Fascinating. Will you do future posts describing exactly how value is an ontological reality, or how you see that? I intuitively think values are real things, and deeply important, yet when I try to think about where value comes from, or whether a particular set of values is the "right" set, I get into a muddle. One part of that muddle is that sincere human beings differ so emphatically on what values are true. Example: Trump and his most dedicated followers embrace and very different set of values from people deeply committed to liberal or progressive values. Yet both groups see their values as the true ones, and some in each of those groups claim their values agree with and even come from God's values.
Another part of the muddle has to do with how God arrives at values. Does God simply know which values are real, with those values existing outside of God, or does God choose which values are true according to God's essential nature? If the latter, say God decided that murder and causing suffering were good ways of implementing values. Would that make it right for us to murder and torment, or would God simply be wrong? I can't see how to get to the bottom of this one (Plato also thought it was a tough question).
A third part of the muddle is, assuming God apprehends true values (whether God knows them or decides them), why has God not made clear what values are true to all of us? The different faith traditions differ on what the right values are to greater or lesser extents (though they also agree on a lot of them). And within religions, there's similar disagreement. Even within the Bible there is a lack of consistency (hence both Trump supporters and progressives can appeal to the Bible). Why hasn't God given us a clear and consistent message on this? In fact, why is God so silent in general? Some people feel God's presence at least occasionally (I do rarely but every once in a while) while others never do (my sisters, for example, who are open to the idea of God's existence but never feel an inkling of God's presence). That is one of the issues I try to deal with in my forthcoming book which is being published on May 1 (The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of God and Christ).
“why has God not made clear what values are true to all of us?”
I believe He has:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.ʼ The second is: ʻLove your neighbor as yourself.ʼ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate in the gospel of John. At its climax Jesus declares “I came into the world to testify to the truth,” to which Pilate famously replies, “What is truth.” Truth is a key word in John’s gospel, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It does not mean simply, the opposite of falsehood. It means something like reality. Jesus is reality, the Logos is ultimate reality. This fits beautifully with Pirsig’s quest.
"The broad, Western cultural consensus, rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, kept the values of Americans mostly homogenous up until the fracturing that occurred during the 50s, 60s, and 70s"
Other than that one moment in the 1860s where there was a tiny hiccup in homogenous American values. (While I appreciate the rest of the post, I think that we're long overdrawn on the account of the myth that the adolescence of the Baby Boomers marked the Fall from an eternal Eden that stretched from the 1940's back to George Washington.)
I'd suggest, though, that the Civil War debate was mainly a struggle within the Christian worldview, even a hermeneutical disagreement between how the Abolitionists read the Bible versus the Southern Christians. See Mark Noll's work on this point. By contrast, no one would have thought that a cultural consensus about, say drug use and sex, during the Sixties was going to be decided on Biblical grounds. That ship had sailed. The counterculture wasn't interested in defending themselves on Biblical grounds like the Southern slave holders were. The marginalization of the Bible as the regulating vision of American values was, by the Sixties, fully in view and kicked off our current culture war anxieties about its marginalization (e.g., school prayer, 10 commandments in courtrooms, abortion, gay marriage, etc. etc.).
I think there's a difference between "a consensus that Judeo-Christian worldview should influence culture", which had a strong place in the US (but as Noll himself points out, waxed and waned throughout colonial and national history), and the wider question of a "cultural consensus". It feels to me that a "cultural consensus" that contains people who strongly disagree on chattel slavery strains at the limits of the common definitions of "culture" or "consensus", or both.
And as Noll points out (if I recall correctly), this inability of a consensus on Christian authority to translate into a consensus on the most pressing moral question of the day was one of the major factors that eventually led to the wider rejection of explicitly Christian values as a useful grounding of cultural consensus.
Whenever someone mentions Pirsig’s work, I often reflect back on Eugen Herrigel’s – “Zen and the Art of Archery”(circa 1948). It’s had its critics over the years, but there are diamond encrusted chunks of infinite wisdom found within its pages -
“What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”
“The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure.”
“Archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself.”
“You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you.”
But “Value” in Herrigel’s existential narrative is somewhat slippery and when ones tries to define it, grasp it, or ever attempt to control it, it remains as elusive and enigmatic as ever. There’s a point in the book where he dishonestly loses the shot, and believes that in the moment, he’s successfully and fully achieved a kind of spiritual unity with non-being. But Kenzo his Master, is onto him and subsequently turns his back to Herrigel in a gesture of umbrage and exasperation. The message for me here as it pertains to faith in Christ, is that just like Herrigel’s over reliance on his personal technique (aka - Theology) we cannot fake our way to The Cross. We must let go of ourselves and all that we think [we know] about Jesus and just let the Living Water flow through us.
Like within the Dao, darkness and light are found within me, but I cannot of myself maintain an equilibrium. Harmony and balance are found only apophatically when I empty my head of destructive images, political arguments and projected fears.
i read ZAMM when i was about 19,,,then again about 6 or 7 years later....
on the second reading i read it in one sitting and at the end i 'got it'.....from that moment on my life took a different course - i quit my PhD in biochemistry (pirsig too studied biochem) and enrolled in a masters in philosophy....within 3 years i would be giving the keynote paper on pirsig's philosophy at a conference in the UK,,,in front of robert himself...
pirsig's insight also relates to the metanoia we are now living - the rebirth of the goddess: the feminine moiety of the divine syzygy. this entity is also called 'the world' or 'the world dancer' in the tarot - it is the culminating arcanum which heralds the new deity and world.
'the world dancer' is moving....she is becoming, the actual fundament of reality. where our other Gods are hypostatic 'persons'....the holy spirit is not,,,,the holy spirit is the least hypostasised of the elements of the trinity....it too is in movement - like breath - that background ebb and flow which is the principle of life sin qua non.
our cardinal sin is that we have mistaken the map for the territory,,,,add to that the fact that our maps do not reflect the terrain with any great degree of fidelity,,,and we are left lost and confused. quality, the world dancer, the goddess, is not a map, it is experience of the real,,,,of the ceaseless becoming which is the nature of life. 'we' - as fixed persons - are abstracted from this flow - the first step away from the Tao.
we exist within the world not on it. the air is a rarified amniotic fluid without which we would perish. the womb of the world is the goddess, and we live in her and through her. this world is alive, it is an organism, and it seeks to integrate and incorporate individuals within it....this growing superorganism is the body of Christ, the true church and the tree of life.
Fascinating. Will you do future posts describing exactly how value is an ontological reality, or how you see that? I intuitively think values are real things, and deeply important, yet when I try to think about where value comes from, or whether a particular set of values is the "right" set, I get into a muddle. One part of that muddle is that sincere human beings differ so emphatically on what values are true. Example: Trump and his most dedicated followers embrace and very different set of values from people deeply committed to liberal or progressive values. Yet both groups see their values as the true ones, and some in each of those groups claim their values agree with and even come from God's values.
Another part of the muddle has to do with how God arrives at values. Does God simply know which values are real, with those values existing outside of God, or does God choose which values are true according to God's essential nature? If the latter, say God decided that murder and causing suffering were good ways of implementing values. Would that make it right for us to murder and torment, or would God simply be wrong? I can't see how to get to the bottom of this one (Plato also thought it was a tough question).
A third part of the muddle is, assuming God apprehends true values (whether God knows them or decides them), why has God not made clear what values are true to all of us? The different faith traditions differ on what the right values are to greater or lesser extents (though they also agree on a lot of them). And within religions, there's similar disagreement. Even within the Bible there is a lack of consistency (hence both Trump supporters and progressives can appeal to the Bible). Why hasn't God given us a clear and consistent message on this? In fact, why is God so silent in general? Some people feel God's presence at least occasionally (I do rarely but every once in a while) while others never do (my sisters, for example, who are open to the idea of God's existence but never feel an inkling of God's presence). That is one of the issues I try to deal with in my forthcoming book which is being published on May 1 (The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of God and Christ).
“why has God not made clear what values are true to all of us?”
I believe He has:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.ʼ The second is: ʻLove your neighbor as yourself.ʼ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate in the gospel of John. At its climax Jesus declares “I came into the world to testify to the truth,” to which Pilate famously replies, “What is truth.” Truth is a key word in John’s gospel, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It does not mean simply, the opposite of falsehood. It means something like reality. Jesus is reality, the Logos is ultimate reality. This fits beautifully with Pirsig’s quest.
"The broad, Western cultural consensus, rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, kept the values of Americans mostly homogenous up until the fracturing that occurred during the 50s, 60s, and 70s"
Other than that one moment in the 1860s where there was a tiny hiccup in homogenous American values. (While I appreciate the rest of the post, I think that we're long overdrawn on the account of the myth that the adolescence of the Baby Boomers marked the Fall from an eternal Eden that stretched from the 1940's back to George Washington.)
I'd suggest, though, that the Civil War debate was mainly a struggle within the Christian worldview, even a hermeneutical disagreement between how the Abolitionists read the Bible versus the Southern Christians. See Mark Noll's work on this point. By contrast, no one would have thought that a cultural consensus about, say drug use and sex, during the Sixties was going to be decided on Biblical grounds. That ship had sailed. The counterculture wasn't interested in defending themselves on Biblical grounds like the Southern slave holders were. The marginalization of the Bible as the regulating vision of American values was, by the Sixties, fully in view and kicked off our current culture war anxieties about its marginalization (e.g., school prayer, 10 commandments in courtrooms, abortion, gay marriage, etc. etc.).
I think there's a difference between "a consensus that Judeo-Christian worldview should influence culture", which had a strong place in the US (but as Noll himself points out, waxed and waned throughout colonial and national history), and the wider question of a "cultural consensus". It feels to me that a "cultural consensus" that contains people who strongly disagree on chattel slavery strains at the limits of the common definitions of "culture" or "consensus", or both.
And as Noll points out (if I recall correctly), this inability of a consensus on Christian authority to translate into a consensus on the most pressing moral question of the day was one of the major factors that eventually led to the wider rejection of explicitly Christian values as a useful grounding of cultural consensus.
Whenever someone mentions Pirsig’s work, I often reflect back on Eugen Herrigel’s – “Zen and the Art of Archery”(circa 1948). It’s had its critics over the years, but there are diamond encrusted chunks of infinite wisdom found within its pages -
“What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”
“The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure.”
“Archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself.”
“You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you.”
But “Value” in Herrigel’s existential narrative is somewhat slippery and when ones tries to define it, grasp it, or ever attempt to control it, it remains as elusive and enigmatic as ever. There’s a point in the book where he dishonestly loses the shot, and believes that in the moment, he’s successfully and fully achieved a kind of spiritual unity with non-being. But Kenzo his Master, is onto him and subsequently turns his back to Herrigel in a gesture of umbrage and exasperation. The message for me here as it pertains to faith in Christ, is that just like Herrigel’s over reliance on his personal technique (aka - Theology) we cannot fake our way to The Cross. We must let go of ourselves and all that we think [we know] about Jesus and just let the Living Water flow through us.
Like within the Dao, darkness and light are found within me, but I cannot of myself maintain an equilibrium. Harmony and balance are found only apophatically when I empty my head of destructive images, political arguments and projected fears.
great post and analysis of the book.....
i read ZAMM when i was about 19,,,then again about 6 or 7 years later....
on the second reading i read it in one sitting and at the end i 'got it'.....from that moment on my life took a different course - i quit my PhD in biochemistry (pirsig too studied biochem) and enrolled in a masters in philosophy....within 3 years i would be giving the keynote paper on pirsig's philosophy at a conference in the UK,,,in front of robert himself...
pirsig's insight also relates to the metanoia we are now living - the rebirth of the goddess: the feminine moiety of the divine syzygy. this entity is also called 'the world' or 'the world dancer' in the tarot - it is the culminating arcanum which heralds the new deity and world.
'the world dancer' is moving....she is becoming, the actual fundament of reality. where our other Gods are hypostatic 'persons'....the holy spirit is not,,,,the holy spirit is the least hypostasised of the elements of the trinity....it too is in movement - like breath - that background ebb and flow which is the principle of life sin qua non.
our cardinal sin is that we have mistaken the map for the territory,,,,add to that the fact that our maps do not reflect the terrain with any great degree of fidelity,,,and we are left lost and confused. quality, the world dancer, the goddess, is not a map, it is experience of the real,,,,of the ceaseless becoming which is the nature of life. 'we' - as fixed persons - are abstracted from this flow - the first step away from the Tao.
we exist within the world not on it. the air is a rarified amniotic fluid without which we would perish. the womb of the world is the goddess, and we live in her and through her. this world is alive, it is an organism, and it seeks to integrate and incorporate individuals within it....this growing superorganism is the body of Christ, the true church and the tree of life.
also - just read this from PKD....synchronous:
"Valis - where is it? It is not in the human mind which see is [subject]
It is not in the world [object]
It is in both - superimposed as one. It is in neither (alone)
It is an event, when the human mind - the self - superimposes itself in union (syzygy) with the world."
Wonderful