Fair enough, but I don't think an honest examining of the reasoning is easily done in an antiprofessionalist tone. For instance, "ignoring" is an internal process to academia--you _have_ to ignore some people and take others seriously, or else you'll fall into the quandary that Pirsig accused professionals of posing: having to read everybody before saying your bit. What Pirsig misses (and other people peeved about their heroes being ignored and then reaching for antiprofessionalist rhetoric) is that the process of "ignoring" _and_ "saving" (that being what you'd like to do to Royce and everyone here to Pirsig) is already internal to academic processes because those are just the regular processes of intellectual maturity. The only way to reverse the process of ignoring by saving is by getting in the game, which the rhetoric of anti-professionalism implicitly abhors, even if what the person does belies it (e.g., pissed off academics often use anti-academic rhetoric before making very academic arguments).
In other words, antiprofessionalist rhetoric just sounds like whining, even if one agrees that Royce should be saved (e.g., his notion of the Beloved Community is very important to leftist thought, like MLK). The rhetoric means nothing, does nothing to help your cause--only patient, professional-looking arguments about why he should play a bigger role than he does would do that. Antiprofessionalist rhetoric is _only_ aimed at critiquing Academe--but it _only_ does it by criticizing the _form_ of it, rather than the content, and it is not the form you are worrying about, as you say below, but the content. It is one thing to do historical and sociological analyses of the culture-form known as the "academic" (like Kuhn and Bourdieu). It is quite another to try and motivate those analyses as criticisms. And I just, myself, don't see a pernicious form of ignoring of Royce, or Santayana for that matter, in the Academy. If they are worthy, they'll find their disciples. Just look at Nietzsche--he didn't become part of the family until Heidegger brought him into the fold. Or Melville--totally ignored in his time. Matt > Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 09:23:17 -0800 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MD] The Futile Quest for Academic Approval > > On a more thoughtful and sober vein (it was late last night when I got in), > my point Matt, was not in trying to critique the Academe, but rather I > wanted to examine the reasoning behind the dismissal of certain philosophers > in the past. I believe all that Dr. Kegley said about Royce, pertains > equally to Pirsig. > > "Ignoring those who are outside of and counter one's views has, of course, > condemned a number of creative and excellent philosophers to the margins of > academic concern, including many philosophers in classical American > philosophy." _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469229/direct/01/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
