Ham said:
Ham is referring to Pirsig's postulate that Quality equals Reality. This is
inconsistent with his pronouncement that "experience is the cutting edge of
reality." If Quality is fixed as a constant of the universe, it canot be
modified or actualized by experience, for experience is relative to the subject
'I'. In short, experience serves no purpose in Pirsig's cosmology.
Magnus replied:
As always, you manage to jam so many wrongs into a paragraph that it's almost
amusing, wasn't it for the fact that some new people might read it and think
it's right.
dmb says:
Gotta agree with Magnus here. How Ham can manage to be wrong eight times in
just four sentences is truly astonishing. How can you hang around here for
years and not learn anything? Zip, zero, nada. Sheer tenacity, I guess.
Anyway, the final scenes in ZAMM where Pirsig condemns Plato for taking the
Good from the Sophists and turning it into a fixed, eternal form have a central
point. And that is just as Magnus said, "Quality is not fixed". Ham has
reversed the "pronouncement" too. Reality is the cutting edge of experience.
Ham has reversed the order of experience with respect to subjects as well. The
subject is not the source of experience, it is a product of experience, a
concept derived from experience. It's all upside down and backwards in Ham's
hands. That's probably where the phrase "ham-handed" comes from. Probably got
his picture right there in the dictionary.
What really kills me is this attitude wherein Ham is the genius and Pirsig just
isn't smart enough to "get it". Somehow that's even more upside down and
backwards than all the other nonsense put together. The nerve!
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