From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 18:19:58 GMT
Chris,
Chris said:
pssst, i will let you in on a secret - there are no levels just as there are no Kantian categories. Do you know why? Because they are static, do you know what happens to static 'entities' in the struggle for life, or in the struggle for truth? They do not survive. Panta rei. What does survive? That which is mobile, insecure, refutable, aposteriori, dynamic. How do we judge apriori, we cannot. ho to discern degeneracy or DQ, I'm sorry my philosophic friends, we can do nothing more but wait and see. A priori levels are platonic forms, Pirsig indeed is a platonist, a neoplatonist actually. Does the name Plotinus ring a bell? So much in a few sentences and so much more to tell. Ok one secret for the Skutvikians among you: there is no subject-object thinking, how could there be such thinking when there is no subject?
Matt:
I think the sentiment of this paragraph is spot on. As long as we read Pirsig as having _discovered_ a priori, Kantian categories then Pirsig becomes a Platonist, the same kind of Platonist he deplores in ZMM. BUT, I think saying "there are no levels" and "there is no subject-object thinking" is slightly misleading. After we hand in our finding metaphors for making metaphors, we can reconfigure some of the old distinctions, mainly because language wouldn't be a useful tool if it didn't make distinctions. What we would stop doing is reading these distinctions into the stars. We would stop suggesting that we found them in the heavens, and instead follow Pirsig in suggesting that we are drawing them in the sand, here on Earth.
In particular, there is subject-object thinking as long as it remains useful to differentiate yourself from others. When we knock SOM off its pedestal and it changes into SOT, its the same de-reification that post-Derrideans make of the fall of "logocentrism" into "the play of binary oppositions." There's nothing dangerous about binary oppositions, as long as you've learned the lesson of not hypostatizing them.
Matt
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