> MARCO:
> Elephant, the truth is here and now under our feet, and you say, "GO AWAY, I'M
> LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH"
ELEPHANT:
That's a risk we all run. Maybe you're right and it's me who isn't paying
attention. And then again maybe you're wrong, and it's you. Obviously your
capitalizing of passages I know quite well enough isn't really much of an
argument either way and wasn't exactly intended as one, now was it Marco?
But yes, you are right, this Prisigianism about looking for truth is right
on the nail. Actually it's lifted from Plato. How can we search for what
we don't know? If we don't know it, we won't recognise it when we find it.
So it's a precondition of enquiry that when we ask the question we already
have some idea what answers is acceptable *as* an answer, even if we don't
know that we do. A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox. Plato's
conclusion is that this makes one more good reason why learning should be
regarded as a kind of remembering, recovering the truth we always knew, but
didn't know we knew. Pirsig's conclusion is that we have to be careful
about our enquiries - that since answers are so tightly bound up with
questions we'd better be sure, if we want the right answer, to ask the right
question, and not go on looking for the truth we want, refusing to notice
the truth in front of our noses. I don't for a moment think those two
interpretations of the practical upshot of this paradox of enquiry are
incompatible. Be careful about what you are looking for - that's what both
Plato and Pirsig are telling us. We could maybe add Heraclitus: "Unless he
hopes for the unhoped for, he shall not find it".
Ok Marco, lets neither of us miss the truth under our noses. We'll take a
second look at your post.
>> ELEPHANT:
>> I don't think that every road can be a "real" road to the
>> truth either. You say later that the only thing we can
>> know in a journey without maps is whether the road is
>> comfortable or not. That's true. But what we don't
>> know is whether a road that is comfortably high-quality
>> at this point is really going to be *ultimately* satisfactory.
>> It may still be a nice road, and lead off in the wrong
>> direction, hence: not all roads are real roads to the good and
>> the true.
>
>
> MARCO:
> In a MOQ context, this is a contradiction.
>
>
> RMP:
> "If the machine produces tranquillity it's right. If it disturbs you it's
> wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the
> machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test."
ELEPHANT:
Ok, Marco, mind if I butt in before you start your capitalizing? Good. No
look: there is absolutely nothing in what I just said that's in the least a
"contradiction" of this ZMM quote. I say that if the road produces
tranquility then it is alright. There isn't any other test that I've
invented. What you're objecting too is my saying that ultimately, in
metaphysics, only one road produces tranquility. It's fine for you to
object to this Marco - but when you do, please produce arguments that are
relevant to the point.
Its as if I had pointed out that no motorcycle will produce tranquility if
you don't put oil in it, and then you come back at me and point out that if
not putting oil in produced tranquility, then not putting oil in would be
alright. Sure it would. But, as a matter of fact, motorcycles need oil.
Ultimately, only one of the two roads here is a tranquility producing road.
The situation with a metaphysics is slightly different, but it does run
parrallel. A metaphysics is to the soul what a repair manual is to a
motorbike. There's a right way and a wrong way, and one of the most
important facets of the right way, as Pirsig beautifully expresses, is a
kind of loving attention and patience with the thing. A feel for the
material.
But we'll come back to that.
MARCO CONTINUES QUOTING ZMM:
> DeWeese asks, "What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?"
>
> "That's self-contradictory. If you really don't care you aren't going to know
> it's wrong. The thought'll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it
> wrong's a form of caring.
ELEPHANT:
Exactly. This is perhaps the most important aspect of this road that I've
been talking about as the one and only right road. Caring. Love.
You think these each paragraph should strike me down Marco, as if they were
spears aimed at the heart of my whole misinterpretation of RMP. It sure
doesn't feel like that. It seems that all your use of these passages
demonstrates is how little you have cared to discover what it was that I was
saying.
MARCO CONTINUES QUOTING ZMM:
> What's more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it's right, and I think
> that's the actual case here. In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right.
>
> (ZAMM, chapter 14)
>
>
> MARCO:
> Probably the Pirsig's best lines. If you really take care for your journey, a
> wrong road can't be "nice".
ELEPHANT:
That's right on the nail Marco. My point is just this: that not everybody
*is* really taking care for their journey.
That's why we get the dangerous profusion of bad roads, roads that aren't
satisfactory in the end, and not in the mean time either, if people could
really care to look at where they are. Not caring - that's what Pirsig is
really railing against.
Another kind of profusion of roads is deceptive - and that's the one that's
often quoted against my kind of position to say that I'm imposing my own
peculiar vision on the whole world. That's the profusion of the great
religions. But the way it seems to me is this: if these traditions have
anything going for them at all it is that they have a share of one common
truth. Do you see things differently Marco?
Anyway I digress. Back to Marco's triumphant victory over me in the
quotes-per-square-inch competition:
MARCO CONTINUES QUOTING ZMM:
> RMP:
> Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways
> are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now
> this is measured with emphasis on ``good'' rather than ``time'' and when you
> make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads
> are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you
> bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment.
> Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of
> drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and
> orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when
> you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when
> you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than
> you want rather than short, where people ask where you're from and how long
> you've been riding.
> It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch
> on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut
> to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the
> road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time
> before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly
> different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the
> people who live along them are different. They're not going anywhere. They're
> not too busy to be courteous. The HERENESS and NOWNESS of things is something
> they know all about. It's the others, the ones who moved to the cities years
> ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was
> a real find. I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and
> yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned,
> perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was
> just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. THE TRUTH KNOCKS ON THE DOOR
> AND YOU SAY "GO AWAY, I'M LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH" AND SO IT GOES AWAY.
> Puzzling.
>
> (ZAMM, chapter 1, Marco's emphasis)
ELEPHANT:
Yes, nice bit of RMP, Marco. And so your emphatic point is.....?
> MARCO:
> Elephant, the truth is here and now under our feet, and you say, "GO AWAY, I'M
> LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH"
>
ELEPHANT:
I think we've been here before.
Now ordinarily one would expect this to be somewhere near a ringing
conclusion, but in fact there's more.
>>> MARCO:
>>> From these words I realize that:
>>>
>>> 1) The "General Theory of Relativity" has been invented
>>> about 100 years ago.
>>> Just like "Newton's Law of Gravity", it's an intellectual
>>> pattern created to explain a Natural Phenomenon.
>
>
>> ELEPHANT:
>> Stop right there. No. Neither Newton nor Einstein are 'explaining'
>> "Natural Phenomena".
>> This is evident (1) in that it is their theories which
>> define what natural phenomenon are in any case
>> (mass, force, acceleration etc),
>> and (2) in that no *explanation* of gravitation is
>> acheived by either Newton or Einstein: what is
>> acheived is *mathematisation* of gravitation (or
>> in Einsteins case of *gravitations* plural): quite a
>> different acheivement.
>
>
> MARCO:
> STOP YOU NOW ! :-)
>
> EXPLAIN: "To make plain, manifest or intelligible; to account for; to
> elucidate; TO DEFINE.
> EXPLANATION: "The meaning of or REASON GIVEN FOR ANYTHING" [Latin Explanare:
> to make smooth]
> (The Webster's Dictionary of the American Language, Marco's emphasis)
ELEPHANT:
You'll have to try another dictionary because these reports of my language
faze me not a jot. Indeed. Quite. Absolutely. I agree. Shall we go
through the synonyms one by one?
To explain is to make plain.
Newton has not made gravity plain, he has made the behavior of objects under
the influence of this force plain.
To explain is to make manifest.
Newton has not made Gravity manifest, he has cited it as the obscure force
responsible for manifest behaviour.
To explain is to make intelligable.
Newton has not made gravity intelligable, he has made the behaviour of
objects under it's influence intelligable.
To explain is to account for.
Newton has not accounted for Gravity.
To explain is to elucidate.
Newton casts no light on gravity: he assumes gravity in order to cast light
on the heavenly bodies.
To explain is to define.
Newton does not define gravity. He defines how behaviour attributed to
gravity will function.
An explanation gives the meaning of a thing.
Newton has not told us what gravity means - that we knew already from our
inability to fly.
An explanation gives the reason for a thing.
Newton has most definitively not given us any reason for gravity. Einstein
has come nearer, in that he can describe why gravity can occur in terms
other than gravity itself (which newton cannot). But even Einstein gives no
explanation for why space should be curved in the presence of mass - which
is his way of *stating* the brute fact of gravity.
So much for Websters. Perhaps for afters you'd like to quote Chambers and
the Shorter Oxford? Be my guest.
MARCO RETURNING TO HIS OWN VOICE:
> IM very HO the "mathematisation" of gravitation (there is no such term in my
> dictionary..... )
ELEPHANT:
You have a defective dictionary.
MARCO:
> ... is an "explanation", in the sense that it's a "reason given
> for " gravitation, expressed in mathematical terms.
ELEPHANT:
Oh yes? And what, pray, dear marco, is this "reason" you tell me is
expressed in the mathematics? You aren't by any chance thinking of the
explanation both manifest and intelligible, the account, the elucidation,
the defintion, or the meaning? Because if you were then I will save my
breath.
MARCO:
> The purpose of science is
> to give a reason for anything.. and this is also the purpose of Einstein's and
> Newton's laws.
ELEPHANT:
This is just where we fail to understand each other. Of course, within
certain limits science is able to trace cause and effect in the hypothetical
constructs it erects. Indeed it is the *purpose* of science to attempt to
trace cause and effect, and to attempt to find a hypothesis which can
survive the test of experience. But it just so happens, Marco, that no
cause as such has ever been found for gravity. Don't come back and say
"masses cause gravity" because gravity just is the mysterious attraction of
masses. A force undefined because unaccounted for and without cause.
>
> ELEPHANT:
>> I often have to repeat this:
>>
>> We're still waiting for our long promised scientific
>> *theory of everything* - it has *not* arrived, repeat
>> *not* arrived. Not yet, boys, not yet. Mark
>> this. We do *not* know why masses attract. They just do.
>>
>> (Similarly, we do not understand why over certain
>> intergalactic distances masses actually repel - they just
>> do).
>
> MARCO:
> Of course, Elephant. I agree. Probably it will never come. I don't see the
> problem.
ELEPHANT:
Then pay attention. If the cause of gravity (or mass -space curvature) is
not understood, it follows that neither Einstein nor Newton nor anyone else,
including you, has ever given an explanation or a reason or an account or an
illucidation or what have you of gravity. They have simply described it -
though the 'simply' is perhaps superfluous as it is above all through
description that we increase our mastery over the world.
>
> ELEPHANT
>> Sorry to cut this short Marco,
>
> MARCO:
> Not a problem Elephant. Really, not a problem
>
>
>
ELEPHANT:
I was sorry to cut that post short - but the explanation, account,
elucidation and exposition, this I may never tire of.
All the best Marco,
elephant
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