Sam and all: I'm just taking up a few points here...
dmb said to Sam: you have interpreted things so that intellect is the enemy of the Good. That is just not at all what Pirsig is saying. Intellect is a species of the Good. ...You've confused Pirsig with Spock the pointy-eared Vulcan. Sam replied: If I have, then most of my concerns are eased. But I DO think that the Phaedrus of LILA has pointy ears, it's true. Likewise, Sam had said earlier in the same post: ...I find the Phaedrus of Lila quite unsympathetic, having massively identified with the Narrator/Phaedrus of ZMM, that I have been driven to explore these questions. And here's a third iteration of the SAMe: ...Phaedrus is basically one dimensional, and intentionally created as such by Pirsig in order to heighten the contrasts between the levels. dmb says: Not only to highlight the differences, but also to depict the problems with intellect. As I see it, Phaedrus isn't one dimensional so much as alienated. He feels strange and beside himself during sex. Rigel thinks he's immoral and subversive. He's exhibiting the ailments of the kind of intellect of the 20th century. Of course, in the end, looking out over Manhattan from his hotel room, he realizes that he's a part of the giant too. He realizes he can stop running from it. And he realizes that picking up bar ladies is a part of life too. He learns to embrace it all. Notice how all three of them come together again as the book closes. A different kind of integration occurs at the end of ZAMM, after he finally lets his son in on the other half, as if Chris needs the ghost of Phaedrus to be part of his dad. Its like the son knows there's something wrong and phony about the suppression of these other figure. But beyond this kind of analysis, I think the spockish version of intellect can't rightly belong in the MOQ. Pirsig's long and sustained attack on SOM attack that very problem too. That amoral scientific objectivity is embodied in Spock's cold logic. Spock is Pirsig's enemy. (I prefer Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard.) He's trying to rescue the intellect from that kind of image. The mad scientist and the nutty professor and the nerd who can't dance are just a few of the many negative dipictions. Some are comical and some are frightening. Pirsig, I think, does a pretty good job of handling the very problem you are complaining about. I think his intellect already is what you want it to be. Mostly. Sam said to dmb: That suggests to me that you are sympathetic to the idea that the 'individual' has a place in the MoQ system even if it doesnt' have any ontological finality (ie it is a static pattern that dissolves into Quality). Fair? dmb says: >From a dynamic point of view, a mystical point of view, reality is a "circle whose circumferance is nowhere and whose center is everywhere." I guess that means each one of us is at the center of eternity. And then even from a conventional, static point of view, we have to accept the concept of individual responsibility and autonomy if we are to exist in the present cultural context without going mad. But the idea of the individual as ontologically primary is rejected. Ayn Rand said, for example, that there is no such thing as society. There are only individuals, she said. This notion of individuality won't work in the MOQ, or to a lover of Wittgenstien for that matter, insofar as individuals are seen as the product of a complex evolutionary history, about which we know very little. To put it in simple MOQ terms, Descartes can think because French culture exist first. But then on the other hand we could say that every part of the MOQ is about the contents of our experience, the varieties of human experience. Oh, I'd say there's more than just a place for the individual in the MOQ, I just think we can to be very careful about what "individual" means. Its actually a highly political word, with loads of baggage and various meanings even within Western culture. But yes, Man is the measure of all things. dmb quoted Pirsig: > "The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving > idea, whereas for the rhetorician it was not an idea at all. The Good was > not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, and > ultimately unkowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." ZAMM 342 Sam replied: I think this is a fair point, but I'm not convinced that the rhetoricians weren't operating at the intellectual level. Think of Kingsley and Empedocles. The point that I thought ZMM was making - and which I very much agree with - is that the transition from one form of society to another (ie the flowering of Greek civilisation) comes before Socrates was on the scene, and that Socrates takes the wrong turn once that system has got up and running. What I think Pirsig argues for in Lila is that Socrates _doesn't_ make the wrong turn. And this is justified by the development of the intellectual level, which is _precisely_ dialectical in nature, or so it seems to me (the manipulation of symbols etc). dmb says: Well, we draw the line at Socrates for reasons of historical convenience, but its not like it happened all at once or because of any one person. He has come to represent the shift because he uses philosophy to question the gods, to question social level values. Now as I see it, we are taken back to that period for two different reasons in those two different books. (And this goes along with what I said last time about Socrates being both a hero and a villian.) In ZAMM he is digging through history to find out how we lost Quality and ended up with a metaphysics of substance. Plato's mistake is seen as crucial. Turning the unknowable and ever changing reality into a fixed and rigid idea was the begining of the end for DQ in the West. Kingsley only goes into detail about that death and makes the same case, that the mystery was turned into and mistaken for an intellectual form, a logical idea, and thereby destroyed. In LILA the task is different. There he is sorting out static reality and the levels. The same era teaches a lesson there too. This is not a contradiction or a shift in roles for Socrates, its just that Pirsig has drawn more than one lesson from that crucial period. Sam said: I like that. I think it ties in with Mark Maxwell's 'sweet spot' imagery as well. But this commits you to a particular understanding of where DQ fits, which I'll come back to below. dmb says: If our understanding of DQ gets too particular then its not DQ, its sq. I think that's the mistake Plato made. But I'm curious to know what you were getting at before you "knackered" out. This cosmic harmony thing commits me to fitting DQ where? As I understand it, we make static patterns out of a reality that is DQ. We spin tiny webs of understanding out of an infinite eternity. So suggesting that it "fits" somewhere stikes me as odd. Its more like everything fits inside DQ. Or so I imagine it. And yea, maybe I ought to give that 'sweet spot' imagery another look. MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_focus/ MF Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_focus follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/mf/subscribe.html
