[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:
I suppose we'll lose you soon to fall classes.  A big loss!

dmb says:
Thanks again and yes, classes have already started and I probably should be doing my homework instead of doing this. But we have a little break next week. There are at least three at different schools on the campus but every class in every building will be strictly off limits during the democratic national convention. One of the professors (psychology of religion) told us that our campus is considered to be the world's number one terror target. The weather is fine so I've been biking to class, watching as the site of the convention gets filled up with white tents and giant press banners. This is right in the middle of downtown. As you can imagine, every hotel room is booked and I've never seen so many cops. Its a little weird. Tried to get tickets to Obama's acceptance speech and even though there is room for 80,000 people, I'm only on a waiting list. 

Anyway, the really hard part of getting back into classes and giving up this discussion group is that the first assigned readings are usually relevant to the conversations going on here. Its very, very tempting to stick around and try to share it, to try and do both, at least for a while. This semester is a good example. I was telling Krimel (off site) about an essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty titled, "The Philosopher and Sociology". I thought it illuminated the conversation we'd been having for the last month or so. For whatever its worth, here's what I wrote to Krimel....

Yea, I think we really were talking past each other. Well, to be less generous about it, I think you're flying at the wrong altitude. As I see it, you're saying "look, these are just the facts" because you somehow imagine that I'm not familiar with the facts. But I keep trying to tell you that the facts are not in dispute. Data is data and the MOQ totally accepts it as such. All along, the point has simply been that science does not have the last word on how to interpret those facts. For that you need ideas, not more facts.

And this confusion is complicated by the "fact" that science operates on the myth of objectivity, which is to say the belief that it has no pre-conceived ideas, that it is simply recording the facts. The myth of objectivity, then, is precisely the failure to recognize the ideas as such through which these facts are interpreted. And subjects and objects are the ideas that give rise to the myth of objectivity. In other words, science doesn't see itself as testing the idea of objectivity but as investigating objective reality itself. This is SOM essentialism and there is no way to understand the MOQ in those terms, except as the view it rejects. 

Pirsig began his college career (at age 14) in what would now be called biochemistry and believed science was the royal road to the objective truth. But he soon discovered that objectivity was a myth and was so devastated by this revelation that he flunked out of school. As a friend recently put it, Pirsig (with an IQ of 170) was not familiar with intellectual failure of any kind until that crushing discovery came along. So he worked on the problem for a while, 40 years or so later LILA was published. I mean, I think you have to see that science was Pirsig's first love and the MOQ was born of an effort to get behind it, under it and otherwise explore its possibilities and limits. He has put away his childish scientism but he's still an empiricist with no sympathy for faith or belief in the supernatural. And that's how his philosophical mysticism, which explores the possibilities and limits of intellect, has to be understood too.

To make a long story short, the difference between SOM and the MOQ cannot be decided on the basis of facts simply because they both handle exactly the same facts. The difference is decided on the basis of their ideas. The facts are not in question. Which is better at interpreting those facts? That's the question. When you start answering that question, you'll be flying at right altitude. Then, instead of talking past each other, we'll crash in midair. It'll be spectacular.





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