Ian linked us to this interesting piece from Stanley Fish > http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/fathers-sons-and-motorcycles/
dmb says:I've reproduced a few of the first paragraphs from Fish's article. His description (reproduced below) very much gets at my complaints about reductionism. It also gets at the difference between the classical Aristotelian narrator and the Phaedrus, the romantic Platonist. As you can see from Fish's description (he's a philosopher), the Aristotelian classicist is a reductionist while Phaedrus is not. This is why it's important to properly understand the literary structure of ZAMM; it has a huge impact on the books fundamental meaning, as Pirsig said in the intro. More specifically, I'd draw your attention to the part where Fish says, "knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts" and the part where Pirsig says, "the division of the world into parts is something everyone does" but in doing so "something is always killed". "And what is killed", Fish adds, "is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic has done its (necessarily) reductive work". That is a good description of what radical empiricism says. That, Krimel, is the problem with reductionism. It kills the thing being reduced. And that's exactly what you do to pure experience. By defining experience as a physiological process, you're asserting the parts and denying the whole. For a reductionist, the whole is nothing but a collection of parts. By dismissing the romantic whole, the MOQ is reduced to pure squareness. As I see it, Krimel, you've only managed to re-create the MOQ in your own reductionist image. (This reductionistic stance is very much connected to your rejection of the MOQ's mysticism and your tacit acceptance of SOM.) But I suppose none of that matters to you Krimel. As you see it, apparently, you know better than me. You know better than Stanley Fish. You are here to correct Pirsig. You also happen to know better than Ken Wilber too. Seriously, dude. I'm not sure I've ever encountered anyone with such an over-inflated opinion of their own intellectual superiority. As I see it, you have no sense of proportion, no sense of who can be taken seriously as a thinker. Let me know when Ivy Leaguers devote their academic careers to your brilliant work. Maybe then it'll be reasonable for you to compare yourself to these guys. Maybe then it'll be believable that you could compete. Until then, you should think about the possibility that you are fallible and that you don't know better than them. Thanks Ian. The philosophy Pirsig and Phaedrus wrestle with is a variant of the holism associated with phenomenology and with thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Martin Heidegger, Daniel Schön, Thomas Kuhn, Erving Goffman and the later Wittgenstein (with Kant in the background). Different as they are in many respects, these philosophers share a conviction that knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts. Rather, they contend, the world must first be conceived or assumed whole and entire (don’t ask how) and the emergence of its parts and the possibility of describing them then follows.Pirsig’s example is describing the parts of a motorcycle, an exercise that has no natural stopping point. But, he insists, no matter how much data the exercise heaped up, true comprehension would still not have been achieved, for the motorcycle “so described is almost impossible to understand unless you know how it works.” Rather than building up from particulars to generals (the empiricist method), you must begin with generals — with an in-place, intuitive awareness of what motorcycles are for, of what can go wrong with them, of what can go right with them — and within that tacit knowledge you will know where to direct your analytic attention. You can’t just begin with analytic attention, with “mere” or “pure” observation, and expect to get anywhere; you must already, in a sense, be there.The problem is that once the parts or facts are made to appear, they seem to possess an independence, and it is (literally) tempting to rest in them and to believe that they are the foundation of things. (In theology this mistake is called idolatry.) “The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work.If we think of the world as a handful of sand sorted into separate piles, there are, Pirsig tells us, two ways of understanding it. “Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and relating them” while “romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting began.” But (and here’s the rub) the handful of sand is only known as something that exceeds the sortings we have made of it; the whole world can never be grasped directly, and so we are always in danger of occupying ourselves with the wrong things. “What has become an urgent necessity,” Pirsig announces (he is hardly the first in history to do so), “is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.” _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_SD_25GB_062009 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/
