MOQ Conference Concluding Thoughts Liverpool University, July 7th 2005
by Khoo Hock Aun " ... "I was very much impressed that the University of Chicago had these “Greatest Books of the Western World” as a collection for its liberal arts program. The sales people for Encyclopedia Britannica used to sell that back in Asia. And I know it is an impressive… set of volumes… You would think that all of the World’s knowledge is in these “Greatest Books of the Western World” [laughter]! So, I was wondering (I don't know whether I posted this on MOQ Discuss) why we don't have the “Greatest Books of the East Asian World”? I don't know which books these are. [Moreover,] I don't know who would want to do such a project or which benefactor would support this. But then again, why don't we have the “Greatest Books of both the Eastern and the Western Worlds”? Because surely I think this is what you [looking at Robert Pirsig] actually struggled to get the world to recognize… "So, the question is now, where do we go from here? The alienation I think that you [still looking at Pirsig] mentioned in the first few chapters of “Zen” still exists today. The subject-object divide is still so ingrained and it's going to permeate around the world and into Asia as well. But, at the same time, there is this philosophic substratum in Asia that I know [despite being] in recession, is all there. Even although I am in a way Western educated, in a sense that underlying philosophy of harmony and unity is [still] hard wired into my genes and my outlook. ... " http://robertpirsig.org/Khoo.htm 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
