Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Mon, 16 Feb 1998 18:48:18 +0100
Hi Donny, Peter and squad
Donny wrote
> > Diana suggested (and reasonably so, for this is what most achademic
> > philosophers do) that you understand X (MoQ, for instance) if you can see
> > his or its position in relation to what goes before in the history of
> > philosophy and maybe see the impact X had on what followed. That's not
Peter
> Hmm... isn't it possible to understand a particular philosophy by
> investigating and studying its tenets, without necessarily investigating
> the development leading up to it? Philosophies are usually entirely
> self-contained worldviews that don't necessarily need history to justify
> their statements, right?
Right. But still, it can be interesting. Also, if the MoQ is to be
accepted by academics somebody is going to have to sit down and write a
couple of dozen papers comparing Pirsig with other philosophers. In the
MoQ the test of the true is the good, in academia the test of the true
is the prestige of the journal it's published in.
Anyway here's my unacademic take on a few guys who had ideas before
Pirsig.
First of all we have Descartes who believed that reality consisted of
two completely separate things -- mind which is intangible and matter
which is tangible. To him man was a dual creature that both thinks and
takes up room in space. The other thing about Descartes is that he was a
rationalist. He thought that logic could prove philosophical truths in
the same way that it proves mathematical theorems.
Following on the heels of Descartes was Spinoza who was also a
rationalist. He didn't agree with Descartes about dualism though. He
thought that everything that exists was made of the same substance.
After the rationalists came the empiricists, notably Hume and Berkeley.
Their contribution to the debate was to disagree with the whole idea of
rationalism. They said that you couldn't draw conclusions based on
reason. The only thing we can be sure about is what we perceive. They
pointed out that perceiving hardness and weight is not the same thing as
perceiving matter -- after all you can perceive hardness and weight in a
dream.
And then we come to Kant who drew together the rationalists and the
empiricists. He agreed with Descartes that mind was separate from body,
and he agreed that reason was the key to understanding. But he also
agreed with the empiricists that you couldn't use reason to understand
the world. The way he reconciled the two was to say that reason was
intrinsic to mind. In other words, as humans, reason is the only way we
can understand the world. The world may not conform to reason but it
doesn't matter because reason is all that we can perceive.
Translated into MoQ-speak, what Kant was saying was that the mind is
intellectual value and that the world is more than intellectual value.
This, of course, is precisely what Pirsig says.
The difference between Kant and Pirsig is that Kant claimed humans
could never understand more than intellectual value, so we would never
understand the world, and there was no point trying to answer the big
questions about it. Pirsig however claims that humans _can_ understand
something more than intellectual value - namely Dynamic Quality - thus
we can understand the world completely and it is worthwhile trying to
answer the big questions.
After Kant came the romantics, who were very, well, romantic. They were
monists, not dualists, and they thought we were all part of one big
World Spirit. They were dead into expressing this world spirit through
art and poetry. They were idealists and not very rational. It's easy to
see that this is the "romantic" side in Pirsig's romantic-classic split.
And after the romantics came Hegel. I don't know that much about him but
it seems to me that where Pirsig and Hegel meet is in the idea that
society shapes the individual and not vice versa.
Then we have the existentialists who would have nodded vigorously in
agreement with the anthem of the MoQ - "And what is good Phaedrus...."
Their big idea was that the idea of a single Truth is irrelevant and the
only thing that matters is what's true to you personally, or what's true
for your existence.
Then Marx who noticed that if we alienate ourselves from our work we
alienate ourselves from our own being -- another idea that's straight
from ZMM.
Hmm this is getting long and I haven't done Freud or Darwin yet. I think
it's quite easy to see that these two knocked man of his pedestal (woman
was never allowed up there in the first place;-) and made him realize
that he was more like a cog in a machine than master of the universe.
When you lay it all out like that it's obvious that Pirsig's philosophy
ties in with all the great philosophers. It's not at all something that
came from nowhere. If you combine a (more serious) discussion of Western
philosophy with a discussion of Eastern philosophy you'd find the roots
of everything that's in the MoQ.
Usual apologies apply
Diana
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