Category: Pirsig

On holiday, sailing in Greece.

Met John Flynn and son David. John works for EMIL (ex EEEL) ExxonMobil in New Malden UK. A long term customer of mine at Foster Wheeler, Reading, UK, down at Esso Fawley. He regularly works with Richard Carroll, someone I employed during my 22 years at FW. Small world.

Also met Hillary and Darren from Epsom (both under 30 !). Sylvia may have persuaded Darren to come to Reading FC to see some real football (England v Lichenstein, who ? tonight). A very lovely couple. I got them and others into a conversation about Northrop’s Meeting of East and West, (which I’m reading by the pool when I get the chance), and Pirsig’s ZMM, and all things human and linguistic about what really matters – poiitics, religion, metaphors dead and alive, metonyms, weak and strong homonyms, aphorisms, euphemisms, rhyming slang, etymology, philosophy, the lot.

Oh yeah, and Alan Pardew resigned as manager of Reading FC this very day.

As you know, I’ve just started reading Northrop [Previous] [ Previous] and already hooked because he is straight into the pragmatic effects of the Catch-22 of the recursive argument about how absolute can a metaphysics be that includes it’s own definition. [Quote] the basic paradox of our time [is that] “sound” theory tends to destroy the state of affairs it aims to achieve [Unquote] (His scare quotes, not mine). As good a statement of the Catch-22 as any I’ve heard.

Some interesting and directly Pirsig related points too …

Chapter 7 is all about culture and Greek science. The main references are McKeon, Hutchins and Adler, right from the opening para. (I skipped to Ch7 from Ch1 after stumbling across the references at the end !). Not only is it about these people, it’s about Hutchins switch from “legal realism” (dialectic with value based inputs) as Dean of Yale Law School to “what is needed is more adequate scientific grounded [Aristoletian] philosophy” as Dean of Chicago University. In fact he was looking for an objective “idea of the good”. A metaphyisics of quality perhaps ?

Interesting that a Pirsig [see timeline] who reads, and is thoroughly influenced by Northrop aged 20, on a troopship in 1948, is shocked (nay, incensed) to find out about McKeon and “the Hutchins mob” [after Rorty] at Chicago University, aged 33 during the summer of 1961, after he has been accepted there and interviewed by McKeon.

Just received “The Meeting of East and West” by F.S.C. Northrop (MacMillan, 1946, 1st ed, 2nd impression) (just said that) and what a book. This is the volume that so influenced Pirsig on his troopship return from Korea in 1948. The book that turned a lateral drifter into pursuer of something important (ZMM25 p124). Anyway, I read the intro and first chapter before getting out of bed this morning.

Given that I got on this knowledge modelling lark from an ISO Information Standards angle, it’s spooky to find the entire volume prefaced with the quote from Chinese philosopher Mo-Tih “Where standards differ there will be opposition. But how can the standards in the world be unified?”

Given my obsession with the Catch-22 of my manifesto, it is even spookier for me to find the opening sentence is “Ours is a paradoxical world.” In fact I’ve already counted the word paradox 4 times in the first 6 pages. As I’ve been discussing with Matt Kundert recently, this paradox would be joke, non-existent meta-physically, if we were not so culturally hidebound by the linguistic metaphors of apparently rational decision making processes. As Northrop says, “The paradox appears in a purely verbal, but none-the-less important, form ….”

Of course this is a book written during and published immediately after WWII, so questions of world harmony were topical. Topical !? I keep saying nothing new under the sun – it was ever thus – and Northrop talks of “ever present” issues.

A very promising start.

On-line Rubaiyat – Via Rivets, but relevant to Pirsig too.

Will The Real Chairman Please Stand Up ? Another one for Pirsig research purposes, Richard McKeon, allegedly the “Chairman” in ZAMM. Interestingly the Chicago University pages show up many interesting Pirsig links.

This one includes the [Quote] From your point of view, they’re insane, and from theirs your insane. Let’s just admit it, we’re all crazy. Remember, all arguments against this are defensive, they’re just reason defending itself in its own terms. Even if we lose the rational discussion, it only proves the analogy to fighting. [Unquote] An interesting re-statement of the ubiquitous Catch-22.

I last rounded up on this stuff back here. And just before this I linked to the abstracts from Quantum Mind 2003 held in Tuscon, Arizona in March this year.

The original BCS Cybernetics Group stuff I linked to earlier is being taken forward in the CASYS’03 conference in Liege, Belgium in August under the title “The Universe, The Nothing That Is”. Sounds like the BCS emphasis is on Information Processing (QIP) in the sense of how the mind actually works, as opposed to the David Deutsch / Oxford-led commercial QuBit quest for creating computing devices based on Quantum effects, though this too seems to have expanded again in collaboration with Cambridge.

The title of one paper from John Wood (?) includes the words Quantum, Synergy and Quality – could that be quality in the monist Pirsig MOQ sense ?

My Brief History of Zen. It’s barely a year since I first even thought of reading ZMM – seems like a lifetime. Here is my first ever blogged reference, with no link to anything !!!

My thought process in the preceeding weeks was chaos / catastrophe / fuzzy / uncertainty / quanta / quantum-computing / eastern-philosophy-vs-science / Brian-Josephson / physics-of-consciousness / Zen …… and then a wondering why ZMM had been on a reading list on my MBA course 12 years earlier, and the fact that I’d never read it. The rest is history.

And now I find a link between Quantonics and Josephson.
Heres an interesting list on the subject of Cosnciousness.
A very useful Pirsig Timeline [via MOQ Focus]
Also find Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control listed by Dan Glover (MOQite) and Tim Allen’s I’m Not Really Here too, the latter (yes that Tim Allen) also quotes Pirsig as a major influence. (Kevin Kelly’s book recommended earlier by Leon.) What a tangled web.

In Lila, we get a great deal of description of the process Bob Pirsig used to manage his thoughts whilst creating ZAMM, and he gives us an insight into his trunkful of 3000 4″ x 6″ slips (index cards) in his letter of January 5th 1969 to his publisher James Landis. He mentions it again on page 129 of the 25th anniversary edition of ZAMM, and on page 189 he says …

Later, when I developed more confidence in my immunity to [the affliction of seeing every thought as archeological debris of some overall design], I became interested in the debris in a more positive way, and began to jot down the fragments amorphically, that is without regard to form, in the order in which they occurred to me. Many of these amorphic statements have been supplied by friends. There are thousands of them now.

I know how he feels – think I said in my intial review that the main thought to strike me was how much I identified with Bob / Phaedrus. I’ve just finished a third read of ZAMM, and I’m still amazed that I had never read it before the manifesto that started this quest. In fact I’d never read anything approaching philosophy before I read Pirsig either. It deserves some proper analysis because, like it or not, together with Lila, it certainly covers every thread of my blog. I think I shall create an analytical essay simply to capture and make some sense of the thousands of annotations and links I’ve made.

Since early 2002 I’ve had on my blog links to two Pirsig sites, MOQ and Quantonics. I’ve never interacted closely with these communities, despite being convinced Pirsig was onto something very important since the 50’s/60’s. I think the reasons for this were, and are, twofold. Firstly, I baulk at the almost religious zeal with which so many followers, nay disciples, seem to approach Pirsig. Secondly, if your aim is to establish MOQism through discourse ahead of any other “ism” and Pirsig ahead of any other philosopher, then be my guest, you will not be alone. My aim, like Pirsig’s I believe, is much more pragmatic.

Throughout ZAMM, he uses the recurring metaphor of looking and travelling up towards “heights” of one form or another, and on each occasion returning to earth or the ocean. In one of the climactic episodes [ch20 p244] when he decides not to complete the hike to the summit with his son Chris, there are questions and suggestions about his lacking the courage to do so [ch21 p255]. I’m sure achieving the rarefied heights of establishing a philosophy for philosophers to debate was never on his agenda. In fact fixed objectives are almost anathema to his dynamical / process view of reality – how many times does he use the aphorism of being better to travel than to arrive – he always returns to his comfort zone of the craftsman and the job in hand. As he says [Quote ch25 p297] Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value. [Unquote] Fix a motorcycle ? How about help any kind of organisation to create and deliver any kind of product or service. That’ll do me.

Re-reading ZMM It had to happen, after reading Phaedrus, and Dr Willis, and strangely after a dinner conversation alluding to Ahab’s peg leg. (The analogies with Moby Dick are patent – The New Yorker). Pirsig says …

[Quote] [Most] of the time I’m feigning 20th C lunacy …. so as not to draw attention to myself. [Unquote] I wish.
[Quote] Common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of ghosts from the past.[Unquote] Except that
[Quote] The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts [ie common sense] can actually exist.[Unquote] Which just about sums up the whole Catch22.

The Paradox of Progress by Dr James Willis [Quote] Throughout this book, I have used my experience of general practice as an analogy for life in a technological world … I have quoted some of the things they say in order to show the wisdom, love, humanity of ordinary people.[Unquote] A thoroughly recommended read, even if tinged with anger at the Thatcher years.

More [Quotes]
As Jacques Ellul predicted half a century ago in The Technological Society, ?Mankind is to be smoothed out, like a pair of trousers under a steam iron?

But that doesn?t worry the regulators in the least. They have all the certainty that they are right of converts to a new religion. They are absolutely unshakable in their conviction that the representation of everything in rigid rules and formal mathematical models is the very epitome of progress and they present their beliefs with a self-confidence, not to say arrogance, which would be fatuous if it were not so familiar ….. It is the replacement of individual experience, common sense, and responsibility by an external structure of rules which is the key change in the new situation.

When I started work at the Middlesex Hospital my senior medical registrar told me that our job in life was to make sure the patients died with their electrolytes balanced. Once I commented to a local undertaker on a body lying rosy-cheeked in his chapel ? ?He looks surprisingly well, considering he?s dead!?. Joking apart, when doctors work to rule there is a grave danger that the rules will do better than the patients.

Here we are at the crux of the paradox. We want to define clear solutions to the problems we can see in the world. But as we do so we progressively destroy the essence of life itself. It seems to be an unavoidable rule that the precise definition of human affairs has the effect of killing humanity itself …. As Robert M Pirsig said in his wonderful book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “?the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can?t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem.” … And all the time the answer we are seeking is there, not actually under our noses, but an inch or two above and behind our noses.

KEEP ON TAKING THE TABLETS OF STONE – Rules, we all knew, were made to be broken. But now technology is being used to enforce the rules without fail and the detached machinery of law is being used to impose penalties without any understanding of the human reality. Computer systems are par excellence machines for the carrying out of rigid rules.

Although many people now suspect that civilisation is rushing towards the brink of a precipice, they have adopted the short term solution of closing their eyes. ?You worry too much, James, why don?t you have a drink.?
[Unquote]

Magic stuff – just read the whole thing on-line today at two sittings. As passionate and inspiring as Pinker’s Blank Slate. Amongst philosophers, only Popper and Pirsig get quoted in the text, but the reference book list not surprisingly also includes Dawkins and DNA/H2G2. I’ve just ordered his other book Friends in Low Places on-line.