[MD] question: MOQ, Pirsigism, passionate emotion

[david buchanan]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 12:37 PM, MR.Brown wrote to all:

 ..."Almost every discussion of Pirsig, ... that I've seen eventually resembles the Church of Reason intellectualizing criticized so adeptly in ZAMM. And what I have not yet seen, ever, is an expression of passionate emotion. There's obviously passionate emotion in ZAMM, and I've always been grateful that RP touches sexuality in L - so where's the expression of this passion in those who have been influenced by him? Am I missing it? What's the subjective importance of this writer to those who love him?


dmb says:

As I see it, Pirsig's aim is to expand rationality, to fully admit human interests and feelings as important and necessary factors in construction of our beliefs and philosophies. And the main idea behind this expansion is to reverse an age-old problem, namely the subordination of everything else to reason. William James calls it "vicious intellectualism". Neither one of them are anti-intellectual like some slack-jawed hick, of course, but they both think that ideas are not to be worshipped, that they are great and good only to the extent that they serve life. Laughter, tears and nookie are part of life too, but Pirsig has written two philosophical novels. He's not opposed to intellectualizing and in his second book he says intellect is the highest and most moral level of static quality, subordinate only to DQ. Of course, artistic or intellectual creativity is not the same as sexuality or passionate emotions and I think the expansion of rationality would involve more subtle and refined sense of what's attractive and exciting on that higher level. Elegant, powerful, inspiring ideas, you know, - and not hot bodies or whatever. This is the lesson about Lila, right? Intellectually she's nowhere, socially she's pretty far down the scale and biologically she's fading fast. She's nobody, practically an animal. She's breaking up, about to change, and it's a good thing too because she can't get much worse. It's gonna be death, the nut house or, if she's lucky, church.

No, Pirsig doesn't advocate regression to the lower levels. He's not anti-intellectual so much as he's opposed to attitudes of objectivity, to the idea of objective truth, to the notion of disinterested observation and the dry old voice of brittle logic. Instead, he says that Man is a participant in the creation of all things, that our ways of thinking and talking have always served human needs and interests and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. We carve out everything, James says. It is in that sense that rationality gets expanded by including the affective domain. This means the church of reason is reformed, not demolished. 

And personally, nothing seemed worth doing until I decided to go back to school to study philosophy. I wanted to be passionate about something but everything seemed boring. Then I met McWatt and Pirsig and it dawned on me how much that would be. That was six years ago, I just finished school and it surely has been fun so far.