[MD] Some historical perspective

[skutvik at online.no]

Dear Marksmit

28 Oct. you wrote:

> I am not fluent in Pirsig's correspondence.  Could you provide an
> example of abstract symbols that cannot be reduced to particular
> experiences?

No that's impossible because the term "symbol" indicates the said 
dualism, as does "subject", "mind" ...etc. why I call them aggregates, 
you can't have one without the other. 

If you want to learn how the intellectual level emerged read ZAMM 
(page 365 in my copy, but that may wary).

    To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some 
    explanation: One must first get over the idea that the time span 
    between the last caveman and the first Greek philosophers 
    was short.  

It was an immensely long process. My philosophy history book start (in 
this respect)  with Thales some 500 years BC, but there surely were 
many more thinkers and much earlier. It also sounds like a 
chicken/egg problem: What came first the "intellectual attitude" or the 
subject/object-loaded aggregates (dichotomies)? According to Pirsig it 
did not start like this at all, but as a search for something fixed in the 
world of flux and continued through Socrates and Plato to Aristotle 
where (says Pirsig) the present day SOM can be spotted. .    

> I know that Wittgenstein tried to build a philosophy on just the 
> opposite.  All propositions can be reduced to elementary truths
> as described in Tractatus.  He later went against this thesis in
> Philosophical investigations, and took a more scientific approach.

Forget all these philosophers, the MOQ leaves them all in the dust.  

> Does Pirsig take into account Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy? It
> is an in depth look at language and reality.

The only philosophers (except the Greeks) that Pirsig refers to is 
Descartes as a milestone on SOM's development, when it reached its 
"mind/matter" stage. After Descartes European - and later - American 
philosophy became ways of tackling the mind/matter enigma and their 
tactics just as many. The next one Pirsig mentions is Immanuel Kant 
and his effort to fend off the frightening consequences of an isolated 
mind (that shifted between being the creator of the universe - idealism 
- and being a side-effect of neural complexity (materialism)  After Kant 
philosophy has idled along with different weird theories, Wittgenstein's 
"linguism" one example. .....until the MOQ came along and pulled the 
rug from under all this SOM-engendered stuff, but like the cartoon 
figures they don't know they have lost their fundament and keep 
walking in the air.

Bodvar