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.
So much packed into those few quotes. There’s some Epicurus in there I think, f.ex his: “justice is merely an agreement among people”, and doesn’t exist objectively. A very long and complicated debate. The last quote might point to the LH dominating impulse and dismissal of the RH, and thus at times the realities. But it also points to the question about where values come from. Are they wired, are they a result of the tool of reason, to they reside within reason itself, is it blunt empirical experience, or a kind of mixture of all of these in different blends according to the actual situation, and so on.