ADRIE KINTZIGER said to Dan:
.., yes, he's [Adrie's son] a programmer and has a full-time job here as
software support engineer, but also works for an American company that is
launching the Cockoo (tm) watch on the mercan market. ... My son bought
McWatt's introduction into the..., without telling me anyway, because he likes
zam, and was reading along on this forum when Mr Buchanan or you or Arlo or
Andre presented something. Probably he wants to catch up with me, without
telling me in so many words he has not a clear vision on on the framework
Phaedrus is carrying, i told him he needs to read Plato first, symposium etc,
heck of a job without. Whilst reading Plato's cave he made the analogy- Pirsig
talking to Chris through the glass in zam, two different realities, immediate
insight! nice....
dmb says:
Plato. Yea, it's important to understand why Pirsig opposes him. And since the
whole history of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, as they say, Pirsig's
opposition to Plato amount to an opposition to the whole history of philosophy
- or rather opposition to the "Platonism" that runs throughout the whole
tradition. Pirsig definitely has some allies and friends who join him is this
defiance. In pragmatic circles these days "Platonism" has become a dirty word,
an accusation. Plato was already being seriously challenged by philosophers a
hundred years ago. William James, taking inspiration from Bergson (the Nobel
Prize winning French philosopher) attacked the Platonic tradition for being
excessively intellectual, viciously abstract.
As James tells it (in "A Pluralistic Universe) Bergson absolutely inverts the
traditional platonic doctrine. Unlike Plato, Bergson held that intellectual
knowledge was the more superficial kind and instead of being the ONLY adequate
kind of knowledge, it is grossly inadequate. "Its only superiority is the
practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience and thereby
save time," James says. "The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the nature of
things." If you want to know the nature of reality, concepts will not help you.
To know reality itself, he says, you must, "Dive back into the flux itself".
"If you wish to KNOW reality, that flux which Platonism, in its strange belief
that only the immutable is excellent, has always spurned; turn your face toward
sensation, that flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always loaded with
abuse. ...The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our
concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, ... these concepts are not PARTS of
reality, not real positions taken by it, but SUPPOSITIONS rather, notes taken
by ourselves, and you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them
than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed."
I think this is also the main thrust of Pirsig's project. Where Plato and
Socrates subordinated experience to intellect, subordinated reality to
concepts, Pirsig (and James and Bergson, etc..) absolutely invert that
priority. Instead, Pirsig subordinates concepts to experience.
Hopefully, that makes sense to you and you'll share it with your son.
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