Matt said to Marsha:
What you've presented are two conflicting passages from Pirsig. ..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. ..So, my strategy is to largely explain away the
passage, to ignore it in a sense. ...
dmb says:
I don't think there is a conflict. As the story is told in ZAMM, Pirsig's
exploration of "Quality" began almost accidentally and, as the story is told is
LILA, we know that he discovered the MOQ's resemblance to James and pragmatism
only after the fact. I look at these two passages and I'm thinking they reflect
Pirsig's point about NOT putting the philosophological cart before the
philosophical cart. In other words, Pirsig came to his own conclusions without
any intention of fitting himself into any particular school of thought or
tradition. In ZAMM, he introduces the reader to Hume and Kant, Plato and
Aristotle because he is responding to the history of philosophy. Despite the
fact that Pirsig lands in very much the same place as James, he and his radical
empiricism are never acknowledged or even mentioned. That how Pirsig's MOQ can
be identified as a form of mainstream pragmatism even though it is not
"intended" to be within any tradition. He didn't start out with the aim o
f landing there but that's where his quest led him. He developed his
philosophy and then found the philosophological label.
I can see how these two passages might seem contradictory to those who haven't
read Pirsig's books, to those who don't know this story. But you and Marsha
should clearly see that this is an imaginary problem.
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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