Dave Thomas said to Dave Buchanan, February 20th:
All your ranting to about this issue is what James characterizes as "vicious
intellectualism."
dmb says:
Just for the record, vicious intellectualism or vicious abstractionism has
nothing to do with the tone or tenor of criticism. The idea behind those
phrases is a complaint about prioritizing concepts over empirical reality,
putting ideas above reality. In the MOQ we see this idea is Pirsig's attack on
Plato, particularly the way he made Quality (empirical reality) subordinate to
Ideas, the way he subordinated the Good and elevated the True.
As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had
become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization
and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and
falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the
temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)
Please notice how this quote also supports my contention that experience is the
"ever-changing" part. Vicious intellectualism is vicious because of the way it
DENIGRATES "THE EVER-CHANGING FLOW OF EXPERIENCE". James and Seigfried define
vicious abstractionism in that quote. It says that Plato "deified
conceptualization", which is to say he turned it into a god. The form of the
Good not only turned Quality into a fixed and eternal Idea, it more or less
evolves into the God of monotheism. This move, they say, "denigrated" the
ever-changing flow of experience. That means an unfair criticism or
inappropriate disparagement of empirical reality.
See? Vicious intellectualism is a phrase that identifies the problem that James
and Pirsig want to solve. In both cases, they want to reverse the mistaken
priority by subordinating concepts to the flux of experience, by showing that
static concepts are always secondary, always derived from the ever-changing
flux of experience (DQ or Pure Experience).
C'mon, be reasonable. Who is more credible on this topic? A professional
academic philosopher like Charlene Siegfried or Marsha? The former has
published books on the topic while the latter can't quite construct a proper
sentence. There is no contest and no reason to doubt that Seigfried knows what
she's talking about.
And finally, there is no reason to think that James and Buddhism are mutually
exclusive so that the MOQ can only be rightly compared to one or the other. In
fact, at least one James scholar says quite explicitly that the Buddha himself
was a pragmatist and a radical empiricist, which is what James and Pirsig call
themselves. That's WHY it is so wrong-headed for Marsha to use Buddhism against
James. Remember when Marsha used the biggest William James fan in the world in
her attempts to belittle James? What does THAT tell you about the quality of
Marsha's thought? It ain't pretty.
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