POSTING FOR QUESTION #7 HAS ENDED / RESPONSE TO THE GROUP BELOW

SINCE GRADING FOR BLOG QUESTION 7 (QUESTIONS ON ROMANTIC/CLASSICAL UNDERSTANDING) HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE, PLEASE DO NOT POST ANY MORE REPONSES TO QUESTION 6 OR COMMENTS ON POSTS ON THE BLOG ITSELF.

IF YOU WANT LATE CREDIT, JUST TYPE UP YOUR POSTS AND RESPONSES TO POSTS, PRINT THEM OUT, AND TURN THEM IN DIRECTLY TO ME.

IF YOU POST THEM HERE A THIS POINT, I WILL NOT KNOW TO GIVE YOU LATE CREDIT.

SINCE MANY RESPONSES WERE SIMILAR, I'VE POSTED MY RESPONSE TO THE CLASS BELOW. PLEASE READ IT (AND POST A COMMENT IF YOU LIKE)!

THANKS,

Mr. B

My response to the group:

I enjoyed reading everyone’s responses. What I noticed was the majority of you felt that:

1. You felt the classical mode of understanding and the romantic mode of understanding were both valuable.
2. You took a romantic approach toward understanding some things and took a classical approach to understanding others.
3. You were equally split over whether the classical and romantic approaches to understanding were reconcilable.

Because you all thought along the same lines, I wanted to offer up a group response to your posts, rather than responding to each individual post. To be honest, I was a little confused by your conclusions. Most of you admit to using both approaches to understanding and you say both approaches to understanding go together well. Below is a follow up question for you to ponder:

Since you admit to using both, do you have a reason for using one mode of understanding over the other?

a. If so, what is it? (Because if there’s a good reason for using one mode at one point and another mode at another point, then they’re not really irreconcilable are they?)
b. If you don’t have a reason for using one over the other—and my guess is most of you don’t—then hadn’t you better simply choose sides? Why on earth use both modes at random? What kind of understanding do you get when you flip flop modes without reason?

Another thing I’d like for you to consider:

Are you really as romantic in your thinking as you think you are?

Dare I suggest that you—as the inheritors of the technological fruit brought about hundreds of years of classical thinking in the Western world—are all actually people who function in the classical mode almost exclusively? Isn’t it true that most of say we also think romantically because we are afraid to fully “come out of the classical closet” because we fear being labeled “square” or “uncool”? Think about it. How many of you do things on a wim? How many of you fail to look both ways before you cross the street instinctually trusting it will work out okay? How many of you think about consequences before you break a rule? Some of you may wear your hair differently or dress differently, but how differently? Aren’t your choices still calculated for effect? Isn’t the truth that living and comprehending the world using a romantic mind set is actually quite difficult in our technological, rational society? Admit it: don’t you think rationally a lot more than you want to think or admit you do?

In the 60s, we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture—two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way. This split between those who embrace technological change and those who resist it obviously still exists, but not as much any more. Didn’t classical understanding win the day with a vengeance? Of course, we’re not exactly proud to admit it. We want to keep up romantic appearances.

Is this not what Steve Jobs has attempted to tap into and to profit from by creating a computer with romantic appeal? Apple has been particularly style conscious and has attempted to make the interface as transparent as possible—it’s got romantic appeal. What Jobs realized is that even though most of us don’t think romantically, we all like to think we do. Consider his TV marketing strategy: PCs are for suits and people with no personality—classical thinkers—individuals choose Apple computers—that Mac guy is so hip! But aren’t we just kidding ourselves? It is still a computer, isn’t it??? Aren’t Apple buyers just like John with his BMW motorcycle? It’s still a motorcycle but he doesn’t want to admit he values the classical vision that made it possible. But perhaps I digress…

Whether we’re closet “classical thinkers” or not, Pirsig believes there is still a real problem with the classic / romantic split. Most of you admitted, both approaches have value, but you also admitted they are irreconcilable with each other. There’s no clear way to live your life in both modes. It’s not that you can’t, but you end up being hypocritical since in the end you just mix modes with no rhyme or reason.

But just what is the nature of this crisis Pirsig feels is around us? While he never explicitly states it, at fundamental level it concerns our confused relationship with technology. Technology has fragmented our relationship with nature (which technology appropriates), each other (technology makes human interaction less necessary), and ourselves (technology can distract us from our own concerns). To quote Andrew Sneddon, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Ottawa University: “Seemingly indifferent to human values and developing under its own logic, technology increasingly isolates us from our natural environment, from one another, and even from ourselves. For though we may be in touch with Belgrade or Tokyo, our lives have lost much temporal and spatial wholeness or sanity. We are often physically and even emotionally closer to fabricated media "personalities" than we are to the person across the breakfast table. Yet whereas we are never left alone by our technology, we are increasingly lonely, alienated from our deepest selves. For we have lost touch with our own feelings, being educated to ignore them in order to function in a technological world. …We are so uneducated about our inner feelings that we only learn to talk about them when we "break down," and have to be repaired by the analyst, at the Group, or in the asylum. For, we learn, our feelings distort our "objective" perceptions, and thus prevent us from functioning like our machines. In this vein, Andy Warhol wryly recalls that he had always wanted to be like a machine, for then it was easier to get along with people. We thus find ourselves fragmented, our feelings alienated from our world, our lives as well as our literature being characterizable by T. S. Eliot's phrase, ‘dissociation of sensibility.’"

Parallel to this public, cultural crisis of technologically-induced fragmentation, Pirsig faces his own personal crisis of fragmentation or "madness." Some years earlier he had been declared clinically insane, and underwent electro-shock therapy to annihilate his mad personality. This earlier self, whom he now calls "Phaedrus," had gone mad as a result of a search for Truth which led him ultimately to repudiate Reason itself. Pursuing the "ghost of reason" through Western science, Eastern philosophy, and rhetoric, Phaedrus found Reason to be "emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty" (Pirsig 110). But he had no place to flee; and, without an alternative to Reason, he simply went mad. Pirsig's personal crisis arises when he encounters and is forced to struggle with his earlier self, the haunting figure of Phaedrus who now beckons him back into madness.

The crisis of technology demands a response; for as in all crises a failure to act itself functions as an action. One response is to flee, as Pirsig's friends John and Sylvia do in trying to escape the "death force" which they see in technology. But being economically dependent on technology, they cannot effectively flee, and are forced to take refuge in a false romanticism (like we all tend to do—especially Mac users!!) which leaves them impotently resentful of technology.

But if flight is not a solution, equally dangerous is the failure to see the crisis as a crisis, and to respond as if one were merely encountering another "problem" to be solved with procedures which employ and reinforce the very technology which constitutes the crisis. Such a response is made by those whom he labels "classicists," people who would argue that if we are low on fossil fuel we simply need build nuclear power plants; or if threatened by swifter missiles simply construct a sophisticated missile-defense shield. For Pirsig, such a failure to perceive the crisis may well ultimately lead to annihilation. Pirsig does not explicitly reject the use of "technological" means to solve technological problems; he encourages, for example, well-tuned motorcycles, precise door latches and non-leaking faucets. His object of attack is not all technologies or even technological capacities; rather it is what he calls a technological "attitude" which fails to perceive the limitations of technique and the values implicit in its use.

To respond adequately to his crises, Pirsig finds that he must reject the tendency to act as if he were simply solving another "problem." For in this and in many crises, we do not yet encounter a clear-cut "problem" or well-formulated puzzle to solve with conventional procedures. A crisis is a rip or tear in the fabric of our understanding, a rupture which demonstrates the very inadequacy of our procedures. Further, we must often cut through the current inadequate formulations of "problems" in the crisis in order to reveal its real disjunctions. For the inadequate formulations, with their deceptively adequate procedures, perpetuate both the crisis and our inability to grasp it. As Richard Coe argues, "the decision to perceive whatever you are investigating as a 'problem' is already a bias and contains an implicit decision about the appropriate procedures to follow. Many of our current and recent crises result in some degree from the biases implicit in 'problem-solving' procedures" (Coe 64).

To respond adequately to a crisis we must disclose our presuppositions and formulate a new way of perceiving and functioning. Pirsig is going to do this in your future chapters by creating a whole new paradigm of rationality—hang on to your hats folks.