From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 03 2003 - 08:48:18 BST
Hey Johnny, Platt, Scott and all,
Thought this was an interesting thread and just wanted to throw my two cents
in...
JOHNNY
Is the Giant primarily the social patterns, along the lines of government,
that keep cities humming, as Platt says, or is it more the economic system
of free enterprise, and technology?
Platt wants to put the Giant in the third level, so that the fourth level
can be free of any "bad" patterns. I think the Giant is a fourth level
pattern, I like to see the third level as pristine.
PIRSIG (LILA 247)
It used to fill his dreams, night after night. When he was little it
was a giant octopus that he'd seen in a cartoon movie. The octopus would
come up on the beach and wrap its tentacles around him and squeeze him to
death. He would wake up in the dark and think he was dead. Later it was
huge, shadowy, faceless giant who was coming to kill him. He would wake up
afraid and the slowly realize the giant wasn't real. He supposed
everyone had dreams like that although he doubted whether most people had
them so often.
He had come to think of dreams as Dynamic perception of reality.... The
static patterns of dreams were false but the underlying values that produced
the patterns were true. In static reality there is no octopus coming to
squeeze us to death, no giant that is going to devour us and digest us and
turn us into a part of its own body so that it can grow stronger and
stronger while we are dissolved and lost into nothingness. But in Dynamic
reality?
....He'd seen drawings of manhole of how manholes led down to
staggeringly complex underground networks of systems that made this whole
island happen: electric power networks, telephone networks, water-pipe
networks, gas line networks, sewage networks, subway tunnels, networks he
had never even heard of, like the nerves and arteries and muscle fibers of
a giant organism.
The Giant of his dreams.
....When he was young Phaedrus used to think about cows and pigs and
chickens and how they never knew that the nice farmer who provided food and
shelter was doing so only so that he could sell them to be killed and eaten.
Thy would "oink" or "cluck" and he would come with food, so they probably
thought he was some sort of servant.
He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same
thing to people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and
though of as beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from
enemies, but an organism that secretly was raising there people for its own
sustenance, feeding upon them and using their accumulated energy for its own
independent purposes. Later he saw there was: this Giant. People took upon
the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a
farmer... Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own
purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals....
RICK
While Phaedrus's initial perception of the Giant came through a Dynamic
perception of reality, the Giant itself he explicitly declares in the last
paragraph quoted, is code for static social patterns ("...People took upon
the social patterns of the Giant..."). This would make Platt correct in
placing the Giant on the third level (at least in Pirsig's estimation).
Moreover, the farmer analogy indicates Phaedrus's insight is that
biological man (like the biological chicken) is really just being used by
the Giant. A 'farmer', keep in mind, is himself a social pattern and thus a
'tendril' of the Giant (to mix metaphors). That is, the analogy breaks down
to ---Giant (social pattern) is to man (biological pattern) what farmer
(social pattern) is to chicken (biological pattern). I believe the overall
inference is that the Giant is the "sum total of all social patterns" and
therefore I think both Platt and Johnny's conceptions of the Giant are too
narrow. Free enterprise, capitalism, governments, agriculture, etc are all
just "organs" of the Giant. Like a biological human needs a heart and lungs
and a brain, a sociological Giant needs an economy, a government and plenty
of farmers.
take care
rick
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to
make it precise. - Bertrand Russell
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