Hello DMB, Marsha, and all,
[DMB] For my own part, I think it's more than appropriate to discuss James and other pragmatists here because the MOQ is in the mainstream of American pragmatism. Pirsig puts it in those terms on the last page of chapter 29. And he says that this is very good news, politically, because he doesn't want his work to be taken as some far out, cult favorite. It's good news, because then the MOQ can hang there in the gallery mainstream academic thought and then it can be positioned next to similar visions, whether they come out of pragmatism or not. One doesn't need to have a personal hotline to Pirsig to know this stuff. It's in the book. ----- I'm going to stray a little from the topic of anti-intellectualism because I don't think I have much to add to that. What I would say is that it occurs to me that there are basically two ways you can approach the MoQ. Either you take a Western road to get there via James and the Pragmatists or Empiricists; or you come at it from the Eastern Buddhist perspective. Both are valid. It seems to me that those who have an Eastern appreciation are much more likely to see the Intellectual Level as SOM than those who are approaching from the other road. I guess this makes neither one wrong, but IMHO the MoQ has much greater explanatory power when the Intellectual Level is viewed as SOM than when it is not. Much to my own surprise, I find that I am becoming daily more and more in the Eastern mysticism camp. This is hard for me to admit since I've always been more scientific and atheistic in my approach to everything else; but then again not so hard to see when I understand that all my prior thinking was steeped in SOM. For better or worse reading the MOQ started me on the journey of freeing my thought processes from SOM - or at least recognizing that they are such - which is the first step. Personally, I would be sad if the MOQ was reduced to just another among the many Western philosophies one can study in academia, or a belief like what one can choose to worship in a church. For me, anyway. Best, Mary 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/md/archives.html
