From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Mon Oct 10 2005 - 19:22:00 BST
Arlo --
[Arlo garners the chutzpah to say]
> When you start with a fallacy, its hard to go
> anywhere but down, Ham.
[Ham responds]:
> I'm interested in why you think my statement is fallacious, Arlo.
>
> Is it because you see the proposition itself as illogical?
> Or is it because it refutes the MoQ notion that the conscious
> self is mere ego and that man is a product of his
> bio-cultural evolution?
[Arlo]:
> After sending that, I felt a moment of doubt, but a person
> can take hearing "individual proprietary awareness" only so
> many times. We've been down this road, you know why I
> think that statement is fallacious. Its not so much that
> it's illogical, but that it's blindly short-sighted, and is offered
> as a thinly veiled theistic elevation of man to satisfy some
> sense of divine supremity and purpose for our existence
> in the cosmos.
Perhaps that "moment of doubt" was your conscience telling you that
dismissing proprietary awareness is "short-sighted".
As for your intolerance of "individual proprietary awareness", how many
times must I hear the phrase "thinly veiled theism"? Do you really believe
that the MoQ's unpatterned Quality is any less "theistic" than my concept of
undifferentiated Essence? Again, I feel the need to remind you of this
personal comment by the MoQ's author.
[Pirsig's note to me of July, 2004]:
> My problem with "essence", is not that it isn't there or
> that it is not the same as Quality. It is that positivists usually
> deny "essence" as something like "God" or "the absolute"
> and dismiss it [as] experimentally unverifiable,
> which is to say they think you are some kind of religious nut.
Is it illogical (or theistic) to acknowledge that the basis for all
knowledge is experience-made-aware, and that conscious awareness is
proprietary to the subject? It would seem to me that any atheist would
accept this truth as empirically self-evident. Indeed, it is the central
thesis of most classical philosophy. Why, then, is the MoQ compelled to
spin webs of patterns around consciousness and intellect, as if to obscure
the proprietary nature of man's essence?
Now it's my turn to "garner some chutzpah".
This insistence on denying the individual as the free agent and
"choicemaker" of the world is uinque to Pirsig's philosophy. It would
appear that the author and his followers are obsessed with fear that
positing man as the locus of existence would be tantamount to religious
lunacy. I can't help but see this as a pervasive paranoia that has thwarted
metaphysical development of the Quality concept.
That's my position. Thanks for clarifying yours.
--Ham
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