From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 15:42:00 GMT
Re: The intellectual level
Bo said:
We know what philosophers Pirsig refers to in his work and (your) Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger are not among them. And if existentialism can be said to be a parallel or forerunner for the MOQ ...maybe?
Matt said:
Pirsig does refer flatteringly to Whitehead in his reference to Whitehead's "dim apprehension" and I thought Pirsig referenced Bergson once (possibly in his line-up of philosophers that other people said he sounded like).
Ant:
I also thought Pirsig made a direct reference to Bergson but it isn’t in ZMM, SODV or LILA. However, this idea might have arisen as Doug Renselle has a number of articles (at www.quantonics.com) comparing Pirsig and Bergson. For example:
“Pirsig vis-à-vis Bergson. Perspectives of Monism vis-à-vis Pluralism”
“A Topical Review of Henri Louis Bergson's Time and Free Will”, and;
“A Topical Review of Henri Louis Bergson's Creative Evolution.”
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The reference to Whitehead is made by Pirsig on page 119 of the 1991 hardback UK edition of LILA:
“When A. N. Whitehead wrote that ‘mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language,’ he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new… It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom.”
Moreover, (probably more for David M.’s interest) there is an M.A. dissertation comparing the MOQ with Whitehead available on microfiche from any University library. Its details are as follows:
Sneddon, Andrew George (1995). “A Process Analysis of Quality: A. N. Whitehead & R. Pirsig on Existence & Value.” University of New Brunswick, Canada.
I also refer to this (though only in passing) in Section 2.5 of my PhD textbook. See below:
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As noted later in Chapter Four, Whitehead shares many of the same concerns of Pirsig’s with SOM. Sneddon (1995, p.76) notes further that Whitehead and Pirsig reached similar conclusions concerning the process nature of reality though from diametric starting points:
“Whitehead thought that the world could better be described as being founded in events of experience; the universe fundamentally experiences itself. This creative activity incorporated the human experience, value-laden as it is, nicely. Pirsig, wrapped up in examining value-differences, eventually arrived at the idea of a universe in process.”
Though, it could be said that Whitehead and Pirsig are both process philosophers, Whitehead seems to suggesting (as per Plato) that there is a reservoir of forms to which the realm of actuality has access while Pirsig does not recognise any such realm (Sneddon, 1995, p.81).
Ultimately, static forms in the MOQ are thought to be essentially intellectual constructions applied to a Dynamic ever-changing reality.
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From what I remember, I thought that Bergson seemed very “Pirsigian” when I read him a couple of years ago and, as with Whitehead, would make a good candidate for academic comparison to the MOQ.
Best wishes,
Anthony.
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