Hi Ron,
I don't know about most of what you referred to, but if
by "Socratic method" you mean something like the
purpose-driven, question-answer dialectic where only at
the end do you realize that the "purpose" or goal you were
being driven to was an aporia ("dead end"), but that
you've nevertheless been changed significantly by it, then
yes, absolutely was ZMM, and I might argue Lila, Socratic.
I think ZMM is fairly certainly a non-didactic didactic moral
lesson, and I like entertaining the idea that Lila was not at
all about the Metaphysics of Quality, but rather in the same
mold as ZMM: the latter broadly for people in a spiritual
crisis, the former more narrowly for metaphysicians in a
spiritual crisis.
The best way I've found of putting his general goal in ZMM
was through Stanley Fish's notion of a "Self-Consuming
Artifact." I deployed this in my fanciful reading of Lila (the
third part of which can be found here:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/prospectus-part-iii.html.
Here is a closing excerpt in relation to Fish:
----------
15. In this way, Lila should be read as what Stanley Fish
calls a "self-consuming artifact." A self-consuming artifact
is one
that leads you down a path while slowly and
subtlely calling that path
into question, before finally the
path just traveled is consumed and
burned away, leaving
the reader in a different place, but no longer
able to
follow the path that led him there. And what's more, not
only
is Lila a self-consuming artifact, but the book itself,
both
by philosophical doctrine and (now) by narrative, is
a model and
suggestion for how we should think of the
"self," the "ego," the
"subject": we should think of the self
as a self-consuming artifact.
The self is a set of static
patterns we inherit from our culture--our
self is an
artifact of culture. As these patterns swim through life,
they consume themselves by dealing with tensions within
themselves and
the new tensions of new experiences.
The self is an artifact that
consumes itself until we are a
self who is no longer our old self but
something new.
Which, in its own turn, requires a new narrative to
explain
how we got there since we've just burned away the old one.
...
17.
The self is a self-consuming artifact because once
you've absorbed an
experience you revise your self to
include that experience so that that experience is no
longer the same experience you just had. The story of
how you got to be you changes as you go along because
you've
changed. And if the story of your life is a piece of
the changing of
your life, then the story is a ladder to be
dispensed with once its
told so that it can be replaced
with a better story to show how you got
to where you are
by the telling of the story.
18. That is the relationship of ZMM to Lila. Lila is a novel
about ZMM. Lila is to ZMM what the later books of Don
Quixote are to the early. Lila is about Pirsig, the author of
ZMM, the creator of Quality. Lila is about a different Pirsig
responding to a different life situation.
In Fish's magnificent book, Self-Consuming Artifacts, he
gives us a handle on Pirsig and what he is up to, calling it
the "aesthetic of the good physician": [quote]
It
follows then ... that a dialectical presentation
succeeds at its own
expense; for by conveying those
who experience it to a point where they
are beyond
the aid that discursive or rational forms can offer, it
becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment. Hence,
the title of this
study, Self-Consuming Artifacts, which
is intended in two
senses: the reader's self (or at least
his inferior self) is consumed
as he responds to the
medicinal purging of the dialectician's art, and
that art,
like other medicines, is consumed in the workings of its
own
best effects. The good-physician aesthetic, then,
is finally an
anti-aesthetic, for it disallows to its
productions the claims usually
made for verbal art--that
they reflect, or contain or express
Truth--and transfers
the pressure and attention from the work to its
effects,
from what is happening on the page to what is happening
in the
reader. A self-consuming artifact signifies most
successfully when it
fails, when it points away from itself
to something its forms
cannot capture. If this is not anti-art,
it is surely
anti-art-for-art's-sake because it is concerned
less with the making of
better poems than with the making
of better persons.
[close quote]
And what is Fish's first example of this aesthetic? Plato's Phaedrus: [quote]
In short, the Phaedrus
is what it urges: "a discourse which
is inscribed with genuine
knowledge in the soul of the learner."
Although a piece of writing
itself, it escapes the criticism
leveled at written artifacts because
it does not exhibit the
characteristics of those artifacts.
Specifically, its words do
not "go on telling you the same thing over
and over," for as
a result of passing through them, the reader is
altered to
such an extent that if he were to go back they would mean
quite differently.
[close quote]
----------
I also tried discussing Pirsig's literariness here:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/reading-pirsig-as-philosopher.html
Matt
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