[MD] Mercator/arctic DMB

[david buchanan]

Adrie said:
... Been also extensively reading on the  Bradley/Pirsig/ Huxley issue, and as you know , Huxley was my first literary love ever. I am not clear on Bradley, nor on the Pirsig Bradley interpretation. i am however clear on Huxley, i did all my re-reading and Perennial cannot be merged into the realityprojection of the moq-  I have my doubts on Bradley, due to the phrase from the annotations, do i have to read him? what is your opinion?


dmb says:

I'm a big fan of the perennial philosophy and I think it's compatible with the MOQ. 

As I understand it, the perennial philosophy says that all of the worlds great religions carry the same basic message. The esoteric core of all major religions is in general agreement simply because people from all times and places have had some kind of mystical experience, a form of awareness in which there is no distinctions. This is how Pirsig describes the primary empirical reality, how James describes pure experience and Northrop describes the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. In religious language this is described as being one with the universe, of being one with god, as becoming god, as identification with the father, as Nirvana, enlightenment or as an awakening. The idea is simply that the static forms we call religion are derived from this widely known primary experience.

"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: ..They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past." (Lila 63)


Absolute Idealism also asserts that reality is a unity, a monism, but it paints a very different picture of reality. William James was a long-time rival of both Bradley and Royce and he generally considered Hegelians to be "prigs". He felt the whole idea was too buttoned up and straight laced. He found it suffocating and morally outrageous. In it's most rigid form, Absolute Idealism says that all of reality, from Genesis to the end of history, is the unfolding of the Absolute Mind. (This is not an anthropomorphic God, but we are definitely in the realm of theology here.) This unfolding proceeds in a perfect chain of causality from beginning to end, so that reality is completely deterministic. There is no such thing as free will. Many human bodies will be crushed on "the slaughter-bench of history" but this is all part of the movement toward final stage of perfect knowledge, so what the heck, right? This unfolding is also completely rational, logical and moves in dialectical stages.


Jung thought Hegel was insane. Maybe he had a good point. It seems to be something like the stages of cognitive development projected out onto the field of history. Naturally, he thought his culture and his philosophy was the culmination of everything, that the unfolding of reality had finally arrived and it just happened to land on his doorstep. If you like grandiosity and determinism, Absolute Idealism is just what the doctor ordered. ... It's almost universally considered a dead philosophy, by the way. 







The annotations aren't very long and it's interesting to see how Pirsig reacts. It's definitely worth the effort. It about time I looked at it again.  If memory serves, Anthony McWatt's thesis advisor wanted to know how the MOQ would compare to Idealism and so Ant asked Pirsig what he thought. So, it seems that the annotations were meant to answer that question for a specific reason, namely so Ant could finished his Doctoral Thesis on the MOQ.   		 	   		  
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