Matt said:
...There is, indeed, nothing wrong with just grooving on Pirsig's text. But
grooving does not an interpretation make, not in the sense that is linked
directly to knowing, and showing that one knows, "what Pirsig means." We don't
all have to have that as our goal in life. It is, centrally, a goal in life
for that lebensform called "academia," but amateurs set their own agendas, and
grooving is a perfectly responsible way of discharging that responsibility,
though _not_ if one also claims to static-pattern-know "what Pirsig means."
.., if there is to be any truth to the idea that _Pirsig's cage_ does open up
beautiful pastures, then we indeed need to understand what that cage entails
and does not entail. Otherwise, there's no sense in saying that these are
beautiful pastures made possible to us _by Pirsig_.
dmb says:
Abstract thought is a prism from which we must escapade. Like a hook on a worm,
I straggle to be free, to flea these earthy blondes in favor of spiritual
puerility.
Just having a little fun there. But seriously,..
I'm thinking about the artful mechanic as a miniature study in the art of
rationality, about the mechanic who returns to engineering school for the sake
of knowledge, rather than grades and credentials. I'm thinking about the
composition students who learned to write by ignoring the rules until AFTER
they realized that Quality is real. Once they had a sense of the point, purpose
and goal of writing - Quality - the rules became handy tools instead of
meaningless abstractions or a rote procedure. I mean, it seems that Pirsig's
overall goal is to fuse grooviness and intellectual rigor, if you will. Most of
his examples are very down-to-earth but the same ideas can also be applied to
science and philosophy. I mean, we don't want this soulful, artful quality in
our ways of thinking but we don't want that move to result in the glorification
of ignorance or sloppiness or laziness. On this view, astering the static
patterns isn't supposed to knock the groovy out of you. It's nearly
a pre-requisite to artful thinking. That's how you get a feel for the work.
It's the launch pad for creative intelligence.
Matt said:
I think the joy gained out of Pirsig's epithet "philosophology" almost always
comes from a reverse-snobbery that is as bad as the snobbery of the academics
that preceded it in one's personal history. In the last few years, I've tried
to exemplify through my behavior how one can have "philosophological knowlege"
without the snobbery (at least, that was the idea); can both laud and uphold
the standards of academic behavior and procedures without illegitimately
overstepping and claiming that amateur philosophy is bunk and its practitioners
merely bad academics. I think we in the MD should think more about what we
each consider to be good amateur philosophy, because I think that one _does_
need to have a _separate_ sense of what that is alongside what professional
philosophy is to make sure that one _isn't_ merely doing bad academics.
dmb says:
I suspect most of the reverse snobbery is due to the slack-jawed, right wing
anti-intellectualism. It sort of floats into the MD from the political culture,
where it's always in the air. In fact, it seems to me that almost everyone has
the wrong idea about "the church of reason". Pirsig has his complaints and the
academic tendency to conflate philosophology with philosophy is one of them but
I think he complains precisely because he cares and because he thinks it really
matters whether or not the church of reason preforms its sacred secular duty,
which is to produce free thinkers, creative thinkers, real thinkers. We can't
have mules pulling the cart of civilization, he says. To the extent that our
colleges and universities produce painters who paint-by-numbers, we're sunk as
a civilization. Artless mules are fine if you just want burger flippers or
assembly line workers. And if you have no knowledge, skill, discipline or
technique, and do what you like at the moment you want
to do it, you are not groovy. You're just a dog. You know? There is such a
thing as spontaneous action and something like instincts and feelings really
should play a role but you can't just think with your gut. The static stuff is
just as necessary as the dynamic. Leaning on DQ all by itself will only result
in degeneracy or chaos. And the static all by itself will only result in
brittle, stuffy, lifelessness and fossilization. And these are not two separate
compartments of reality. They go hand in hand and work together. James and
Pirsig both say there must always be a discrepancy between concepts (sq) and
reality (DQ), and yet they both say that concepts are true only to the extent
that they can be put to use in this immediate flux of life. Concepts are good
and true only to the extent that they work in experience, in the concrete
particulars of life.
Anyway, I take "amateur" to be a description of one's motives. The word can be
used as a polite term for incompetence or a lack of professional standards, but
it also refers to those who do something for the sheer love of it, for its own
sake. That's admirable, usually. And it seems to me that an amateur
philosophers would naturally, almost inevitably, want to know more and more
about philosophy. This is a different kind of education with its own advantages
and disadvantages, but you're definitely going to learn and grow as a thinker
by following your interests outward from the thing you love. Following that
vague scent doesn't mean you're thinking carelessly. Quite the opposite. Its
probably not going to be systematic or in historical order or anything like
that and that's a big part of what makes it all so delicious and easy, but if
you then go up against those who've learned under a more formal and systematic
approach, it's going to be a bit rough. There will be knowledge
gaps even in the most elementary places. But you're not a mule and so you can
see the systematic approach as a helpful tool, one you wouldn't mind having in
your kit. It doesn't have to be taken as suffocating or oppressive. The church
of reason has a noble mission even if you also have to work a bureaucracy while
you're there.
Matt said:
... we should be fully able, as intellectuals, to supply a systematic
representation of Pirsig's philosophy, and that this is in fact the necessary
possibility presupposed by the use of the phrase "what Pirsig means." If one
wants to defend the idea that they know "what Pirsig means," then it is on the
basis of having a sense of a consistent line of reasoning in Pirsig's texts and
words. This is a consistency that can be made explicit if one so chooses.
However, this systematic consistency that undergirds the possibility of him
having a coherent, non-contradictory philosophy that "means something," does
not in any way cut against any of his insights about DQ or irrationality or
madness. I think it is wrong to infer from the "ineffability of DQ," as Ian
termed it, to the perniciousness of systematic thinking or scholarship and
academia.
dmb says:
I think that's exactly right. The MOQ as such is a system of thought and it is
offered up to academic professionals. (That's my central reason for rejecting
the idea that "love" should have played a central role in the MOQ.) This
objectionable inference, I suspect, is predicated on the wrong sort of
anti-intellectualism. The kind that James and Pirsig subscribe to is aimed at
the whole history of philosophy since Plato. Using that criticism to condemn
contemporary colleges and universities is a very selective application of a an
idea that extends to our entire civilization. In Pirsig's terms, the idea is
not to condemn or reject the intellectual level. He's just saying that concepts
have to be subordinate to reality and not the other way around. That's what
went wrong back in ancient Greece.
Granger (page 11) has a great quote from Mark Edmundson's bool "Literature
against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida":
"Literary criticism in the West begins with the wish that literature disappear.
Plato's chief objection to Homer is that he exists. For to Plato poetry is a
deception: it proffers imitations of imitations when life's purpose is to seek
eternal truth; poetry stirs up refractory emotions, challenges reason's rule,
making men womanish; it induces us to manipulate language for effect rather
than strives for accuracy. The poets deliver many fine speeches, but when you
question them about what they've said, their answer are puerile; they don't
know what they're talking about. Though Plato can be eloquent about the appeal
of literary art, to him poetry has no real place in creating the well-balanced
soul or just state. When he conceives his Utopia, Plato banishes the poets
outside its walls."
Pirsig not only attacks Plato on this very point, criticizing his pursuit of
fixed and eternal truths, he does so in the form of literature. In this case,
the literary medium is the philosophical message.
"Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could
find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the
Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and
unmoving Idea, whereas fro the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good
was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately
unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." (ZAMM 379)
There must always be a discrepancy between concepts (sq) and reality (DQ). All
concepts are secondary and static and are derived from reality. If they are
subordinated to reality in this way, they're awesome and we love them. The
problem is that abstractionism had already become vicious by Plato's time.
Vicious abstractionism is the cause and target of James and Pirsig's
complaints. Vicious abstractionism denigrates and de-realizes the empirical
reality from which our concepts were abstracted in the first place. It
subordinates life to the intellect, whereas James and Pirsig are saying that
intellect is the servant of life.
There are many legitimate ways to get at the meaning of Pirsig's work, to find
out "what Pirsig means". And one of the best ways is going to be precluded by
that slack-jawed form of anti-intellectualism. I mean, you'd be cutting
yourself off at the knees to dismiss the dissertations produced by McWatt,
Granger and Sneddon. I think it's safe to say they have a pretty good grasp of
what Pirsig means. And since Pirsig identifies what he means with pragmatism in
general and James's radical empiricism in particular, your goal will be
furthered by exploring James and other pragmatists. Why not? Why wouldn't you,
if you aim is to understand what Pirsig means.
Because conceptual thought is a cage that can only be unlocked by the triumph
of the gut-thinkers? I don't think so.
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