Arlo said:
"...Goya wrote a caption for the print that complicates its message,
'Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her,
she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.' In other words,
Goya believed that imagination should never be completely renounced in favor of
the strictly rational. For Goya, art is the child of reason in combination with
imagination." - Sarah C. Schaefer
It strikes me that this could be a sort of proto-MOQ description of Pirsig's
central metaphor. For Goya (in 1799), 'reason' was a new child of the
Enlightenment. Goya's work was being done right at the moment in time the
intellectual level was gaining independence from social forces. Pirsig writes,
'The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever.' (LILA)
That was the reason Goya was talking about, "science and reason come only from
the objective world". While the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic Period,
which in many ways as an abandonment of intellect in favor or 'validated
intense emotion' (Wikipedia), Goya seemed to point to an expansion of reason
rather than a dismissal. For Goya, 'reason' without imagination led to
corruption, but imagination without reason fairs no better. It is when 'reason'
and 'imagination' are united that the arts flourish.
dmb says:
Yes, Goya is expressing a sort of proto-MOQ. I think that's about right. John
and Silvia Sutherland sort of represent the romantic movement of the 1950s and
60s, which is just one of several romantic periods that counteracted the
disenchanting effects of Rationalist philosophies and what amounted to the
worship of pure reason. William Blake was publishing his work in the 1780s and
90s but his sentiments were echoed by Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison in the
Beat/Hippie period.
But of course Pirsig drops the classic-romantic distinction because romantic
thinking is still thinking and so distinguishable from DQ, which is
pre-intellectal or pre-conceptal and prior to any kind of thinking.
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