Andre asked Platt: Can you explain to me how Pirsig, or for that matter the MoQ supports the 'American free market culture' when it is grounded in: 1) the subjective egocentric religious doctrine of Protestantism and the individualistic political doctrine, grounded in Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke's conception of a person as a mental substance, and 2) the laissez-faire economic theory formulated by Adam Smith and Jevons, which rests in turn on Locke,Hume and Bentham? ...I always thought that the MoQ rejected theism and subject/object analysis and that it rejected the existence of a value-free scientific/atomistic/amoral rationality upon which the philosophies of point 2 in the above are grounded.
dmb says: As I see it, Platt can hold onto his version of the MOQ only by ignoring certain quotes and ideas. And, Andre, you've asked about one of those forbidden ideas. You've made a perfectly legitimate observation here but it won't do any good because taking a serious and honest look at it would be way too expensive for Platt. It would cost him everything, ideologically speaking. He'd have to re-arrange countless ideas, abandon a pile of others and generally reorient his whole attitude. I'll bet you a million Euros that it's not going to happen anytime soon. I guess that sort of interpretation is forgivable (unless you hang around here and have been corrected 1000 times) because people do tend to see what they want to see. In a recent study, conservatives saw Steven Colbert as a conservative. That's hilariously wrong. Anyway, on top of that natural tendency, the narrator in Zen and the Art sees things differently. He and Phaedrus often disagree with each other. It's probably important to realize that Pirsig describes him as an UNRELIABLE narrator. The story is told from his perspective, mostly, but he's the character who said whatever it took to get out of the hospital. He's the bullshitter, the charmer, the people-pleaser. And it's his words and ideas that the conservative will find most appealing and he or she will take that for the substance of the MOQ. In some cases this means ignoring what Phaedrus says. Pirsig says he got the idea from Henry James' novel "The Turn of the Screw", where the narrator is psychotic and paranoid but the reader doesn't necessarily see that fact. It's a neat trick, especially since Phaedrus is supposedly the one who went insane. Anyway, it's easy to notice the shift in perspective in the following passage AND it speaks to the topic as well... We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource...individual worth. There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to. Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then. dmb continues: Notice how the narrator's speech is full of cliches and platitudes while Phaedrus is philosophical and far more interesting? It's hard to miss, unless one wants to miss it that is. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® goes with you. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Mobile?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Mobile1_052009 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/
