Fred said:
>Excellent. If Bergson were still alive he might have sued Pirsig for
>plagiarism.
Well, I hope not. In ZMM, the narrator recalls the joy with which Phaedrus
read Poincare. There is Northrop, Whitehead and James. First reading Bergson
(and I have only very little as yet), I was overjoyed. To see two people
with such similar dynamic patterns of understanding the world, both of which
highly appeal to me, brings the feeling "the more the merrier". Only Pirsig
knows where credit for his work is due. I leave that to him, and stay
content with widening my vision on the MOQ through yet -another-
complementary philosopher.
Other crossed paths:
August Comte - "static" and "dynamic" social values. (his words)
Friedrich Nietzsche - "appolonian" and "dyonisian" human ways of life
Ruth Benedict - took Nietzsche's "a" and "d" and applied them to
the anthropological study of personality - and guess in which book?
Yes - "Patterns of Culture", the same one holding our Brujo from the Zuni
culture. Hmm... "classic" and "romantic" understanding...
F.S.C. Northrop - "theoretic" and "aesthetic" - this, P writes, really
started him on his philosophical quest.
David Hume - viewed memory (sq) as occuring "in the wake" of experience (DQ)
G.W.F.Hegel - viewed history as a dialectic movement from thesis to
antithesis to "synthesis" (new, dynamic, better). this movement of history,
which is the (rational) Spirit objectified, is "a motion
towards freedom - the Absolute"
Immanuel Kant - I think P's concept of classical and static reality being
intellectual constructs forever unverifiable outside of the observer comes
directly from Kant. As does all this nonsense on the website about some kind
of MOQ-bastardized copernicanly inverted intellectual "a priori" filter,
which is the only tool we use to know the world. (completely impossible
together with a body-based empiricism, which also gives only half the
picture, to the exclusion of the rest)
Meister Eckhart - when read with Zen Buddhism in mind, gives probably the
nearest to P's apparents values on mysticism. (Don't forget also it was
Peyote by which he was inspired to answer the transcendental abstract
questions it presented to him - --- see! you are not your thoughts!
Carlos Castenada - "tonal" and "nagual" in relation to social and
intellectual. (I haven't read this myself - I think Glove knows it well)
Anyways, we just have to hold up all these slightly differing truths to the
light and pick and paste together those with the highest quality, and when
proper - we must give credit where due.
rich
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