[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

Bo said:
Can't you understand that there are just two options. 
Either MOQ's intellectual level is 

1) = SOM

or

2) = what SOM means by "intellect", namely the mental 
compartment called "mind" where concepts - ideas - 
thoughts .. are formulated and stored.

Matt:
I want to applaud this formulation as mightily the most 
concise, though it does make more opaque how you can 
conceive yourself as _avoiding_ SOMism, and carrying on 
something different (say, the MoQ, or SOLAQI, or 
whatever).  (And it makes one wonder why you are so 
emphatic that there are only two options.)

(Side note to Squonk: "what SOM means by 'intellect'" 
_is_ what the MoQ means by spov and ipov.  So 
technically, in this instance, Bo wasn't wrong in his 
formulation when you reminded us of the latter fact.  I'd 
also mention that your use of the equal sign was 
ambiguous when alongside Bo's usage.  In (A), the 
"mind" _is_ spov and ipov, but in (B) and (C), you did 
not mean "is," you meant "is _an_."  Bo wants to say, as 
ambiguously in your (B), that SOM _is_ ipov, but if I'm 
not mistaken you, like most, agree with Pirsig that SOM 
_is an_ ipov, rather than the whole kit and caboodle.)

If the MoQ's intellectual level is SOM--(1)--then how 
does that make the MoQ revolutionary, rather than just a 
re-recognition of the fact that SOM is the way the world is?

Whereas (2) is the interpretation in which we recognize 
that though there are certain phenomena that remain the 
same (intellectual, social, biological, inorganic stuff), the 
interpretation of these phenomena is not set in stone, but 
optional--we can arrange them differently if we like.  Like, 
say into the MoQ.

I guess the above rhetorical question about (1) is what 
I've never understood, and might be said to be the 
primary problem facing such a thesis.  Was Pirsig just 
promoting self-consciousness?  What about all that stuff 
_in_ ZMM deriding the paradigm he was excavating, 
deriding materialism, the S/O Dilemma that SOM produces, 
deriding dialectic, deriding the fact that we'll do what is 
reasonable even when it isn't any good?

I guess because I don't understand how your thesis avoids 
some of these problems as a point of Pirsigian exegesis, 
and I don't think I'm alone in this, it isn't clear _how_ we 
can take the thesis seriously until those problems are 
cleared up.  Not without, at least, handing in our Pirsigian 
ID cards.  The distinction between a subject as a 
consciousness and an object as a piece of the world being 
percieved is clearly an important distinction in the history 
of increased articulation of how we are, but that 
recognition is not SOM.

At least, it's not clear to anyone else it is.

Bo said:
The "Greeks" times have been deemed a fundamental 
upheaval by  historians, philosophers, writers, thinkers 
...etc. but no one had interpreted it like Pirsig's SOM so it 
has not reached any mythological status. This is the 
world-shaking revelation of ZAMM and if you see Matt's 
blog as "debunking" it you are even dumber than he is. 
You can mean whatever you want about my SOL .... even 
step on my blue suede shoes ... but ZAMM's on SOM is 
inviolable.

Matt:
This just seems silly.  The notion of "classical Greece," 
as a time of Enlightenment before the "World" fell into the 
"Dark Ages," is a very distinguished European myth with 
a long pedigree.  Even after scholars and intellectuals 
stopped treating Ancient Greece as the Cradle of All 
Things Great, all still consider that time a hotbed of 
cultural change.

My stupid close reading of ZMM and what Pirsig means by 
SOM aside (foolish me for engaging in intellectual 
dialogue), what is weird and strange above is the 
relationship between ZMM as a piece of intellectual 
scholarship and the rest of intellectual scholarship--i.e., it 
creates the impression that you are entirely ignorant of 
any other intellectual scholarship but Pirsig's.  Which I 
know is not true, but it is certainly how you appear most 
of the time.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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