Horse said to Marsha:
I think Pirsig is using the term 'fiction' here in the same way that one would
use the term 'illusion'. An illusion is real enough in that we don't have to
see it as something that doesn't exist - it just doesn't exist in the way we
think it does. The 'I' is illusory, not fictitious. Big difference.
dmb says:
Right, Marsha is reading the rejection of the Cartesian conception of self as a
rejection of ANY conception of the self. This rejection is part of rejecting
subject-object metaphysics. Sometimes Pirsig calls this the metaphysics of
substance because Descartes had divided all of reality into mental substance
and physical substance. These are metaphysical posits and that's what is being
rejected, the notion that there is some kind of entity behind thoughts and
things.
But that doesn't mean that Robert Pirsig is a fiction. It just means that he is
made of the same stuff the rest of reality is made of and better conceived as a
complex ecology of processes rather than some essential thing. Like Nietzsche
and James, Pirsig is saying that there is no distinction between consciousness
and content, that there is no entity that does the thinking or rather that the
thinking itself is the thinker. When we say "it rains" we don't really mean to
suggest that some entity separate from the rain preforms the task of raining.
The rain itself is the only "it". And so it is with thinking. When we say "I
think", it's just a figure of speech. It's just about the grammatical rules of
English.
In James's 1904 essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?", he answers the title
question in the negative. No, as an entity there is no such thing, he said.
Consciousness is a function, a process. Whitehead described this as a direct
attack on the Cartesian self. Bertrand Russell said James's essay "startled the
world" for the same reason.
But to simply say that Pirsig and you and me and everyone else is just a
fiction not only misses the whole point of what is being rejected, it also
leads to a rather vacuous nihilism. One might as well say that the bombs that
dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima with just fictions and so were the hundreds
of thousand so dead. In a world of pure fiction nothing is right and nothing is
wrong. Shall we say that genocide and mass murder is "not this and not that"?
What would be the consequences if we acted as if that idea were true?
Or, what if we read the MOQ as saying that reality - including ourselves - is
made of values all the way down? What if we acted as if that were true instead?
Should we treat the world and ourselves as static patterns of VALUE or as a
fiction? Do you suppose Marsha's nihilistic reading would have better
consequences? Not me, brother. Even if it did make sense, which it doesn't, I
think that reading is an outrageous moral nightmare.
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