Hey Mary:
About six years ago a guy named Paul Turner gathered a bunch of quotes just
like you. Except he gathered the quotes that show Pirsig's intention to expand
rationality. Paul thought these quotes were enough to disprove Bo's position
even without explanation. I think he's right about that. Take a look and see if
you don't agree.
Hi all, especially Bo This post is a response to Bo’s assertion that his SOLAQI
fits better with Pirsig’s previous writing than the definitions given in Lila’s
Child and correspondence, particularly Pirsig’s statement that the MOQ is also
an intellectual pattern.
This post is simply a series of excerpts from ZMM and one from Lila which
require no commentary from me other than to say that rationality is clearly
part of the intellectual level and that SOM is described here as traditional,
conventional rationality. I think this series of quotes show that Pirsig
conceived of the MOQ as a "root expansion" of rationality and, as such, is also
part of the intellectual level.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Phædrus
spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. That was true. The ghost he pursued was
the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of
Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself."
"To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system"
is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same
structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by
structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and
purpose."
"But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid
repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than
causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic
thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the
rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will
simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic
government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that
government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the
succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little
understanding."
"Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better
world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the
Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and
shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of
people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of
reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins
to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless
and spiritually empty."
"One can see how both the informal and formal processes of hypothesis,
experiment, conclusion, century after century, repeated with new material, have
built up the hierarchies of thought which have eliminated most of the enemies
of primitive man. To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems
from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive
conditions. It's such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it's
all but shut out everything else and now dominates man himself. That's the
source of the complaint."
"What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the belief that the crisis
is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the
situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself
is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at
a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by
feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them.
And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is
that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that
you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a
solution."
"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the
topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new
experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from
hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you
have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something
that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's
familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when
expansion's needed at the roots."
"The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy
feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up.
The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in
the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet
people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon
the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason."
"Columbus has become such a schoolbook stereotype it's almost impossible to
imagine him as a living human being anymore. But if you really try to hold back
your present knowledge about the consequences of his trip and project yourself
into his situation, then sometimes you can begin to see that our present moon
exploration must be like a tea party compared to what he went through. Moon
exploration doesn't involve real root expansions of thought. We've no reason to
doubt that existing forms of thought are adequate to handle it. It's really
just a branch extension of what Columbus did. A really new exploration, one
that would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus, would have to
be in an entirely new direction."
"Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of
the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're
presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I
think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of
falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very
close analogue there."
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional
reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and
this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're
getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism,
mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of
classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is
sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to
understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to
abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking
about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn't make 'sense.' But what's
really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't
grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover
art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're
at the roots."
"A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a
study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the
art of rationality itself."
"Now I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be
tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal
recognition of Quality in its operation."
"It's long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of
facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of
these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a
formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn't
destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings
it far closer to actual scientific practice."
"I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional
rationality's insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided
reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be
rigidly separate from each other." "When traditional rationality divides the
world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really
stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought
to go."
"Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality
decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his
circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a
new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual
rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual
blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was
no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to
Quality."
"The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of
biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally
correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher
evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the
Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that
chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant
experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one-is another matter altogether.
Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is
as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it
is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an
integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress
itself."
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