[MD] Stuck on a Torn Slot

[MarshaV]

dmb,

I do not disagree with your reading of ZMM and the examples you offer.  But the MoQ in LILA has gone beyond ZMM, and it offers a hierarchical structure with Intellectual patterns of value on the top level.  You've got here a far more complicated theory.  Static patterns of value were not even considered in ZMM.  I do not think your examples address the MoQ's intellectual static patterns of value.


Marsha   



On Nov 30, 2010, at 12:43 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> A person wouldn't have to read much more than the title of ZAMM to notice that bike repair is Pirsig's central metaphor. There is a moment in the book wherein a torn slot on the head of a screw becomes the center of that central metaphor. The function of that particular screw is to keep the engine's cover plate in place until you need to get inside the engine for repairs. Without that screw, you're totally screwed. And if the slot is torn, the screw won't turn, which means the cover plate can't removed, which means you're stuck. No repairs can even begin until that tiny little problem is solved. All of a sudden, Pirsig says, that little slot becomes the most important thing in the world. It stops the whole show. As I read it, SOM is that torn slot. Until that is taken care of, the repairman can't even get started. In other words, the solution offered by the MOQ begins only after addressing that stuck screw, only after rejecting the "dualistic reason" that has turned "the worl
> d into a stylized garbage dump".
> 
> "The answer is Phaedrus' contention that classic understanding should not be *overlaid* with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. ...We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.  The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue."
> 
> "I think that when this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context.  I've said you can actually *see* this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do.  To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. ... The mechanic I'm talking about doesn't make this separation.  One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work.  What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object.  "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold" - there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop
> .  But in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal dualistic scientific outlook."
> 
> dmb says:
> This is what is means to "care" about what you're doing. Pirsig is not talking about love and affection or anything sweetly sentimental. This type of Zen mechanic is deeply engaged in his work such that the "duality of self and object doesn't dominate [his] consciousness". "When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on", he says, "then one can be said to 'care' about what he's doing.  That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself." And of course this is just as true for any other task, including philosophical tasks. The first thing to do is get rid of that damaged screw, to get rid of the metaphysical assumptions that stop us "taking hold" or "being with it". 
> 
> This grooving mechanic doesn't get to ignore the demands of all those precision parts. Caring is going to include a respect for their purpose and function of each part as well as it's relation to all the other parts. The classical understanding is very much a part of what it means to have a feel for the work. In other words, rejecting SOM is not at all the same as rejecting rationality or conceptual understandings. It's just that we change our relationship to those intellectual quality patterns. We are not longer separate from them. They are not external realities but human creations that help to make us what we are. Even that screw is a work of art, not the starting point of reality, and if that creation no longer serves our purposes we are allowed to drill it out and get a new one. 
> 
> And that's why it is so objectionable to equate intellect with SOM. It would prevent Pirsig's repair job from going forward. That equation says that getting unstuck is impossible. It says the cover plate will never come off again, which means the bike will never be repaired or ridden again. It's says we can't care and intellect itself is condemned to be forever flawed. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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