From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Mar 26 2005 - 23:12:10 GMT
Matt, Sam, Ant and all mockers:
First a brief review of a point made by both Matt and Sam....
Matt Kundert stated March 17th 2005:
Pirsig's key message to us is his recitation of Socrates' message to
Phaedrus: "And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good-/Need we ask
anyone these things?"
...This strikes two chords. First is a kind of antiauthoritarianism that
mimics the Protestant move. No one has a special relation to the Good over
and above anyone else. But notice that not only is one caste's special
authority destroyed, _anyone else's_ authority is destroyed. By
internalizing our relation to the Good-Quality-Pirsig has basically told us
that each of us has a special relation to Quality that no one can override.
Likewise, Sam Norton (in his "teaching Quality" thread) said on March 26th:
But there remains this question about teaching Quality. Because the
_rhetoric_ that Pirsig uses tends to drift towards the subjective side. For
example: "And what is Good, Phaedrus, and what is not Good - need we ask
anyone to tell us these things?"
In a world where we are still dominated by SOM conceptions that sort of
rhetoric supports relativism. No one person's taste is of greater merit than
anothers. I don't believe that this is what Pirsig supports (at all) but it
is a tendency supported by some of his rhetoric - a rhetoric which is deeply
rooted in cultures deriving from the Protestant Reformation. Luther: Here I
stand, I can do no other. The individual becomes the arbiter of truth. And
it ties in with a relative privileging of DQ over SQ. Which at the highest
levels is perfectly appropriate. Luther was a genius and a great saint. But
we are not all Luther. Or Pirsig. Or...
dmb replies:
Pirsig mimics the Protestant individualists when he quotes Socrates? And the
question is aimed the disestablishment of our churches and universites? A
Wilberism springs to mind. He says that postmodernism has equalized science
and religion "by shooting them both in the head". In other words, as I
undertand it, the MOQ seeks to be a remedy for this kind of destruction
rather than being the cause of it. I would like you both to seriously
consider the possibility that the MOQ does NOT derive its
anti-authoritarianism from Protestant individualism but rather from the
East. When this is seen, I think you'll realize that the implications of the
question are much different than you think. Take a look at what Huston Smith
says in "The Religions of Man" and I think you'll see that the similarities
with Luther are rather tortured and superficial compared to the Eastern
parallels that just POP out here...
"1. Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority. His attack on authority
was double-edged. On the one hand he wanted to break the monopolistic grip
of the Brahmins on the religious discoveries to date, and a good part of his
reform consisted of no more than making generally known what had hitherto
been the property of the few. ...But if his first attack on authority was
aimed at an instituiton - the Brahmin caste - his second was directed toward
individuals. In a time when the multitudes were passively relying on the
Brahmins to tell then what to do, Buddha challenged each individual to do
his own religious seeking. 'Do not accept what you hear by report, do not
accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is belief, nor
because it is the saying of your teacher. Be ye lamps unto yourselves. Those
who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not
look for assistance to anyone beside themselves, it is they who shall reach
the very topmost height'."
"2. Buddha preached a religion devoid of ritual. Repeatedly he ridiculed the
ancient meticulous observances of Brahmanic rites and prayers to the
helpless gods. They are trappings and rigamarole, irrelevant to the hard,
practical job of ego reduction and spiritual release. Indeed tthey are worse
than irrelevant; 'Belief in the effacacy of Rites and Cermonies' is one of
the ten fetters that bind man's spirit. Here as apparently everywhere Buddha
was consistent; discounting Hinduism's forms he resisted every temptation,
if he felt any, to institute new ones of his own, a fact which has led many
writers to characterize his teahings, unfairly, as a rational moralism
rather than as a religion."
"3. Buddha preached a religion devoid of speculation. Ample evidence in the
record suggest that he could have could have been one of the world's great
metaphysicians if he had put his mind to the task. Instead he flatly refused
to discuss metaphysics. His silence on the subject did not pass unnoticed.
'Whether the world is eternal or not eternal, whenther the world is finite
or not, whether thee sould is the same as the body or whether the sould is
one thing and the body another, whether a Buddha exists after death or does
not exist after death - these things' one of his disciples observed, 'the
Lord does not explain to me. And that he does not explain them to me does
not please me, it does not suit me.' There were many it did not suit. Yet
despite incessant needling, he continued his 'noble silence'. His reason was
simple. 'Greed for views' on questions of this sort 'tend not to
edification'. His practical program was exacting, and he was not going to
let his flock be diverted from the hard road or arduous action by the
agreeable fields of profitless speculation."
The following is from Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen":
"...as a Chinese proverb puts it, 'One showing is worth a hundred sayings'.
Compare, for example, the ease of showing someone to tie a complex knot with
the difficulty of telling him how to do it in words alone.
Now the general tendency of the Western mind is to feel that we do not
really understand what we cannot represent, what we cannot communicate, by
linear signs, by thinking. We are like the 'wallflower' who cannot learn to
dance unless someone draws him a diagram of the steps, who cannot 'get it by
the feel'. For some reason we do not trust and do not fully use the
'peripheral vision' of our minds. We learn music, for example, by
restricting the whole range of tone and rhythm to a notaton of fixed tonal
and rhythmic intervals - a notation which is incapable of representing
Oriental music. But the Oriental musician learns music not by reading notes,
but by listening to the preformance of a teacher, getting the 'feel' of it,
and copying him, and this enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal
sophistications matched only by those Western jazz artists who use the same
appraoch.
We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do not use the 'peripheral
mind'. Being human, we use it all the time, and every artist, every workman,
every athlete calls into play some special development of its powers. But it
is not academically and philsophically respectable. We have hardly begun to
realize its possibilities, and it seldom, if ever, occurs to us that one of
its most important used is for that 'knowlege of reality' which we try yto
attain by the cumbersome calculations of theology, metaphysics and logical
inference.
When we turn to ancient Chinese society, we find two 'philosophical'
traditions playing complementary parts - Confucianism and Taoism. Generally
speaking, the former concerns itself with the linguistic, ethical, legal,
and ritual conventions which provide the society with its system of
communication. Confucianism, in other words, preoccupies itself with
conventional knowledge, under its auspices children are brought up so that
their original wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Procrustian
bed of the social order. The individual defines himslef and his place in
society in terms of the Confucian formulae.
Taoism, on the other hand, is genreally a pursuit of older men, and
especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their
retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation
from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism
concerns itself with conventional knowledge, with understanding of life
directly, instead of the abstract, linear terms of representational
thinking.
Confucianism presides, then, over the socially necessary task of forcing the
original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention - a task
which involves not only conflict and pain, but also the loss of that
peculiar naturalness and un-self-consciousness for which little children are
so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages. The
function of Taoism is to undo the inevitable damage of the discipline, and
not only to restore but also to develope the original spontaneity, which is
termed tzu-jan or 'self-so-ness'. For the spontaneity of a child is still
childish, like everyhing else about him. His education fosters his rigidity
but not his spontaneity. In certain natures, the conflict between social
convention and repressed spontaneity is so violent that it manifests itself
in crime, insanity, and neurosis, which are the prices we pay for the
otherwise undoubted benefits of order.
But Taoism must on no account be understood as a revolution against
convention, although it has sometimes been used a pretext for revolution.
...To be free of convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.
The West has no recognized institution corresponding to Taoism because our
Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the Absolute-God with the
moral and logical order of convention. This might almost be called a major
cultural catastrophe, because it weights the social order with excessive
authority, inviting just those revolutions against religion and tradition
which have been so characteristic of Western history."
dmb concludes:
I hope both Smith and Watts were ringing bells for you left and right. I
mean, this post already quite long and hope you will see how Pirsig's
approach is echoed in these Eastern traditions. Doesn't it just POP?! It
seems to me that just about every point they make is also made by Pirsig and
could be backed up with a quote from ZAMM or LILA or both. But let me say
that the anti-authoritarian streak we see in Pirsig goes way beyond
"sticking it to the man" or a disrespect for philosophological work. It is
much more thorough. It goes after all static traps including your own mind.
It is best understood as a move to allow a greater degree of DQ into the
West, where the "Absolute-God" has long been identified with the "moral and
logical order of convention", where the conventional ego has long been
taken for a primary reality. I think there are lots of Eastern elements in
the MOQ and the parallels are hard to miss on this matter in particular. He
rejects the isolated ego as a fiction, right? He identifies DQ with
mysticims and sq with conventional realities, don't you think? The
anti-authoritarianism in the MOQ is not telling us to abandon society's
static patterns in favor of our own static patterns. That is the definition
of insanity. Rather, its about abandoning all static thoughts in order to
apprehend a non-rational, non-verbal reality.
More later,
dmb
"Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be
apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning
of history." Pirsig in ZAMM, p25
"In the spiritual traditions of both East and West - I am thinking not about
particular religions, but about the mystical element to be found in them all
- we find the claim that eventually one must let go of the activites of
thought and imagination in order to enter a region of consciousness that
such symbolic activity cannot reach." Guidebook to ZAMM, p22
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