Arlo said to David Harding:
...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.
dmb says:
I think that's exactly right.
Pirsig's work will clarify James and vice versa. This is not a winner-take-all
contest. The purpose of side-by-side comparisons is simply to get clear about
what these guys are saying, to fully grasp their meaning. It's not that we must
use James, pragmatism, or radical empiricism to illuminate the MOQ. There are
other valid options, like Northrop's work or books on Buddhism, for example.
But James is the easiest and most obvious simply because Pirsig explicitly
identifies his MOQ with mainstream James and mainstream pragmatism and gives us
a chapter full of clues to follow. It's the easiest and most obvious because
Pirsig gets us started in that direction and connects the terms for us. He
tells us how they both reject SOM and they both move to radical empiricism
instead. Instead of dividing reality into subjects and objects, they
distinguish static concepts from dynamic experience.
Pirsig tells us what James’ radical empiricism means and what it means is a
rejection of SOM:
"...he [James} meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point of
experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from
something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of life
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective
thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object,
mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure
experience cannot be either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this
distinction.” (Pirsig 1991, 364-5)
James said, " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality,
because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and
flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for
the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." (Pirsig 1991, 365)
Seriously. How can anyone read these quotes from Pirsig and still conclude that
James's work is anything other than helpful? That conclusion, one held by
Marsha, isn't even remotely plausible. I think it's so obviously wrong that
it's not even worth disputing and yet here I am disputing it. It's like having
to argue that a mechanic need wrenches and screwdrivers and such. It's such a
no-brainer that I resent spending time on it and I'm kinda horrified that this
is not already completely obvious to every single MOQer. If you don't
understand this, dear reader, then you just don't get what Pirsig is saying. (I
can see that Arlo totally gets it and that Marsha totally doesn't.)
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