From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Nov 18 2005 - 19:45:53 GMT
Mike,
It's lucky I even saw your post. I don't even glance at most posts anymore
unless I'm tied into them somehow, and our conversation was so long ago I'd
completely forgotten about it. I just have a few brief comments.
Mike said:
So we agree that labelling levels 1 and 2 "objective" and 3 and 4
"subjective", is unacceptable? (except possibly as a disposable finger to
point at this evolutionary story)
Matt:
Well, I guess. Doing the labeling that way was helpful for Pirsig to get a
handle on one sense of the S/O split, and I don't see any problems with it
as long as you can see the difference between the two senses of "objective"
(and "subjective"): one refers to rocks, the other refers to an area of
knowledge that its easy to get agreement on. I think Bo, like most
post-Cartesian philosophers, conflates the two. I think Pirsig also often
conflated the two.
Mike said:
I'm fairly sure that you're using "subject" and "object" as an analogy, to
be taken with a large pinch of salt, but in any case I want to re-phrase
this more accurately, as "the individual intellect evolved out of the group
mind". This re-phrasing makes it patently obvious that the distinguishing
characteristic is autonomy.
Matt:
I don't know if I'm using subject and object as analogies so much as I don't
trust the terms. TO me, they carry too much philosophical baggage to be of
much use. But one thing I do _not_ want to say is something like "group
mind." I don't know what that's supposed to be, unless you translate it to
"language." Doing that, of course, makes "individidual intellect" look kind
of silly, too, but then that's the whole point of Sam and my's effort to
make the discrete distinction between social and intellectual look silly and
fruitless.
Mike said:
So you don't think we can have a discrete distinction between mythos and
logos? For the moment, I still have high hopes that such a distinction can
be linked to autonomy, or S/O[2].
Matt:
Nope, no I don't. In fact, I think the entire idea of "discrete"
distinctions is fruitless. But more to the current matter, I think Pirsig
takes most of the air out of a distinction between mythos and logos in ZMM
when he describes the "mythos over logos" argument. I think most people
here, and Pirsig, too, have misunderstood what the argument stands for. The
argument _erases_ the discrete difference between the two, it doesn't draw
one in at an evolutionary stage of time. When Pirsig said that dialectic
came out of rhetoric, I do not think he was saying that "dialectic is still
the method we use to search for truth, its just that it came from rhetoric."
He reversed the order to eliminate the idea that there is a method that
searches for truth.
Matt
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