John,
you know, I've always been curious about something Pirsig wrote in ZAMM:
"Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:
He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes
the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge
may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-
Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was
recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand."
Where in Pirsig's work does this knowledge manifest? One can have a
higher IQ than that and still never have proven a theorem
Hilbert-style or with natural deduction. And before one has done
something like that it's unlikely that they could be considered a
swift knower of logic.
As a knower of logic, Pirsig could probably tell whether there's a
mistake in the Heinous Quadrilemma.
In any case, I didn't even know Whitehead made other than analytic
philosophy. And funny that Dan just mentioned Gödel and now you
mention this, because Gödel proved Whitehead's and Russell's project -
Principia Mathematica - to be impossible. Pirsig convinced me of the
importance of the MOQ but I mightn't have understood undefinability
without Gödel.
Regards,
Tuk
Lainaus John Carl <ridgecoy...@gmail.com>:
It's got to be one or the other.
Probably not the latter, makes more sense the former. He himself admited
that he wasn't much of a scholarly philosophologist. And who has time to
be? Academics in their lairs, maybe. In this busy age life is too big to
keep your nose in books all the time. So "ignoramous" non-perjorativel
then, but the fact is, he DID at least read some AN Whitehead. Quotes him
from reading his book on history of philosophy, in the bowels of the
troopship. You'd think he might have followed up on the man's thinking a
bit?
All these questions I mumble to myself are bound up in my reading the
introduction to a book by Whitehead, Religion in the Making, starting with
a quote from said book,
*There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life;
and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the
quality of the quality. (RM 80)*
Now, dear fellow MoQers, I don't know about you, but that statement kicks
me right in the gut. Quality? That's OUR term, right? What's Whitehead
doing stealing it from us? In 1926, even. That takes some chutzpah AND a
time machine.
The introducer, goes on to say,
" Religion in the Making is a book about value. The intriguing passage
quoted above suggest several important aspects of Whitehead's philosophical
thinking about the reality and metaphysical significance of value (here
termed 'quality') and reveals one the central objectives of the present
text. First, the sentence manifests Whitehead's typical approach to
intuitive experience, especially the qualitative and emotionally clothed
dimensions of our immediate contact with reality. As a corollary to
this, Whitehead is implicitly asserting (against much of the critical
tradition in philosophy) that we do in fact,have such immediate contact and
that it can serve as a starting point, if not a justification, for the
kinds of claims made by metaphysicians."
That is, Quality cannot be defined, but you KNOW what it is. And THAT it
is. And this can be a starting point for discussion and logical
analysis. Pirsig and Whitehead seem to be perfectly harmonious,
fundamentally, So was Whitehead an influence on Pirsig's thought?
OR, did they take separate trails up the same American mountain of thought
and reach the same perspective?
Who knows?
Anybody?
JC
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