Adrie said:
... Been also extensively reading on the Bradley/Pirsig/ Huxley issue, and as
you know , Huxley was my first literary love ever. I am not clear on Bradley,
nor on the Pirsig Bradley interpretation. i am however clear on Huxley, i did
all my re-reading and Perennial cannot be merged into the realityprojection of
the moq- I have my doubts on Bradley, due to the phrase from the annotations,
do i have to read him? what is your opinion?
dmb says:
I'm a big fan of the perennial philosophy and I think it's compatible with the
MOQ.
As I understand it, the perennial philosophy says that all of the worlds great
religions carry the same basic message. The esoteric core of all major
religions is in general agreement simply because people from all times and
places have had some kind of mystical experience, a form of awareness in which
there is no distinctions. This is how Pirsig describes the primary empirical
reality, how James describes pure experience and Northrop describes the
undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. In religious language this is described
as being one with the universe, of being one with god, as becoming god, as
identification with the father, as Nirvana, enlightenment or as an awakening.
The idea is simply that the static forms we call religion are derived from this
widely known primary experience.
"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: ..They
share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside
language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of
reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion
of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American church argues
that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally
resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision
Quests in the past." (Lila 63)
Absolute Idealism also asserts that reality is a unity, a monism, but it paints
a very different picture of reality. William James was a long-time rival of
both Bradley and Royce and he generally considered Hegelians to be "prigs". He
felt the whole idea was too buttoned up and straight laced. He found it
suffocating and morally outrageous. In it's most rigid form, Absolute Idealism
says that all of reality, from Genesis to the end of history, is the unfolding
of the Absolute Mind. (This is not an anthropomorphic God, but we are
definitely in the realm of theology here.) This unfolding proceeds in a perfect
chain of causality from beginning to end, so that reality is completely
deterministic. There is no such thing as free will. Many human bodies will be
crushed on "the slaughter-bench of history" but this is all part of the
movement toward final stage of perfect knowledge, so what the heck, right? This
unfolding is also completely rational, logical and moves in dialectical s
tages.
Jung thought Hegel was insane. Maybe he had a good point. It seems to be
something like the stages of cognitive development projected out onto the field
of history. Naturally, he thought his culture and his philosophy was the
culmination of everything, that the unfolding of reality had finally arrived
and it just happened to land on his doorstep. If you like grandiosity and
determinism, Absolute Idealism is just what the doctor ordered. ... It's almost
universally considered a dead philosophy, by the way.
The annotations aren't very long and it's interesting to see how Pirsig reacts.
It's definitely worth the effort. It about time I looked at it again. If
memory serves, Anthony McWatt's thesis advisor wanted to know how the MOQ would
compare to Idealism and so Ant asked Pirsig what he thought. So, it seems that
the annotations were meant to answer that question for a specific reason,
namely so Ant could finished his Doctoral Thesis on the MOQ.
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