John B/ Denis P/ Maggie H/ and Group
John wrote:
> Regarding my accusation of fascism in Ch 22 of Lila, I stand by it.
> Convince me otherwise. Regarding the Giant, Pirsig says, "For the
> moment the towers of the World Trade Center seemed to have won the
> race upward but those other skyscrapers seemed not to know it. All of
> them together were no longer just buildings or part of a city, but
> something else people didn't know they could be. Some kind of energy
> and power that wasn't anything planned seemed to constantly surprise
> everyone at how great it all was. No one had done this. It had just
> done itself. The Giant was its own creation." (Ch 28) ...........etc.
To be honest I have never liked the Giant observation of LILA and
have criticized it before. After I saw your post I tried to find my old
messages (it's not easy to get one's mental gears in reverse) but to
no avail Anyway you prove my hunch, but please understand,
here's P. writing and rewriting (when I first heard from him he said
that the new book was complete but needing some revision ... and
it took another ten years before it was published) finally he did not
know what to keep and what to throw away, think of how many
"asides" he may have jettisoned.
I seem to remember that Margaret Hettinger expressed a dislike of
it. Is that correct Maggie if you still receive?
Denis comments your post:
> While I agree that Pirsig didn't make such a good job of defining the
> social level of his metaphysics, he didn't make the mistake of
> confusing social values with an agregate of individual organisms. As
> you'll remember, each level is made of patterns of values, but those
> values are NOT the same. Inorganic values are different from
> biological, social or intellectual values. These are four very
> distinct worlds, only linked at each stage of development by a thin
> thread of "machine code". DNA for I/B, nervous system for B/S,
> Language for S/Int (last two are proposed by me).
..snip
You will receive the Nobel Price in Philosophy as soon as it is
constituted :-) Otherwise you make a good job of defending the
Giant metaphor and are right at all points, maybe it was just this
passage (from LILA) that went so badly with me:
> > "When societies and cultures
> > and cities are seen not as inventions of 'man' but as higher
> > organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war and genocide and
> > the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible."
> > "This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating
> > something better than any biological organism could by itself
> > achieve."(Ch 16)
"Higher organisms" seems to indicate that everything takes place
inside the biological level, much like the trite wailing about national
states as evil structures. Many thinks highly of this idea believing
that it is the essence of the social level of the MoQ (f.ex. the
harangue that Oisin delivers) but this is NOT the way that Social
Value is to be regarded. In LILA Pirsig repeatedly describes the
improvement that this level means and what biological
"vicissitudes" it releases existence from ... but all of a sudden it's
a nightmare: Incongruous with the rest IMO. OK, a city may be a
social pattern, but New York City least of all a typical such, so
dominated by intellect that the social part is almost invisible. All in
all the NYC stay spawned many sombre thoughts with Phaedrus -
obviously he is no big city lover.
The fascist deduction from the Giant metaphor eludes me
completely, and the "consciousness" of the various levels (from P's
remark about ......an intelligence of its own) seems to be a great
hang-up with John. I must point to my effort to oust this arch-SOM
notion from the MoQ, it's poison there and possibly the reason you
never seem to get it right ;-)
Bo
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