Hi Rick, Struan, Richard, Ian, Jonathan, Platt and all others
On the topic of the "good of utility" versus "the good of morality."
I seem to be the one who indirectly sparked this discussion with my June 10th
post. In that post I wrote about my ongoing struggle to offer people a new
vision of Morality, a vision which logic stubbornly refuses to accept. My
proposal was that Morality is a real aspect of nature. I compared it to
gravity, which everyone considers a real aspect of nature. While science
doesn't know what gravity *really* is, we still consider it real. We think
it's common sense to know gravity is real. I say Morality is like gravity; it
exists.
We assume Morality is a human or social invention, much like the laws passed
in courts are inventions. To assume this would indeed be logical and
rational, but it wouldn't be correct. Morality is not a law passed in a
court; it exists regardless of the courts. If a court decided we didn't need
gravity anymore, gravity wouldn't go away. Morality won't go away. Oh, we can
ignore it, much like we can ignore gravity, but we will suffer the
consequences.
Part of the problem with words is all the excess baggage they carry, and this
was one of the reasons Struan wanted to replace Quality with "X". And
certainly the word Morality carries excess baggage and evokes a lot of
religious connotations. Even "gravity" is a victim of prejudice; the word
generally evokes the simple image of things falling to the ground. The truth
is, both gravity and Morality are far more complicated than we can presently
grasp (although I think beneath the complication lies a beautiful
simplicity). Our link to both gravity and Morality throughout history has
been intuition. Gravity happens to be, to our five senses, seemingly less
ambiguous than Morality, and is thus an easier, more attractive target of
piles of scientific explanations. And when the modern, logically dominated
mind is presented with scientific explanations, it accepts these with less
trepidation. Reason is more important to the modern mind than intuition,
which is unfortunate (see my June 10th Einstein quote about intuition).
Logic is slowly but surely pushing the importance of faith and intuition
aside, slowly but surely entrenching itself in our unconscious mind and
dominating the foundations of our perceptions. Any disparaging remarks about
logic are batted away with old, lame responses like: "We're not in the dark
ages any more thanks to logic!" or "We have logic to thank for all these
wonderful inventions!" etc, etc.
True, we think. . .we DO owe lots of thanks to logic. Why attack logic? Why
attack reason? It's like attacking the hand that feeds you, isn't it? The
hand that feeds you.
Still, something is amiss. There is a feeling of unease. And logic and reason
definitely has something to do with it. Pirsig writes all about it in Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That special book which connected with so
many.
The hand that feeds you. . .hmmm. Makes me think of the zoo. Animals in
cages. Dependant on the humans who feed them. Perhaps logic is a cage. Keeps
the instinctive animal within us all from running wild. In a way that is
good. But in another way it is tragic.
The bird that once soared free, the human spirit, has been caged. The bird
that once soared free rarely flies far from its cage anymore, the cage of
logic, and considers the cage home. Things outside the cage don't matter as
much anymore. Why should they matter when we've got everything we need inside
the cage?
It's a grand cage, to be sure. Thousands of years in the making. The chief
architects of the cage were Socrates and Aristotle. Everything else has been
modifications of their rough blueprints. A cage for the mind.
That bird inside the cage, for reasons it doesn't fully understand, sometimes
longs to be free. The cells that make up the bird remembers what it was like
to fly free, to see a vision of reality that wasn't partitioned or divided by
the bars of the cage. But the cage has become so comfortable, so safe; the
bird can't think of any REASON to leave, so it just makes the cage bigger and
bigger....
Okay, I'm getting carried away I guess. But it's food for thought.
JONATHAN:
This SO
ontology is so important and so intrinsic to our whole way of thinking
that I find it laughable when members of the MoQ discussions simply say
"SOM is wrong".
JON:
One of Pirsig's most vital points is exactly what you wrote above. The
subjective-objective way we perceive reality has come to utterly dominate our
"whole way of thinking." This kind of domination of thought is dangerous.
Of course this is good in some ways, but Pirsig points out that we are almost
totally blind to the negative ramifications of SOM. People often call
religion a "crutch" but the same can definitely be said about logic, reason,
and SOM. These are crutches. Without them we are wild, yet with them we are
crippled.
The cult of logic has brain-washed far more people than any religion in
history. Of this there can be no doubt.
JON:
>Is that the point I am missing? That you think there is no important
>relationship between these two distinct types of goodness? And if so, are you
>saying that this is the main defect in Pirsig's philosophy?
STRUAN:
There is, of course, an important relationship there, but, they are not of
the same order. They
should not be seen as ontologically synonymous. The main defect? No. The main
defect is that the MoQ
relies upon SOM for its veracity.
JON:
Here we are getting close to something. Even Struan admits that there is "an
important relationship" between what he calls "the good of utility" and "the
good of morality."
I wish Struan would come back and elaborate some on the nature of this
relationship. In his words it is an important relationship, and I agree. It
is also a mysterious relationship. Has anyone solved the mystery?
Jon
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