From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Dec 21 2002 - 23:57:52 GMT
Sam, Mari and all:
Excuse me for butting in, but a good chunk of this is relevant to our
"systematic" discussions, so I cut it out and moved it over.
Sam summed it up:
In the Platonic path, the intellect is dominant.
In the Christian path, surrender of the will to God is key.
Sam added:
(Christianity is not about the abandonment of intellect. It is about
surrendering the intellect - and the intellectual products like our ego and
the deadly sins that go with the desire for ego-preservation - to a higher
power.)
Then Sam drove it home with:
To return to my militant atheism: it was a manifestation of the mainstream
of our present culture, in which the modernist project of triumphant
Reason - atheistic, self-sufficient, controlling, technocratic, inherently
totalitarian - has largely succeeded in eviscerating the Christian
alternative. As I am, temperamentally, an intellect-dominated person, that
Modernist idolatry took deep root in my understanding. Although I would not
have had the words to describe it accurately until very recently: my
understanding was Platonist, in the sense that I have described.
DMB says:
In the interest of civility I won't belabor the point, but I have to say
these comments are pretty rabidly anti-modern and anti-intellectual. Islamic
fundamentalists, for example, also think "surrender to the will of God is
key". The funny thing is that a mystic would agree with that statement too,
but in a radically different way than social level religions see it.
Nirvana, for example, is a state of mind where one is no longer motivated by
social level values, no longer motivated or hindered by fear and desire.
Instead, the person acts out of a deep center within themselves, the
identity that is discovered in the mystical experience. This is the true
meaning of abandoning self, giving up on grasping with symbols and then
surrendering to the divine will. I mean, you're using lots of Christian
symbolism and language to refute what I'm saying, but it can also be used to
support what I'm saying. It really does serve as a sign-post to DQ. This is
why I sometimes think you are just inches away from seeing what I mean, but
then inches turn into miles when you come up with something like this.....
Sam said:
That triumphant Modernism was built upon the re-incorporation of the
Platonic path within Western Christianity itself, from which came the evils
of the Inquisition, Scholasticism, the Crusades, the Wars of Religion and,
ultimately, the Holocaust.
DMB says:
No, Modernism was built upon the Aristotelan path. "This duality of form and
substance and the scientific method of arriving at facts about substances
wre central to Aristotle's philosophy. Thus the dethronement dialectic from
what Socrates and Plato held it to be..." (ZAMM P330) It is Aristotle's
emphasis on "substance" that led to amoral scientific objectivity. SOM is a
metaphysics of substance. That's what killed God and put a dark mark on
modernity. Further, both the modern scientific worldview and social level
religions are extremely hostile to the Platonic/Socratic quest for the One.
They equate mysticism with insanity and heresy. (Scholasitism very much
involved the effort to join Aristotle's physics with Christian theology.) I
think it is profoundly incorrect to blame this mystical tradition for
everything from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. As Pirsig says, war,
genocide and human exploitation are best understood as antics of the giant.
No. Sorry friend, but the suggestion that mystics and philosophers are
responsible for that kind of bloodshed strikes me as preposterous. That is
to say, it is backwards. Quite the opposite is true.
Sam said:
Now as you may have noticed, I think that the Pirsig of Lila (much less so
the Pirsig of ZMM) is setting out an intrinsically Platonist metaphysics, in
the sense described here. So I have become a 'fallen priest', in Matt's
phrasing. Having the time to spend thinking about these matters is opening
up things in a way that I didn't expect. (It's quite possible that my
'Sophocles' thread was simply me working out my own neuroses about the
intellect, and that I 'projected' the Platonism onto Pirsig. But I don't
think so. There does, after all, need to be a good 'hook' on which to hang
the projection.)
DMB says:
As the "correction" above suggests, I think the problem is a
misunderstanding of Plato and Platonism. Perhaps you have projected
something onto Pirsig inappropriately, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps you're
projecting SOM onto Plato? I mean, it seems that Pirsig and Plato both tried
to provide and intellectual description of a Dynamic reality, and that SOM
is the very antithesis of that Dynamic worldview. Understanding this is key
to understanding Pirsig. The MOQ is an intellectual description of a
mystical reality and it is intended to correct SOM's godless and nihilistic
materialism. I think the MOQ really can help you with your struggle. That's
the dis-ease of modernity and it is everybody's struggle. It is the revival
of this mystical reality, which can be described in non-religious modern
terms, which the intellect can be see in the worlds religions and myths,
which is the source of all things and the center of our own beings, that
will cure our amoral scientific worldview. Again, I hope to make a case that
the Sophists were a mystical bunch, that the Socratic tradition only sought
to elevate this ancient spiritual wisdom to a new level and that this is
what Pirsig seeks to revive. Consistent with his 'mythos over logos' idea,
he derives his MOQ from their myths and Plato does the same. Until then...
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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