Hi Dave, Matt said: Since Nietzsche was working in a post-Hegelian intellectual world, I think it would be interesting to compare the cultural stories Hegel, Nietzsche, and Pirsig tell in trying to explain how we got to where we are. Because all three think that story-telling is an important piece of our intellectual armament as far as figuring out how to move forward. And all three were reacting to directly to Kant. But there are significant differences between them, and it would help clarify Pirsig's position in cultural history to see how it was different than his predecessors.
Dave said: Hegel? I don't get that. Pirsig explicitly denies Hegel in both of his books and James battled against the Absolute for most of his life. Isn't Hegel the ultimate Rationalist while James and Pirsig are radically empirical? I can hardly think of anyone less comparable. Matt: Yeah, but you haven't taken into account people getting Hegel wrong. Hegelian scholars like Klaus Hartmann, Robert Solomon, Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, and Robert Brandom are beginning to offer a much different picture of what Hegel meant than what Hegel's immediate predecessors took him to mean. Pirsig rejected Hegel's "Absolute Spirit," by which I take it, like you, he rejected the Absolute bit. (He says in ZMM that Hegel left out romantic experience, but I think that's wrong--when he says that Hegel's philosophy is entirely classic, I think we get a better sense of what Pirsig is reacting to, and I think it's Hegel's notion of the Absolute.) But construing Hegel as "the ultimate Rationalist," as the British Hegelians did (which is what James was reacting to), is exactly what's falling out of favor. (Unless one starts construing "rationalist" as Brandom has.) I wasn't talking about Hegel's notion of the Absolute, however, but about the cultural story he tells, particularly in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The kind of world-historical story of cultural evolution that Nietzsche and Pirsig tell dovetail, not only with each other, but with the kind of story Hegel tells, though Hegel's description of the "beautiful soul," for example, might receive different treatment in the hands of Pirsig. But, maybe it's not for you. I wasn't suggesting that everyone we read we do so on the assumption that they're perfectly congenial. Matt 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
