[MD] Bo's right! For all the wrong reasons? (Part2)

[David Thomas]

Hi Krimel,
> 
> [Krimel]
> Excellent set of posts here, Dave. I have been beating away at most of this
> for a long time but you have summarized it all very nicely.
Thank you.
> I also agree strongly with what you said about the relationship of ZMM to
>Lila. ZMM is almost universally regarded as the better book.
After nearly 15 years and countless hours of head banging I finally came to
the conclusion that the MoQ just has too many problems. Since I just
recently came to this conclusion, from a philosophical point of view I'm not
sure how much is salvageable from either book.
>I see it in almost every
> bookstore I wander into and while Lila is there sometimes it is nowhere near
> as ubiquitous. 
I always make it a point to check out where they are shelved in my local
Barnes and Noble. They're always restocking and moving things a little based
on shelf space. Both are always in or around "Oriental Religion" but you
will sometimes find them the next shelf over in "New Age-Occult." Last time
it was four copies of ZaMM in "Oriental Religion" and one forlorn copy of
Lila at the bottom of the "Christianity" section. What a hoot!
>I would almost recommend the opposite of what Paul Turner
> suggested. He claimed that since Lila was later than ZMM, whenever there was
> a conflict Lila should be regarded as taking precedence. I think Lila is
> full of errors from the making of up of James quotes but the failure to
> understand the basics of evolution.
> 
> Here is an example of that which I haven't heard mentioned before. Take
> Pirsig the social critic. He spends a lot of Lila talking about Victorians
> and hippie and the radical social transformations of the '60s with very
> little mention of civil rights and feminism. These were far more profound
> and radical changes in the American way of doing things than the peace and
> love anti-war movement of the hippies. It is hard to take serious any
> analysis of trends in American culture of the 1960's that ignores civil
> rights and feminism especially in a treatise on morality.
Right. What about the Weatherman,SDS etc ? I recently heard somewhere that
there were more acts of terroristic bombing and arson during that period
than any other in American history. Pirsig, no comment.
> I particularly agree that to the extent that Pirsig is trying to lay an
> intellectual foundation for morality, he fails utterly. He doesn't even
> address Mill and doesn't talk at all about Kant's ideas about morality other
> than to call them ugly. He doesn't mention at all any contemporary thinkers
> in morality. How are we to take this seriously?
Right, just this morning before read your post I Googled "moral metaphysics"
in addition to Kant and many, many others I found this:
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/cunningham.html
Any reference to Dewey's "Natural Metaphysics" or the whole class of similar
work by others in Lila?

Or this which I recently caught in a reread of "The Matrix and Philosophy"

"...dialectics is a theory of evolution or progress. It is based on
the...idea that the engine that drives motion and change...is the struggle
of opposing forces. Someone who thinks dialectically thinks the of the world
as a constantly evolving place, a place that life is never still. Moreover,
a dialectician (which Pirsig forthrightly claims to be) thinks of the world
as space in which oppositions between everything from individual molecules
of matter to complex ideas are striving to reach new levels of consciousness
and organization."

Cross out "consciousness" and is this not a pretty good synopsis of the
system MoQ proposes?  Now the other shoe. The lead in to this paragraph
before the first dots say:

"The theoretical foundations of Marx's thought are derived, in part, from a
novel reading of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's "dialectical"
philosophies. In Marxist thought,..."

Why no reference to Marx, and only these two for Hegel, in Lila?

> A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his idea
> of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower of
> Aristotle. Psychology Today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone was
> right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the comparison
> with James interested him most because it looked like there might be something
> to it. (Lila 152)

> He didn't like Hegel or any of the German idealists who dominated philosophy
> in his youth precisely because they were so general and sweeping in their
> approach.(Lila 152)

The world wide consequence of Marxist definitively answers that question.

The Matrix maybe an apt metaphor for Lila.

Dave






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