Doug Renselle (renselle@on-net.net)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 18:15:59 +0100
Hi Donny and TLS!
See comments below -
Donald T Palmgren wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Mar 1998, Doug Renselle wrote:
>
> > I am not so much avenging Pirsig as I am trying to show that SOMites
> did
> > the same thing to Pirsig by erasing his mind with electro-shock as
> the
> > (SOMitic) Church did to Galileo and others when their intellectual
> > Static Patterns of Value evolved and began to gain power.
>
> Let's be careful about who does what to whom. It was the
> psychologist who "zaped" pheadrus. Today, Doc. Shrink'em is the most
> poewerful force or morality -- or at least moral enforcement. (What a
> gastly claim!) A kin to the Popes of Galilao's hayday. There are
> certain
> social/moral conventions that one must adher to in order to be granted
> person-hood (To paraphrase Erving Goffman, people are things we talk
> to,
> objects [be it the Greenland icecap or a mental patient] are things we
> talk about.) Hegel calls these moral norms the "ethical substance"
> (and
> I'll come back to that later because the point is that it is both
> ethical
> and substantial -- that is, the solid world of stuff is the same as
> the
> social world of normalization and person-hood... Hegel does say, the
> world
> [social and natural alike] is constructed of ethics/morals/values.)
> But as
> for Doc Shrink'em, consider: When Billy Bomber blows up a building and
> kills inocent people, 70-100 years ago we called in the priest to
> explain:
> Why did God allow this to happen? Now we call in the shrinks to tell
> us,
> What made Billy do it?
> The point for now is, P didn't get zaped for taking issue w/
> SOM, he got zaped because he stoped responding to the outside world,
> sat
> in a room and pissed on himself. His sin wasn't against SOM (or any
> other
> "intellectual theory") but against society -- social value. (There are
> people w/ "goofyer" metaphysical notions that P around this
> universities
> department and I bet Antony could name one or two where he is as well,
> but
> these people will only not be taken seriously -- they still get to be
> people.)
>
Donny,
I want to use a couple of Pirsig quotes here in response to your words:
"Years later, after he was certified as 'sane,' he read 'objective'
medical descriptions of what he had experienced, and he was shocked at
how slanderous they were. They were like descriptions of a religious
sect written by a different, hostile religious sect. The psychiatric
treatment was not a search for truth but the promulgation of a dogma.
Psychiatrists seemed to fear the taint of insanity much as inquisitors
once feared succumbing to the devil. Psychiatrists were not allowed to
practice psychiatry if they were insane. It was required that they
literally did not know what they were talking about." p. 328 of 410 in
the 'Lila' Bantam hardbound edition.
Focus especially on the last sentence in the quote!
I think Pirsig is showing us unambiguously that those powerful "Doc
Shrink 'ems" are intrinsically incompetent, as was any professor at
Bozeman at the time Phaedrus was there who felt s-he 'objectively'
taught 'quality.'
Doug Renselle.
> > In legacy SOM, we of TLS know, Aristotelian
> > substance/body/matter/property (the objective) reigns over the
> > insubstantial/mind/immaterial/value (the subjective). We hear the
> > SOMites preach, "Be objective. Your subjectivity is of low
> utility."
>
> (Actually Phedrus didn't have a good understanding of
> Aristotle --
> and frankly neither did the goof-ball "Aristotle expert" teaching the
> course in ZMM -- so the "Aristotialian" label is a tad out of wack.)
> I still object to this "object" = "objective" "subject" > "subjective" move. Somebody said that they are like two different
> shades
> of green, but still essentually the same thing... no, no, no. Let's
> look
> at the words how they are really used:
> "Be objective. Your subjectivity is of low utility." Is that
> suposed to the "SOMite" (hoo-boy) moral imperative or something. Now,
> that
> is a straw man.
Donny,
Yeah, unfortunately that's exactly what many of us have to deal with in
today's work-a-day world. I just spent three dreadful years as a
director of a large, global corporation where those ubiquitous words
made my ears ring. FYE, that same corporation worships at the font of
the one of the most SOM Ivy League Universities.
It is ingrained, Donny, regardless whether you see it as a "strawman."
It's no sham! It is pure, Aristotelian, substance legacy with all of
its objective isolability and separability. It's a "Hold still while I
measure your objective properties." legacy.
Doug Renselle.
> I work w/in an art department, I'm now pursuing a BFA in fine
> art.
> When you "read" a good piece it's not unlike "reading" cloudshapes.
> Everyone has there own subjective little angle. But that's not
> attacked!
> That's part of what art is. Art has no (or little) problem w/
> subjectivity. (Of interpritation -- of quality? When it comes time to
> hand
> out grades...?)
> Now return w/ me to Lab-rat and Gloria in the lab. In the lab
> there is a moral imperative to be objective -- well, of course! That's
> what science is. But the point is that objectivity and subjectivity
> arn't
> "things" on-to-themselves; they're *roles* -- a posture one assumes,
> takes
> up and drops at appropriate moments. ("Damn it Lab-rat, be
> objective!")
> (The idea [or ideal?] of Sherlock Holmes being the objective observer
> every waking hour is silly stuff.)
Donny,
OK, let's play the classical SOM science role of objectivity. What
happens when we do that? In general, we get the wrong answers!
Why? Because classical SOM science assumes, objectively, that an object
may be isolated from its environment. Why does it assume that? Because
of the SOM presumption (which Hugo so elegantly showed us) that a schism
exists twixt Aristotelian S and O. That schism is a major piece of the
SOM legacy.
MoQ shows us that Static Patterns of Value (SPoVs) are co-within Dynamic
Quality. SPoVs are inseparable from: DQ and other SPoVs in DQ.
SOMites denigrate this MoQ axiom.
So the SOM presumption that an observer may objectively observe an
object in isolation, in general, is wrong. The SOM mythos is wrong on
one of its most closely held assertions.
The new science, quantum science, affirms necessity for a more MoQ-like
mythos as foundation philosophy. It decries the inadequacies of SOM
science as a general tool of science.
(Note: SOM science works well but only approximately in the
super-atomic realm. It does not work in the sub-atomic realm. Further,
since the Inorganic SPoVs of MoQ were invented by Quantum SPoVs at the
[unmentionable] level below (Pirsig's chaos), here is another piece of
evidence that SOM deserves its proper diminished role: subsumed within
the MoQ.)
Doug Renselle.
> (And by the way, this thought is Aristotialian! When we study
> Aristotle we look back through this vast distorting prism of 2000
> years of
> Christain reiterpritation, and then end in our present point of view
> of
> Psychology -- we unconsciously (?) psychologize everything -- we place
> it
> inside the individual mind, on the scale of the individual. The
> Greeks
> didn't think that way. We forget that Aristotle's *Nichomacheian
> Ethics*
> is part 1 of a two part work on Politics. For Aristotle the moral unit
> isn't the individual, it's the polis -- the city-state. The "subject"
> here
> is most certainly not an internal psyche; it's a society. Aristotle
> has
> been badly abused by chemistry teachers and goons like the Dept. head
> in
> ZMM who read his books w/o looking at the context, and w/o asking,
> "Did a
> book mean the same thing in Aristotle's Greece as it does today and
> here?"
> [And I don't mean the meaning of a text w/in a book; I mean the medium
> itself -- did writting a book mean the same thing?] It's not Aristotle
> Phedrus reacts against; it's that bone-head interpreter. [And, by the
> way, Aristotle was not an advocate of objective, emperical,
> "scientific"
> observation (obviously). That role didn't even exist at the time.] And
> as
> far as reacting against that bone-head interpritor: THAT is the Church
> of
> Reason, not SOM. I'm writting a paper about this, as I've said, but
> the
> argument in brief is: P never escaped the Church. He just set up a new
> denomination. What the church is, is this need to pick an -ism, make
> it a
> war cry -- select an enemy [the SOMites] and dig in to the trenches.
> I've
> said before, I find that mantality unphilosophical and undignified.
> It's
> the result of trying to force-fit philosophy into an achademic
> setting.
> More later.)
>
> Now thats where one might find "subjective" and "objective."
> What about this idea of the (knowing)subject and (known)object.
> In ZMM P is clear that experience is the result of the bumping
> together of subject and odject. Let's walk through 3 "trancendental"
> ontologies:
> Lao tzu / Daoism:
> Out of the Way come forth pairs of opposits. Our experience in
> the
> field of time is always in terms of pairs of opposits (past-present,
> up-down, good-bad, male-female...), but the Way has no contrast.
>
> Kant:
> Out of the Moral self comes forth (knowing) subjects and
> (known)objects. These create (by bumping together) the manifold
> (manyness)
> of experience -- IE all experience is something knowing something --
> that's what it means. The Moral self is "outside" (a metaphore) the
> manifold. We never experience it. We have faith in it, for it is
> reasonable to do so (it cures the platipi that were bugging philosophy
> in
> Kant's day [Hume and Decartes]).
>
> Pirsig:
> (ZMM)
> Out of Quality come forth S and O (Aproximatly meaning
> Mind-Body)
> and experience is the result of a S and an O encontering one-another.
> But
> Quality is not *in* exp. for it, after all, gives rise *to* exp.
> (LILA)
> P sheds his Eastern flavor and says:
> What really exists is *only* Quality. It has two states (these
> are my own words): the potential and the realized (the in-itself and
> the
> for-itself in Hegelian lingo). As his diagram in the Einstein-Magreet
> artical shows (on the LS web page) he identifies inorganic, and
> organic
> SPoV as "objects" and social and intellectual SPoV as "subjects,"
> saying
> that these insubstantial things are a higher form of value evolution
> than
> the spacialy-extended, solid "stuff."
> (Frankly I liked ZMM better.)
>
> Does that shed light on anything or just muddle the already
> murky
> water?
Donny,
Thanks for the excellent comparison of the three ontologies above. I
found comfort in your interpretations of each. Neat!
One more quote from Pirsig, just for you Donny:
"As an author, Phaedrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly
because he didn't like it, and partly to avoid putting a
philosophological cart before the philosophical horse.
Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually
forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the
great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what
you want to say. The catch [Platt?] here is that by the time you've
read what all the great philosophers of history have said you'll be at
least two hundred years old. A second catch [again, Platt?] is that
these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them
innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what
they missed.
"Phaedrus, in contrast, sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by
the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various
philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe and then
to see what great philosophers agree with you. There will always be a
few somewhere. These will be much more interesting to read since you
can cheer what they say and boo their enemies, and when you see how
their enemies attack them you can kibitz a little and take a real
interest in whether they were right or wrong.
"With this technique you can approach someone like William James in a
much different way than an ordinary philosophologist would.
"Since you've already done your creative thinking before you read James,
you don't just go along with him. You get all kinds of fresh new ideas
by contrasting what he's saying with what you already believe. You're
not limited by any dead-ends of his thought and can often see ways of
going around him. This was occurring in what Phaedrus had read so far.
He was getting a definite impression that James' philosophy was
incomplete and that the Metaphysics of Quality might actually improve on
it. A philosophologist would normally be indignant at the impertinence
of someone thinking he could improve on the great Harvard [SOM U.]
philosopher, but James himself, to judge from what Phaedrus had read so
far, would have been very enthusiastic about the effort. He was, after
all, a philosopher." pp. 323-4/410, in the 'Lila' Bantam hardbound
edition.
Mtty Donny,
Doug Renselle.
>
> TTFN (ta-ta for now)
> Donny
>
-- "Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable."By Henri Poincaré, in 'Science and Hypothesis,' p. xxiv, translated from French in 1905 by J. Larmor, published 1952 by Dover Publications.
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