From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 08:40:17 BST
Hi all,
A quick response to Mark who asked "Where, in LILA, do you see Socrates
re-enthroned, where does Pirsig claim that "truth stands independently of
social opinion?" . These two quotes from Lila are the source:
"When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all
intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a
hurricane of social forces. That hurricane is the history of the twentieth
century. There had been other comparable times, Phaedrus supposed. The day
the first protozoans decided to get together to form a metazoan society. Or
the day the first freak fish, or whatever-it-was, decided to leave the
water. Or, within historical time, the day Socrates died to establish the
independence of intellectual patterns from their social origins. Or the day
Descartes decided to start with himself as an ultimate source of reality.
These were days of evolutionary transformation. And like most days of
transformation, no one at the time had any idea of what was being
transformed." (beginning of chapter 22)
"What the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that it is only social
values and morals, particularly church values and morals, that science is
unconcerned with. There are important historic reasons for this: The
doctrine of scientific disconnection from social morals goes all the way
back to the ancient Greek belief that thought is independent of society,
that it stands alone, born without parents. Ancient Greeks such as Socrates
and Pythagoras paved the way for the fundamental principle behind science:
that truth stands independently of social opinion. It is to be determined by
direct observation and experiment, not by hearsay. Religious authority
always has attacked this principle as heresy. For its early believers, the
idea of a science independent of society was a very dangerous notion to
hold. People died for it. The defenders who fought to protect science from
church control argued that science is not concerned with morals.
Intellectuals would leave morals for the church to decide. But what the
larger intellectual structure of the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is
that this political battle of science to free itself from domination by
social moral codes was in fact a moral battle! It was the battle of a
higher, intellectual level of evolution to keep itself from being devoured
by a lower, social level of evolution." (chapter 24, about a page in).
Regards
Sam
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