[MD] still going?

[david]

Dan said:

As per the final paragraph... how can knowledge be objective? What I
see the author doing here is taking the subject and object as literal
entities existing independently forever apart. The trip-up occurs when
subject and object touch (in a metaphoricalish philosophical sense of
course since if subject and object are simply terms denoting a
worldview they [as independent entities] can never touch) and the
known becomes the knower, or the object becomes the subject.

This seems to nullify the argument. But if you (or anyone) have a few
minutes to spare and fancy a chat, please let me know what you think.


dmb says:

Hmmm. I don't think the author of The Guidebook to ZMM is taking subjects and objects literally. He's explaining how ancient and modern philosophers treated them - and that could be described as "literally". But what's more interesting, I think, is the difference between the ancients and the moderns. This difference helps us understand what Pirsig was doing, which was neither ancient (Aristotle) nor modern (Kant) but more like Nietzsche's view. 

Just as "the Tao, the unnameable One, gives rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, yin and yang," so it is with "Quality, the unnameable One, [which] gives rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, subject and object. Quality is neither subject nor object but is the ground of both and permeates both". I think yin and yang, like subject and object, are secondary creations and are among the nameable things, so this differs from the claim that subject and object are primary, differs from the claim that they are literally the starting points of reality.  

DiSanto thinks there "is a genuine parallel" between the yin-yang polarity and the subject-object polarity but I'm not so sure. I'd only go so far as to say it's an interesting idea that's worth thinking about. And it does help us make sense of the difference between the ancients and the moderns. The ancient tendency to think of knowing primarily as a kind of receptivity meant that the active, shaping role of the knower was largely unnoticed. But after Kant it changed so that the subjective mind imposes its thought categories and thereby takes an active role in shaping the world as we know it. 

But the MOQish answer comes just one page after the parts you quoted; on page 117 of the Guidebook to ZMM: 

"...the question arose, Why do human beings impose categories upon things in the process of knowing them? Nietzsche's answer, which has resonated throughout the 20th century, was that human beings are not really interested in knowing things but in making them amenable to their own desires and needs. Underlying and permeating the human desire to know is a 'will to power,' a drive toward self-expansion and self-assertion. With knowing thus reduced to willing, it became easier and easier to talk about human beings, in their knowing activity, as not just shaping but even creating their world. Phaedrus, for example, said that we 'create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it'."


Like Phaedrus and Nietzsche, the Pragmatists also insist that we create reality according to human needs and practices. The mistake of idealist and materialist alike, John Dewey said, is that they confer existential status to the products of our reflection. In other words, the subjectivists and the objectivists both make the mistake of treating our creations as if they were literally real. But Pirsig and the Pragmatists are saying that subjects and objects are among those products of reflection, are among the things we've created. In the MOQ we'd call them intellectual static patterns, which are derived from Quality.


Thanks for raising the issue.


Dave