All MOQ Discuss My final instalment on Matt Kundert's excavation of SOM essay found at: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/excavating-som.html
Matt: > I want to suggest that ZMM is much more of a journey then some > commentators let on. Pirsig is tracing the trail of his enemy > through history. His first important stop is with the Subject/Object > Dilemma. That is a specifically modern dilemma. It didn't arise with > the Greeks, the Greeks didn't think about it or consider to give > answers to it. Agree most vehemently. The Greeks' enormous achievement was that of "discovering/creating" the Appearance/Reality distinction and with Aristotle's version (Reality=Substance, Appearance=Form) Pirsig says "our scientific understanding was born". There was no S/O dilemma until Descartes mind/matter version. > But Pirsig is going backwards through our philosophical history to > find the root cause of our problems. So he deals with the SOD (I > might add, unsuccessfully at that point), but it is only a stage in > his hunt. He (we) learn something from the encounter and what we > learn is that the dilemma is all wrong. So we ask: why is it here? > Part IV is the finishing of Pirsig's hunt. He traces the modern > dilemma back to the Greeks. So what began the chain of events? > "Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal > Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from > opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon > subsequent history cannot be overstated." (382) He´s right, it can´t > be. Parmenides gave us the appearance/reality distinction. We must > penetrate beyond appearances, beyond shifting opinion, to the > imperishable, immortal reality. Pirsig doesn't say that Anaxagoras' > identification of the Immortal Principle with nous, "mind," had > importance that couldn't be overstated. Anaxagoras gets one line. > His placement with Parmenides as Socrates' teachers is to remind us > where we came from and where we are going back to with the wisdom we > find in the past. Anaxagoras "nous" hardly corresponds to the post-Cartesian "mind". but never mind!! > After the appearance/reality distinction was made important, the > Sophists came along and contradicted them. They said that "their > object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of > men. All principles, all truths, are relative." (383) But they > didn't have the tools to win. They didn't have a way of > distinguishing between probable knowledge and absolute knowledge. > All the Greeks had was opinio and episteme, crappy opinion and > perfect knowledge. Perfect! No sooner had SOM's budding "objectivism" manifested itself before the inevitable "subjectivism" popped up in form of the Sophists > What Plato did to destroy the Sophists was create a method for going > from opinio to episteme: dialectic. This was the creation of > epistemology. Parmenides created metaphysics by distinguishing > between appearance and reality, and that distinction demands an > epistemology, a method, criteria for being able to tell opinion > about appearances from knowledge of the imperishable reality. At the > heart of SOM, then, is that distinction (appearance/reality) and the > demand for a method. Through the vicissitudes of time, it turned > into its modern progeny: This sounds most learned and correct. > "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) Again Eureka! This is the INTELLECTUAL VALUE of the objective- over-subjective attitude which remains even after the metaphysical validity of the S/O divide is disproved, which it is by the paradoxes it leaves in its wake. > To supplement this reading of Pirsig, I should provide a story of > how metaphysics and epistemology spawned modern SOM. I clearly don't > have enough room here, nor, really, the expertise. The best > supplemental story for Pirsig's concerns with SOM (as I've drawn > them here) is Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It was > accident that I came to read Rorty religiously, him becoming my > second philosophical father to Pirsig. But the more I think about > it, the more I see their concerns syncing up. I believe you Matt. I have never understood the Rorty issue, but DMB's rejecting him points to Rorty and Pirsig being close. > I will suggest this here, though: the mind/matter problem didn't > become a problem until Descartes. Jeez! Here you say it. I hadn't read all of your essay before starting, but this is just right. > The subject-object idiom didn't become solidified until Kant. Even more agreement. Exactly what I tried to jam down David T's throat. Westenn philosophy - the S/O - came to a halt with Kant. Science however has raced on but its philosophical foundation has not. Why the Quantum discoveries finds no explanation and the science magazines have given up on physics and gone "psychic" > Don´t get me wrong though. The Greeks clearly had some sort of > concept for "mind," nous as Pirsig said. But nous isn't exactly what > we mean by mind. Exactly. > And the Greeks had some sort of concept for "matter," maybe > phusis (which roughly translates to "nature"). What I´m saying is > that there wasn't a mind/matter dualism, which spawned off its own > particular problems that we are familiar with, until the modern > period. It is, in fact, partly what marks off the beginning of the > modern period of philosophy. So, for instance, the Greeks would not > have understood Pirsig´s Subject/Object Dilemma. We ways look back and reshapes the past in the light of the current "glasses", Pirsig looks back on the Greeks with the MOQ specs on and sees a context never seen before. While those with the - um - Greek S/O specs still in place believe that "intellect" is some mental capacity, not understanding it as a Quality Level. Thanks Matt 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/
