From: Rudy (rudy_o_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Jan 04 2003 - 02:23:27 GMT
Over the holidays I had some spare time on my hands,
so my own "Quality decision" was to re-read Pirsig a
bit and to ponder some more of the discussions on this
list. I also revisited the rhetorical questions that
I posed last month regarding the relevance of your
ruminations. When I composed those questions, I didn't
fully appreciate certain things. I.e., many or most
of the participants on this list are philosophers,
whether by profession or training or interest. Like
theoretical particle physicists, philosophers are
entitled to their abstractions. They do their work
using language not necessarily accessible to the
average educated person. Philosophers aren't
responsible for increasing the rate of growth of the
GNP or designing a car that gets 100 miles per gallon
or helping individuals to resolve their past emotional
traumas; they think about the workings of the mind and
try to help humankind realize the various ways that it
perceives and thinks about things, and why it's
important for people to know how they think about
things (and maybe why it's important to think about
things that haven't yet been thought about). In
effect, they work for no one, and yet they work for
all fields of intellectual endeavor; they strive to
understand and improve the process of analysis,
reflection and critical reasoning such that
scientists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, therapists,
political leaders, ministers, artists, writers and
every enlightened person of good will may come to use
the facility of the mind and the heritage of language
to greater effect. Not a bad thing, admittedly.
Pirsig analyzes the world of academic philosophy by
comparing it with philosophology (Lila, Chapt. 26),
and concludes that most academians urge their students
into philosophical appreciation and not into the act
of philosophizing. And maybe that's not such a bad
thing. There's no shortage of great philosophical
thought out there, and knowing such thought should
help students to live more enlightened lives (well,
many of them, anyway) even if they never get around to
mapping out their own world views.
As Pirsig says, statics and dynamics have a yin-yang
relationship; the dynamic needs the static framework
to latch on to, or it otherwise may be lost. The
dynamic of great philosophy needs the static academic
world of philosophology in order to be memorialized,
just as the great spiritual figures such as Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha need the temples,
churches and mosques, with their fixed doctrines and
rituals, in order to be remembered. And in that
light, one can see what the MD list is becoming: the
Temple of Pirsig Philosophology. (I would imagine that
some of you old-timers on this list are yawning at
this point; ho-hum, another newbie is having the
scales fall from his eyes).
I agree that Pirsig probably deserves such a Temple;
as Martha Stewart says, it's a good thing. It's all
good. I'm glad that you're doing this. But let me
just take a moment to tell you where I'm coming from.
I was one of the many people who were entirely
captivated by Zen and the Art back in the 80s. Mr.
Pirsig seemed to lend hope that our lives of quiet
desperation did in fact have meaning after all. He
told us in ZAMM that he's a smart fellow (170 IQ), and
backed himself up with all sorts of interesting facts
and complicated insights. And yet, he brought it all
down to simple acts like tightening handlebars with
shims made of aluminum beer can stock, or trying to be
patient with his son. He presented himself as an
average member of post-industrial society, a technical
writer raising a family in an assumedly
run-of-the-mill suburban town. And yet, he was able
to use his prodigious learning and intellectual
talents to find meaning and hope in his
then-quite-average circumstances. He didn't do it
with touchy-feely psychology or free-floating New Age
presumptions or moldy religious piety or mystical
pretensions. His reflective toolkit contained Western
Technology and Eastern Wisdom and Classical Learning,
while his motorcycle toolkit held WD-40 and socket
wrenches and screwdrivers of various sorts. It was
such a wonderful balance of tangibles and
abstractions, experience and reflection (and subjects
and objects? Yes, for sure, but in an inter-related
sort of way). Holistic, as they used to say. I
didn't quite agree that "Quality" was the right word
for what Pirsig was reaching for, but it didn't really
matter. I knew what he was doing: in Lila terms, he
broke through the static constructs that threaten to
choke us and put some dynamic back into our lives.
The motorcycle roaring along a two-lane blacktop up in
the high country was the perfect metaphor for it all.
So here we are, two decades later. And guess what? The
need for a ZAMM experience seems greater than ever.
So I took to the Internet looking for a place where
the spirit of ZAMM still burns bright, where the
dynamic continues into the present, where the journey
is still on, where sensitive and intelligent people
continue to combine critical thought with daily life
experience. A place where folks discuss "Zen"
(actually, more like "Tao", or really an overall
combination of great thought) along side the art of
writing industrial safety regulations, or the art of
raising children, or the art of deciding who to
support in the next presidential election, or the art
of protecting personal freedoms in an era of homeland
security, or the art of developing low-income urban
housing, etc. You get my drift. And, for better or
worse, I found moq.org.
From what I've been able to learn, it appears that Mr.
Pirsig left behind the "avatar of everyday life"
approach of ZAMM and used his fame to climb the ladder
of philosophical abstraction. Hey, what can I say to
that? He took a long shot with ZAMM and it came in.
He then used his fame and fortune to follow his bliss,
which he found more within the realm of abstract
thought and less within his toolbox of wrenches and
voltmeters. He thus wrote Lila, which appears to offer
a set of abstract intellectual tools offered in good
faith for use by anyone interested in making their own
ZAMM journey. But Lila doesn't continue the journey,
at least not in a tangible, emotionally accessible
manner. Lila is the start of the static latching
process relative to the dynamic created in ZAMM. And
this discussion list appears to be a further step in
that process.
I gather that many of you are teachers, some are grad
students, others just interested in philosophy. I hear
you talk about Richard Rorty, who, from what little I
know, is another "bad boy" of the philosophy circuit.
That says to me that you're a bunch of philosophy
people who experience some discomfort with the overly
static, overly philosophologal nature of the academic
institution, an institution so static that it cannot
find room for Pirsig despite the fact that he has
clearly influenced modern American thinking. For now,
the universities won't philosophologalize Pirsig, so
you are taking on the task. Perhaps some day, once
you've held a few conferences and had some papers and
books published from them, the universities will feel
a bit more comfortable in adopting the work that you
are now doing. Again, that's not a bad thing.
By comparison, I'm looking for something a bit more
feelings-conscious, given that Pirsig himself once
admitted to feelings, e.g. his emotional engagement
with his (late) son and with the world he found along
the back roads of Montana and Idaho (and the ZAMM
postscript with the keyboard doodlings of his
daughter). In Lila, by contrast, there is no Pirsig
at all, only a fictional alter-ego, Phraedus, who
scarcely admits to any feelings (a philosopher's
dream: leave the affective world and all its chaos to
the psychologists and to the women folk, e.g. Lila).
On the other hand, I sympathize with Pirsig's
intellectual distrust of emotional volatility and
understand his use of a "classic-romantic" fencing in
ZAMM to help keep emotional matters under control.
Obviously, with emotions filtered out of Lila, he had
the luxury of abandoning this rather SOM-oriented
dichotomy (i.e., the "subject" of the intellectual
facility versus the "objective" emotional-hormonal
animal). But back in the messy everyday world where
people do get hot and bothered, basic SOM is sometimes
necessary for survival. As some of you "listers" told
me, and I believe Pirsig says as much in Lila, SOM is
not to be entirely disposed of, but is instead to be
reflected upon and transcended as circumstances allow.
Also, I'm looking for a dynamic where Pirsig's ideas
themselves can be criticized and challenged. (Little
thing: in Chapter One of Lila, "Get Down Tonight" is
not the voice of the black ghetto, as the song was
written and sung by white men. Big thing: I agree that
the "biological" evolved from the "inorganic" and
represents something "higher", but I have trouble with
the extension of the paradigm such that the
intellectual is ranked above the social; it seems to
me you have some chickens and eggs going on there, at
least for we homo sapiens, who can detect mixed-up
metaphors and yet still get the point). I don't see
very many Pirsig critiques on this list (although
admittedly, there is occasional "heresy"); ZAMM is at
times passed off as an early stage of Pirsigism, but
Lila is usually quoted reverentially and
unquestioningly, just as the Bible is used in the
major Christian academies. But then again, if the
main purpose here is to philosophologalize Pirsig so
as to challenge an even colder and more static
institution, then I can understand and even agree why
no one takes the time to challenge the master.
Perhaps you've got an even bigger Buddha to turn into
road-kill here. (PLEASE NOTE: I'm only using a stupid
metaphor here, and am not in any way advocating
violence :^)
Now that I better understand and sympathize with the
MD, I hope you better understand what I was looking
for. So, philosophize and philosophologalize on, and I
wish you best of luck in your quest to change the
learning institutions for the better. If that's the
practical application of the MD, then live long and
prosper, academic brujos that you are.
Rudy
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