From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jul 22 2005 - 04:02:04 BST
Hey Erin,
Erin said:
When you gave your story what it looked like to me is that you had
deconstructed your beliefs about the concept God and then had this useless
concept hanging. You would like it to fade away but know it won't so would
encourage people who do find it useful to expand it to be less exclusive.
Is this a correct understanding of your position?
Matt:
Sort of. What happened to me when I was thirteen was certainly not a
deconstruction. That implies far too much self-consciousness. It was more
like suddenly finding myself out of place, looking around and going, "Whoa,
hey, I gotta' believe what for why?" I just never took God seriously. He
never motivated me. He was never in my vocabulary of reflection. (What's
interesting, though I think periphery, is that I became a self-identified
atheist, ya' know, picking at believers for sport, but it was after reading
Pirsig that I softened, eventually to the point of not even wanting to be
identified as an atheist.) In fact, I think this is most often what happens
for individuals and is more analogous to what happens to a culture as it
"drops" a concept. Deconstruction is a process on the way towards dropping
for culture, but an individual who _needs_ to deconstruct is somebody who
isn't ready to give it up. Like Nietzsche's deconstructions of God. I
don't think Nietzsche ever got over God. They played a very live role in
who he was. Deconstruction is like a last step of the ladder before you
realize, "Hey, why am I climbing this ladder?" Then you just toss the
ladder. A related example are the foundational deconstructionists like
myself. I think I was too entranced by Platonism to just give it up. So I
have to keep deconstructing it to remind myself what not to be. In a sense,
I've given it up and could get along just fine without deconstructing
Platonism. But in another sense, I'm obsessed with philosophy, it is an
important part of my reflection. And when I reflect, I sometimes have to
deconstruct to ward off the demons, like a ritualistic exorcism. Someday,
there won't be any demons. But until then, I have to ward off my own and
help others ward off there's.
So, when you say that you "had deconstructed all the beliefs that were
taught to me but it never occurred to me that I could reconstruct the
concept to better fit who I was and what I believed," I think that fits with
the way I view the ghosts that haunt us. These ghosts, of course, are the
same ghosts that Pirsig told us about in ZMM: the ghosts of Newton, Locke,
Paul, Moses. They aren't necessarily demons, but they aren't necessarily
fairy godmothers, either. Which ones are which are determined by the course
of evolution. One might say that you had tried to purge yourself of the
ghost of God, but it wouldn't leave. It was discombobulated for a time, not
really knowing what it was doing since you kept thrashing it. At the time
of deconstruction, it was a demon to you. But as it became more and more
pallid, you eventually came to see how to restore its color, how to fill it
out and make it a companion again. My own ghost is too pallid for use. But
I've learned to see His reflection in Quality (let alone other people's
faces), the new ghost that haunts me.
So my suggestions are two-fold: to people who, like me, don't take God
seriously, i.e. don't use Him for purposes of reflection, simply don't worry
about God. I think in the long run it would be better for our culture to
not use religious vocabularies. But in the short run (which I think
eventually leads to the long run goal), I might use a religious vocabulary
to urge others towards visions of God that are better.
On communication, reconstruction, and poetic redescription, I think we are
more or less in the same place. Poetic redescription, or reconstruction, is
the same thing as a new construction. When you change the language around
you (which you cannot help but do when you use it), you are creating it
anew. These creations aren't ex nihilo, though. They are created with the
materials presented to you by your culture, language that is zuhanden,
ready-to-hand. The more powerful your willed poetry (the more "catchy" it
is), the more people will understand you because they will have picked it
up. People may not exactly understand you, just as a lot of people don't
understand God or Shakespeare. But the most powerful of poets (like Moses
and Shakespeare) shift our language, shift our self-understandings by
convincing us to use their language, their vocabularies. So, someday our
children may be talking about Erin and her God.
Matt
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