From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 29 2005 - 23:08:54 BST
Excavating SOM
----------------------------------------
Bo,
Bo said:
I see that you are in a panic to distance yourself from me. A great pity,
but who am I to stop you.
Matt:
This is starting to reach the apex of comedy, but more importantly, it is
about to nosedive down the other side into just plain sad.
Bo--I was never on your side. I was always criticizing you. The first step
to critique is understanding, which brings _vocabularies_ together, but not
necessarily agreement. People can't agree or disagree until they understand
each other, and I worked pretty hard trying understand what the hell you've
been going on about all these years. I wasn’t positive that we’d disagree
on any substantial issue, but I had a pretty strong sense that we would, and
I think that sense has proven correct. Much of my emphasis on how you don’t
disagree that much with everybody else was an attempt to off-set your
bizarre predilection for painting yourself as insane or “beyond the pale.”
I’m sorry, you’re not. I’m not even sure that your iconoclasm is
interesting.
I recommend trying to engage Bo to anybody who wants some extra practice at
the art of interpretation. You really gotta' work hard at getting the
disparate pieces of sentences he leaves around to fit together and "unlock"
their meaning. But I think I got it. But for you Bo--a lot of your replies
just keep pointing to a very bad reading habit. It just seems more and more
that you don't understand people very well, at least, when I think they are
being fairly understandable.
At any rate, I do have something philosophically pertinent to say, though it
does have to do with Bo's reading habits. I want to answer two questions:
Is the SOM of ZMM really the mind/matter dualism? and Does the mind/matter
dualism really start with Socrates?
The first is an attempt to do Paul one better. I think Paul is absolutely
right to bracket the firstness of Pirsig’s ZMM to Lila in the face of Bo’s
“I’ve got the True MoQ because it was the first one” and focus on which one
is better. For his purposes, he just wants the best philosophy. That’s
what I want most of the time, too. But I’d like to focus on Bo’s textual
claim about ZMM, that it is quite obvious (with “overwhelming” textual
evidence) that Pirsig is talking about the mind/matter dualism in ZMM. Not
only do I think Bo’s SOL is not as good as the standard interp, I don’t even
think it can be found as a position Pirsig ever took. (Granted, of course,
that what I’m about to do doesn’t rebut the possible utility of Bo’s
interpretation, but Paul’s done a bunch on that and so have I.) Bo’s claim,
of course, is not just that Pirsig’s talking about mind/matter, but that its
obvious that the subject/object dualism is the intellectual level in ZMM.
The problem for Bo is that he conflates a whole host of distinctions under
it, and locates them all with Socrates. I wanna’ pick out the mind/matter
dualism.
Is the SOM of ZMM really the mind/matter dualism? There are two primary
areas where Pirsig describes what he’s up against: the S/O Dilemma (Ch 19,
my pagination will be to the 25th Anniversary ed.) and pretty much all of
Part IV. I think Bo gets most of his material from the first, the S/O
Dilemma. The SOD is set up as a mind/matter dilemma: does Quality “exist in
the things we observe?” or “is it subjective, existing only in the
observer?” (231) Pirsig butts his head against each of the horns. He says
in acknowledging the truth of the objective horn, “Quality … was not a
physical property and was not measurable,” (234) thus taking the dualism
seriously, as true. When he goes up against the subjective horn he takes on
“scientific materialism,” “what is composed of matter or energy and is
measurable by the instruments of science is real.” (236) Pirsig makes
pretty good work of scientific materialism, but, he says, that lands him in
the camp of idealists, which he wasn’t so sure about. And then he says,
“Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter,
with relationship to Quality was unfair,” (239) before concluding: “Phaedrus
… went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma
and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter.”
(240)
All of this bodes well for Bo. Here we have Pirsig linking subject and
object directly with the mind/matter dualism. What else could he be talking
about?
The clues are littered about in this section, but they aren’t completely
obvious. The first is his treatment of the objective horn. To grab that
horn would be to “refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific
detectability.” (232) He abandons that route, because of the seeming
obviousness of physical properties, but not before indicating that he was
“thrown off by an ambiguity in the term _quality_.” (234) I don’t think it
was the ambiguity in quality, I think it’s the ambiguity in “object” and
“subject” that does him in. In preparing his brief assault on the objective
horn he says, “In today’s world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific
knowledge don’t get off the ground.” (234) Hey, but where are these ideas?
They’re in the mind, right? Hunh. So, ideas about objects, like scientific
knowledge, get to be objective? And, really, “objectivity” itself simply
stands for “ideas in the mind that relate to matter,” as opposed to
“subjectivity” which means “ideas in the mind that relate to something else,
e.g. ______ .” This ambiguity in the terms he’s using bursts right out of
the text a page later when he slices and dices scientific materialism:
“scientific concepts … could not possibly exist independently of subjective
considerations.” (237) The reason is because anything in the mind is
subjective, in the subject. That’s the bind and the ambiguity.
I think the sentence that tells us the most about Pirsig’s concerns is this
one: “The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions
between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate subjective, unreal,
imaginary elements from one’s work so as to obtain an objective, true
picture of reality.” (236) Because when we get to the finale of ZMM, there
is a stunning lack of talk about subjects and objects. Instead, its about
rhetoric, dialectic, logic, reason, mythos, logos, truth, the good. I think
it is important to take into account that ZMM is a journey, not a
dissertation. It is attempting to bring us to a state that resembles
Pirsig’s, when he first went through it, and to do that it goes through the
same stages he went through. But that doesn’t mean theses are positive,
like a ladder we keep going up. Its more like pulling a sled through the
snow, picking up and dropping things as we need—except that Pirsig doesn’t
tell us when he’s dropping things.
...continued in Part II
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