From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jun 15 2003 - 22:49:22 BST
PIRSIG from chapter 30
"Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from "nature" or
sometimes from "God," but Phadreus thought neither of these was completely
accurate. The logical order of things which the philosophers study is
derived from the "mythos".The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric
which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of
this religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the
PARENT of our modern scientific talk. This "mythos over logos" thesis agreed
with the MOQ's assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are
built up out of social static quality. Digging back into ancient Greek
history, to the time when this mythos-to logos transition was taking
place...."
sq: The mythos of social culture and rhetoric is intellectual. Culture and
rhetoric here involve: 'The collection and manipulation of symbols, created
in the brain, that stand for patterns of experience.' It may not be
philosophy, but it is intellectual. From this comes philosophy, from
philosophy comes scientific talk.
[David Buchanan] In the Lila quote Pirsig is explaining the distinction
between the mythos and the logos. He's saying that the logos is built up out
of the mythos, that it is derived from the mythos and distinct from it.
Squank seems to interpret this to mean that the mythos IS the logos, that
the parent IS the child, that old religious rhetoric IS the same as our
modern scientific talk. I'm truly baffled by this lapse of logic and wonder
how anyone could subscribe to such nonsense. It erases one of the most
important features of the MOQ and renders the moral codes utterly
unintelligible. Like SOM, it fails to make a distinction between the social
and intellectual level by simply asserting that they both happen in the
brain, both involve some kind of cognitive function. This might be true, but
it still does not negate the distinction.
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