[MD] Parmenides the Taoist

[david buchanan]

David M posted this link to an essay on Pirsig:
http://www.onlineoriginals.com/showitem.asp?itemID=287&articleID=37

dmb says:
The essay is titled, "Collapse into Silence: Pirsig, Tao, and The 
Parmenides" by Stephen Gallagher.

I was a little bit thrilled by it.

I read some of Peter Kingsley's re-examination of Parmenides in his 
"Reality" a while back. Kingsley basically makes a case that Parmenides was 
a mystic but has been read otherwise for a couple of dozen centuries. I even 
tried to hook this up with Pirsig's reading of these ancient figures in some 
conversations with Sam many moons ago. Gallagher's essay is so much like 
Kingsley in style and in substance that I would have bet money that Kingsley 
was the author. Gallagher is some kind of Kingsley impersonator or 
something. Its a bit spooky. Anyway, Gallagher's essay knocked my socks off. 
It was a dream come true. It was like somebody did my chores for me - for 
free and without being asked.

Did anybody else have a similar reaction or otherwise read it?

I wonder what Matt would make of the appearance/reality distinction as 
Gallagher has it? It looks to me that Parmenides refuses Plato's dialect 
trap for the same reason Pirsig does and that both of them are opposed to it 
for the same mystical reasons. Basically, they're both opposed to Plato's 
attempt to encapsulate Quality, to convert it into a fixed concept. And the 
appearance/reality distinction - the Plantonic version rather than the 
post-Positivist modern version - is born in this same bogus move.

In his refusal to accept only dialectical knowledge as knowledge, I see 
Matt's version of Rorty doing the same thing as Plato.

Anyway, I just wanted to encourage MOQers to take a look and say thanks to 
David M.

Thanks, David M.

dmb

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