From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 01:59:42 GMT
Pirsig wrote:
What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no
such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those
divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind
sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions
and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and
you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets
a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still
believes the divisions were there.
But they weren't, as Phaedrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of
the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that
mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the
anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
dmb says:
I don't know if you have anything specific in mind, Chin, but this struck me
as a confirmation of what I was trying to say in the "empiricism" thread
last weekend....
The
position that God is to be found within has always existed as an underground
current in the West and the idea that man and nature are seperate from God
has been the dominant view. The religions of the West are religions of
exile, of trying to get back to the garden, of trying to earn a place in
paradise through a proper relationship with God, usually mediated through a
social institution and its functionaries.
Now step back from these two appraoches for a moment and recall Pirsig's
assertion that "all our intellectual descriptions are culturally derived",
that the myths, rituals and cosmology stories of the social level come
before any intellectual descriptions can be made. Now if we consider that
the theological positon in traditional christianity has maintained the idea
of a transcendent God in the sense that it is ontologically seperate and
then compare that kind of duality to the kind of duality we get in SOM, I
think we can see a continuity. We can see that mythological dualism led to
intellectual dualism. And I think it is no accident that Pirsig is rejecting
both SOM and theism in favor of philosophical mysticism, which does NOT
posit a transcendent God. Instead, the MOQ is a form of philosophical
mysticism, which says that "the reality of the world is intellectually
unknowable". Its also no co-incidence that mysticism is rejected by BOTH
traditional christianity AND scientific materialism. The MOQ is derived from
different cultural elements, from the American Indians, from the East, and
from the contrarians who inhabit that underground current in the West. The
MOQ uses these elements to avoid dualism of either kind and instead asserts
that reality is undivided and undefinable.
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