From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 21:10:15 BST
Dan, Scott and all:
Scott said:
>A major difference between Pirsig and Plotinus, is that the latter held
>that the world emanated from Intellect (nous), via Soul, and our job is to
>make the return journey, whereas with Pirsig, there is only the upward
>journey, with intellect something to be cast off. The Plotinian Intellect
>plays approximately the same role as the MOQ's DQ, but since the MOQ sees
>the intellect as only another level of static pattern, the two philosophies
>become very different. The MOQ is nominalist and empirical, while
>neo-Platonism is neither.
dmb replies:
I just have a brief comment to add to Dan's reply. (below) While I'm sure
there are differences between Plotinus and Pirsig, not least of all because
they lived many hundreds of years apart and speak different languages, I
think the differences you've described here is mostly just a matter of
names. The concepts being expressed are very similar regardless of what they
are called. In fact, there are many, many names for what Pirsig calls DQ.
The labels change, but the content remains the same. As Aldous Huxley puts
it...
"In Vedanta and Hebrew prophecy, in the Tao Teh King and the Platonic
dialogues, in the Gospel according to St. John and Mahayana theology, in
Plotinus and the Areopagite, among the Persian Sufis and the Christian
mystics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance--the Perennial Philosophy has
spoken almost all the languages of Asia and Europe and has made use of the
terminology and traditions of every one of the higher religions. But under
all this confusion of tongues and myths, of local histories and
particularist doctrines, there remains a Highest Common Factor, which is the
Perennial Philosophy in what may be called its chemically pure state. This
final purity can never, of course, be expressed by any verbal statement of
the philosophy, however undogmatic that statement may be, however
deliberately syncretistic. The very fact that it is set down at a certain
time by a certain writer, using this or that language, automatically imposes
a certain sociological and personal bias on the doctrines so formulated. It
is only the act of contemplation when words and even personality are
transcended, that the pure state of the Perennial Philosophy can actually be
known. The records left by those who have known it in this way make it
abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist,
Christian, or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially
indescribable Fact."
Thanks,
dmb
Dan replied:
Yes there seem to be major differences between Plotinus and Robert Pirsig
but I think the philosophies of each are similiar in many ways too. I've
taken the liberty to cut and paste a couple of what I feel to be pertinent
sections from Plotinus' Six Enneads:
From the Third Ennead:
We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are
not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the
appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the
persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some
scurrilous clown; yet take away the low characters and the power of the
drama is gone; these are part and parcel of it. (
http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.3.third.html )
Doesn't this remind you of the brujo in LILA? And how RMP says it's hard to
tell the degenerates from the Dynamic individuals that a society needs to
survive and thrive?
This section seems to especially pertain to Ant's viva voce question:
There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose
nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves
to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at once
Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul.
The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not
all things; all things are its possession- running back, so to speak, to it-
or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be.
But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity,
not even duality?
It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all things are
from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no
Being but Being's generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act
of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One
is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has
produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been
filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle. (
http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.5.fifth.html )
Notice how Plotinus describes the One as nothing -- seeking nothing,
possessing nothing, lacking nothing. Compare that to RMP describing Dynamic
Quality as equivilant to Buddhist nothingness. Also "its exuberance has
produced the new" is very similiar to RMP's Dynamic Quality being new and
always something of a surprise.
Thank you for your comments,
Dan
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