[David to DMB] It's good to compare ideas. Some ideas are better than others. Pirsig says a whole lot which James never mentions.
[Arlo interjects] I'd like to emphasize that "comparison" is a pretty rudimentary activity and is, rightfully, very low on the academic trajectory. In this example, James also says a lot which Pirsig never mentions. The goal should not be a "victory" but a synthesis, an expansion, an illumination to expand the scope and meaning of the idea-systems being considered. No idea-system is (or can be) complete. In academia, there are of course also trajectories of precision, examining and clarifying one idea-system (usually in the form of parsing the historical dialogue of which that idea is an utterance), but these stand in symbiosis with trajectories that bring multiple utterances together to illuminate a greater patch of darkness than any one could alone. You say that Pirsig has greater explanatory power than James, but I'd propose that Pirsig + James has greater explanatory power than either one solo. Reading Dewey, James, Nietzsche, Northrop- and I'd suggest Vygotsky, Hofstadter, Campbell, Bahktin, Giddens, and other anti-S/O authors (as well as those working in other, non-text, media) all leads to a greater illumination than dismissing everyone that does not use Pirsig's chosen words. One goal of academia is to suggest and encourage this syllabus, say "Anti-SOM 101". This is why I find it frustrating when people say or imply that Pirsig's voice should be dissected from the ongoing historical dialogue, to the point where other authors (as if all other authors are "SOM" by default) are not only passively but actively dismissed. 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
