[MD] Transhumanism

[Ian Glendinning]

Excellent Matt / Mary

Another counter intuitive strange loop.
Making humility explicit, devalues it.

Making the good "truly" definitive makes it bad / less good.
Love it.

The time has come for meta-meta-physics, methinks.
Ian

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> [Mary Replies]
>> I hear what you are saying, though I don't at the moment remember who the
>> rhetoriticians were vs the dialecticians, or even necessarily where Plato
>> came down on anything (it's late).  I don't have to 'always be right', but I
>> have the right to speak up and if you think I am being overly assertive I
>> refer you to almost any other post by any other person for examples of real
>> acrimony.  There is a double standard. Sometimes I choose to pretend it is
>> not there.
>
> Mary--this is what I don't understand.  I never said you
> have to "always be right."  I was talking about the
> consequences of a philosophical thesis.  You and I differ on
> it, and I thought you were airing out, in a reasonable
> manner, a root of disagreement.  I thought you were
> right: this does appear to be a root disagreement,
> because--as I reconstruct--you want to make humility a
> philosophical assertion (about which may or may not be
> assented to) and I want to leave it a personal virtue.  You
> think that the philosophical assertion is important, I think
> because it leads to personal humility (something along the
> lines of "Pirsig and the Buddha held this thesis about
> humility, therefore their own personal humility was a
> consequence of it").  I think just the opposite happens.  I
> think once one turns it into a philosophical assertion, you
> pave the way for ignoring humility.
>
> But when I opened up this area where it would seem we
> disagree, you thought I was saying _you_ have a
> personality fault, "always be right," or that I didn't think
> you had a right to speak up, or were being overly
> assertive.  Your post was refreshing absent of acrimony
> (despite the fact that expressions of "I hope for your sake
> you grow out of what you think some day" seem naturally
> condescending, but what else is really at stake when we
> engage in the act of persuasion).  I thought I mentioned
> that.  But I do absolutely think that in the long run,
> adherence to your view has more potential to create
> acrimonious people than my view, as counterintuitive as
> that may seem.  And it's for the reason Pirsig laid out at
> the end of ZMM, when you make the Good subservient to
> the True, which is what I think happens when you
> makeover humility into a philosophical thesis.
>
> Matt
>
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