From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Tue May 24 2005 - 04:36:26 BST
Sam and all:
I'm just taking up a few points here...
dmb said to Sam:
you have interpreted things so that intellect is the enemy of the Good. That
is just not at all what Pirsig is saying. Intellect is a species of the
Good. ...You've confused Pirsig with Spock the pointy-eared Vulcan.
Sam replied:
If I have, then most of my concerns are eased. But I DO think that the
Phaedrus of LILA has pointy ears, it's true.
Likewise, Sam had said earlier in the same post:
...I find the Phaedrus of Lila quite unsympathetic, having massively
identified with the Narrator/Phaedrus of ZMM, that I have been driven to
explore these questions.
And here's a third iteration of the SAMe:
...Phaedrus is basically one dimensional, and intentionally created as such
by Pirsig in order to heighten the contrasts between the levels.
dmb says:
Not only to highlight the differences, but also to depict the problems with
intellect. As I see it, Phaedrus isn't one dimensional so much as alienated.
He feels strange and beside himself during sex. Rigel thinks he's immoral
and subversive. He's exhibiting the ailments of the kind of intellect of the
20th century. Of course, in the end, looking out over Manhattan from his
hotel room, he realizes that he's a part of the giant too. He realizes he
can stop running from it. And he realizes that picking up bar ladies is a
part of life too. He learns to embrace it all. Notice how all three of them
come together again as the book closes. A different kind of integration
occurs at the end of ZAMM, after he finally lets his son in on the other
half, as if Chris needs the ghost of Phaedrus to be part of his dad. Its
like the son knows there's something wrong and phony about the suppression
of these other figure. But beyond this kind of analysis, I think the
spockish version of intellect can't rightly belong in the MOQ. Pirsig's long
and sustained attack on SOM attack that very problem too. That amoral
scientific objectivity is embodied in Spock's cold logic. Spock is Pirsig's
enemy. (I prefer Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard.) He's trying to rescue
the intellect from that kind of image. The mad scientist and the nutty
professor and the nerd who can't dance are just a few of the many negative
dipictions. Some are comical and some are frightening. Pirsig, I think, does
a pretty good job of handling the very problem you are complaining about. I
think his intellect already is what you want it to be. Mostly.
Sam said to dmb:
That suggests to me that you are sympathetic to the idea that the
'individual' has a place in the MoQ system even if it doesnt' have any
ontological finality (ie it is a static pattern that dissolves into
Quality). Fair?
dmb says:
From a dynamic point of view, a mystical point of view, reality is a "circle
whose circumferance is nowhere and whose center is everywhere." I guess that
means each one of us is at the center of eternity. And then even from a
conventional, static point of view, we have to accept the concept of
individual responsibility and autonomy if we are to exist in the present
cultural context without going mad. But the idea of the individual as
ontologically primary is rejected. Ayn Rand said, for example, that there is
no such thing as society. There are only individuals, she said. This notion
of individuality won't work in the MOQ, or to a lover of Wittgenstien for
that matter, insofar as individuals are seen as the product of a complex
evolutionary history, about which we know very little. To put it in simple
MOQ terms, Descartes can think because French culture exist first. But then
on the other hand we could say that every part of the MOQ is about the
contents of our experience, the varieties of human experience. Oh, I'd say
there's more than just a place for the individual in the MOQ, I just think
we can to be very careful about what "individual" means. Its actually a
highly political word, with loads of baggage and various meanings even
within Western culture. But yes, Man is the measure of all things.
dmb quoted Pirsig:
> "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
Sam replied:
I think this is a fair point, but I'm not convinced that the rhetoricians
weren't operating at the intellectual level. Think of Kingsley and
Empedocles. The point that I thought ZMM was making - and which I very much
agree with - is that the transition from one form of society to another (ie
the flowering of Greek civilisation) comes before Socrates was on the scene,
and that Socrates takes the wrong turn once that system has got up and
running. What I think Pirsig argues for in Lila is that Socrates _doesn't_
make the wrong turn. And this is justified by the development of the
intellectual level, which is _precisely_ dialectical in nature, or so it
seems to me (the manipulation of symbols etc).
dmb says:
Well, we draw the line at Socrates for reasons of historical convenience,
but its not like it happened all at once or because of any one person. He
has come to represent the shift because he uses philosophy to question the
gods, to question social level values. Now as I see it, we are taken back to
that period for two different reasons in those two different books. (And
this goes along with what I said last time about Socrates being both a hero
and a villian.) In ZAMM he is digging through history to find out how we
lost Quality and ended up with a metaphysics of substance. Plato's mistake
is seen as crucial. Turning the unknowable and ever changing reality into a
fixed and rigid idea was the begining of the end for DQ in the West.
Kingsley only goes into detail about that death and makes the same case,
that the mystery was turned into and mistaken for an intellectual form, a
logical idea, and thereby destroyed. In LILA the task is different. There he
is sorting out static reality and the levels. The same era teaches a lesson
there too. This is not a contradiction or a shift in roles for Socrates, its
just that Pirsig has drawn more than one lesson from that crucial period.
Sam said:
I like that. I think it ties in with Mark Maxwell's 'sweet spot' imagery as
well. But this commits you to a particular understanding of where DQ fits,
which I'll come back to below.
dmb says:
If our understanding of DQ gets too particular then its not DQ, its sq. I
think that's the mistake Plato made. But I'm curious to know what you were
getting at before you "knackered" out. This cosmic harmony thing commits me
to fitting DQ where? As I understand it, we make static patterns out of a
reality that is DQ. We spin tiny webs of understanding out of an infinite
eternity. So suggesting that it "fits" somewhere stikes me as odd. Its more
like everything fits inside DQ. Or so I imagine it.
And yea, maybe I ought to give that 'sweet spot' imagery another look.
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