[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[david buchanan]

"Pirsig's annotations on Copleston" (at robertpirsig.org) is source of the quote Bo and Platt asked about. Here's some context, so you can see what "stages" he's talking about and such. This is Absolute Idealism and the "stages" are stages of religion, stages in the realization of the divine All.

The first stage, that of 'objective religion', is dominated by awareness of the object, not indeed as the object in the abstract technical sense of the term, but in the form of the external things by which man finds himself surrounded. [Pirsig: The MOQ would say that  “objective religion” is preceded by awareness of values, as in infants before they learn to distinguish shapes, and in lower biological species such as earthworms which probably do not distinguish objects but do distinguish what is better and worse.] At this stage man cannot form an idea of anything 'which he cannot body forth as an existence in space and time'. We can assume that he has some dim awareness of a unity comprehending both himself and other things; but he cannot [208] form an idea of the divine except by objectifying it in the gods.
The second stage in the development of religion is that of 'subjective religion'. Here man returns from absorption in Nature to consciousness of himself. And God is conceived as a spiritual being standing apart from both Nature and man and as revealing Himself above all in the inner voice of conscience.
In the third stage, that of 'absolute religion', the selfconscious subject and its object, Nature, are seen as distinct yet essentially related, and at the same time as grounded in an ultimate unity. And God is conceived 'as the Being who is at once the source, the sustaining power, and the end of our spiritual lives'. This does not mean, however, that the idea of God is completely indeterminate, so that we are forced to embrace the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer For God manifests Himself in both subject and object, and the more we understand the spiritual life of humanity on the one hand and the world of Nature on the other, so much the more do we learn about God who is 'the ultimate unity of our life and of the life of the world'.  [Pirsig: The MOQ would add a fourth stage where the term “God” is completely dropped as a relic of an evil social suppression of intellectual and Dynamic freedom. The MOQ is not just atheistic in this regard.  It is anti-theistic.]


See, every stage of reality's unfolding is about God and religion, even the most primitive phase wherein "man cannot form an idea of anything". The whole thing is nothing but a divine unfolding. So when Pirsig adds a forth stage where the term "God" is dropped, you're supposed to laugh at how neatly and quickly he disposes of the whole trajectory of the thing. He's saying, politely, this is not philosophy at all. It's just religion, a relic of the social suppression of thought. He's mocking this overtly theistic form of Idealism by suggesting they drop their central term; God. I think it's pretty damn hilarious, actually.