Hi Gav, Risky:
A cautionary note on the value of pragmatism:
> GAV:
> so pirsig hitches his wagon explicitly only to pragmatism.so where does
> that leave us? firstly let's go a bit further with pragmatism. pragmatism -
> as pirsig sees it - is about the good being the test of the true. this
> implies a lack of ideological rigidity and a high degree of flexibility and
> responsiveness to changing conditions. it seems that pragmatism is
> therefore incompatible with *bureaucracy*. bureaucracy (whether public or
> private) is one big heavy static latch. bureaucracy is a feature of big
> government and big business.
>
> RISKY:
> I agree with the transition to pragmatism too. Well done again.
>From LILA, Chap. 29:
"But the Metaphysics of Quality states that practicality is a social pattern
of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social values since
that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one. The idea that
satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according
to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of satisfaction
and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a
satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it
to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low level static social and
biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution
of truth and. Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been
horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as
anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it."
Platt
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