Marsha to Andre:
Right, and Buddhism is pragmatic and is based on a radical empiricism too. My
concern is confining the MoQ to the Jamesian tradition.
Andre replied:
No such 'confining' intended Marsha. I should also say that in both ZMM and
LILA, Pirsig has referred more to Taoism and (Zen)Buddhism than to the Jamesian
tradition.
dmb says:
I don't see why anyone should feel confined. Pirsig read James after ZAMM was
published, prompted by an article in the Harvard Educational review which
claimed Pirsig was a lot like James. In Lila he tells us that he "found fits
and matches that no amount of selective reading could contrive" and after a few
pages of explanation Pirsig says the MOQ is a form of mainstream American
pragmatism. Considering that, I think it's obvious that comparisons with James
would only be helpful and illuminating.
Pirsig also tells us that his MOQ does nothing for "Quality or the Tao. What
benefited was reason," he says.
Similarly, in her book about James Charlene Seigfried says, "there is no doubt
that the project of reconstructing the task of rational thinking was central to
his life work."
"Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would
find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos
had endowed our culture with the tendency to do what is 'reasonable' even when
it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing right there. I said a
long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I
meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other
and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then."
(ZAMM 358)
Similarly, discussing the problem James calls "vicious abstractionism",
Seigfried says, "abstractionism had become vicious already with Socrates and
Plato, who deified conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of
experience, thus forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly
constructed extracts from the temporal flux." (William James's Radical
Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)
"Is thought for the sake of life? or is life for the sake of thought?." (James
1000)
"I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget
it." (ZAMM 246)
"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite
difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if
this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one." (James 508)
As I see it, laying these quotes side by side only adds to the richness and
texture of the idea they commonly discuss. It's a chance to hear the song by
three different singers, if you will, or a chance to shed light on the notion
from three different angles. Surely it can't hurt.
And how does it make any sense at all to construe the use of quotes as
authoritarianism? What reason is there to construe the use of comparisons as
confining or restricting? What kind of anti-intellectual paranoia motives such
goofiness?
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
