From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Dec 19 2004 - 00:33:00 GMT
MSH and all:
Pirsig in ZAMM:
"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' a
human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the
human imagination."
msh asks:
Yes, this comment has always troubled me. "The world has no
existence whatsoever outside the human imagination." Is Pirsig an
Idealist or an Empiricist or what? I can see how the laws of nature
and logic might be said to exist in our imaginations, but everything?
Is this just some poetic enthusiasm from way back, near the beginning
of ZMM, to support the ol' ghosts around the campfire setting?
What do y'all think he means? Is there something OUT THERE, or not?
dmb says:
Paul Turner has helped me out on these sorts of issues and I think he's
absent from the forum mostly because he's working some MOQ things up. Not
sure, but I believe he's been thinking hard on this one. As I understand it,
this notion is carried all the way through to recent comments from Pirsig. I
recall a quote, that may come from Lila's Child, where Pirsig says something
like... The MOQ says that the idea that inorganic reality came before
intellectual reality is a very good idea, one of the best ideas there is,
but the MOQ still says ideas come first. ...And if I didn't hack it up too
much, I think the idea here is that the world as we know it is our creation.
This is not to be taken in terms of SOM, where a subject thinks of the world
and POOOF! it magically appears. No, this idea has to be understood in terms
of mysticism. This idea that things emerge out of no-thing-ness, that
subjects and objects are intellectual constructions we create out of this
void, this undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. Its Idealism in a very
broad sense, a collective, mutual arising sense, not a solipsistic, new age,
we each create our own reality way. Remember his idea of defining sanity as
simply buying into the culture's assumptions, of thinking about reality the
way most everyone else does? Its the idea that these constructions are a
social, cultural, collective thing. As he says, a culture of one defines
insanity. At the same time, there are any number of cultures, and they don't
always agree about what real and what came before what.
And so by the time we get to Lila and we get a metaphysics that consists of
more than just one word, we see that these constructions, these ghosts,
these products of the imagination can also be called social and intellectual
static patterns and that in terms of static patterns, they are as real as
rocks and trees. This is where Empiricism comes in two ways. At the bottom
of it all is the direct, pre-intellectual value awareness that gives rise to
all our static constructions, this is radical empiricism, based on
experience at the very root of all things. And then there is also the
expanded empiricism that sensory experience to include experience of the
mind and the mystical vision that is neither of the body or the mind.
You can probably tell that I have struggled to make sense of it too, but
maybe this little pile of puke will help anyway.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Dec 19 2004 - 00:36:23 GMT