From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 22:47:53 GMT
Erin,
Matt said:
Pirsig's flip comment about education being hypnosis isn't meant to be
derogatory
Erin said:
I think there was a wee bit derogatory about how the classroom is set up.
Matt:
All right, I'll grant you that it was supposed to be a little derogatory, a
bit of a side-swipe at certain education practices.
But I still take the main point of Pirsig's discourse on Western ghosts to
be his exchanging of "discovery" metaphors for "making" metaphors. Take
this part from the end, "We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac
Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he
was born and that magically he discovered [italicized in his text] these
words." He continues, "Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts.
Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The
whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't
[italicized] a human invention." You can see why a pragmatist like myself
would like these few pages so much. Pirsig adds this about tradition,
"Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and
thousands of these ghosts from the past." Taking this all together, with
his thoughts on education and the fact that Pirsig isn't _against_
education, I read Pirsig at his finest pragmatist hour.
Matt
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