[MD] Arlo

[david]

Arlo said to Ian:
...Are people brought up in a culture where science and art are not only divorced but antagonistic? Of course. Has 'art' been devolved in our schools by capital interests to a zero-value commodity? Of course. This was the problem space of ZMM.    Rather than normalize or naturalize 'classical' versus 'romantic' modes of thinking, and rather than than trying to invoke faulty pop-psychology to imprint this distinction onto the biological level, maybe you and John should join every one else here in the solution space, where Pirsig's goal was to problematize this artificial distinction-as derivative of SOM thinking- and unite/fuse these two at the basic level.


 dmb says:
Right, there is still plenty of SOM-type thinking among non-philosophers. And it's okay on that level because on that level nobody takes it too seriously. It's common sensical to believe that feelings and values are subjective while true facts are objective. But that's not quite metaphysics or philosophy. In the latter world, there are lots of thinkers who'd agree with Pirsig's complaints about SOM. They'd agree that such a dualism leads to a false picture of who we are and what our situation is really like. I see this all the time, usually among Pragmatists or Buddhist and sometimes both. My only real point here is to say that it IS possible to escape from SOM and MOQers aren't the only ones who see how to do that. Here is a sweet little example. The reviewer seems to get it, the author being reviewed seems to get it and the author quotes two other authors who also seem to get it. Lots of people get it. It's not easy, but it's not magic either. 



Review of "The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism", by Steve Odin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Review by Barry D. StebenIn in Philosophy East & West. Volume 48, Number 4, 1998.

“The locus of the self is therefore neither in the subject nor in the object but in a ‘situation’ unified by pervasive aesthetic quality arising through the valuative transaction between organism and environment.” -- David Hall and Roger Ames in Thinking Through Confucius

http://www.academia.edu/1928535/The_Social_Self_in_Zen_and_American_Pragmatism._By_Steve_Odin._Albany_State_University_of_New_York_Press