From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat May 08 2004 - 21:43:17 BST
MSH, Platt and all:
Mark Steven Heyman wrote:
...If a premise is irretrievably out of sync with my sense
of reality, then I'm afraid I'd have to toss the bath water, and the
baby too. Pirsig/Phaedrus himself does this in ZMM, when studying
philosophy in India, when a remark by his philosophy professor
causes him to leave the classroom, and India, and give up:
"But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was
blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for
what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked
coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor
smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange."
(ZMM-PB, Page 126)
dmb says:
This is one of my favorite "scenes" in ZAMM. It's so very cinematic, don't
you think? Blithely expounding and coldly asking. If I were the director I
might even intercut a couple of mushroom clouds and the burning flesh of
Japanese women and children just before the professor says "yes". As I read
it, young Phaedrus is giving up because he's disgusted by the professor's
lack of moral outrage. And even though the MOQ also holds that our static
reality is illusory in a sense, it also asserts that the unfolding of this
divided world is an evolutionary moral development and nothing but.
On another note, it seems to me that Pirsig would certainly endorse the
efforts of the Democracies to defeat fascism during WW2, I don't think he's
endorsing or defending the bombing of Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Quite the
opposite. One can support the cause and deplore the tactics without
contradiction. It seems that Platt's reading seems to defy this. It strikes
me as a rather crude formulation to equate terrorists and criminals with the
biological level and then assert that we ought to kill them like germs. This
sentiment echoes Hitler, not Pirsig. Jeez dude, its one thing to disagree
about politics, Pirsig and everything else, but I never imagined there was
so much murder in your heart. We don't reduce the entire human being to
biology just becasue they've commited a crime or even if they are habitually
anti-social. They are still social and intellecutual creatures even after
being convicted, at least potentially. The implications of your postition,
Mr Holden, are genocide and mass murder.
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