Calling all workers!
27 Jan. Case said:
> Guys, yesterday SA offered up a quote from Chapter 9 of Lila that I
> have included at the end of this post. I believe the context was: how
> are Native American religions similar to Zen? Clearly at some point
> Pirsig seems to have thought they were. He says that Lila, or at least
> the book that was to come after ZMM, was going to be about Indians.
> But it is not. It is about a psycho-floosy. Maybe this is because the
> Indians are not nearly as Zen as Pirsig would like them to be.
I have seen this issue circulating and the question must be: Had
the said Indians developed a Value metaphysics, because Pirsig
obviously sees Zen as having some similarities with the MOQ. I
don't think the Indians had and what's more I don't think that Zen
and the full-fledged MOQ compares very well and wonder why
Pirsig kept up the Zen connection. One point is this in his
"Summary" of 2005:
The "Quality" of the Metaphysics of Quality is not a basic
substance, or anything like it. The Buddhists call it
"nothingness" precisely to avoid that kind of intellectual
characterization. Once you start to define Quality as a
basic substance you are off on a completely different path
from the MOQ.
"Nothingness" indicates an a-moral existence while "quality"
indicates that morals is its very ground. Already here an
insurmountable barrier appears. Secondly: "To avoid intellectual
characterization" sounds as if Pirsig sees intellect=language and
this is dubious: People of the Social Era surely had language and
thus "intellectualized" a lot if THAT definition was valid.
In my opinion the MOQ should have broken its ties with
Buddhism, mysticism and all that jazz. The MOQ - in its own
terms - builds on a long sojourn in the intellectual level (SOM)
and thus sees the all these dichotomies - among them the
language/reality - as intellect. The East had only a short brush
with intellect (Upanishads) before going on to some Quality-like
insight. This makes Zen look like mysticism to us, and they must
speak like mystics to us.
> Certainly their quests for visions and their stress on NOW is Zen-like
> but Native American traditions are Paleolithic in nature. Their
> cultures were prehistoric and more like those of cave men than of
> moderns. Perhaps in confronting this Pirsig decided to take a
> different path, write a different book.
Someone said, and I agree, that Lila was intended to be about
Indians. I have a newspaper clipping from 1974 where Pirsig says
to a reporter that the next book's tentative title is "Those Pesky
Indians" and we all know that it was the anthropologists and their
"objective" approach to the Indians - and all pre-modern cultures
- that was his focus. Pirsig says something in LILA how he drifted
away from this as the MOQ started to take form.
But it looks like Pirsig was unable to drop it and therefore let the
Indian's vision quest sound as if the Indians lived in a DQ reality.
This is similar to the ZMM where it sounds like the Ancient
Greeks lived in an Aretê=DQ reality. The latter is understandably
from the early ZMM stage when he saw SOM as as some evil
displacing the said reality. However he omitted what his former
self had understood, namely that "intellect" is the S/O divider.
Instead the said level became a mindish faculty contaminated by
SOM, and the MOQ a de-bugging intellectual pattern.
OK, this is my "axe" as you all know, but if seen this way so many
puzzle pieces falls into their correct place. For the present
nobody knows how to interpret ZMM in a MOQ light. Even Pirsig
is silent. In the said summary he calls ZMM a novel with a
skeleton of a philosophy (and vice vers regarding LILA) but it's of
immense interest if the skeleton fits the full-fledged philosophy
and it does not without some level application. The Ancients were
of course the social level and the Sophist no remnants of that
era, but the idealists (subjectivists) of the emerging S/O-intellect.
Now regarding the American Indian. They were still at the social
level, so I agree with Case that they were Paleolithic. That is not
to say that their world view was primitive, perhaps just as
advanced as the mono-theism of the Mid-East, all these are
social patterns. And yes, Pirsig decided to write a different book,
but regrettably mixed these early things with the final MOQ and
created much confusion,
I would have liked one short excursion into one particular aspect
of the MOQ. There is a level aspect of MOQ's relationship with
the 4th level (even if it "contains" it) Now remember the upper
level's collusion with the one below its "natural born enemy;
Intellect joining Biology in their common struggle with Society told
about in LILA. The MOQ's ally in its struggle with Intellect will be
Society and is the reason why the social - Aretê -era looked like a
paradise lost in ZMM and why the Native Indians' traditions
seemed so Quality-like to Pirsig when came to know them
through Dusenberry. But this is a dangerous temptation we must
be aware of. The MOQ has no business with social value
whatsoever.
IMO
Bo
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