[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

> Bo has long held the position that Intellect is equivalent Subject/Object differentiation.
> 
> This is the subject of this thread: any thoughts regarding that in light of your current thinking?

No.  Other than Bo isn't very good with history because 
he has a fairly small box everything has to fit into.

I still think the same thing I did when I wrote this from 
a post series with Bo on this subject some years ago: 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/excavating-som.html

Historically speaking, if by "subject" Bo means a 
self-conscious thinker and by "object" he means a 
material thing, then Bo doesn't have a leg to stand on 
in saying the Intellect is S/O and that it began in 
Greece.  Plato was not a SOMist in this regard, and 
neither was Aristotle, and Descartes is generally 
considered to be fairly original on that point of dicing 
reality into res (Latin for "thing") cogitans and res 
extensa.  There are so many ambiguities in the area, 
in fact, that because Bo hasn't teased them out is a 
big reason why not many can understand the thesis, 
let alone get to the point where they think the thesis 
is a good idea (there are a few, of course).  It seems 
simple, but it's not.

While Bo takes relish in the fact that he thinks Pirsig 
went the wrong direction in Lila and he's steering the 
right course out of ZMM, I think it's pretty clear that Bo 
doesn't really get ZMM right either.  That's what the post 
is about.  It's seems clear to me that there is a steady 
movement backwards through time, chasing down the 
Ghost of Reason, from mid-century era philosophy of 
science (the problem of hypotheses), to 18th-century 
modern philosophy (S/O Dilemma), to Ancient Greece 
(rhetoric vs. dialectic).  Pirsig was too historically 
conscious to think that every era or culture manifests 
the same difficulties just the same, and an overzealous 
reductionism just blots out the intricasies of the 
particular problems.  Pirsig was doing a collage on a 
massive scale to try and find a pattern, but it is surely 
the wrong response to pull up the pattern from the 
collage, knock out a few pieces, encase it in lead, and 
hit everybody with it.  I don't know, maybe if it worked 
I'd feel differently, but the big fish Pirsig was after was 
Reason, and there's little reason to think in Pirsig, in 
ZMM or Lila, that that can easily be reduced to S/O 
differentiation.  And chucking what Pirsig thought, there's 
still little reason to think A) materialism--which has to be 
a main idea behind SOLAQI as I understand it--in its 
Greek variety is sufficiently like scientific reductionism, 
which is what the S/O Dilemma is about, and B) that the 
origins of thinking are not only latecoming, but 
restrictively simple in composition.

On the other hand, I haven't been following Bo's 

course over the last couple years.  So, I'm probably 

talking a bit out of school.

I apologize for stumbling into the thread.  It doesn't seem 
very well marked for fidelity, and I apologize, but I hadn't 
really been following it.  I only saw that one post for 
some reason.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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