[MD] a-theism and atheism

[Platt Holden]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 6:34 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> Platt said:
> ... In Chapters 22 and 24 of Lila, Pirsig lays out how intellectuals have
> played a prominent role in creating social paralysis. Is it any wonder that
> there's an anti-intellectual crowd? One need only open his eyes and mind  --
> and read ZAMM and Lila -- to understand.
>
> dmb says:
> That conclusion is incorrect. As many have tried to explain, you are
> conflating intellect with a defect. You are confusing the patient with his
> disease. MOQers are supposed to be opposed to SOM, not intellect or the
> grammatical structure of the english language. In short, you're just wrong
> about this anti-intellectual stuff. You're imposing your own attitudes on
> the material and to do that you have to ignore a great deal of what Pirsig
> says about intellect.
>
> As you know from that last time we went through this (Oct 25th) Pirsig
> said:
>
> "...a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over
> social values is absolutely superior to one that does not." (Lila, p.311)
>
> "From a static point of view, socialism is more moral than capitalism. It's
> a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just
> a society that is guided by mindless traditions."
>
> "It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than
> socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less
> moral as static patterns go."
>


Platt
Pirsig speaks of the "paralyzing intellectual system" and DMB presents us
with a perfect example, his inability to write the very next sentence after
"They are less moral as static patterns go." The next sentence
that paralyzes DMB is:

"What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists,
reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door
to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things." (Lila, 17)

Yes, indeed. Denial of what is right in front of one's eyes,  i.e.,
intellectual paralysis.



>
> You should be able to see that intellect and the flaw are two different
> things. Your task is to discover where one concept ends and the other
> begins. You are conflating and confusing the metaphysical assumptions of
> science with intellect itself. This is distinction should be clear in these
> passage from one of your favorite chapters (22) but I'm not holding my
> breath:
>
> "But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that
> science, the intellectual pattern that bas been appointed to take over
> society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has
> no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with
> facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope
> or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never
> find a single moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They
> exist only in your imagination. From the perspective of a subject-object
> science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no
> point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just
> functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy,
> nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder,
> with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals,
> just functions.. Now that intellect was in command of society for the first
> time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to run
> society with?"
>

Platt
Your task is to explain the difference between the metaphysical assumptions
of science and the metaphysical assumptions of "critical thinking" taught in
the hallowed halls of academe.