Ant McWatt said:
..I probably receive correspondence about the "new secret of the universe" once
every month and most of this [...] is arcane nonsense. However, being a
philosopher (rather than a philosophiologist) is - I think anyway - about
trying to keep an open, beginner's mind. So despite the tons of bullshit that
such a mind has to go through, at least there are the occasional pearls of
wisdom such as the MOQ. Moreover, reading Eddo's last couple of posts, I do
think there might be a little more than "psychotic nonsense" to his ideas (i.e.
his answer to Dave that he's using mathematics for his philosophical system as
it is the least culturally biased "language" makes some sense; at least on face
value). Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this particular converstion
pans out.
dmb says:
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between brilliant and crazy - but
usually it's pretty damn easy.
As I see it, Pirsig accomplished what he did despite his "illness", not because
of it. He didn't see what he saw because he was insane but because he did the
work. He thought and thought and read and read for years and then he was faced
with a practical problem in his professional life and his solution was
scrutinized by the community in which he worked and then later by the
"officials" at the University of Chicago. Even as he was getting himself thrown
out, he thought "I'll just have to write my thesis in some other way". And so
he did. In one of the early interviews (NPR in 1974) he describes ZAMM as "a
dissertation embedded in a narrative". The narrative is a powerful story of
redemption to those who've suffered from mental illness, wherein madness is a
divine gift and not a curse or a burden - but the dissertation stands or falls
because it makes sense or it doesn't. Sorry, but we don't get any extra points
for the pain suffered in the production of a thesis. It's good a
nd right or it's not so good and not so right.
There is plenty of room to accommodate different tastes and sensibilities. No
reasonable person would be opposed to open-mindedness but we also need to be
discerning and sensitive to the qualities that separate good ideas from
confused or convoluted drivel. I'm not talking about formal rigor or fancy
rules. But can we not rule out the bat shit crazy, please?
Jeez. Is this a discussion group or a psychiatric hostipal?
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