[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Dave,

Differences in Pirsig's philosophy as presented in ZAMM and later in
Lila are interesting to inquire about, but I take issue with your
MOQ-1 and MOQ-2 designations. There was no such thing as the MOQ upon
publication of ZAMM.


Pirsig in Lila:
"But six years later, after publication of a successful book, most of
these problems had disappeared.  When the question arose of what would
be the subject of a second book there was no question about what it
would be. Phædrus loaded his old Ford pickup truck with a camper and
headed back into Montana again, to the eastern plains where the
reservations were.At this time there was no such thing as a
Metaphysics of Quality and no plans for one.  His book had covered the
subject of Quality.  Any further discussion would be like a lawyer
who, after swinging the jury in his favor, keeps on talking and
talking until he finally swings them back the other way again.
Phædrus just wanted to talk about Indians now.  There was plenty to
say."

Dave:
>But he knows it! After the last instance of ³intellectual² in ZaMM he says,
>The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he
>has been doing has been a fool¹s mission to begin with.²

>Does he abandon the ³fools mission?² No. Jump shift from the undefined
>Quality-Romantic/Classic split of ZaMM, add another 15 years of grinding
>intellect to Lila. Low and behold what do we find positioned near the top of
>the heap, just a dynamic blink away from pure Quality? The intellectual
>level!

Steve:
This all gets clarified in Lila if you take the reason that Pirsig
criticizes in ZAMM to refer to reason based on SOM premises rather
than intellect in general. It is a particular wrong turn taken by the
Greeks and epitomized in the positivists that is problematic for him
rather than intellect as it has always been at all places and times.
If it were not so, then how could he mount an intellectual attack on
all of reason?

Pirsig in ZAMM on the corruption of reason:
"I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the
medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall
off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think
this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of
falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There’s a
very close analogue there.

"But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of
conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the
experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of
topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in
irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and
the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to
handle what they know are real experiences."

"I’m not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is
sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You’ve never
had to understand it really. It’s always been completely bankrupt with
regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root
experiences I’m talking about. Some people still condemn it because it
doesn’t make ‘sense.’ But what’s really wrong is not the art but the
‘sense,’ the classical reason, which can’t grasp it. People keep
looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art’s more
recent occurrences, but the answers aren’t in the branches, they’re at
the roots."

....

"He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it
as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the
ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic
technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to
be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality,
and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among
the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the
tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do
what is "reasonable" even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of
the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in
pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and
Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and
Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back
then."


Steve:
So the problem is not reason as such, it is Quality subordinated to
reason. In the MOQ, reason is properly subordinated to Quality. Even
though it is the highest static good it is subordinate to DQ.



Dave:
> Was there any doubt that many attracted to ZaMM¹s MoQ-1 would feel betrayed?
> I think to some degree much of conflict we see here is between those who are
> more romantically biased vs those who are more classically biased.

Perhaps, but it is also a misunderstanding about what Pirsig means by
metaphysics.

Best,
Steve