Hi Mary > You see, I _do_ think Pirsig himself was the > originator of this idea.
Pirsig obviously did propose that there was something wrong with rationality as it was popularly understood at the time of writing ZAMM. He discovered that the origin of the problem was the subordination of Quality to subjects and objects. You seem to be reading Pirsig's talk about rationality to be commensurate with his later talk about intellectual patterns in general. However, "rational" is a Quality-word for complimenting intellectual patterns that are thought to be good. In ZAMM Pirsig suggested a root expansion of rationality to help us better handle values. Even if you read "rationality" in ZAMM to correspond with "intellectual patterns" in Lila (and I think you should not), a root expansion doesn't suggest anything like the idea that traditional rationality is its own level of evolution. It contradicts that view in an imagine of widening the view of what ought to be called rational. He did not say anything to the effect that the traditional view of rationality should be regarded as an evolutionary level and a step toward a new level that is something other than rationality. How could Pirsig have proposed the idea in ZAMM that the collection of all intellectual patterns of value is equivalent to traditional subject-object metaphysics when he had not formulated either concept at that time? Even if reading Lila later made you think that Pirsig equated the two, the comments from LC should now make it clear to you that it was never Pirsig's intention to do so. It should be clear that if you thought so, you were getting Pirsig wrong. If you still think your reading is the best way to see things, then you need to say that Pirsig was always wrong about the MOQ and was only "the originator" of this SOL idea to the extent that this idea was inspired by a misreading of Pirsig. Best, Steve 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
