Hi Marsha,
Marsha said:
Were Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato or Aristotle's philosophy theistic?
Matt said:
I take this to be a good example of a "mu" question, at least one that doesn't
have a clear cut answer because of intellectual evolution.
We all remember that Pirsig, following Aristotle, said that "first philosophy"
is called "metaphysics." We should bear in mind that Aristotle's redactor is
the one that named that collection of manuscripts "Metaphysics." What did
Aristotle actually call "first philosophy" in the Metaphysics?
Theology.
Marsha said:
I thought that was teleology.
Matt:
I'm not sure Aristotle ever used a word or phrase translatable as teleology,
but certainly what came to be identified as that position had its origins in
Aristotle's account of causes, four of them to be exact--material, formal,
efficient, and final. It was the last, the final cause, that Galilean science
eliminated in its formulation of causation and created the antithesis between
teleology and mechanism. (Pirsig, for his part, doesn't wish to eliminate
mechanism, but simply the antithesis between the two--we can have purpose in a
cause-and-effect world of rocks.)
Aside from the academic trivia, Marsha, I did want to answer your original,
brief question about knowledge and theism. There has clearly been an
extraordinary outpouring on the topic, but I don't like most of them--they are
too fast and dirty. Particularly Pirsig's quick identification of the MoQ as
anti-theistic. If the MoQ is to retain it's identity as a system and not
simply one dude's philosophical beliefs (which almost everyone here wants to
distinguish, though at almost all points I do not), then the MoQ most certainly
cannot simply _be_ anti-theistic. It is too general for that.
The starting point has to be answering something like your starting question,
"What is the relationship between theism and knowledge and how is it
determined?" That is a good beginning question. And I think the answer has to
be something along the lines of--
1) Theism is a collection of intellectual static patterns.
2) Knowledge is a general kind of subset of collections of intellectual static
patterns that displays a high degree of internal valuableness, so much that
degradation of that value is reason to think one is exclude from that
collection. (In colloquial terms, "No, you are _wrong_" or "No, that's
_false_." Such rebuttals to degradation are exclamations that you have
evacuated the static area of typical valuing. Of course, brujos are told that,
and they are also the ones that--by challenging the typical--help the areas,
these collections of static patterns, evolve.)
3) Theistic knowledge is a particular subset of intellectual pattern within the
larger collection of intellectual static patterns called "theism." This means
that "Christ has risen" is both a statement of fact within that collection
_and_, by virtue of that fact (that the statement is taken to be a fact), an
announcement of participation in that particular collection of static patterns.
This also means the denial of the statement is an announcement that one is
_not_ participating in that collection (one does not _value_ those static
patterns of value).
This, I think, is broadly all the MoQ can say as a system. Anything else, like
how the MoQ tells us reality is evolving towards X and therefore we shouldn't
do Y anymore (and here we can substitute for X "Reason" and Y "God" and pretty
much get the standard MoQ-inspired answers I've been seeing from others and
Pirsig, which also look suspiciously like the standard 18th century
Enlightenment answers), is just more Marx-like tea-leaves reading, trying to
find the pattern of history and then arguing, in a non sequitor, from "this is
how things have been" to "this is how things should be"--which is exactly what
the brujo story suggests we shouldn't do.
Orienting ourselves to theism and knowledge as (1)-(3) does above also suggests
to us the better question we should ask, both others and ourselves--what is it
that these collections of static patterns are valuing and why should, or
shouldn't we, value them, too? And since these are _collections_ it shouldn't
surprise us if individuals vary between them on what parts of the larger
collection they share with each other and if different pieces of the
collections can be evaluated separately and with different results. (I mean,
fer Criss sake, religious people have never agreed with each other on what they
should exactly believe, so why do us non-believers keep painting them with one
brush?)
The result of this kind of inquiry would then fall along the lines of 1)
finding pieces that are bad and should be extirpated from everyone ("God told
me to invade that country, so I must do it"), 2) finding pieces that fulfill a
need that others fulfill otherwise ("you read the Bible on Sundays, I read
Shakespeare, and that chick watches the sunrise--all of us getting our
spiritual nourishment where we most receive it"), and 3) finding pieces that
fulfill a need we don't really have anymore, but are otherwise harmless even if
we think it is archaic ("I will go to Heaven when I die"; "I can't eat pork, it
ain't kosher").
None of the above answers any questions about what to think about theism, God,
or religion. The MoQ doesn't answer questions, it gives us better questions.
This would, I would think, be the perfect place in which a re-orientation is
desired and I think the above is the kind of re-orientation engendered by the
MoQ.
So, all in all, if you, Marsha, have a religion-of-one that says that beauty is
divine, and you seek no converts and receive no help from others in
articulating your religion save the few odd books you might happen to come
across or what-have-you, than I think that is great, and beautiful, and as
religious as any other religion, even if only in its very Emersonian fashion
(which I take to be even more beautiful for it). We don't need a church to
have a religion; we don't need a sense of the divine that transcends
spatiotemporal boundaries; we don't need to think that science is bad. All we
need is enough imagination and desire to deploy a certain, if kinda' creaky,
vocabulary of articulation.
Matt
p.s. Yes, this was for everyone who thinks I couldn't speak MoQese if I wanted
to. I don't have any proof-texts for the things I've said, but I do think
they're fairly reasonable extrapolations of the vocabulary Pirsig developed.
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