Patrick and all who've posted in this thread:
Define SOM in a few sentences? OK, but some elaboration will follow the
short definition.
If I had the time I'd describe why the other answers missed the mark, but
let me just say that too many of them were tangled up in mysticism and in
epistemological issues. That only confuses the issue, especially if the
question specifically asks for a simple answer. Its not THAT complicated.
SOM isn't just a philosophy. Its a worldview. Its the worldview of the
modern Western world. In a phrase, it is scientific materialism. In a word,
it is modernity. Subjects and objects are treated with differing importance
by the various philosophies within the SOM worldview, but for the most part
it has become a "metaphysics of substance", as Pirsig calls it. This is
huge. This worldview is what killed God and gave us the modern world.
To be more specific, Pirsig uses the term to identify the most basic and
most damaging premise of this worldview, to locate a philosophical
linch-pin. And the roots of it can be traced back to the ancients, but the
modern scientific worldview was established AS A WORLDVIEW only after the
Enlightenment. In any case, Pirsig is not the first or the only one to
consider the inadequacies of scientific materialism. Here's some Ken Wilber,
from his INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY.
"The spiritual dimension, it was solemnly announced, was nothing but a
wish-fulfillment of infantile needs (Freud), an opaque ideology for
opressing the masses (Marx), or a projection of human potentials
(Feuerbach). Spirituality is thus a deep confusion that apparently plagued
humanity for approximately a million years, until just recently, a mere few
centures ago, when modernity pledged allegiance to sensory science, and then
promptly decided that the entire world contained nothing but matter, period.
The bleakness of the modern scientific proclamation is chilling.
...scientific materialism halted the journey at the very first stage and
proclaimed all subsequent developments to be nothing but arrangements of
frisky dirt. Why this dirt would get right up and eventually start writing
poetry was not explained" p55
"..the major philosophers of the Enlightenment were committed to what we
would recognize as an empirical-scientific outlook, in any of its many
forms; sensationalism, empiricism, naturalism, realism, materialism. And
there was good reason for this empirical slant. ... But the inherent
downsides of this approach are perhaps obvious: In its understandable zeal
to correlate all otherworldly "metaphysical" realities with this-worldly
"empirical" realities, modernity inadvertently collapsed all interiors into
exteriors (A disaster of the first magnitude). All subjective truths
(introspection, consciousneess, art, beauty) and all intersubjective truths
(morals, justice, substantive values) were collapsed into exterior,
empirical, sensorimotor occasions. Collapsed, that is, into dirt. Literally.
The great nightmare of scientific materialism was upon us (Whitehead), the
nightmare of one-dimensional man (Marcuse), the disqualified universe
(Mumford), the colonization of art and morals by science (Habermas), the
disenchantment of the world (Weber) - a nightmare I have also called
flatland." p69-70
Its pretty amazing to see the similarities in the solutions offered by
Wilber and Pirsig, but that's another post.
Thanks,
DMB
P.S. I've been on vacation.
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