[MD] Was Pirsig prescient or what?

[ian glendinning]

Sorry Platt, need to separate issues.
(My opinion of you is irrelevant to the point - I just can't resists
the digs in your case - a nasty habit I've developed.)

The point where you make the mistake is in the "entirely", (having
just impressed me with the "not always" elsewhere - oops there I go
again).

The idea that things were going to the dogs is perennial.
Pirsig didn't invent that. James and Northrop make reference to that
fact too, the fact that it is perennial, not the fact itself.

The idea that western culture had a misplaced belief in the concrete
objectivity of things, with human mind etc as something entirely
separate (and maybe even mystical) "SOMism" for short is hardly new.
Pirsig didn't invent that either.

But I'm a big admirer of Pirsig's originality still, why ...

Because he syhthesised a wonderfully prescient neo-Darwinian
evolutionary model of how "everything" in the world works (the MoQ)
AND he based it on the dynamic quality of interactions as the more
fundamental view of "things". There, his synthesis, and choice of
Quality, was original. Of course the order of all the words he wrote
in two captivating books was original (and effective) too.

But the whole point you made in the quote was not "entirely" original.
Sorry to harp on yet again, but there are middle views here.
Ian


On 11/3/06, pholden at davtv.com <pholden at davtv.com> wrote:
> Quoting ian glendinning <psybertron at gmail.com>:
>
> > Unfortunately Platt is one of those I consider trapped by that
> > domination, and appears to see only non-intellectual pre-existing
> > moral patterns, cast in stone by US Conservatism.
>
> I say you're trapped in SOM with your constand harping about the middle ground.
> So there.
>
> > What Platt ignores in "Pirsig's Prescience" is that the idea wasn't
> > entirely new with Pirsig, it has been around for millennia (as Wiliam
> > James records). The world has always been seen "in our time" by
> > commentators as "going to hell in a handbasket" for this reason.
> > Pirsig's originality was in the MoQ framework, and in writing a decent
> > book or two to widen awareness of that fact.
>
> Pirsig's explanation of the decline is an entirely new idea, something
> I didn't ignore in any way whatsoever. How do you come up with this stuff?
>
> Platt
>
>
>
>
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