[MD] e: Reading & Comprehension

[Platt Holden]

When someone starts to question another's motives, you know he has lost the
argument.

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:

> [Andre]
> I apologize for having been abrupt and terse Marsha when you asked for full
> quotes plus explanation. A summary you will find in Anthony's PhD. More
> stuff, as said, in LILA and the LC.
>
> [Arlo]
> In the years I've been here, this impasse has been insurmountable. What I
> find interesting is that no other "level" is so assaulted, so denigrated, so
> demonized, as the "awful" intellectual level. By casting it as "just SOM",
> it is forever condemned as an "obstacle" in an otherwise clean trajectory to
> harmony. Rather than expanding rationality, as was Pirsig's goal, we have
> his highest moral (static) level reduced to a incurable disease in the
> silent, harmonic landscape of "inorganic-biological-social" bliss.
>
> What has been interesting over the years is to witness the psychology
> behind this. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Bo's SOLAQI seems to
> be an attempt to place "Western Culture" as the morally dominant worldview,
> and reduces all non-Western worldviews to "social". That is, "we" (Western
> cultures) are "intellect",  non-Western cultures are "just social", and so
> our superiority can be claimed. Platt, on the ironic other hand, demands
> intellect be reduced to SOM as a way of causally dismissing "intellect" as
> broken or inferior, it becomes just another "Boogeyman" in an otherwise
> tiring and cliche-ridden anti-intellectual crusade. Marsha, although this
> will likely draw her ire, has probably the best intentionality at dismissing
> "intellect" to promote a more artistic, "merry prankster" approach to life.
> What I think she misses is that it was the malady of a subject-object
> primacy within intellect that the MOQ was attempting to cure, it is an
> expansive philosophy, not a condemnational one. It is a uniting of
> classical/romantic approaches, not a dismissal of one and a championing of
> the other. The Buddha rests just as comfortably in semiotics as in
> gardening.
>
> But then my own psychology says intellect is worth saving, there is a great
> value in it, and I think Pirsig's placement of it as the highest moral order
> shows he feels similarly. The MOQ is not a "burn down the universities"
> philosophy, it is a "reclaim the universities" philosophy. It does not
> condemn "science", it saves it. It does not dismiss rationality, but it
> expands its power. As DMB pointed out, the goal of the MOQ is beautiful
> science and intelligent art. The SOL view offers us neither.
>
>
>
>
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