From: Richard Loggins (brloggins@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Dec 23 2004 - 00:03:22 GMT
Ian,
Oh no it's not conclusive. But lets at least be honest about it for God's sake. It's another data point on a mountain of data points.
Retoric that works for the dis-affected millions. There is power in that. Rock on. - Rich
Ian Glendinning <ian@psybertron.org> wrote:
Rich,
I recognise that passage, but do not see it as that literal or conclusive ...
(Not that I'm actually all that interested in labels of schools of philosophy, you understand)
He actually says ... "MIGHT be a sound logical position"
As I mentioned in a related thread, in many parts of ZMM he is really stating the problem, not his metaphysical answer, that came in Lila.
More sense / more digestible / less far fetched - these are the reasons I see him as pragmatic (not a pragmatist with a capital P necessarily)(that's me being pragmatic). He's looking for what works, call it rhetoric if you like. IE it's what get's the common-sense message across - to millions of disaffected, confused and frustrated post-hippy baby-boomer readers, and now to post-dot.com, post-millennial, post-9/11 readers - not to professional philosophologists.
It works. End of story. Spread the word.
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Loggins
To: moq_discuss@moq.org
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 2:57 AM
Subject: Re: MD Is Morality Relative? (or "Is there anything out there?")
Yes, Mark, Pirsig is a philosophical Idealist and a Radical Empericist both. I thought everyone here, especially those who post a lot and seem to know what they are talking about, knew that. lol. I hope you are not disappointed. You did read his books? This from zamm, for example:
"This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in "common sense" language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid. The argument that the world was all mind might be a sound logical position but it was certainly not a sound rhetorical one. It was way too tedious and difficult for a course in freshman composition. Too "far-fetched." "
The MoQ is Pirsig's attempt to make philosophical Idealism, which makes abundent more sense then scientific materialism, more rhetorically digestable. A less 'far-fetched' sounding kind of idealism, to be sure, but idealism thru and thru. I suppose that your not picking up on this until now is testiment to Pirsig's skills in this regard. - Rich
MSH said:
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?
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good.
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good.
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 : Thu Dec 23 2004 - 00:29:48 GMT