Mary said: For any story to be compelling, it must have drama and psychological tension, but how do you build suspense, drama, and tension into a metaphysics?
Matt: If you ask Hegel, he'll tell you add in history. I started a project a year ago that got put aside, of writing mini-commentaries on each chapter of ZMM. It was part of a larger attempt to read Pirsig into the history of philosophy (a project I've put aside indefinitely), and I'd hoped to someday finish these mini-comms and begin an MD experiment, of posting one each week (for 32 weeks) and inviting everyone to reread ZMM with me, using the mini-comms as conversation-starters. I still want to do it, but I haven't been able to put aside enough time to make sure there's no pause in the 32 week period. At any rate, I've been contemplating what it means to read Pirsig as a philosopher for some time, and a lot of it has to do with the drama, as you call it, Mary. I've tried out some answers to the question in these three places, http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/prospectus-part-ii.html http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-quality.html http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/reading-pirsig-as-philosopher.html but this is the first paragraph of the mini-comm for the first chapter of ZMM: ---------- When you read allegory, you’re always supposed to remember that, while on the surface you’re reading about mechanics fixing motorcycles, what you are really reading about is Platonic Reason. We might think of allegory as “prose argument by poetic means,” and if our chosen arguments are about abstract concepts, we might think of it, as in Spenser, as philosophy by any other name. The genius in Pirsig is in uniting prose philosophical argument with narrative symbolism, blurring the boundaries and showing us how—in a deep and material sense—we are both talking about why these particular motorcycle mechanics suck and what went wrong with Plato: symbol and material, theory and practice collapse into one. Pirsig brings philosophy home by showing how it affects our lives, and one life, by telling the story of his life and the life of philosophy in one narrative, and displaying how the life of philosophy—both the history of philosophy and living philosophy as a form of life—affected his. ---------- Mary said: For Pirsig to say that the Intellectual Level is thinking itself when this seems to surely fly in the face of all he has said before must mean something Matt: Heh, I suppose, but we have very different senses of the obvious. Adrie said: one of the treads displayed, is that Matt uses content , and Mary is building content. Matt: That's not a bad way of putting it--it connects with what I said about philosophical rhetoric, the choice of vocabulary, and how, once somebody's assured me that we agree on an issue, there's not a lot more to say (other to repeat my skepticism if the rhetoric continues). For as Mary said, we often get caught with our foot in our mouth when we assume we understand somebody else too soon, but the real trouble is that even if you are patient, what do you do when the person doesn't sound right? When the content says one thing but the form's telling you something else? To remain patient, you have to at some point shrug and admit you don't get it (which is what I think Mary was saying earlier). Matt _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2 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/md/archives.html
