From: Matthew Stone (mattstone_2000@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 09:37:55 GMT
Everyone
I am very interested in the way in which Pirsig fits
into the postmodern direction of philosophy. I
originallt thought him to be quite the pioneer,
deconstructing the western episteme, showing the
problems, the non-neutrality, the impurity of thought.
But his reconstruction in Lila seems to undo the
integrity of his original mandate. Specifically, the
idea of the intellectual level seems to reintroduce
the problematic notions of the self, of human
rationality, of ideas, that fly in the face od the
concerns about 'humanism' in philosophy that Foucault
has warned us of, for example. I know he posits the
MoQ as a mere alternative to the SOM, but doesn't
Pirsig open himself to criticism here?
Can't the MoQ survive on only one level - the
material? Aren't the other three levels mere
extentions of the material, simply 'abstracting' the
movement and structure of physical particles such as
they make sense (e.g. the notion of an 'idea' in the
human brain, in the intellectual level)? Thus, is not
the introduction of an 'intellectual level' a
dangerous move, tempting people into seeing people as
'beings', with 'ideas', not purely patterns?
The reason why the MoQ appealed to me in the first
place is that it first seemed to remove problematic
concepts such as the self and the truth and so on,
from reality, and re-phrase it purely in terms of
structure. But the more I think about the
intellectual level, the less appealing it becomes.
Matt
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