On Mar 7, 2011, at 10:00 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> Marsha said:
> Seems that in October 2005, RMP decided to clarify his position.
>
> dmb says:
> Not at all. Pirsig was summarizing the MOQ in 2005 and the part you posted
> only repeats what he'd already said in the opening pages of chapter 26 in
> Lila. There he explains the similarities between his ideas and James's were
> pointed out by a reviewer only AFTER his first book was published.
> "A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his
> idea of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower
> of Aristotle. Psychology today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone
> was right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the
> comparison with James interested him most because it looked like there might
> be something to it.
> It was also very good philosophological news. James is usually considered a
> very solid mainstream American philosopher, whereas Phaedrus first book had
> ofter been described as a 'cult' book. He had a feeling that people who used
> that term WISHED it was a cult book and would go away like a cult book,
> perhaps because it was interfering with some philosophological cultism of
> their own. But if philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the
> MOQ is an offshoot of James' work, then that 'cult' charge was shattered. And
> this was good political news in a field where politics is a big factor.
> In his undergraduate days Phaedrus had given James very short shrift... "
> (324)
Marsha:
RMP is an American, and a metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, that alone
would make the MoQ "a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century
American philosophy, ..." I agree that the MoQ is radically empirical and
pragmatic, and that there are many similarities between the MoQ and James's
writing, but so are there also like similarities between the MoQ and Mahayana
Buddhism. I agree that RMP wrote about some of the MoQ's similarities with
James in LILA. My point is that in October 2005, long after the publication of
Lila, in a paper representing a summary of the MoQ, RMP clarified his position
by writing most succinctly that "The Metaphysics of Quality is not intended to
be within any philosophic tradition, ..." Further into the paragraph he
offered his reason: "The Metaphysics of Quality's central idea that the world
is nothing but value is not part of any philosophic tradition, ..."
Again I offer RMP's 2005 statement for your consideration:
"The Metaphysics of Quality is not intended to be within any philosophic
tradition, although obviously it was not written in a vacuum. My first
awareness that it resembled James' work came from a magazine review long after
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was published. The Metaphysics of
Quality's central idea that the world is nothing but value is not part of any
philosophic tradition that I know of. I have proposed it because it seems to me
that when you look into it carefully it makes more sense than all the other
things the world is supposed to be composed of. One particular strength lies in
its applicability to quantum physics, where substance has been dismissed but
nothing except arcane mathematical formulae has really replaced it."
(A brief summary of the Metaphysics of Quality, October 2005)
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