Hi Marsha,
Marsha said:
I dismissed what I thought were _negative_ statements without
supporting arguments. I can accept that they were your personal
opinion. If you would like to present the standards by which one is
judged an adequate vs limited scholar and why RMP failed, please
do so. If you would like to present standards by which an argument
is ultimately judged good or bad and why RMP presented a bad
argument, please do so. If you would like to present any other
evidence, examples and explanation to support your claim please do
so. And if you do address your argument to me, please write down to
my level. Though I am often interested in what you might have to say,
I have never enjoyed or felt adequate to unpack your rhetoric.
I can also see this type of labeling (good and bad) as reification, a
som habit; a som habit which I too often fall into myself.
Matt:
What I find very curious about your angle of approach to what I said
is that it strikes me as the "som habit" par excellence when it comes
to argumentation. And it can't be the "good" or "bad" labels
themselves, for aren't they just the labels we attach to our evaluative
connection to reality, which Pirsig says we couldn't get rid of if we
tried? (Not the labels, the connection.) The habit, I think, is rather
preconceiving the area in which the labels get deployed as being
static, which I don't do. Kicking that habit would involve seeing the
conversational space that arguments are deployed in as a fluid area
in which it doesn't make any sense to ask about "ultimately judged
good or bad." I was assuming no such grandiose and
impossible-to-approach standard in the background to what I said, so
I find it odd to have it requested.
I also do not, for reasons articulated in my "Pirsig Institutionalized" in
the Essay Forum, accept the transition between "without supporting
arguments" to "[just] personal opinion." I take it, on the model of
"we _are_ our static patterns," that our personal identity (i.e.
whatever is called into being by "Matt Kundert" or "MarshaV") always
comes along with arguments in its train (on Pirsig's analogy, in fact).
This is what "authority" or "expertise" or "intellectual reputation" are.
They are the necessary social latches to which specifically intellectual
patterns accrue so that we can do more than create long scrolls of
amassed data and argument-strings when we are trying to articulate
ourselves and communicate to each other.
I did not offer any evidence the first time around of whose example
divested Pirsig's argument of its veracity (i.e. that no one's seen
connections between Aristotle, Spinoza, and James before). As
such, I was relying on my reputation. One can, quite legitimately, ask
for more than just that. But what I do think is a nasty SOM habit is
supposing that a "personal opinion," i.e. anything that does not come
with elaborate argumentative chains with mountains of evidence (I'm
being hyperbolic, clearly) is ignorable. After all: what evidence did
Pirsig supply? None, none at all. You were taking him at his
authoritative word. And that's what I matched against his. That's
why I talked about your rhetoric of responding to me. I have no idea
whether you really were just dismissing me--but that's the stance
your words told me you were taking. You can dismiss me, but not,
it would seem to me, on the grounds you appeared to be.
So, what you were doing is saying, "Nah, I'll take Pirsig's expertise
over yours Matt." That's a perfectly fair judgment, the kind we make
all the time in life when confronted with different persons saying
different things. Given that I didn't offer any examples, that I didn't
do any research to solidify my point, that's a perfectly acceptable
response. But what isn't, I think, is supposing that I was doing
something different in kind to what Pirsig had done in that passage.
If I had really cared about the point I was making, thought it was
important (which I don't really), I would have done research. But
do we really need to do intensive research for every suspicion and
judgment we make in life? Shouldn't we prioritize and give our time
to important things, rather than marginal, unimportant things?
But, even though it's not really a point I think it's all that important to
make, the second time around I offered Randall, who sits on my
shelf. If one example is not enough to at least lend a creak of doubt
to Pirsig's grandiose rhetoric of "why has no one ever noticed," then
I'm not even sure what more research would do. I don't have a
programmatic standard by which to judge good from bad scholars--I
do so by direct acquaintance, a dim apprehension, if you will, of
worth based on my experience in reading scholars. I wouldn't ask
for anything else from a scholar working in the field who is _not_
writing research on the subject, but is instead offering rather like
balancing comments and impressions based on their experience.
And "based on experience" is what accumulates and creates
"authority."
That's how I see it, at least.
Matt
p.s. I don't know how to write to you, specifically, Marsha, so I
apologize for the displeasure my style causes. But we all deal
with that from each other, don't we?
> >>>
> >>> Marsha quoted from Pirsig:
> >>> "I also have a concern of my own. This is the concern that
> >>> philosophers, instead of coming to grips with the philosophy at hand,
> >>> sometimes dismiss it by saying, “Oh he is saying the same as
> >>> someone else,” or “someone else has said it much better.” This is the
> >>> latter half of the well known conservative argument that some new
> >>> idea is (a) no good because it hasn't been heard it before or (b) it is
> >>> no good because it has been heard before. If, as has been noted by
> >>> R.C. Zaehner, once the Oxford University Professor of Eastern
> >>> Religions and Ethics, I am saying the same thing as Aristotle; and if,
> >>> as has been noted in the Harvard Educational Review, I am saying the
> >>> same thing as William James; and if as has been noted now that I
> >>> may be saying the same thing as Spinoza: then why has no one ever
> >>> noticed that Aristotle and Spinoza and William James are all saying
> >>> the same thing?"
> >>> (RMP, 'A brief summary of the Metaphysics of Quality")
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
