Matt said to Arlo:
... whatever clear, articulable understanding of Pirsig I have, it is
predicated on my occasionally and deliberately _ignoring_ some passages of
Pirsig in order to articulate a clear, consistent understanding of what Pirsig
"meant." Mr. Buchanan is good at bringing up these ignored passages.
dmb says:
I don't see how that could be possible regardless of the ideas in question. How
likely is it that a clear understanding of any theory will result from ignoring
some parts of it? The notion strikes me as absurd. When you say stuff like
this, it's hard to believe you're not just joking or something.
Matt said:
...Since both of us understand Pirsig to be rejecting SOM, I view those
passages as backsliding because I am unable to glimpse a coherent understanding
of the two kinds of passages together. Mr. Buchanan--able, he thinks, to
construct a consistent sense in which Pirsig isn't a backslider--is correct, it
is an inability on my part. What I remain unconvinced of is that there is an
overall, consistent context in which all the parts can be made sense of in the
way Mr. Buchanan suggests (in other words, I remain unconvinced that his
interpretation is successful and coherent), and that my inability to do it,
because of my unconvinced state, isn't insufficient imagination, but the
inability of putting oil and water together.
dmb says:
Well, I guess the coherent picture is my interpretation in some sense but the
oil and water metaphor suggests that the MOQ itself has parts that will never
go together. That would be a claim that Pirsig has created an incoherent
picture and your unwillingness to put oil and water together suggest that my
interpretation forces a coherence upon an otherwise inherently contradictory
system. Obviously, I disagree.
Matt said:
I might be wrong on this score, and Mr. Buchanan right, but as an honest
inquirer I have to confess my recalcitrance. This also means that if someone
asked me, "given your brilliant and correct interpretation of Pirsig's
philosophy, what did he mean by 'pre-intellectual cutting edge of
experience'--and let me stipulate that you cannot say it is a Platonic wild
oat or explain it away in a gloss that ignores the role of 'direct,'
'philosophology,' the glasses metaphor, and the menu metaphor--now: go, tell
me," I would likely have to confess, "I don't know what he meant by it, not if
it means knocking over the other things you stipulated as 'correct' already in
my understanding--because as far as my imagination and ingenuity will let me, I
do not see how they can be put together while holding on to Pirsig's visionary
status."
dmb says:
Well, that's just it. The "pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience" is a
phrase that describes the central term of the MOQ. How can anyone have a
brilliant and correct interpretation of anything without a solid understanding
of its central terms? See, it's not that I'm some neat freak who needs every
word to be properly accounted for. Ignoring the passages that talk about
pre-intellectual experience is really quite epic because it is so central to
everything else in the MOQ. I suspect your real trouble with such notions is
simply that they don't appear on Rorty's radar. It's not just a co-incidence.
He ignored the same sorts of passages in James and Dewey that you ignore in
Pirsig.
Matt said:
Calling me short-sighted, unimaginative, and un-understanding because I am
unable to so, while impolite, would be more or less right. However, it would
also be rhetorically silly to do so because such epithets rest on the
question-begging claim that one has already offered that visionary and coherent
understanding. This claim is no more question-begging then the one that carves
out two halves and says they are oil and water, but showing enough fallible
foresight suggests stopping at the part where you notice that your conclusion
begs the question over the opposite understanding.
dmb says:
It only counts as question begging if I don't offer an answer to the question
but I do offer answers. Lots and lots of them. Usually you refuse on the basis
of your interests or my rudeness. Either way, you simply refuse to get into it.
That's your choice, not mine.
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4
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
