From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Dec 01 2005 - 00:27:24 GMT
Anthony said:
Well, even if mysticism assists in eradicating poverty in the long term, it
would be worthwhile. Moreover, unlike Christianity, in the short run
Pirsig's ideas can help you personally with your motorcycle maintenance
(and, as I'm finding out at the moment, some decorating)!
I also think it's a good idea to distinguish between material poverty and
intellectual/spiritual poverty. For instance, materially the West is first
world status area (and, even then, not for everyone) while spiritually it
often seems like a third world one.
Matt:
I can certainly agree that long-term things are still worthwhile. I can
certainly see that much of the wisdom of the East would be a good balance to
the consumerism that is widespead in Western, first world nations,
particularly America.
The distinction between material and spiritual poverty may be a good one,
but I'm just not sure how to specify spiritual poverty. Whereas with
material poverty, there are very good, agreed upon ways to tell when it is
in evidence, I'm not quite sure what ways there are to tell the difference
between spiritual poverty and spiritual well-being, at least ways that could
be agreed upon. I know Robert Bellah (et al)'s book, Habits of the Heart,
tried to put its finger on America's spiritual poverty, but it seemed overly
Platonic in its search methods, forcing the appearance of poverty in cases
where I'm not sure it was there.
When I flesh out what I might mean by a "spiritual crisis," I usually do so
by saying that the democratic nations have a crisis in self-image. To
appropriate Auguste Comte's stages, I think we are still in the process,
after moving from the theological stage to metaphysical stage between the
Renaissance and Enlightenment, in moving from the metaphysical stage to the
secular stage. To use Gotthold Lessing's Christian terms of secularization,
after moving from God to Christ, I think we are still trying to move from
Christ to the Holy Spirit. I think there are a number of ways to put this
"coming to terms" with the movement of the age, but one is to say that we
still need to come to terms with Darwin, and another to say that we still
need to come to terms with Mill. The first suggests that we still haven't
fully naturalized our philosophical self-image by coming to terms with
Darwin's radical suggestion that we are continuous with nature. The second
suggests that we still haven't fully democratized our moral self-image by
coming to terms with Mill's radical suggestion that, as long as you ain't
hurtin' nobody, what you do in the privacy of your own home is nobody's
business.
Matt
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