Ant McWatt said to dmb:
Dave, I had a another look at this quote (from ZMM) in context and it's because
of Quality's essential MYSTICAL nature that Pirsig distances it from Hegel's
"Absolute Mind". Maybe that's unfair on Hegel but it's Pirsig's "completely
classical, completely rational and completely orderly" understanding of Hegel's
Absolute i.e. that is to say its supposed DEFINABLE nature which is critical
for our purposes here. Otherwise, I wonder what James would make about
Pirsig's comments on Bradley's Absolute - as seen in the Copleston Annotations?
:
"The description of Bradley as an idealist is completely incorrect. Bradley’s
fundamental assertion is that the reality of the world is intellectually
unknowable, and that defines him as a mystic." ..."Bradley has given an
excellent description of what the MOQ calls Dynamic Quality and an excellent
rational justification for its intellectual acceptance."...
dmb says:
Sorry it took me so long to reply, Ant.
I think you're quite right that the difference hinges on Pirsig's "completely
classical, completely rational and completely orderly" understanding of Hegel's
Absolute. It's also easy to see how Bradley could look pretty darn mystical at
certain moments but I would defer to William James on this. He had personal and
philosophical relationship with Bradley (and Royce) for most of his adult
lifetime and there is a sustained attack against that sort of Absolutism
throughout his work. He wanted the scalp of the Absolute he said and he
disliked so much precisely because it was a "completely classical, completely
rational and completely orderly" understanding of the Absolute.
The conclusion of James's essay "Absolutism and Empiricism".
The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible
impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its
relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract
with no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live in a large seaside
boarding-house with no private bed-room in which I might take refuge from the
society of the place. I am distinctly aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of
sinner and pharisee has something to do with the matter. Certainly, to my
personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all
prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. There is a story of
two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same funeral. One came first and
had got no farther than "I am the Resurrection and the Life," when the other
entered. "I am the Resurrection and the Life," cried the latter. The
"through-and-through" philosophy, as it actually exists, reminds many of us of
that clergyman. It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a
thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread
abysses and its unknown tides. The "freedom" we want to see there is not the
freedom, with a string tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that
philosophy. "Let it fly away," we say, "from us! What then?"
Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental grossness. But again, Ich kann nicht
anders. I show my feelings; why will they not show theirs? I know they have a
personal feeling about the through-and-through universe, which is entirely
different from mine, and which I should very likely be much the better for
gaining if they would only show me how. Their persistence in telling me that
feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of
absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in
things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the
expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can
kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to
set an example, what can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more
seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over
this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the
construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels
quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything
else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied.
But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will
hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are
hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us,
and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in
possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?
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