Krimel said: I honestly have no idea what SOM is supposed to mean anymore. Pirsig's version is largely an argument against positions that no one actually holds. And his rants against science are mostly about his own idealized view of it.
Matt: I feel your pain. I think it gets bandied about in so many different kinds of ways that it begins to lose focus. It is not always so bad, but it is tough if your case hinges on it. [snip] You have to generalize about classes of philosophers to cast your net wider than a single, other person. We _are_ all unique snowflakes, and it is easy to rebut a generalization with recourse to the "no one holds every single one of the views you've just attributed to a whole class of people," but that's not why we use the generalizations, so the rebuttal falls a little flat on the critical level (though sometimes people are just making shit up). [Krimel] True enough. At least with Pirsig there is a standard that we can point toward. I think my real frustration stems from the fact that it gets bandied about here in all sorts of ways that don't make much sense. From it having something to do with sentence structure to being a catch all from whatever someone doesn't like, to being something akin to "common sense" that we need to just get over. >From my own "complex Descartes" view, any move past solipsism requires some kind of leap of faith. I think this is true however we cast the nature of our own experience and the nature of "other minds"; as being derived from an external world, as composed of ideas, as illusions spun by clever demons. [Matt] Pirsig's ZMM, I think, succeeds at this at a level Lila never quite made it to, in particular when he talks about science. You say Pirsig is reacting against his own idealized version of what science is and is supposed to do--that is absolutely the case, but it is not _his_, it _was_ his, and his interest in exploiting his own autobiographical history is because this idealized version is _often_ what regular people kind of think about science (only "kind of," because it is not as if regular joes at the bar think about "what science is" a lot, but they do react to science a lot). [Krimel] ZMM surely works better for me than Lila. I get a very pro-science vibe from ZMM. There his indictment seems to be against romantics unable to get over themselves and see the "art" of technology. In Lila he paints science as possessed by the SOM demon. But I also notice in perusing books stores that I am much more likely to find copies of the ZMM than Lila in stock. [Matt] On a similar note, what's funny to me, now, about Pirsig's ZMM, is that it seems, on the one hand, so behind the times--who feels this way about science and technology? [Krimel] Well, look around. There's Dave and Gav whining about alienating metaphors. And it's not like they are the only ones here who express some dissatisfaction with the pace or tenor of the times. [Matt] I had no idea, when I first read ZMM on the eve of George W. Bush's ascension, that the exact same culture war, between science and religion, was going to bubble to the surface. Perhaps I'm late to the party, but I guess I never thought it was that obvious. [Krimel] I wrote a review of ZMM for a college town magazine shortly after it was published and I have seen those culture wars raging from hot to cold the whole time. Being late to the party seems like a bit of a blessing to me. It reminds of Bob Segar's line, "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
