"Pirsig's annotations on Copleston" (at robertpirsig.org) is source of the
quote Bo and Platt asked about. Here's some context, so you can see what
"stages" he's talking about and such. This is Absolute Idealism and the
"stages" are stages of religion, stages in the realization of the divine All.
The first stage, that of 'objective religion', is dominated by awareness of the
object, not indeed as the object in the abstract technical sense of the term,
but in the form of the external things by which man finds himself surrounded.
[Pirsig: The MOQ would say that “objective religion” is preceded by awareness
of values, as in infants before they learn to distinguish shapes, and in lower
biological species such as earthworms which probably do not distinguish objects
but do distinguish what is better and worse.] At this stage man cannot form an
idea of anything 'which he cannot body forth as an existence in space and
time'. We can assume that he has some dim awareness of a unity comprehending
both himself and other things; but he cannot [208] form an idea of the divine
except by objectifying it in the gods.
The second stage in the development of religion is that of 'subjective
religion'. Here man returns from absorption in Nature to consciousness of
himself. And God is conceived as a spiritual being standing apart from both
Nature and man and as revealing Himself above all in the inner voice of
conscience.
In the third stage, that of 'absolute religion', the selfconscious subject and
its object, Nature, are seen as distinct yet essentially related, and at the
same time as grounded in an ultimate unity. And God is conceived 'as the Being
who is at once the source, the sustaining power, and the end of our spiritual
lives'. This does not mean, however, that the idea of God is completely
indeterminate, so that we are forced to embrace the agnosticism of Herbert
Spencer For God manifests Himself in both subject and object, and the more we
understand the spiritual life of humanity on the one hand and the world of
Nature on the other, so much the more do we learn about God who is 'the
ultimate unity of our life and of the life of the world'. [Pirsig: The MOQ
would add a fourth stage where the term “God” is completely dropped as a relic
of an evil social suppression of intellectual and Dynamic freedom. The MOQ is
not just atheistic in this regard. It is anti-theistic.]
See, every stage of reality's unfolding is about God and religion, even the
most primitive phase wherein "man cannot form an idea of anything". The whole
thing is nothing but a divine unfolding. So when Pirsig adds a forth stage
where the term "God" is dropped, you're supposed to laugh at how neatly and
quickly he disposes of the whole trajectory of the thing. He's saying,
politely, this is not philosophy at all. It's just religion, a relic of the
social suppression of thought. He's mocking this overtly theistic form of
Idealism by suggesting they drop their central term; God. I think it's pretty
damn hilarious, actually.
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