[MD] Pirsig and Socratic method (a question for Ant)

[MarshaV]

Very beautiful Matt!

 From the first moment I read the following poem, it was mine.


    Yes, I know from where I came,
    Ever hungry like a flame;
    I consume myself and glow.
    Light is all that I conceive,
    Ashes everywhere I leave.
    Flame I am assuredly.

        (Nietzsche, Ecco Homo, The Gay Science)


Marsha



At 07:49 PM 6/16/2009, you wrote:

>Hi Ron,
>
>I don't know about most of what you referred to, but if
>by "Socratic method" you mean something like the
>purpose-driven, question-answer dialectic where only at
>the end do you realize that the "purpose" or goal you were
>being driven to was an aporia ("dead end"), but that
>you've nevertheless been changed significantly by it, then
>yes, absolutely was ZMM, and I might argue Lila, Socratic.
>I think ZMM is fairly certainly a non-didactic didactic moral
>lesson, and I like entertaining the idea that Lila was not at
>all about the Metaphysics of Quality, but rather in the same
>mold as ZMM: the latter broadly for people in a spiritual
>crisis, the former more narrowly for metaphysicians in a
>spiritual crisis.
>
>The best way I've found of putting his general goal in ZMM
>was through Stanley Fish's notion of a "Self-Consuming
>Artifact."  I deployed this in my fanciful reading of Lila (the
>third part of which can be found here:
>http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/prospectus-part-iii.html.
>Here is a closing excerpt in relation to Fish:
>
>----------
>15. In this way, Lila should be read as what Stanley Fish
>
>calls a "self-consuming artifact." A self-consuming artifact
>is one
>that leads you down a path while slowly and
>subtlely calling that path
>into question, before finally the
>path just traveled is consumed and
>burned away, leaving
>the reader in a different place, but no longer
>able to
>follow the path that led him there. And what's more, not
>only
>is Lila a self-consuming artifact, but the book itself,
>both
>by philosophical doctrine and (now) by narrative, is
>a model and
>suggestion for how we should think of the
>"self," the "ego," the
>"subject": we should think of the self
>as a self-consuming artifact.
>The self is a set of static
>patterns we inherit from our culture--our
>self is an
>artifact of culture. As these patterns swim through life,
>
>they consume themselves by dealing with tensions within
>themselves and
>the new tensions of new experiences.
>The self is an artifact that
>consumes itself until we are a
>self who is no longer our old self but
>something new.
>Which, in its own turn, requires a new narrative to
>explain
>how we got there since we've just burned away the old one.
>
>...
>
>17.
>The self is a self-consuming artifact because once
>you've absorbed an
>experience you revise your self to
>include that experience so that that experience is no
>longer the same experience you just had. The story of
>how you got to be you changes as you go along because
>you've
>changed. And if the story of your life is a piece of
>the changing of
>your life, then the story is a ladder to be
>dispensed with once its
>told so that it can be replaced
>with a better story to show how you got
>to where you are
>by the telling of the story.
>
>18. That is the relationship of ZMM to Lila. Lila is a novel
>about ZMM. Lila is to ZMM what the later books of Don
>Quixote are to the early. Lila is about Pirsig, the author of
>ZMM, the creator of Quality. Lila is about a different Pirsig
>responding to a different life situation.
>
>In Fish's magnificent book, Self-Consuming Artifacts, he
>gives us a handle on Pirsig and what he is up to, calling it
>the "aesthetic of the good physician": [quote]
>It
>follows then ... that a dialectical presentation
>succeeds at its own
>expense; for by conveying those
>who experience it to a point where they
>are beyond
>the aid that discursive or rational forms can offer, it
>
>becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment. Hence,
>the title of this
>study, Self-Consuming Artifacts, which
>is intended in two
>senses: the reader's self (or at least
>his inferior self) is consumed
>as he responds to the
>medicinal purging of the dialectician's art, and
>that art,
>like other medicines, is consumed in the workings of its
>own
>best effects. The good-physician aesthetic, then,
>is finally an
>anti-aesthetic, for it disallows to its
>productions the claims usually
>made for verbal art--that
>they reflect, or contain or express
>Truth--and transfers
>the pressure and attention from the work to its
>effects,
>from what is happening on the page to what is happening
>in the
>reader. A self-consuming artifact signifies most
>successfully when it
>fails, when it points away from itself
>to something its forms
>cannot capture. If this is not anti-art,
>it is surely
>anti-art-for-art's-sake because it is concerned
>less with the making of
>better poems than with the making
>of better persons.
>[close quote]
>And what is Fish's first example of this aesthetic? Plato's Phaedrus: [quote]
>In short, the Phaedrus
>is what it urges: "a discourse which
>is inscribed with genuine
>knowledge in the soul of the learner."
>Although a piece of writing
>itself, it escapes the criticism
>leveled at written artifacts because
>it does not exhibit the
>characteristics of those artifacts.
>Specifically, its words do
>not "go on telling you the same thing over
>and over," for as
>a result of passing through them, the reader is
>altered to
>such an extent that if he were to go back they would mean
>
>quite differently.
>[close quote]
>----------
>
>I also tried discussing Pirsig's literariness here:
>
>http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/reading-pirsig-as-philosopher.html
>
>Matt
>
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"He who neglects the present moment throws away all he has."
   (Friedrich von Schiller)