Hi Marsha,
What you've presented are two conflicting passages from Pirsig.
That does need to be taken seriously long enough to offer some
explanation for what one takes the conflict to mean. I will refrain
from being haughty about my own explanation, though I don't think
you'll like it any better than, say, Dave's. But at least what needs to
be taken seriously will have been taken seriously.
How I deal with the conflict: I don't take his statement in 2005
seriously. I think his blanket statement that the MoQ is "not intended
to be within any philosophic tradition" is true but misleading: I think
it only means that he didn't intend the MoQ to be pragmatism, but
rather found pragmatism to be helpful in explicating it for a certain
kind of audience. I also think his claim that the "central claim" of the
MoQ is "not part of any philosophic tradition" is terribly misleading at
best. I think it can be shown that Kant initiated a tradition of
thinking about reality (as rooted in normativity) that Pirsig takes part
in.
Often when I say things like the last thought, I get in trouble with
certain people. I'm not sure why. I think some people think I'm
devaluing Pirsig's philosophy, or his achievement, or something along
those lines, but I'm not sure what the connection is between thinking
Pirsig has a really cool philosophy and seeing him as historically
situated. Some people, it would appear, think that seeing a figure as
historically situated makes them less cool. I don't see the connection.
So, my strategy is to largely explain away the passage, to ignore it in
a sense. I'm not sure that devalues Pirsig's accomplishment either.
Do we love everything that comes out of our lover's mouth? I'm not
fond of everything Emerson says, but he's my favorite hero right
now, and I'd like to count myself as an Emersonian despite the
former. And I'd like to consider myself a Pirsigian, too. And despite
my hangups and shortcomings when it comes to understanding
Pirsig, no one's convinced that this is a bad idea.
Matt
> RMP( 1991):
> "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American
> philosophy, It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the
> test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or
> some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience."
> (Lila 366)
>
> RMP (2005):
> "The Metaphysics of Quality is not intended to be within any philosophic
> tradition, although obviously it was not written in a vacuum. ... 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." (RMP, 'A Brief Summary of the MOQ')
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