Hi All, The red thread all the way through ZMM and Lila, as far as I can follow it, is that SOM ( i.e the dialectically inspired S/O thinking) has a defect in it. Phaedrus arrives at this conclusion inductively...he sees it all around him. The world created' through this S/O inspired thinking and its practical consequences/ actions (technology) has this' 'ugliness'' about it. Human beings do not recognise themselves in it. ( much as Marx's alienation). Actually it isn't even S/O thinking and living (syruped over with romantic false-ness,stylised with a veneer that is downright depressing). Insanity, Pirsig calls it. He arrives at the conclusion that, what is missing is Quality and the way he found (retrieved) it was going back (historically) to ancient Greece, the mythos before Aristotle and Plato. He went back to the Sophists, the time when the 'intellectual level' had not yet 'arisen' out of the social level.At this time they were teaching Virtue...Quality 'And in Aristotle (demoting Virtue and stating Truth) and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity(i.e Truth) as reality'(ZMM p346) This was the inspiration , the beginning of the intellectual level that 'transcended' society and 'inspired' the development and continuation (whenever and wherever it suited) of social patterns of value. 'And when traditional rationality ( i.e. the dialectical mode) divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality (ZMM p 275-6). Pirsig remains a Sophist...and the Sophist mode of rationality is rhetorically inspired. And his reasoning in this sense is very simple: when dealing with 'objects' there is the rigorous course of arriving at 'truth' of statements about relations between them through ( dialectically inspired) logic. But, as he clearly states in Lila, subjects, humans, do not follow cause and effect rules, they do not 'hold still' and therefore you need to apply a different 'rationality', not arriving at 'truth' no! arriving at good. Truth has never meant much to human beings I am afraid. Good has!! And this is arrived at rhetorically. That is that part of 'rationality' suppressed (remaining at the social level) and excluded from 'true-ly', intellectual thinking..i.e.excluded from 'intellect'. Now, I think this 'split' is artificial and has never, ever since its inception behaved in the way it was meant ( i.e the strict Aristotelian way). It has always been regarded as a bone of contention (to say the least). One cannot treat human beings in the same way as 'objects' are perceived to be treating themselves!!! Because here is the huge, big snag: recent scientific discoveries (actually dating back to the late 19th Century) suggest that the very foundation upon which science has been built ( i.e. employing those means of arriving at a 'truth' full representation of reality) is wrong. It is based on assumptions that are contradicted (made foolish!) at the sub-atomic level. Pirsig introduces a 'human' element'/ interpretation; subatomic 'particles' behave in the way they do because they 'prefer' to do so and from this interpretation an entire metaphysics is built ( deductively i.e after he has posited the Quality as One). His arrival at Quality through the inductive process has developed into the deployment of this process (of course together and subsuming his own analogues),and arriving, deductively,at a re-interpretation of all that we have created within us and without us i.e: at a 'radically different way of understanding' (Pirsig, An Introduction to ... A McWatts Critical thesis). All is connected. It is One. If this not, ipso facto,means a radically different way of thinking... of intellectualisig, I do no know what you would call it.
It is my observation then that the combination of the dialectic and rhetoric (the 2 supreme modes of thinking? having led to other, supreme quality insights, and re-definitions[encapsulated within the frame of mind called MoQ) are employed by Pirsig (together with his own analogues), to arrive at Quality and that this is what the intellectual level should be and be a reflection of.( can this be called an evolutionary step? I do not think so, because the MoQ, in this way has been given the intellectual capacity to reflect on itself (instantaneously) and thereby go through a 'growing up' process..a maturing process. Intellect correcting intellect (with the aid of its parent level:society ( This is not detracting anything from the Intellectual level...it just keeps it from going berserk! because it is still in nappies!!!). The intellectual level can have such a wonderfull relationship with the rest...if only it realised it comes from it! Artists realise this! For what it is worth Andre 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/
