DMB, DMB said: Usually I hate the kind of criticism that knocks a piece for the things it didn't say or should have said but it really does seem wrong to leave this out of an essay about Pirsig and Plato. Matt: Well, aside from the self-consciousness I confided to Marsha, there's also the issue of the essay not exactly being _about_ Pirsig at all. There was some scholarly exposition of the spirit of Pirsig (like the bit about the Republic) and there was some scholarly exposition of what happened in Greece with the Sophists, Socrates, and Plato (like the bit about the Sophists as the first professional intellectuals), but both of these bits were used to other ends--I wasn't writing about Pirsig's philosophy (exactly), I wasn't writing about Plato's philosophy (exactly), I was writing about philosophy (if somewhat inexactly, as all such writings about that subject must be). Specifically, _Western_ philosophy, which is why it would have been even more weird and awkward to write about Eastern intellectual traditions in the middle of it, for their traditions would have required a story of their own (of their birth, etc.).
If I had been writing specifically about Pirsig, excavating _his_ thought and philosophy rather than a parable (a story about Philosophy that has a moral for us), it would have been more weird and neglectant to _not_ talk about his Eastern connections, as you and Marsha say. And, like I said to Marsha, I am self-conscious of my working of only certain avenues in Pirsig, and if I should ever have opportunity to write at length about Pirsig, an opportunity to write a comprehensive exposition and analysis of Pirsig, then I am in very much agreement that to not uncover the hidden resources behind his use of the Dao and Buddhism and Northrop would be negligently one-sided. Until then, though, I'm content to uncover pearls of only one sort, with the attendant understanding that I'm not _trying_ to be comprehensive. At best, I'm leaving notes on the way to a more comprehensive understanding of Pirsig (by tracking down one side of him). And, in another respect, I'm not always (particularly in this case) repeating Pirsig's own story (i.e., trying to understand his story better), but trying to cast sidelight on it by telling a different one. Bo said to Matt: More agreement, the Sophists were part and parcel of the budding intellectual level - of SOM - namely its subjectivists. "Man the measure" was their credo that opposed Socrates' and Plato's objectivism, that truth was independent of man. ...What you write here and in your blog may be correct, but it clutters MOQ's level picture which is that before these last 500 years BC - before the intellectual LEVEL - the social LEVEL ruled. DMB said: It's pretty clear that your assertion, that the Sophist's were the subjective half of SOM, is explicitly contradicted here [in the text quote from Pirsig]. The contest between Plato and the Sophists is not a contest between subjective and objective truth. It's not a contest between social patterns and intellectual patterns either, even though Pirsig invokes Homer's heroes in making a case for arete as Dharma too. It's a contest between dynamic and static quality. Matt: Realize, I'm quite sympathetic to checking Bo's, shall we say, heavy-handed appropriations of other people's material (Pirsig's, mine, whoever). However, I'd like to distinguish between three different levels of inquiry we might make into Pirsig in relationship to this point--1) what really happened in Greece, 2) the correct usage of Pirsig's terminology, and 3) the use Pirsig puts his terminology. For instance, with (1) we might inquire into the actual development of the concept of arete from Homer to Plato, and this would provide sidelight onto Pirsig's use of that data in making his points about arete, which would be (2)--because it doesn't matter whether Pirsig is scholastically right or wrong about arete for his _philosophy_, though it might tell us something about his philosophy to know if he is. In this case, I was doing a bit more of (1) than either (2) or (3), and Bo wants--as usual-- to do (2). In your check on (2), I think you might be more doing (3). For instance, while it is always a contest between Dynamic and static patterns (that's the root of culture change, of the movement of history, according to Pirsig's terminology), we do need to be able to tell a story about the creation of the levels. I think Bo might have been doing the latter, while you riposted with the former. On the other hand, I might be misunderstanding your point, and that you are expressing a disagreement on (2)--such that it _isn't_ always apropos to point to a conflict as Dynamic v. static, that sometimes the conflicts are static v. static, and sometimes specifically DQ in toto v. static patterns in toto. Either way, let me say this in relation to Pirsig's assertion that the intellectual level was being created in Greece, and--on this supposition--there were only three operative levels previously. I think Bo's continued assertion that SOM is the intellectual level is wrong on a historical and conceptual level. He concedes that it is wrong on the textual level, so there's very little point in emphasizing that, but on the side of history, I don't think anything like the modern subjective/objective distinction existed in Greek thought (though its original impetus is clearly traceable to there) and to characterize as Bo does is too excessively misleading, to the point of being counterproductive. On the conceptual side, he's just hypostatizing the Cartesian malformation of Platonism. Does it make sense to say that we _discovered_ the _fact_ that we have minds, a subjective side, somewhere around 500 BCE or 1700 CE (depending on whether you believe Bo or me)? And if we follow Pirsig in saying these things were _created_, why would we have to keep shitty, unworkable junk we made up? Why can't we invent something better to replace it? That's why I've never understood Bo's interpretation. It's a Platonic appropriation of Pirsig, a Platonist sliding the latest philosophies into the conceptual cubbyholes he brought with him, when the point of most self-described revolutionary philosophies is to create new cubbyholes--to understand them in the old, while entirely within one's rights (as an implicit rejection of the new slots), is besides the point to those who want to work with the new ones. At any rate, I think the key to understanding what happened in Greece, and the relationship of Pirsig's social/intellectual distinction to historical evolution, is in the advent of literacy. I didn't talk much directly about the shift from an oral culture to a literate one, but in following out the work of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, I think it casts tremendously illuminating sidelight. Reflection on past customs, to be able to think about them critically, just wasn't possible until we could right them down. Customs passed on orally were, ironically considering the fluidity of oral speech compared to written, more static in terms of cultural change because the efforts of inferential reasoning--critical thinking--are next to impossible when it is only your personal memory that locks anything down. If reasoning is going in a line from A to B to C, and concluding D, how can anybody--let alone you-- check your line of reasoning (a pointedly spatial, ocular metaphor notice) if no one can remember what A and B were? And how do you remember your conclusion, why you changed your mind from X to Y? If beliefs are habits of mind, and you remember vaguely the new thing you're supposed to believe (which is a habit of action, and so meaning also do), but not why, might you not just keep going on believing X? And likewise if you completely forgot Y entirely. And how do you pass on Y, a better belief than X, to your children if you forgot it? The thought experiment is to help ease into the counter-intuitive thought that an oral culture is more static than a literate one, despite the fact that the written thought is more static than the oral one. It is precisely _because_ of the increased ability to hold the thought still on paper that makes it easier for us overcome it, and thus become more Dynamic as a culture. The interpretation of the social/intellectual distinction is along the lines of the authority/reason distinction, except now--rather than the Platonic, metaphysical interpretation given by Enlightenment philosophers--we can give a rather more detailed explanation of what this means. Authority is in vogue in an oral culture because inferential reasoning, which demands the off-shoring of memory to paper, is insanely difficult and the reason one holds to X is because person P says it works for them. Person Q might say it doesn't, but Q is a known crazy person with no authority (meaning we shouldn't trust them). (I say "crazy" with full sidelight being cast on Pirsig's philosophy of insanity.) But after literacy becomes widespread, we can ask for reasons to believe X from both P and Q, and then think about those reasons at our leisure, though sometimes authority will do in a pinch. The application of this interpretation to our current culture might go something like this-- if you want to pull together the seemingly disparate threads of why those with more education are statistically more likely to be liberal, why Reagan began eviscerating the American education system, why he began the process of tearing down the welfare state and increasing the gap between rich and poor, why Bush Jr. thought it was a good thing for a person to have two jobs, why Chris Matthews likes to say that Republicans are looking for a leader and Democrats for a meeting, and why Limbaugh listeners call themselves "dittoheads," look no further than an understanding of oral culture. More education means more reading, more reading means increased exposure to different thoughts and increased ability to mull over thoughts. More poverty means less time to read and think as anxiety over food and material concerns takes over, just as Maslow said, when you take that second job. Looking for a leader is all you can do when you need a surrogate to do the thinking for you because you have to take the thinker's word for what they say. And with the inability to off-shore memory to external sources from your own head, you need the repetition of talking points in your ear to help you remember what you think. I think there is a sense in which the terms "social" and "intellectual" service well what happened in Greece, and a sense in which Pirsig was right that there's nothing inherently wrong with the social--society wouldn't exist without it--but that we need to understand the conflict. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_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/
