bullshit
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, February 3, 2010 4:02:30 PM Subject: [MD] Excavating SOM. Part one. All MOQ Discuss My disappointment over the SOL interpretation not being accepted is one thing, but when SOM is distorted ...phew! Perhaps my SOL thesis has created the need to distort SOM, at least I hope there's agreement about SOM's emergence is described in ZAMM starting with this passage: To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some explanation: One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last caveman and the first Greek philosophers was short. The absence of any history for this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of at least five times all our recorded history since the Greek philosophers, there existed civilizations in an advanced state of development. They had villages and cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields, agricultural implements and domestic Let's look into Matt Kundert's "Excavating SOM", I think he has it right. > What seems a simple question, I think, is actually quite difficult. "SOM" > is Pirsig's mantle for the Great Enemy, for the kind of philosophy he > wants to dissociate himself from. Because there is a lot of philosophy out > there, it would help to figure out where exactly the tradition of > Subject-Object Metaphysics begins, what it is, how to identify instances > of it, and how what other philosophers are saying hook up to it. This far, agreement. > I've always identified the SOM with the appearance/reality distinction. > When Pirsig developed the S/O Dilemma and suggested that to be subjective > is to be unreal, I took that as a dominant marker of what was going on. I > see the subject/object distinction as coming out of the appearance/reality > one. The subject/object distinction is a specifically modern version of > this older distinction, which trails back to the Greeks. Agreement about the origin of SOM is the Greek "Appearance/Reality" schism even though Pirsig starts at an even earlier stage, but never mind, after Socrates had coined the term "Truth" the counterpoint "Not True" emerged automatically and this is (now in the opposite order) "Reality/Appearance" is plain. Also agreement about subjective/ objective being a modern version of Appearance/Reality, but it first had to go through Plato's and Aristotle's stages (the former deemed "senses" as mere appearance while "ideas" was reality. The latter had "forms/substance" in the same roles. > The difficulty in figuring out what Pirsig thinks the great enemy is is > that sometimes it seems like his enemy is materialism and sometimes it > seems like something else. I wish Matt wouldn't not proceed so fast. "Materialism" is a result of the Mind/Matter development. Descartes did not coin materialism but after he had made the human body a material entity run inhabited a mental mind did SOM's built-in enigma "materialize": What was primary, matter or mind, and only after that did the philosophical movements called materialism and idealism (mindialism) occur. > What's more, many followers of Pirsig interpret him as primarily > fighting materialism. I'd like to pursue this difficulty by answering > two questions: is SOM the same as the mind/matter dualism? The Mind/Matter dualism is a later version of SOM in the same sense that SOM is a later version of Appearance/Reality. > and Does the mind/matter dualism really start with Socrates? In the above said sense Yes! > If either is true, then materialism as a philosophical thesis matters a > lot more to Pirsig's project. Note that once "Truth" emerged its counterpoint "Not True" forced its way in, and this goes for all varieties over this theme, Once objective emerged subjective popped up, and here is the point: All S/O variants are aggregates. Thus both materialism and idealism are MOQ's antagonists. > If they aren't, then there's bigger fish to fry than any thesis about > what reality exactly is. Both subject/object and mind/matter begins with the Greek Appearance/Reality distinction, there are no bigger fish than those two, but they have many offshots . > There are two primary areas where Pirsig describes what he´s up against: > the S/O Dilemma (Ch 19) and pretty much all of Part IV. The SOD is set up > as a mind/matter dilemma: does Quality "exist in the things we observe?" > or "is it subjective, existing only in the observer?" (231) Pirsig butts > his head against each of the horns. He says in acknowledging the truth of > the objective horn, "Quality ... was not a physical property and was not > measurable," (234) thus taking the dualism seriously, as true. But at that stage Phaedrus HAD to take SOM's dualism seriously! What would have happen if he just had wandered out in the Montana wilderness to stare into the sun of Quality? Nobody wold have heard about him since. He stood after all with one foot in SOM with the other just probing the ground ahead. > When he goes up against the subjective horn he takes on "scientific > materialism," "what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable > by the instruments of science is real." (236) Pirsig makes pretty good > work of scientific materialism, but, he says, that lands him in the > camp of idealists, which he wasn't so sure about. Right! After having refuted the objective horn (rather an easy task nowadays, but perhaps worse in the fifties) he turned to the subjective horn, but this is not "taking on" scientific materialism rather taking on idealism (if my English serves me?) But here Pirsig passes things a bit easy over. It is is SOM's subjective horn which is the "mean" one "... not being sure about" is far too weak a refutation. > " And then he says, "Actually this whole dilemma of > subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality > was unfair," (239) before concluding: "Phaedrus ... went straight between > the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is > neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter." (240) Right. he concludes that Quality can't be found in any SOM camp, it's neither objective nor subjective > Here we have Pirsig linking subject and object directly with the > mind/matter dualism. What else could he be talking about? Sure, the two are two identical! > The clues are littered about in this section, but they aren't > completely obvious. The first is his treatment of the objective horn. > To grab that horn would be to "refute the idea that objectivity implied > scientific detectability." (232) He abandons that route, because of the > seeming obviousness of physical properties, but not before indicating > that he was "thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality." (234) I > don´t think it was the ambiguity in quality, I think it´s the ambiguity > in "object" and "subject" that does him in. In preparing his brief > assault on the objective horn he says, "In today's world, ideas that > are incompatible with scientific knowledge don't get off the ground." > (234) Hey, but where are these ideas? They´re in the mind, right? Well, yes, refuting SOM's objectivity seems easy, it's child's play to show that "everything is subjective" thus the dilemma ought to have been devoted to refuting the subjective horn, THAT is the mean one for a metaphysics out to claim the "M" throne, but, this was at a very early stage, his overwhelming mission was to show that Quality was Reality. > So, ideas about objects, like scientific knowledge, get to be > objective? And, really, "objectivity" itself simply stands for "ideas > in the mind that relate to matter," as opposed to "subjectivity" which > means "ideas in the mind that relate to something else, e.g. ______ ." > This ambiguity in the terms he's using bursts right out of the text a > page later when he slices and dices scientific materialism: "scientific > concepts ... could not possibly exist independently of subjective > considerations." (237) The reason is because anything in the mind is > subjective, in the subject. That´s the bind and the ambiguity. Likewise, but even if the SOM - be it in its subject/object or mind/matter form - can't stand up for scrutiny and the true context soon shows namely that you can't have one without the other - the two "horns" is an aggregate - SOM's value shows namely the objective attitude. Even discovering that SOM is metaphysically invalid requires an objective attitude and this remains THE INTELLECTUAL LEVEL of the MOQ > I think the sentence that tells us the most about Pirsig's concerns is > this one: "The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid > distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate > subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an > objective, true picture of reality." (236) STOP PRESS! Here is what I have harped on for the last ten years: In a MOQ context SOM's value is the "objective-over subjective" attitude. That this must be the value of the intellectual LEVEL (and nothing emerging with the Neanderthals) goes without saying. Hugs and kisses Matt! End of part one. Bodvar 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/ 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/
