Hi Marsha, > On Nov 6, 2011, at 3:32 PM, Matt Kundert wrote: > > > > > 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. > > Marsha: > I think the "although obviously it was not written in a vacuum." acknowledges > other philosophic influences, so I won't dismiss the 2005 statement as > you do. When RMP states that the MoQ "is not intended to be WITHIN any > philosophic tradition" he means just that, especially when he writes of > a relationship to quantum physics.
No, you're right about acknowledging influences, but I don't think that eliminates what I take to be misleading. (And I don't like the word "dismiss." I think that implies a rhetorical attitude to me about Pirsig that I do not hold. If you have it in your heart to take me to be sincere, I would appreciate it if you understood my attitude to Pirsig's writings to not be occasionally dismissive, but rather as sifting through with care.) You actually come closer than Pirsig to stating explicitly what I take to be a wrong interpretation of what Pirsig meant (by all-capping the "within"), and that because it would evacuate the meaning of what it would be to state a philosophical position. To have a "space" (with coordinates within it to find your "position"), you need more than one point. I take it that a philosopher cannot be alone and still be a philosopher. A philosopher can have (and perhaps should have) relationships to things other than philosophy, but that yet means that as a philosopher qua philosopher his primary relationships are to other philosophers. If Pirsig called himself a physicist, and what he was doing physics, then the primary relationships for figuring out what kind of "position" he holds would be different. What is misleading isn't the idea that he doesn't have influences (though I find that he sometimes verges pretty close to saying such things). What is misleading is the idea that one can do philosophy without _at least implicitly_ having a relationship to other philosophers (the "implicit" bit is terribly important to my point). He comes slightly close to that in the 2005 passage, but even closer to it in the philosophology chapter in Lila. It is because I think such vergings are misleading that I emphasized the "intended" bit, and not the "within" bit. 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
