[MD] SOM - do we need it?

[Ian Glendinning]

Amazing Gav, I'm just blogging a piece on having finished Crime and
Punishment, and the line I took from the final page was this one ...

"In place of dialectics life had arrived, and in his consciousness
something of a wholly different nature must now work towards
fruition."

Same message I think.
Ian

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 2:53 AM, gav <gav_gc at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> hi,
>> Interested in the Dostoevsky reference ... just finished
>> Crime &
>> Punsihment (after Karamazov Brothers last year) .... I get
>> the
>> allusions all the time, wonderful stuff, but I'm
>> struggling to pin
>> down specifics. Could you elaborate your point on that ?
>>
>> Ian.
>
> in crime and punishment raskolnikov slides further and further into a sort of schizophrenic tension....on the one hand he sees himself ennobling his position through simply having the audacity to do what one wills...on the other he is entrapped by his own emotional sensitivity which seems to thwart the practical attainment of any material betterment of his condition.
>
> ultimately the tension snaps and he murders a miserly old lady in cold blood... driven by frustration and justified by the essentially amoral world of scientific materialism that informs his musings...by extension, this the western weltanschauung drives society as a whole to more extreme and horrific acts, driven by this same frustration and excused through rationalisation.
>
> fyodor saw it coming....and he foresaw the remedy too: a return to life - to the world. in fact i think the last line of the book is:
>
> "But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of
> a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into
> another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new
> story, but our present story is ended."
>
> replace 'a man' with 'man' and you have the story....
>
>>
>> On 7/28/08, gav <gav_gc at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>> > Pirsig's mission is to replace SOM with MOQ, so
>> why are many on this list reluctant to let SOM go?
>> >
>> > the answer, i believe, is that .
>> >
>> > the intellectual cannot be solely SOM: the MOQ is an
>> idea and it is not SOM.
>> >
>> > to let go of SOM is to let go of the idea of dualism,
>> of solipsism, of the possibility of pure objectivity.
>> instead the subjective becomes partnered with the
>> intersubjective (to follow husserl and merleau-ponty). the
>> intersubjective world - the previously 'objective'
>> world - is the world of phenomenal consensus.
>> >
>> > with the copernican re-ordering of the universe a
>> schism was created: the everyday world of our perceptions
>> was usurped by the idea of the 'real' order of a
>> heliocentric universe. the locus is not with our own
>> body-subject and its being-in-the-world, but with an
>> abstract point of reference. this abstract realm is only
>> accessible by the intellect. in other words reason becomes
>> the sole method of recognising truth - plato's world of
>> forms, christian heaven, and the pre-eminence of (SOM)
>> intellect all presuppose and perpetuate this
>> abstract-phenomenal dichotomy with precedence given to the
>> abstract. in other words the abstract becomes real and the
>> phenomenal becomes epiphenomenal: this is baudrillard's
>> 'simulacrum' or the spectacular reality of the
>> situationists. SOM is part of this worldview and it
>> can't be separated from it. to try and hang on to SOM is
>> to miss the point of pirsig's work.
>> >
>> > the copernican revolution enthroned the sun as the
>> centre of things; this is a paternal standpoint. the earth
>> is the goddess, the sun is god and the human is supposed to
>> be the dynamic union of the two. since copernicus the earth
>> has become merely an object and only god - the male aspect
>> of divinity - is recognised.
>> >
>> > we perceive from earth. our experiential locus is the
>> body-subject - this is the experiential centre of the
>> universe (god is an intelligible sphere whose centre is
>> everywhere and circumference nowhere - cusa). only from this
>> point of view can we esemplastically reconcile the realms of
>> heaven and earth into a dynamic unity.
>> >
>> > if we need more proof of the need for SOM to be
>> superceded we need only look to phenomenology and
>> existentialism. the psychopathological effects of SOM were
>> recognised and predicted by husserl and others (most
>> famously dostoevsky). SOM is the 'disensoulment' of
>> the earth - of ourselves. it is the mechanisation of life
>> and human and it is this that is the meaning of the robot/AI
>> myths - NOT the production of truly intelligent autonomous
>> mechanical beings, but the production of mechanical beings
>> from truly intelligent autonomous ones!!!!!!!!
>> >
>> > so i entreat one and all to stay true to the core of
>> pirsig's work. if you think SOM is okay then you are
>> very sorely mistaken and you should probably go back and
>> read bob's books again...slowly.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >      Find a better answer, faster with the new Yahoo!7
>> Search. www.yahoo7.com.au/search
>> > Moq_Discuss mailing list
>> > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>> >
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>> > Archives:
>> >
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>> > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>> >
>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>> Archives:
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>
>
>      Win a MacBook Air or iPod touch with Yahoo!7. http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/