Hi Elephant, Andrea and ontologisers.
>RMP gave me a good way
>to welcome back morality into my intellectual world, where I always felt it
>belonged. And it did this by working from *within* my prior system of
>(standard
>western) beliefs.
>
ZMM to some extent changed my idea of what morality meant. Previously my
unexamined prejudice was that science is equatable with reality, and
morality is a separate, arbitrary code, which is often restrictive,
reductive and generally irritating, but which, overall, is a necessary evil.
But ZMM turned that division on its head for me, by placing the sense of
value at the centre of the world, and making everything else secondary -
which seemed like a veritable Copernican revolution to me at the time. But
LILA seemed to me to turn morality back into an arbitrary code; I'm happy
with 'Dynamic/Static', but social levels and intellectual levels of reality
seem like empty abstractions to me - they have no intuitive resonance.
That's probably why I felt the urge to write my rambling criticism.
You say that MOQ works *within* the prior system of Western thought; I feel
that, in fact, whilst the MOQ system seems to comprehend all of inner and
outer reality, all of the terms within the system have become woolly and
compromised. In fairness to logical positivism, within the field that it
delimits, it does have an exemplary rigour. When Pirsig says things which
are outright nonsense, such as that bit in the epilogue to ZMM - I don't
have the quote in front of me, but something like, when he's talking about
Chris' death, and asks where "Chris" has "gone", saying that he can't just
have ceased outright to exist, or the "Second Law of Thermodynamics is in
trouble" - as if the second law of thermodynamics has anything to do with it
(the same in LILA, come to think of it, where he views evolution as an
example of a system 'running up', rather than 'running down', which it
obviously isn't in any meaningful sense)- you have to wonder if his attempt
to subsume science into the continuum of Quality hasn't made him lose sight
of the important ways in which science is genuinely different to other
discourses. The same thing with the pseudo-scientific analysis of moral
questions, which as I previously said, I found deeply unconvincing. And I
think yoking mystical morality (Dynamic Quality) to the idea of a moral
order (Static Levels) is an unworkable idea; you can't have both, which is
the point I was trying to make about the Zen monks in WWII.
And the other thing is I just think the set of ideas put forward in LILA are
mostly very derivative. I meant to add, incidentally, that the American
Indian influence on white settler culture has been amply documented since
time out of mind, rather than being some earth-shattering new insight
(Leslie Fiedler, for example, can refer in a throwaway sentence to "the
reticent speech of the American Indian and of the white frontiersman who
imitated him" [In 'Waiting for the End', 1964] without needing to back up
his statement).
There are definitely diamonds amid the dross though. I'm just very sceptical
about the attempt to build on LILA's MOQ; it's a very shaky foundation. I
think my pseudo-Freudian version is better. Well, whatever.
Lynch (or WG if you prefer).
PS. Tell me more about Weil and Murdoch.
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