Matt said to Ron:
As I see it, great thinkers are worlds unto themselves in their writings, and
knowing your way around them is knowing the hidden roads that connect those
worlds, like worm holes. Or to vary to maps, I say "hidden" because it's not
as if the map of Jamestown connects to Deweyland and Pirsigtopia at the edges,
one map ending and another picking up where it left off. Every map describes
the same world, and flipping back and forth between them, finding the hidden
roads, is a matter of figuring out how they describe the same landmarks. "Oh,
see, Pirsig calls that hill 'direct experience,' but Dewey calls it...wait,
that's not that hill. Oh, this must be it: 'habits.' Boy, that's kind of
weird..." It is an active, live investigation of flipping back and forth. And
then, of course, one has one's own map...
dmb says:
Since James, Dewey and Pirsig all call themselves pragmatists and radical
empiricists, flipping back and forth between them and otherwise using their
terms interchangeably is not very difficult and, in fact, that's exactly what
I've been doing.
And even if you knew very little about Pirsig or Dewey, how could you fail to
detect the similarities between phrases like "static intellectual patterns" and
"thought habits". The only thing required to see a parallel here is familiarity
with the english language. How is it possible for an educated person to fail to
detect the similarity between, for example, "direct everyday experience" and
"the immediate flux of life". There is nothing particularly hidden about the
way these artists use the language. In the most crucial cases, James and Pirsig
use EXACTLY the same terms; static and Dynamic and they both use them to mean
the same thing. Pirsig praises James as an ally and James praises Dewey as an
ally. It's all quite explicit and they all speak in standard American english.
The problem is certainly not the inscrutable, cryptic or hidden nature of their
work. The problem is that your man Rorty doesn't do empiricism or epistemology
and so he has no use for that part of James and Dewey. If one is trying to see
how they are parallel to Pirsig, Rorty is the wrong kind of pragmatist and he's
not a radical empiricist at all. There is nothing Zen about him either.
Obviously, it's a terrible mis-match (which is basically what Rorty himself
told you about ten years ago). Your tenacious grip on this ill-fitting
perspective has you intellectual paralyzed - as far as "getting" the MOQ is
concerned. It's no accident, I suppose, that you end up eviscerating the MOQ in
the same way that Rorty eviscerates James and Dewey. Apparently, this tenacious
grip even prevents you from seeing the obvious parallels, as explained in
previous paragraph above.
The similarities between their terms, labels and ideas are so obvious to me
that I'm really quite stunned by your baffled reaction. When this is added to
the fact that you almost always delete all the evidence and the explanations
from your responses, it does seem like you are simply being contemptuous,
disingenuous and evasive. Why do you refuse to engage the substance of this
debate? How many times have you bailed out?
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