Category: Pirsig

Great Books, here at WindsOfChange.

WindsOfChange. motto “Liberty. Discovery. Humanity. Victory.” is a communal blog headed up by Joe Katzman in Toronto. In this interview he points out how 9/11 spurred him into blogging action.
“I was already maintaining a resource site focused on the Internet and business. Then 9/11 hit, and the in-depth geopolitical, military and intel understanding I had put aside for a decade politely kicked down my front door and re-introduced itself. The seriousness of what was to come was immediately clear to me – as was the importance of intelligent, informed discussion on the choices our countries and peoples would have to make”
(NB. Know what he means. See what was the original footnote on every page of my blog.)

Toronto again – nuff said. Interestingly, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, is that Pirsig has a connection with Anapolis, the location of St Johns University, the subject of the Great Books link at the start of this post.

And there’s more from Dr Austin. Taking emergent as high and fundamental as low, he talks of higher level emergent properties having causal effects on the underlying structures, such that the emergent properties are “causal realities”. As in Pirsig’s levels of static quality, the high can control the lower, but the lower must only ever support, never constrain, the higher. Never forget your roots.

Just finished Kerouac on BA2027. Aren’t west-bound transatlantic flights a great place to read – 90% of the book in the one sitting. I guess I need to understand a little of the circumstances under which it was written – one drug induced sitting ? – published 1955 about 1947 to 1949 period in which the author refers to writing and successfully publishing a first work.

The music and the locations are seductive; the drink, drugs, driving and women plain wild. A great east-west anthroplogical thread in there – the fellahin cultures, the Tao. (We know Pirsig was influenced by Kerouac. He would have read on-the-road immediately prior to his “teaching quality” episodes.)

What did Sal and Dean mean, headed for Times Square in 1948 driving through the tunnel from Jersey, by “We are a bunch of Arabs going to blow up New York” ? Intriguing.

Bought Kerouac some time ago; as the seminal beat-generation road story, it seemed de-rigoeur to have read it, since it forms part of the backdrop to Pirsig. Anyway I’m well into it at last. (Thinking out loud – Plenty of parallels with Pirsig’s mid-west already, though Pirsig’s timing does not overlap – his back-packing days were before Kerouac, Kerouac’s on-the-road days were Pirsig’s given-up / middle-age period, and of course the ZMM trip itself was another 10 years later ? Massive tributes to Hemmingway. And lines from Hendrix songs, 10 years ahead of their time, so is this where Hendrix got the lines ? – too much confusion, kiss the sky, weird.)

Yesterday bought Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and a mighty tome called “Zen and the Brain” by Dr James Austin – quite technical (and current apparently) in terms of brain physiology, as well “states of consciousness”, including those altered by meditation and/or drugs.

Not been in the Pick much in recent weeks, but went in last night intending to continue reading Midgley’s “Myths We Live By”, and ended up spending the whole evening in deep conversation with another interesting punter.

Ex boat-builder, putative journalist, everything from simplistic rationale missing age old issues to world politics, taking in Pirsig, Asimov, the county of Essex, collective consciousness, the contrast between top-flight and lower league football, command and control management, potential big-brother censorship of the web, unlearning generations and Colonel Qadhafi’s Little Green Book.

Where to start ?

Just updated my link to David Lavery‘s Owen Barfield site a couple of days ago.

Today Robert Pirsig himself recommended David Lavery’s “Evil Genius” site via Ant McWatt on the MoQ Discussion Board.

Who is Joanna Climacus ? Real or fiction ?
(Or is it Johanna Climacus – both spellings on the site ? The former in the page text, the latter in the button & book-cover graphics)

A fictional lady buying her stairway to heaven ?

Here is St John Climacus of the “Ladder to Perfection” (or Stairway to Heaven)
Here is Joanna (Polish ?) – “Room of my Own” blogger recommending Climacus.
All other “Joanna Climacus” hits are on Lavery’s site.
No “Johanna Climacus” hits indexed anywhere.

Intriguing plot – at first brief glance – travelling back in time to terminate Descartes and rid the world of mind-matter duality, and more besides ? The Name of the Rose approached from the 24th rather than 14th century ?

(Thread on MoQ-Discuss debating whether or not Johanna Climacus is the female nom-de-plume of David Lavery. No substitute for reading it and drawing your own conclusions. Anyway, one piece of education, Kierkegaard used Johannes Climacus as his own pseudonym / character.)

Almost finished reading Bronowski’s “Man Without a Mask”, about the life and works of William Blake, and was struck, by this summary …

“We find [Blake’s life] eccentric, only if we miss it’s context, which is made by his writings and his times together [American and French and Industrial revolutions] … the context of a man who gave his mind to speaking in a public world.”

Also this succinct summary of the significance of freedom and empowerment, and that social (industrial, political) institutions should be means to that end, not means of control and restriction.

“Blake believed society had no ends. Like his [Satanic Mills] it is a means become master …. The good remains an end to which society gives means, but which man must know and make.”

This last phrase is in fact exactly Pirsig’s MoQ view of the social and intellectual levels of Quality [Good]. Lower layers support (act as hygiene) to those above, but do not direct or control [Maslow] Individual man must know and make.

Interesting given yesterday’s BlogWalk in London [walking around Bloomsbury], that a striking conclusion by David Wilcox, was that discussing blogging as social software within organisations seemed simply to raise all the issues of society and organisation, independent of blogging as the technological means, and that in itself was a valid reason for blogging as a subject and a tool. Linked posts as index cards again. How true. Nothing new under the sun again.

Those issues of society and organisation I’ve seen previously summarised by Quinn & Cameron as the classic paradoxical aspects of management – empowerment vs control, centralisation vs decentralisation, discretion vs direction, open-communication vs secrecy, and so on. Johnnie Moore mentioned a company whose elightened operational guidelines was simply a single statement that “Each member of staff should exercise their best judgement”.

A ZMM site I’ve not noticed before. Will add to Pirsig Pages.

Been reading his “What is Life” (1944) and “Mind and Matter” (1958), together with his own autobiographical sketches. Marvellous stuff. These physicists who first came into contact with quantum physics, were clearly all deeply affected by the strange view of “reality” it presented and how this related to human scale everyday reality. Einstein famously struggled with “god playing dice”. Heisenberg too I’ve read and found the same philosophical and moving experience. Stops you in your tracks.

“What is Life” is a very interesting discourse on genetics and evolution – the Lamarckian metaphor, despite the clear Darwinian causality – and the relationship between quantum scale physics and DNA biochemistry – fascinating. Life and crystals as negative entropy or free energy. Roger Penrose provides a glowing introduction of this theorectical physicist’s contribution to molecular biology.

“Mind and Matter” goes further into the subject / object divide in scientific reality – and leads straight into the Vedic Upanishads and Eastern “mystical” “holistic” views being much closer to the quantum world view. He’s no cod philosopher either – he draws on Spinoza, Descartes, Schopenauer, Kant et al, and rails against the Greek legacy in western culture, whilst still naturally defending its correct position in science itself.

(Didn’t notice if Fritjof Capra and Michael Talbot cited Schrödinger – must check that out. I wonder if that erstwhile budding molecular biologist Robert Pirsig ever read Schrödinger. Intriguing.)

A bit of a brain dump after following the new Adler link from Jorn in the previous post. All old ground, but suggesting Pirsig missed aspects of McKeon as the “Chairman” in ZMM.

Richard Peter McKeon (1900 – 1985) Columbia – Woodbridge & Dewey AB’20, AM’20, PhD’22, Sorbonne, Columbia’25, Hutchins – Chicago’35, Dean’36-’48, Ideas & Methods 211 (Room Cobb 112 first floor corner), Retd’74, (Bibliography)

Mortimer J Adler (1902 – 2001) – Columbia PhD’22(approx), Chicago’30 Law’31 (Great Books / Synopticon ’52)

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899 – 1977) Yale AB’21, LLB’25, Law Dean’27, Chicago President’29-’51, (World constitution – post Hiroshima)

Charles Hartshorne (1897 – 2000) Chicago’28-’55

In the polarizing battles surrounding the general-education movement at Chicago, McKeon was often stereotyped as a Great Books advocate, an Ancient (vs. the progressive Moderns), and a strict Aristotelian who analyzed texts based on the requirements laid down in the Poetics. His schematism made it possible to appreciate the philosophy of the past without taking sides.

Common themes – The Great Books, Liberal Education, Ford Foundation, Encyclopeadia Brittanica.

Frederick J E Woodbridge
John Dewey
George Anastaplo
Richard Rorty – McKeon AM’49, AB’52
Robert Pirsig – Minneapolis BA’50, MA’58, Chicago McKeon Ideas&Methods’61
Doug Mitchell – McKeon AB’65 (book)
Zahava McKeon (his wife) – McKeon PhD’74
David Owen – McKeon AM’66, AB’80, PhD’84
Milton S Mayer (1908 – 1986) – McKeon
Robert Coover – McKeon AM’65
Susan Sontag – McKeon AB’51
Paul Goodman – Mckeon PhD’54
Paul Rabinov – Mckeon AM’65, AB’67, PhD’70
Wayne C Booth – McKeon AM’57, PhD’50
Morman McLean – McKeon Phd’40
William McNeill – Mckeon AB’38, AM’39 (Book – Hutchin’s University)
Richard Buchanan – McKeon AB’68, PhD’73

With thanks to Andrew Chrucky’s “In Search of the Real University of Chicago” for the many direct and secondary links.

Robert Maynard …. both Hutchins & Pirsig – spooky.

“Our erroneous notion of progress,” Hutchins writes, “has thrown the classics and the liberal arts out of the curriculum, overemphasized the empirical sciences, and made education the servant of any contemporary movements in society, no matter how superficial.” Consequently, a student who entered the university would find a “vast number of departments and professional schools all anxious to give him the latest information about a tremendous variety of subjects, some important, some trivial, some indifferent. He would find that democracy, liberalism, and academic freedom meant that all these subjects and fractions of subjects must be regarded as equally valuable. It would not be democratic to hint that Scandinavian was not as significant as law or that methods of lumbering was not as fundamental as astronomy. He would find a complete and thoroughgoing disorder.” Hutchins advocates at the collegiate level “a course of study consisting of the greatest books of the western world and the arts of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking, together with mathematics, the best exemplar of the processes of human reason.

That’s a plea for values in my book, shared with Adler and KcKeon I’d guess. Can’t see Pirsig would disagree ?

Mortimer Adler dropped out of school at 14 years of age and went to work as a secretary and copy boy at the New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist. After a year, he took night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. A biography Pirsig would recognise !