Andre said to Marsha: (Responding to her reading of what it means to "Kill all intellectual patterns.") And a host of quotes from Hagen and Pirsig that do nothing to clarify the issues at hand. Marsha, how dare you present yourself as inquiring into the similarities between the MoQ and Zen Buddhism...'. You have proven and continue to prove that you do not understand the first (!) thing about Pirsig's MoQ nor Zen Buddhism.
dmb says: Right. Marsha's mistakes are countless and one could literally spend all day untangling the various confusions but the basic problem is pretty simple. She attacks the cure as if it were the sickness. She uses the Buddhist rejection of SOM and its "intellectual grasping" to attack the MOQ's position on static intellectual quality. The problem is, of course, that the MOQ's intellect is NOT the disease but the cure for that disease. That's why quotes from Hagen (or other Buddhist writers) cannot rightly be used against the MOQ's intellect. Many errors follow from this basic mistake. This failure to comprehend the similarities between Pirsig and Zen is the main source of many serious problems such as relativism, nihilism, anti-intellectualism and general incoherence. What's more, this same mistake lets Marsha think that "killing the intellect" is the answer to every question, even when we're talking about the conflict between social and intellectual quality or the MOQ's conception of truth as a high quality intellectual pattern. She mistakenly uses Pirsig's rejection of SOM to reject Pirsig's replacement of SOM. She treats Pirsig's "new spiritual rationality", the expanded rationality that's subordinated to undefined Quality, as if it were the very thing it's meant to replace. Because Marsha doesn't understand this distinction, she wants to kill all intellectual patterns indiscriminately, regardless of whether it's the cancer or the medicine, regardless of whether it's the problem or the solution to that problem. This is the same mistake that also prevents her from seeing the similarities between Buddhism and other pragmatists like James and Dewey. She even went so far as to try to use Buddhism against James by quoting Alan Wallace, one of the world's foremost William Jamesian Buddhist scholars. (As Wikipedia says, "Influences on his thinking and research derive not only from Buddhism and contemporary physics and neuroscience, but also William James, the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher whom he often refers to as one of his 'intellectual heroes.'") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Wallace I have presented this evidence to Marsha many times over the past few YEARS but her profoundly anti-intellectual attitude (and ego) always acts as her own personal intellectual immune system. Nothing can penetrate this armor so that she simply repeats the same mistake over and over again regardless of the quality or quantity of the evidence before her eyes. The term “Buddhism” doesn’t appear in any of James’s book titles, but more than a century ago Kitaro Nishida, “Japan’s foremost modern philosopher”, recognized some very Buddhist ideas in James’s radical empiricism, especially James’s notion of “pure experience”. Joel Krueger’s paper, "The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment,” explains some of those connections. In “William James and Buddhism: American Pragmatism and the Orient”, David Scott goes so far as to claim that the Buddha himself was, like James, a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. His case includes some discussion of John Dewey as well. There is an interesting paper on Dewey’s Zen wherein the author makes a case that Dewey’s emphasis on primordial experience is not some mushy-minded relativism but rather essential “if our thought is to be grounded and transformative”. If Marsha were willing and able to hear what these scholars are saying, she wouldn't be using them against each other but rather enriching her own understanding. Instead, sadly, her intellectual development is totally arrested. She's stuck repeating the same incoherent drivel over and over again as a response to everything and anything no matter what. She has nothing to offer except that often repeated mantra, the one that never made any sense in the first place. You know, the one with those ever-changing static patterns. But Marsha is right about one thing; she's not at all interested in truth. It doesn't matter if it's fancy or plain and simple. She just won't hear it no matter how many times she's given the chance. I strongly suspect that her problem - this level of incorrigibility - is more psychological than philosophical. 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
