dmb said to Platt:One example that springs to mind is the narrator's comments about big government programs and the individual. Just a few lines later, Pirsig tells us that Phaedrus went a different way, that he saw the solution in a new spiritual rationality, not cliched ideas about self-reliance. I've pointed this out to you before, but apparently you just don't care what Pirsig says about it or what he really means.
Platt replied: For someone who claims to "know how to locate textual evidence for the assertions I make" it's more than passing strange that you include in your "evidence" the phrase, "not cliched ideas about self-reliance" which is nowhere to be found in the cited "few lines later." On second thought, not strange that you would edit what Pirsig wrote to support your own misguided theories. dmb says:Yea, that's the kind of response you always give and that I fully expected. Not that it'll make any difference to you, but that phrase you can't find in the passage is mine and I never said otherwise. You've already proven to be completely unteachable but for the sake of any other interested MOQers, I'll quote the referenced passage again. It comes from chapter 29. You should know. You've quoted the narrator on this point many, many times. As you can see, a few lines later we see that Phaedrus has different, contrasting view just like I said. "My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. 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." Man, I really should take my own advice. Why do I bother? Now I'm gonna just skip right to the phase where I see the futility of trying to reason with you. I give up. _________________________________________________________________ Lauren found her dream laptop. Find the PC that’s right for you. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/choosepc/?ocid=ftp_val_wl_290 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/
