"Marcus was considered a stoic philosopher and stoicism has Platonic roots,
I believe. The passions are rejected. Pirsig, on the other hand, seems to
place more importance on emotion and feeling as a guiding principle toward
intellect."
Ron has a good point. To my mind though, passions primarily come
from the "organic" level of MOQ and Pirsig was in agreement that passions
were of a lower order than societal and intellectual MOQ. I think our sexual
and survival based passions are hard wired into our genome for the most part
and can negatively conflict with the upper levels of the MOQ paradigm or can
be a positive to increasing quality of life.
I believe Pirsig and Marcus Aurelius would be in agreement about the
passions. They both would accept human passions, just as long as they stayed
within the boundaries proscribed by the upper levels of MOQ, society and the
intellect. For Aurelius, passions were part of the nature of man. He said
that you are sinning, if you go against your true innate self which has been
created by the perfect numinous "Whole". I grant that Aurelius believed that
the passions should be controlled by the mind, especially if they led away
from the laws of society. Wouldn't that be Pirsig's position too, except,
Pirsig might use "the "static quality of society" rather than "the laws of
society"? Beyond this, here is where, I think, Pirsig has added value to our
philosophical models: Pirsig might affirm this control of passions aligned
to the static quality of society, but then he might go on to ask: Is there a
higher "dynamic" quality to be evolved to, one on the organic, societal and
intellectual levels that is of higher quality than the "static" quality we
now have? I think this was what Ron was getting at. Further, I think we are
seeing an example of this with what is now going on in our culture: the
recreating of society's laws in regards to same-gender marriages. People
are trying to change the laws of society to express what they hope to be a
new dynamic quality. We shall see. Pirsig pointed out that "Free Love" of
the 60's and the hope that it was a new social dynamic quality did not work
out so well.
My take is that Pirsig and Aurelius are both for the rational mind
directing our thoughts, our passions and our acts so that they align
qualitatively with the "static" MOQ on all levels. Instead of emotion and
feeling, I might use "intuition" for that which supplants the rational mind
when it comes to going beyond the static and, hopefully, on to a new dynamic
MOQ for any of the four levels: inorganic, organic, social and intellectual.
(It occurs to me that I don't think much about seeking quality on the
inorganic level, perhaps because it seemingly has little to do with my own
life which, to my mind, starts with the organic level.) Feelings and
Intuition are creative forces. I suppose that is why we turn to the creative
among us for new evolutionary ideas of quality, that is our geniuses, our
artist, our philosophers, and writers.
Finally, I admit to being a neophyte in the study of philosophy.
Pirsig brought me in to this subject and the waters just keep getting deeper
:)
Ron talks about the Sophists. My first definition of sophist came
from reading Pirsig. A Sophist was a person who was a tricky fellow who used
words to deceive. Pirsig in his first novel "Motorcycle Maintenance", talked
about the Sophists being the good guys and being made out to be the bad by
other rival schools of philosophy. I am reading "The Trial of Socrates" by
I.F. Stone. I am not sure that I did not get this title from a reference in
Pirsig's "Lila". Anyway, Socrates is portrayed in that historian's,
seemingly very knowledgeable work, as someone who gave no answers but only
negated everyone else's point of view. Socrates and Plato both supported
Sparta's repressive governing model. Socrates did not believe in Athenian
democracy or in its' open and free society. He lectured the young of Athens
rich aristocratic youth on the benefits of the Spartan government and
against the Athenian model. In short, in my mind, Socrates went from the
hero/martyr I had thought him to be to an unenlightened ancient, someone who
was against personal freedoms and democratic government. I do not know if
Stone is totally incorrect in his portrayal of Socrates. I am sure that
Socrates had his other positive sides and contributions to society.
Nevertheless, Stone's book was certainly an interesting read to this
beginner. His last point of interest to me was that we should not remember
Socrates as a hero/martyr, but we should remember that the Athenians,
through fear of recent attacks on their democracy, transgressed their own
society's static quality of personal freedoms by condemning Socrates to
death (in this case: Socrates freedom of speech to attack Athenian
democracy).
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