Hi Matt .
4 Feb.
>From Matt's essay:
Pirsig begins his scattered narrative about the genesis of what
he later calls the intellectual level with the piece above about
subject-object differentiation
Bo shouts!
> > Another Eureka! See. even Matt recognizes that the intellectual LEVEL
> > (of the later MOQ) starts with the subject/object differentiation. Why
> > is Mr Kundert so silent about this? Why doesn't he come to my assistance
> > in my fight for this obvious context?
Matt:
> Because, Bo, if you hadn't noticed, you cut me off in the middle of
> sentence. I'm not sure if this might not largely be attributable to
> the fact that you're forced to use English because none of us know
> your home-language, but you didn't really understand the gist of that
> mini-essay. But--perhaps I just wasn't very clear. Some people think
> I'm a very difficult, confusing writer. I'll concede the issue. (Or
> maybe Bo was being ironic, though that's not a style I've often seen
> him reach for--he's so _earnest_ seeming.)
First it's "cutting me off", then my poor English and finally the
possibility of you "not being very clear". I think you are crystal clear and
that you - like Pirsig - when writing freely see the SOL interpretation
constantly popping up.
> But for clarification sake, I was not suggesting that the
> subject/object distinction is the "intellectual level," but that what
> Pirsig was showing the genesis of was what he later called the
> "intellectual level." That's literally what I said.
You said exactly what the quote above says. However, in ZAMM there
was only one static level - SOM also called "intellect - and this is the
mystery. Why didn't LILA follow up with SOM= the intellectual level and
its emergence (in Europe) as told in ZAMM? Instead we get the
genesis of a totally mysterious "intellect"
"There's a ritual for washing, for putting up a house, for
hunting, for eating and so on - so much so that the division
between 'ritual' and 'knowledge' becomes indistinct. In cultures
without books ritual seems to be a public library for teaching
the young and preserving common values and information.
These rituals may be the connecting link between the social
and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive
song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain
cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive
religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have
been derived. (LILA page ...)
> The question I'm tangling with in the essay is whether the endgame of
> Pirsig's story is the subject/object distinction. My answer is no,
> that's just a later growth out of something earlier. What's the
> earlier thing? I'm not sure how explicit I was in that paper (haven't
> read it in a while), but the locus to me has to lie around Pirsig's
> claim that Truth was born in Athens and that Plato was a dialectical
> dick because he was trying to protect this new, fragile, precious
> commodity.
I plan to complete my analysis of your paper, but the "endgame of
Pirsig's story"? If you mean the Greek story it's no doubt that its point
is that they created the S/O distinction. "Something earlier"? Well we
will never know how many philosophers there were before the known
ones. Then about SOM = the intellectual level there are so many
indications of it that even you - inadvertently or not - arrived there.
> All Bo's claims of obviousness to the contrary, I think there's
> a very subtle game afoot in ZMM, and that when Bo waves
> his hand saying, "blah, blah, we all know ZMM's a travelogue
> with chautauquas stuffed in it," he's missing an integral point
> I'm attempting illustrate through the reading --that the
> _process_ of ZMM, the _way_ it unfolds is an integral part of
> reading its message, and that waving away its form is to
> importantly miss its content. I wasn't just remarking on
> something we all know when I talked about ladders and sleds,
> I was attempting to get some people to think differently about
> what "we all know."
A lecture worthy the inscrutable Matt, but speaking of "games afoot" I
wonder what motivates this game of denying the SOL? .
Bodvar the irrefutable
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