Dear Rick,
thanks for your answer.
RICK:
> "This interpretation is taken to a sublimely silly height when Pirsig
> tries to extrapolate it to give new meaning to the comments made by
Indians
> after hearing that Phaedrus was good friend of Dusenberry, they say, "He
was
> a GOOD man." Pirsig quips: "The Indians didn't see man as an object to
whom
> the adjective 'good' may or may not be applied. When the Indians used it
> they meant good is the whole center of experience and that Dusenberry, in
> his nature, was an embodiment or incarnation of this center of life."
Thus,
> if "good" is being used not as a description of Dusenberry, but rather, in
> the fashion that Pirsig describes, then the fact that Dusenberry was kind
to
> Indians and helped them out was irrelevant to the use of the word. Had
> Phaedrus shown up and said that he was a good friend of General Custer,
the
> Indians presumably would have said the same thing, since Custer was, just
as
> much as Dusenberry, an "embodiment or incarnation of this center of life."
> If not, and if the use of the word is dependant on the character of the
> person in question, then it's a description... an adjective. If so, and
the
> character of the person in question is irrelevant to the use of the word,
> then 'good' has lost its meaning as it can be equally applied to anyone
from
> Hitler and Bin Laden to Gandhi and Martin Luther King."
Indeed. A thing that has no value does not exist, he also writes, so it is
correct to state that according to the MOQ even Hitler and Bin Laden have
value (are good). He is just trying to state that instead of simply
attaching an adjective (a definition) "Good" or "Bad", "Sane" or "Mad" to
Hitler, Bin Laden, Gandhi, M.L. King, Phaedrus, Lila.... we should try to
investigate the reasons for they are what they are.
Osama is not a bad guy who pops out solitary in the Arabian desert. If he is
the best terrorist on the earth, it is thanks to a very complex process of
relations. Evidently, somewhere there have been conditions so that a lot of
people have contributed to the idea that it was good to be a terrorist. It
is obvious we have to catch him and his gang, and it is equally obvious that
in order to prevent such things we have to understand why someone decides it
is good to kill >3000 innocent human beings. I fear we could discover we
are (maybe even involuntarily) part of the process. It is not the man who is
good or bad, it is the process of quality seeking that creates a pattern of
behavior we know as the man.
Then, it is IMHO probably true that it is a trick the statement about the
Indians using good as a noun rather than as adjective. I can't speak the
Sioux dialect, sorry, and I'm hardly fighting with English... but I bet that
Indians use the "good" adjective too.
> If Pirsig means what you say he does (and I believe 100% that he
does),
> he hasn't actually expanded the meaning of the word "good" at all; Not one
> bit!!! Rather, he has created a homonym, a word that is spelled and
> pronounced like another word, but completely distinct in meaning.
Pirsig's
> 'Good' (the groundstuff of the universe) and the traditionally defined
> 'Good' (the adjective and its related noun) have no more in common than
> 'wake' (an Irish funeral) and 'wake' (the trail of a
> boat) ---[best example I could come up with on short notice]. The are
> spelled and pronounced alike, but that's where the similarities end....
> Pirsig could have used any word, or made up any word, the fact that he
> choose the letters 'g-o-o-d' looks to be a coincidence as his definition
> seems to have absolutely nothing to do with good(adj).
>
But partly that's what philosophers do. They use old words to bear new
meanings . Just think of Plato's ideas ("Eidos" was simply the Greek term
for image). The history of philosophy is full of examples like that.
I don't think he has randomly chosen four letters. And he was not trying to
expand the meaning of the word "Good". Quite the contrary. He was trying to
explore the inexplicable using the words he had available. He used Quality,
Value, Good as he thinks that these terms are closer to the big "?". He
thinks that these terms can better explain us the kernel of reality...
better than Idea, Substance, Being, Meaning, God, Soul, Truth, Tao or
whatever else.....
of course, he could be wrong. As well as me.....
Ciao,
Marco
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