On Jul 24, 2010, at 1:54 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> Arlo said:
> It just struck me as coming close to the height of absurdity to declare that
> the man who's ideas we are here (ostensibly) to discuss is the "least"
> authority on what those ideas are. It would be like me saying, "Let's talk
> about what John's ideas are, but the person who we can ignore the most in
> that discussion is John".
>
>
> Mary replied:
> You see, the person with the original inspiration no longer exists. Robert
> Pirsig the author is not the person who experienced the original insight. He
> has no direct memory of it. No 'arloian' absurdity exists, and if there is
> any 'bullshit', it is in the 'DuMB' complaints.
>
>
> dmb brushes an old post:
>
> I guess that sort of interpretation is forgivable because people do tend to
> see what they want to see. In a recent study, conservatives saw Steven
> Colbert as a conservative. That's hilariously wrong. Anyway, on top of that
> natural tendency, the narrator in Zen and the Art sees things differently. He
> and Phaedrus often disagree with each other. It's probably important to
> realize that Pirsig describes him as an UNRELIABLE narrator. The story is
> told from his perspective, mostly, but he's the character who said whatever
> it took to get out of the hospital. He's the bullshitter, the charmer, the
> people-pleaser. And it's his words and ideas that the conservatives will find
> most appealing and he or she will take that for the substance of the MOQ. In
> some cases this means ignoring what Phaedrus says. Pirsig says he got the
> idea of an unreliable narrator from Henry James' novel, "The Turn of the
> Screw". That story is told from the narrator's point of view. She is
> psychotic and paranoid but the reader doesn't necessarily see that fact. It's
> a neat trick, especially since Phaedrus is supposedly the one who went
> insane. Anyway, it's easy to notice the shift in perspective in the following
> passage, although there are many other examples as well...
> "We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural
> resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's
> just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the
> rebuilding of this American resource...individual worth. There are political
> reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not
> one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth
> and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they're right. We
> do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned
> gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have
> been pointed to.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, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not
> being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture
> with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to
> do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the
> whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of
> the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become
> separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under
> and reason made supreme somewhere back then".
>
> dmb continues:Notice how the narrator's speech is full of cliches and
> platitudes while Phaedrus is philosophical and far more interesting? It's
> hard to miss, unless one wants to miss it that is. I mean, quoting the
> narrator is risky business at best. He's the kinda the villain of the story,
> you know? Chris knows he's a phony and a pale shadow of his former self and
> that's what's killing him. The narrator is whoever you want him to be. He's
> spineless and everything he says is calculated to please. Unlike Phaedrus,
> he's dominated by social level values. Check out Pirsig's introduction to
> 25th anniversary edition (1999). That's how Pirsig characterizes him there
> and he does so in order to prevent misinterpretations of the book.
Marsha:
If you watch again the latest dvd, RMP states clearly he doesn't really
remember much before his hospitalization. Wouldn't those years before the
hospitalization be the Phaedrus years?
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