From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 29 2005 - 23:17:24 BST
...from Part II
(If you've forgotten, Pirsig's about to start talking about mind/matter
again, so pay attention.)
“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 his is all about
anyway, and _still_ believes the divisions were there.” (382)
This is a difficult to passage to interpret. Leaving aside Pirsig’s
allusion to his “discourse on Western ghosts” (the same passage that Bo
disavows as idealist clap-trap, which should raise a question as to how
committed Bo is to his own historical narrative), I want to focus on how
whether we should interpret Pirsig as saying that the _Greeks_ created the
divisions, or whether they were created by somebody else. Bo wants to
suggest that the Greeks created all of those divisions together, that SOM,
issuing from the subject/object dichotomy, all came together in a heap. I
don’t think they did. I think Pirsig shunts all of them under the SOM
mantle (for very good reasons), but I don’t think the Greeks created them
all. To interpret this passage as suggesting that the Greeks created them,
Bo will hammer down on “_until now_ there was no such thing as…”. He will
point back to the paragraph before where Pirsig fingers Anaxagoras as one of
Socrates’ teachers.
To loosen the hold of this suggestion, I want to again remind people that
Anaxagoras wasn’t a literal teacher of Socrates. I think his placement in
the previous paragraph has nothing to do with suggesting that the
mind/matter dichotomy existed or was created by the Greeks, but that its
there to remind _us_, us “modern minds,” that the “mind” is important. When
I read that paragraph, I will hammer down on “Those divisions are just
dialectical inventions that _came later_.” When Pirsig says that the modern
mind balks and says that these divisions were “_there_ for the Greeks to
discover,” I think we have to be careful about taking it too literally. I
think the important bit is Pirsig’s reference to the “modern mind.” For the
modern mind, we do have these distinctions. But I think we need to gloss
forward Pirsig’s statement that they “came later” and remember that Pirsig,
a page before, says that the “first conscious search for what was
imperishable” was what “spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the
Greek civilization.” When Pirsig goes on to talk about what Plato and
Socrates did, he doesn’t talk about mind or matter, subject or object, form
or substance. He says that Plato and Socrates, “are defending the Immortal
Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence
of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what
anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. … He damns them
because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth.”
(383) And then: “And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about
Quality is somehow opposed to all this.” (384)
I want to suggest that ZMM is much more of a journey then Bo lets on.
Pirsig is tracing the trail of his enemy through history. His first
important stop is with the Subject/Object Dilemma. That is a specifically
_modern_ dilemma. It didn’t arise with the Greeks, the Greeks didn’t think
about it or consider to give answers to it. But Pirsig is going backwards
through our philosophical history to find the root cause of our problems.
So he deals with the SOD (I might add, unsuccessfully at that point), but it
is only a stage in his hunt. He (we) learn something from the encounter and
what we learn is that the dilemma is all wrong. So we ask: why is it here?
Part IV is the finishing of Pirsig’s hunt. He traces the modern dilemma
back to the Greeks. So what began the chain of events? “Parmenides made it
clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God,
is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this
separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated.”
(382) He’s right, it can’t be. Parmenides gave us the appearance/reality
distinction. We must penetrate beyond appearances, beyond shifting opinion,
to the imperishable, immortal reality. Pirsig doesn’t say that Anaxagoras’
identification of the Immortal Principle with _nous_, “mind,” had importance
that couldn’t be overstated. Anaxagoras gets _one line_. His placement
with Parmenides as Socrates’ teachers is to remind us where we came from and
where we are going back to with the wisdom we find in the past.
After the appearance/reality distinction was made important, the Sophists
came along and contradicted them. They said that “their object was not any
single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all
truths, are relative.” (383) But they didn’t have the tools to win. They
didn’t have a way of distinguishing between probable knowledge and absolute
knowledge. All the Greeks had was opinio and episteme, crappy opinion and
perfect knowledge. What Plato did to destroy the Sophists was create a
method for going from opinio to episteme: dialectic. This was the creation
of epistemology. Parmenides created metaphysics by distinguishing between
appearance and reality, and that distinction _demands_ an epistemology, a
method, criteria for being able to tell opinion about appearances from
knowledge of the imperishable reality. At the heart of SOM, then, is that
distinction (appearance/reality) and the demand for a method. Through the
vicissitudes of time, it turned into its modern progeny: “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)
To supplement this story, I should provide a history of how metaphysics and
epistemology spawned modern SOM. I clearly don’t have enough room here. I
will suggest this, though: the mind/matter problem didn’t become a problem
until Descartes. The subject-object idiom didn’t become solidified until
Kant. If you want a little more meat to these suggestions, I can direct you
to the narrative I tell in January, 2005 in the MF (look that up). Don’t
get me wrong though. The Greeks clearly had some sort of concept for
“mind,” _nous_ as Pirsig said. But--_nous_ isn’t exactly what we mean by
mind. And the Greeks had some sort of concept for “matter,” maybe _phusis_
(which roughly translates to “nature”). What I’m saying is that there
wasn’t a mind/matter _dualism_, which spawned off its own particular
problems that we are familiar with, until the modern period. It is, in
fact, partly what marks off the beginning of the modern period of
philosophy. So, for instance, the Greeks would not have understood Pirsig’s
Subject/Object Dilemma.
I’ll end this long exposition with some short, bullet-point conclusions of
Bo’s project:
1. If subject-object is coextensive with mind-matter, then Pirsig never
treated them as central to the intellectual level (if anything, it would
have to be appearance/reality). This refutes Bo’s, “I have the true MoQ
because it was the first one.”
2. If SOM is coextensive with the mind/matter dualism, then it did not
arise with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. This refutes Bo’s simple
co-optation of Pirsig’s narrative of the rise of SOM.
3. If SOM (as mind/matter) is the intellectual level, then you’re caught
with an interface problem: How does mind hook up to matter? This catches
you in the problems of epistemology which Pirsig’s identification with the
Sophists was supposed to elude.
4. If SOM (as mind/matter) is the intellectual level, then you’re stuck
with scientific realism: Only what corresponds to matter is objective
knowledge. Everything else is solely about the mind, and so subjective.
This catches you into the problems of scientism, which is part of what
Pirsig was trying to destroy.
Matt
p.s. By the way Bo, apropos Scott: you may be confused about this, but
people can understand and still disagree (in fact, they have to understand
before they can disagree). Maybe I need to add some caps or exclamation
points here to help you understand this, but I'd like to see you disagree
with that statement. It'd be a fun excusus into paradox.
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
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 : Wed Jun 29 2005 - 23:57:06 BST