From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Oct 06 2002 - 20:27:00 BST
Sam, John and all:
I nixed all the Rorty stuff and have only a few comments about the ZMM/Lila
comparison.
ZMM:
"Socrates had been one of Phaedrus' childhood heroes and it shocked and
angered him to see this dialogue taking place.. Socrates is not using
dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it.Phaedrus'
mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil
thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try to
understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but who real purpose is
never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and
enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu,
muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain and control it.
Evil."
ZMM:
"Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer
came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsulated it;
made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid,
immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the
highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis
of all that has gone before."
SAM:
Now, it would appear that, in writing Lila, and developing the metaphysics
of Quality, Pirsig is himself succumbing to the 'metaphysical temptation'.
One clue to this is the changing status of Socrates - in Zen he is the
totalitarian rationalist, using dialectic as a rhetorical device to reject
the Sophists. Whereas in Lila Socrates 'paved the way for the fundamental
principle behind science: that truth stands independently of social
opinion'. Suddenly Socrates is one of the good guys again. Is the Pirsig of
Lila actually a dialectician that the Pirsig of ZMM would condemn?
DMB:
Even though the MOQ was not yet created, I think we can read those ZMM
quotes in terms of levels. The sophists were the height of the social level,
pre-rational mythic thinkers who had a finely honed sense of quality or
excellence at that level. The dialecticians like Socrates and Plato sought
to contain all that with rationality and logic, with intellect. Pirsig is
more hostile to this conflict in ZMM because he doesn't yet see it as the
birth of the fourth level. At the time he saw it as a clash between classic
and romantic quality. Once he realizes that this dialectic is more than just
a rhetorical device out to destroy the sophists, he abandons that
distinction in favor of static and dynamic patterns. When he sees these
patterns in a hierarchy of levels, his hostility subsides. He goes from
wanting to undo it, to wanting only to correct its mistakes.
The problem he has with writing Lila is different. Plato and Socrates were
trying to contain social patterns within intellect, while Pirsig's
metaphysical system is trying to put an intellectual container on higher
Dynamic and Mystic truths. The former is evolutionary while the latter is
degenerate, which is why its so much fun. Umbrella drinks for everyone!
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