dmb, You did a journeyman's job of attaching Nietzsche into Pirsig's narrative. But it seems you have missed some of the boarder issues at stake. You have ignored areas of disagreement between the two and in the process left your version of Pirsig looking a talented amateur, clueless of his subject matter.
Nietzsche and Pirisg are hardly alone in looking back to the Greeks as sources of today's problematic. Those footnotes littering Plato are legion. They are the fingerprints of everyone who has seen a moon to point at in Plato. But it is hardly as if the world when to hell because of sect of Greek philosophers had a few bad millennia. Husserl for example, sees the crux of the matter in Greek geometry. He thinks the self-evidence of Euclid's axioms produced an age of awe and wonder; a dynamic quality that has degenerated into a static Quality he calls sediment. In Husserl's story the current crisis begins with Galileo. Galileo's aim was to read the thoughts of God in God's own language, mathematics. In his zeal Galileo begins what Husserl calls the mathematization of Nature. The language of God would prove its worth as a tool. Descended from the stone axe, this artifact allowed mankind to expand its consciousness from the macro to the microscopic. Men could agree on how to speak God language with ever greater precision and in speaking to transform their common lifeworld. But in all their speaking no one seemed to be listening... Run through the treadmill of time, Husserl says the result of clothing nature in the garb of math has been an "indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people." But if God turns out to be absent or mute one can hardly blame Galileo or Plato for wanting to speak to him. Neither of them set out to start a crisis in the future. They sought to end the crisis in their present. Plato saw the sophists appealing to the reptile brain. At the dawn of rationality he sought standards to measurement belief. For Galileo the situation was much more dire. The Greeks had been co-opted by the Catholics. The scholastics were far worse than the sophists. Like you they had settled on a truth and sought only to hammer it into to anyone who dissented. Galileo was not running toward the enlightenment and modernity. He was running away from ages of Crusades and plague and the Inquisition. Just 30 years before Galileo was called to answer to the Inquisitor and stripped of his freedom, Bruno was been burned at the stake for claiming the earth moves. With Galileo men began looking down into God's creation instead of gazing up at his throne. For Nietzsche the problem wasn't with the True versus the Good; it was the Apollonian versus the Dionysian; the rational versus the irrational. He thought it was foolish to look in either direction. He was not seeking to replace one set of bad ideas with another. His complaint against the likes of Galileo was just that; they were attempting to replace the old dead gods with new ones and I don't see how your Pirsig would fare any better in his eyes. No, the Platonic moon is tagged with the spray paint of footnotes and the smeared with the prints of a thousand index fingers. It is no challenge to find a few loops or whorls that any two might share in common. It is not hard to cobble together a collage of quotations. The challenge is to add something of your own; some sort of glue to hold it together. This heightens the illusion that these quotes haven't just been slammed together. It also your piece some character and prevents it from becoming just a hodge-podge. Your blind use of other people's words especially trips you up when you intersperse this from your version of Pirsig with any mention of Nietzsche: "...only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done." The juxtapostion highlights the fact that both your Pirsig and Nietzsche used madmen as avatars . But unfortunately your Pirsig's seem to be giving his madman credit for what Nietzsche's madman did. Worse you yourself seem unaware that this could only be read as either narcissism or simply not paying attention. No, your Pirisig appears as much the accidental Nietzschian as the accidental pragmatist. At least he acknowledges some dim awareness of James, of Nietzsche he shows no sign of familiarity. All I can say is I am glad you are digging this hole for your Pirsig not mine. Perhaps I have be too critical of you here, so in penance, let me offer a few tips. Always remember that the first duty of a good sycophant is to make the boss look good. It would be nice to retain some dignity in the process but of course that's optional. Also when you write, it's a good idea to keep the ratio of your words to "textual evidence" a bit higher than 50%. I've attached links to several freshman English composition sites. I hope they can assist you, better than I, on that score. Then again you may have at the ready, some more mature sample of your work than this bit of recycled material. I would be happy to look it over for you. Anyway, I hope that helps! Krimel As promised, websites with writing tips on the use of textual evidence: http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/information-technology/sources /2.5.2.xml http://www.une.edu.au/tlc/aso/aso-online/academic-writing/quoting.php http://www.uefap.com/writing/citation/citefram.htm http://www.waylink-english.co.uk/?page=61190 http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QPA_PorQ.html 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
