[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Andre Broersen]

Bodvar to Ian:

I have done nothing but debate, but its water on geese backs. The
SOL point is that SOM was the intellectual level (before the MOQ
revealed its true role) In LILA Pirsig writes:

     Or, within historical time, the day Socrates died to establish the
     independence of intellectual patterns from their social origins. .

Andre:
This reinforces my quotation in the rest of this issue of posts:Pirsig writes:
If Rigel identified Phaedrus with this intellect vs society code (ie SOM)...he certainly picked on the wrong person'.

The point is that all the hard-hearted have been overawed by this notion that Mr.Pirsig's most brilliant insight was the revelation of 'reality' as SOM. But by the time he had identified (or rather classified) this he was already steeped in moral patterns. Please remember that he only rejects the S/O analysis because it rejects (or doesn't recognize) values i.e morality.

The MOQ accepts all existing (SOM derived)knowledge. And all you die- hards keep on referring to this diagram in ZMM which, as Pirsig points out in Lila, has been superseded. Now THAT is the brilliance of Pirsig...identifying the existing SOM assumption 'structure' and at the same time improving it, expanding it, to include the most fundamental of categories, the oldest IDEA in the world: Quality.

Bodvar:
Need I spoon-feed you weak-interpreters? (*) In a ZAMM context
Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Aret? past, here
he is said to represents the intellectual level's independence of its
social origin  (all levels have their origin in the former level).Without
resorting to smoke-screens, how is this glaring fact explained?

Andre:
Phaedrus stated that with Aristole the SCIENTIFIC understanding of reality was born. BUT!!! Was arete killed in the process? It was killed in the process only by the scientifically minded! And, as Pirsig reminds us in Lila, to what extent is science 'independent of society??? He says quite unequivocally: it is not. And, if you look only slightly into the works of either James, Northrop or carefully read Pirsig, you will notice that the IDEA of arete has never left 'mankind'. For examples I refer you to Africa,East and South East Asia, Russia, Europe, Australasia... etc. And to put the icing on the wonderful cake, Mr. Pirsig found it in the New World as well: America!

Pirsig's brilliance lies in the fact that this IDEA can be and is intellectually proven and defended, scientifically proven and defended, religiously defended, mystically defended....................... even by little children...because it is the oldest idea known to mankind....it is in our bones, our sex, our hearts and our brains. It is in our total constitution: DQ/SQ.

I have never really understood the idea of a strawman but I get the strong feeling that the SOL is a strawman-and-a-half. It is a still-born intellectual constuction.