Hi, Struan,
I must say that while I agree with some of your recent critics, I do not
believe you'll ever manage to close down this forum if you persist posting
to it and generating such an amount of replies. Perhaps your aims would be
served best by silence, don't you think ? ;)
But anyway, thanks for your contributions, it keeps this forum amusing.
>P.S. Denis - thanks for reiterating my points.
You're welcome. ;)
>Might you perhaps pick
>Horse up on his far greater level of insulting? I doubt it.
The difference between Horse and you is that your insults are both
systematic and directed at anyone trying to make a contribution to this
forum, while Horse's are only directed at you, *as a result* of your
belligerent attitude. While I do not believe Horse's answer to be the best
way to deal with you, I will freely admit that I'll believe his version over
yours any day of the week. You make a poor Discordia, I'm afraid.
> Does that
>make you a hypocrite? I suspect so.
Flattery will get you nowhere, sir. :)
>Metaphysics is all about questions. There is no 'grand plan' and stupid
>(sorry but they are) simplistic answers like those contained in Pirsig's
>work make me vomit and the people who fall for them make me weep for the
>human condition.
See what I meant ? Convincing people to abandon flawed ideas takes a little
more work than just calling them idiots, Struan. You're obviously well-read
and articulate enough, but where have you left your manners ? Anything you
say, as valuable as it may be, will only get through if you take the pains
of keeping up the "social" side of a conversation. If you keep up lacing
your posts with contempt, insults, insinuations and slander, do not be
surprised if people focus on that and forget their intellectual content.
For something to be exchanged, a link has to be established and maintained,
first. You seem to be convinced that bashing it into our heads will be far
more effective, but since you've been at it for close to four years and that
insults have been the only replies you got so far, I think it might be
useful to change strategy, no ?
OTOH, I do not believe your rabid attacks upon anything Robert Pirsig has
ever written are justified, and I do think I'll ever call his work
"worthless", no matter how gently you might try to convince me. No one is
wrong 100% of the time, Struan, not even you. You call Pirsig "unoriginal"
(as if it should definitely condemn him), while himself found analogies
between his philosophy and others' like William James or even Lao-Tzu !
Sure, he's unoriginal, since no one is *purely* original. I mean, he has
told the story a Chinese guy told 2500 years ago in a different form...
well, that's a blatant case of plagiarism, which should be severely
condemned ! :-/
No one builds in a vacuum, Struan, and even if I agree that some of what
Pirsig's wrote isn't so good, some I still find valuable.
You're not among a bunch of fundamentalists, ready to die for their Hero,
but among people who wants to discuss some ideas and see how far they can
take them.
We're here to put the MOQ to the test, and see what we can get from it, and
what we should reject. The last thing we need is a petty tyrant who condemns
the whole process and wants to keep philosophy in the academic Ivory Tower.
Quite frankly, I do not give a damn if Pirsig gets academic recognition or
not. If what he said about reality as a moral process doesn't get through,
someone will one day come and say it in some other way that will get it in
the limelight. As you've noticed, he's not the first one to have said it,
after all.
It's just a question of time.
Try to keep your temper down, in the meanwhile. Pirsig didn't write his
books just to spite you, you know ?
Denis
PS : BTW, I thought you were a professional jazz musician, and now you
seemed to have gained the "philosophy professor" status. So which is the
profession and which the hobby ? Just curious.
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