From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Oct 31 2005 - 03:46:19 GMT
Mike,
I'm not sure about your suggestions' fidelity to whatever it is Bo has been
talking about, but so much the worse for fidelity. I attempted at some
length earlier this year to unearth what the consequences of his "SOL" were,
but it almost seems like Bo's way of forwarding his philosophy is to remain
vague and never remained pinned anywhere, so one could with a straight face
say, "This is Bo's opinion." (DMB recently said that Anthony's pretty much
said the last word about Bo's SOL and I can concur. Back when I first began
my long excursus into trying to understand Bo, I noticed that Paul, Anthony,
DMB and I were all in general agreement about what the weaknesses of SOL
were, and specifically Anthony and I were forwarding the same argument about
the fatal weakness--that SOL has a self-reference problem; it can't place
itself anywhere.)
But in relation to what you're suggesting about the inescapability of
subjectivity, unlike Ham and Descartes, I'm not sure what is so momentous
about that realization. Thinking of subjectivity as momentous strikes me as
something that drew Descartes into making the mistakes he did, which is what
created SOM in the first place. The only truth it seems to me we need to
take from the subject/object divide is that the first-person point of view
is the way we think. What we don't need to do is try and draw some
philosophical conclusions from it, try and build a philosophical system out
of the idea of cogito ergo sum. The subject/object divide _doesn't_ exist
as a metaphysical divide, if metaphysical divides are the kind of divides
that are there anyway, whether we think about them or notice them or not.
Pirsig's suggestion about Quality was that metaphysical divides in this
sense _don't_ exist. What do exist are certain efficacious ways of making
our way about the world. Descartes took one of those ways, the first-person
point of view, and tried to pin a bunch of other stuff on to it (the search
for essences, absolute certainty, belief in God, etc.). Pirsig thinks that
this has produced more problems then its worth. Pirsig is taking another
one of these ways, the evaluative interrelatedness of everything, and trying
to pin a bunch of things on to it (non-linguistic experience, pragmatic
truth, the nature of insanity, etc.). I think Pirsig's successful in some
of the pinning (less in others), but I think the point we should draw from
Pirsig's example is that these pinnings are ad hoc, according to our own
patterns of fancy, our own proclivities.
This is what I think Pirsig means by making philosophy deeply personal. We
tangle with the problems that permeate ourselves. But since we are an
instantiation of our culture, the way in which we handle these problems
sometimes have more than idiosyncratic appeal. Sometimes they may help
others. In other words, sure, "the subject/object divide is fundamental to
what we are," but so is the fact that we live in evaluative relation to
everything, that time moves forward, that language unlocks poetry, that we
are evolving animals, that we need to eat to live. All these things are
true and seem fundamental to who we are. It would probably be a good idea
to stop trying to pin any one of them down as _fundamental_ over and above
everything else. That's the point of Pirsig saying that the S/O distinction
is not fundamental to reality. Why not give gold metaphysical stars to all
of them, and then get on with figuring out which of our fundamental parts
are important to this or that particular problem, rather than getting one of
them to be a hook on which to hang everything else.
Matt
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