[MD] The Johnottations

[david buchanan]

Adrie said to John:
Here you deliberately "forgot" a piece, John. The paragraph's end is Mr. Pirsig's concluding sentence, you left it out for obvious reasons
 
This is it, the complete paragraph WITH PIRSIG'S CONCLUDING END SENTENCE recontextualised again.
 
"Where is this identity to be found? At this point Coleridge is at the same door that Phaedrus was at, but he doesn’t have the key of Quality with him. So he answers: 'Only in the selfconsciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation.' What in the world is selfconsciousness of a spirit? But if the spirit is originally the identity of subject and object, it must in some sense dissolve this identity in order to become conscious of itself as object. Ridiculous. Self-consciousness, therefore, cannot arise except through an act of will, How did will get in here? and 'freedom How did freedom get in here? must be assumed as a *ground *of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it'. The spirit becomes a subject knowing itself as object only through 'the act of constructing itself objectively to itself'.  This is the sort of nonsense that has inspired logical positivism."

 "THIS IS THE SORT OF NONSENSE THAT HAS INSPIRED LOGICAL POSITIVISM" (Pirsig, Emphasis is Adrie's)


dmb says:
Yep. This is yet another example of dishonest, selective reading. John wants us to think that Pirsig would accept or endorse these idealistic notions despite the fact that he's right here on record saying these notions are ridiculous nonsense. This is what I complained about yesterday, where the reader's interpretive "skills" are such that clear, explicit statement are completely reversed to mean very the opposite thing.

There's room for interpretation of course but to interpret "ridiculous" and "nonsense" to mean good or right or true is just plainly wrong. 

What really baffles me, is how anyone can do this sort of thing without feeling ashamed or embarrassed. How does John figure that nobody will notice his self-serving editing choices? How does he figure that anyone will read Pirsig to be saying the very opposite of what he is saying? And what kind of arrogance does it take for John to claim that his own thinking is deep compared to Pirsig's shallow thinking? 

It's really depressing.