Hi Dan, Ron, Matt, I didn't mean to imply any "backtracking" in the sense of Pirsig changing his mind about DQ. I hadn't yet even formed much of an opinion on the matter and was throwing out some textual evidence that we should deal with in forming a view.
In Pirsig's claim of having made an "unwise" claim, I was thinking of him as a teacher and of the Buddhist story of the ferryboat. (The one about provisional teachings. Once we cross the river, should we still carry the boat on our backs?) And of his 360 Zen idea where we perhaps can correctly associate DQ with the Good upon the return, but to get to 180 we have to drop all preconceptions of what the Good is and what DQ is. I was thinking that his statement wasn't so must "unwise" but just a teaching needed by one person to get to a certain level of understanding that a different person may not need and in fact may be better off without. The apparent (or real) contradictions in explaining DQ can perhaps be explained by the problem of writing a book for a wide audience while different students need different teachings at different times. 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
