just in case
> you missed it, here is a section from Ant's post.
>
> "...it looked as though the whole book would center around this long
> night’s meeting of the Native American Church. THE CEREMONY WOULD BE A
> KIND OF SPINE TO HOLD IT ALL TOGETHER. FROM IT HE WOULD BRANCH OUT AND
> SHOW IN TANGENT AFTER TANGENT THE ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX REALITIES AND
> TRANSCENDENTAL QUESTIONS THAT FIRST EMERGED IN HIS MIND THERE…
>
> Phædrus couldn’t have gone that distance without the peyote. He would
> have just sat there “observing” all this “objectively” like a
> well-trained anthropology student. But the peyote prevented that. He
> didn’t observe, he participated, exactly as Dusenberry had intended he
should do…"
>
> Couldn't have gone that distance without the peyote. That's it right
> there, amigo. Psyedelic revelation. Certainly one that post-session
> was given a lot of rational work, but the origin, the source, the Quality
moment...
> well, Pirsig makes that clear.
[Platt]
You can think that the MOQ is based on a hallucination if you wish, but at
the end of the chapter on his peyote experience Pirsig summed it up by
writing:
"And as Phaedrus's studies got deeper and deeper he saw that it was to this
conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order, that
his study should be directed." (Lila,3)
No major insight, just a "study" of the conflict between freedom and order.
The great breakthrough came later after weeks of thinking about the brujo in
Zuni story when he made his seminal first cut -- Dynamic and static
Quality. That first cut launched the entire structure of the metaphysics
that followed. "In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most
important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything
beneath it." (Lila, 9)
[Case]
I have recently come upon the reference Bennedict sites regarding the Brujo
and I believe she, if not Pirsig, has misrepresented the whole incident. The
Brujo got into trouble because he was drunk and was making an ass of himself
not because he was an agent of dynamic change.
As for Pirsig's view as expressed in Lila regarding peyote there is this:
"After the sixties the whole issue of peyote became one of those no-win
political contests between individual freedom on the one hand and democracy
on the other. Clearly LSD was injuring some innocent people with
hallucinations that led to their death, and clearly the majority of
Americans wanted drugs such as LSD made illegal. But the majority of
Americans were not Indians and certainly they were not members of the Native
American Church. There was a persecution of a religious minority going on
here, something that's not supposed to happen in America.
The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief,
unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that 'hallucinatory'
experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of
insanity, the term 'hallucinogen' is clearly pejorative. Like early
descriptions of Buddhism as a 'heathen' religion and Islam as 'barbaric,' it
begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as part of their
ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a 'de-hallucinogen,' since it's
their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and
reveals the reality buried beneath them."
As for Platt's repeated use of the passage about hippies suggesting that
Pirsig has a negative view of them try this one:
"The Hippies have been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the
period following their departure as a 'return to values,' whatever that
means. The Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie
revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of
values.
The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution against both
society and intellectuality. It was a whole new social phenomenon no
intellectual had predicted and no intellectuals were able to explain. It was
a revolution by children of well-to-do, college-educated, 'modern' people of
the world who suddenly turned upon their parents and their schools and their
society with a hatred no one could have believed existed."
In the passage below he does condemn the Hippie but not at all in the way
that Platt does:
"Phaedrus thought that this Hippie revolution could have been almost as much
an advance over the intellectual twenties as the twenties had been over the
social 1890s, but his analysis showed that this 'Dynamic' sixties revolution
made a disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got started.
The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two
directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality. The
revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are antisocial, and
since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the same. That
was the mistake."
Case
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