Hi Angus,
You wrote:
> Well his exact words were in German....so your quote,
> to be Pirsigian, would be to say this is the
> translation by xYz and I think it is a higher quality
> version than Angus', if that was your point.
Indeed they were! I'm so used to studying them in the English that I forget
his 'official' writings were still in German. I wasn't actually trying to be
snooty about different translations. My purpose was two-fold - 1. to point
out the difference between 'mind' and 'intelligence', because I don't think
they're identical (of course I'll now have to go back to the original German
to see which word W actually used!) and 2. to give the reference so that
John B could chase it up if he so chose.
> If you could go in depth on depth grammar, that would
> be really, in a "60s" ish sense, deep. Obviously,
> Wittgenstein talks about more than a utilitarian
> notion of language... I think it would help with
> Pirsig, at least I'm (language) game. Maybe a new
> thread? A full treatment of language and Pirsig, at
> least recently anyway, has not been heard. You might
> be the right person for that with this depth grammar
> thang.
I've had in mind for a while to do a substantive post on language and
mysticism (related to William James as well as Wittgenstein), because Pirsig
is quite good, I think, in how he treats mysticism, and James - and
consequently Wittgenstein - aren't quite so good (I don't think Pirsig
really sees them as opposition, in the same way that, for example, SOM
thinkers are opposition). There's something here that needs teasing out,
which I shall do when I get a chance. Quite a few posts recently have
touched on this, and I need to go back through them (I've been away from
home for about two and a half weeks, and I'm spending this weekend catching
up!!)
> That's my running point: Wittgenstein predates Pirsig.
Hmmm. My sense was more that they were climbing the same mountain from
different sides, the mountain in this case being the rejection or reappraisa
l of scientific/modernist thinking. But they are really quite different in
how they climb the mountain, IMHO. And of course, the range of their
thinking in both cases diverges from this common interest in quite different
ways. Wittgenstein is very much a product of turn of the century Vienna, and
pessimistic about culture, whereas Pirsig is (a product? a part?) of the
1960's counter-culture, and optimistic. Amongst other differences... I
think they would both agree that the real motorcycle is the self though.
> One thing I am interested in, is, where is Pirsig
> original.
To my mind Pirsig is original in that he 'shows the fly the way out of the
fly-bottle' from within the Western scientific/rational mindset. I don't
think that has been done before. Certainly Wittgenstein does something
similar, but the jump he makes is much larger and at a much higher level of
abstraction. They're compatible, but not identical. I have a lot of sympathy
with Pirsig when he says, quite late on in ZAMM (I can't remember the exact
phrase) something about the post-Phaedrus personality deciding to leave the
high country of the mind, while he wrote down to earth stuff, and that being
worth just as much. It's not that one is better than the other; both are
needed. As for people like Heidegger, to my mind he is still within the SOM
mainstream metaphysical tradition, whereas Derrida is a rhetorician. Neither
(IMVHO) are any of them anywhere near as artistically satisfying as I find
Pirsig, especially in ZAMM. I don't think we can separate out the content of
what Pirsig says in ZAMM from the way in which he does it, and *that* to my
mind is why he counts as a profound thinker, and original. I just find ZAMM
tremendously satisfying, at every level. Have done ever since I first read
it at age 18, before spending three months wandering around the States on
greyhound buses with lots of time to spend thinking about it.
> But, the metaphysical split of the MOQ is NOT....
His language and mode of expression are original (and therefore able to be
dynamically assimilated), even if the central parts of the truths he
expresses are timeless.
> Quality (God) = DQ (Holy Spirit) + sq (Jesus)?
> Quality = late Wittg.(depth grammar) + early Wittg.
> (picture theory)?
Not sure where you're going with that stuff. I do interpret the tradition of
the church as static quality, of different degrees of utility (Hi Wim!) and
the Spirit as a form of DQ (so far so orthodox and Trinitarian). But a) I
wouldn't talk about that a lot in this forum ;-) and b) I don't think it's
possible to map Wittgenstein onto the MoQ. He's a useful reference point
though.
Sam
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