From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Fri Jul 22 2005 - 07:36:05 BST
Matt and the Multitude.
This was sent a few days ago but .... I try again:
16 July you wrote:
> Here's your sentence: "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." (ZMM, 382, 25th an. ed.)
> Sound's like mind/matter, subject/object were created by the Greeks,
> don't it? But here's the sentence directly afterward: "Those
> divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later."
> "Came later." That throws a wrench in the easy meaning of your one
> sentence. I think you have some more interpretive work to do. You
> might start with countering my own interpretation (Part I to Part
> III, on June 29).
If you now start to question that ZMM is about the emergence of
the SOM, and that its "modern" variety is the mind/matter
distinction, what is there to discuss? Even Paul can't let that
pass, or is the common cause so important that everything is
suspended?
> Matt:
> Too bad you didn't read my argument, or else you wouldn't have
> obliviously oblitered the nuance I created between S/O and A/R.
> Part of my argument is that they are different, as of course you
> acknowledge when you say that A/R is a facet of S/O. However, it is
> my argument that A) Pirsig doesn't think A/R is a facet of S/O, but
> rather the other way around and B) that it is a perverse trashing of
> the historical record to say that the Greeks had a mind/matter
> problem (at least one that looked like ours, like the S/O Dilemma).
I have never said or meant that the SOM sprang into existence
in the mind/matter form, not even in the subject/object one it was
that Pirsig in his dispute with the teachers understood that their
premises was the subject/object one and THEN started to read
Greek history with this as a sieve and found how it had developed
from the first search for eternal principles, via Plato (where the
S/O is most subtle) and Aristotles where it had become more
recognizable (form/substance), only with Descartes had it got its
final form, but we call the whole development SOM.
> Bo said:
> The implications was the first tentative MOQ in which the
> subject/object or mind/matter dualisms are intellect. How difficult
> can you possibly make these things.
> Matt:
> Hey, look at that! You're forwarding an interpretation! Good for
> you, Bo!
> This is the most promising suggestion you've made and I only wish
> you spent more time developing it, rather than with the hip-shot,
> interruptory remarks you use. As it happens, I can (and have) agree
> with your narrative, that Phaedrus was still caught in the web of
> SOM at the beginning of the S/O Dilemma. What he found out was that
> no argument he could forward could do the trick because the terms of
> the question were all wrong.
Thanks, also for an exact analysis.
> However, I still think the implications you
> draw from this section are the wrong ones. You say that by
> situating Quality behind S/O Pirsig has recognized that the S/O is
> intellect. I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's
> saying, ala Lila, that the way we carve up Quality depends on
> purpose: sometimes S/O, sometimes Romantic/Classic (which was the
> split he ended up with in ZMM, I might add, not S/O), sometimes
> Dynamic/static.
Pirsig calls the romantic/classic a false start (as the basic split),
the dynamic/static one he arrived at is the final form. Your
statement that it sometimes is valid and sometimes not rests on
the silly notion that the SOM is a "quality" metaphysics in the
sense that it is so divided. Quality is a subjective pattern in the
SOM, that's the whole point.
> In other words,
> the implications of the S/O Dilemma section is not "intellect equals
> the S/O distinction," but the pragmatist attitude that allows us to
> wipe the board and begin again.
Intellect is very much pointed out as the S/O generator in ZMM,
it's even drawn in the said diagram.
> Matt said:
> All you do is beg the question in your favor without really
> explaining why. How is it you beg the question, you ask? Because
> you're slipping in your definition of the MoQ at the moment of
> critique. Everytime we explain our definition (as opposed to yours)
> you freak, "The MoQ is an intellectual pattern? Oh God, that means
> everything is an intellectual pattern!" But that's a
> sleight-of-hand trick. We define the MoQ as "intellectual
> patterns."
OK, what is NOT intellectual patterns in your view then?
> Bo interrupted:
> ... and by default all utterings about reality are "intellectual
> patterns", heck, all utterings are because you see language itself
> as intellect? Isn't that so? And by now you possibly see the fallacy
> of the "manipulation of symbols" definition?
> Matt:
> Your interruption at that precise moment is telling, Bo. Right when
> I was about to explain the sleight-of-hand trick you are performing
> (on yourself most of all), you do it again. Or, at least, that's
> the implication. You actually stop before you get to it, in utter
> disbelief that we could continue on as we do. But no argument or
> explanation is offered and you don't say a thing after my
> explanation of what you are doing (which, I'll repeat, you _are_
> doing and it causes your argument to fall apart--you need to address
> that). Bo--it isn't obvious to us. Utterings are intellectual
> patterns because language is definitive as the currency of
> intellectual patterns. That's our position.
"Language as the currency of intellectual patterns". Wish I knew
what that means. Anyway IMO language is the "carbon" of
intellect, but like inorganic carbon didn't become biological in
spite of being life's building block, language does not become
intellect for being intellect's building block.
> So what's the problem? We've been trying to get
> you to tell us. You seem to imply that not all utterings are
> intellectual patterns. Then what the hell are they? That's the one
> thing I've never been able to figure out.
As said above language is a social pattern thus when ancient
people spoke to each other that was not intellectual utterings. No
more than cries from a Mosque minaret or the words of a
Christian mass
are.
> As we'll get to in a
> moment, how is your position on language different from ours? Are
> your opinions about the MoQ/Reality not intellectual patterns?
My opinions are not intellectual in the (true) S/O sense, but like
intellect in its time exploited social value (used language for
forwarding its own value) the MOQ exploits intellect for its own
purpose.
Bo
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