Greetings Struan,
A little while back, when you kicked off a rather heated discussion, you said the following:
"Contrary to the popular and simplistic belief prevalent here, which considers Pirsig to have invented some brilliant new way of looking at things, the original meaning of Idealism was ('Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy' - London - 2000 -
pg 379):
'any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of value, for example Platonic forms'
I took that to mean that you were accusing Pirsig of being an Idealist. So in response I wrote:
IMHO Pirsig is not an idealist in the formal sense you describe. In particular he does not believe that the physical world is unreal - his discussion of 'pre-intellectual awareness' is I think the largest stumbling block to placing him in that camp. He does not doubt the continued existence of a reality independent of the observer. The MoQ, it's true, does provide for an intellectual categorising of that reality, but it does not say that all reality is constituted by the perceptions of the intellect. Things at the intellectual level, perhaps, but a rock exists at the inorganic level, whether or not there is something intellectual around to perceive it or not.
Then in your reply to Platt and others, you appended the following PS, which I took as your response to my above question:
....We agree that, Pirsig 'is not original in placing value at the centre of his metaphysics' and we agree that the moq 'cannot be brought happily within mainstream Western philosophy'. Great, those were the main points I was trying to get across. Could you persuade some others here?
Now then. I have a question for you, and for anyone else who might be interested in trying to tie down a specific answer to a concrete question. Do you believe that Pirsig is in fact an Idealist, in the 'mainstream Western philosophy' sense, that would include Berkeley, Kant and Hegel in its different variants? It seems to me that this is a question that it is possible to answer - there's lots of evidence available, and lots of people around who can thrash it out. Could well be it's been discussed before, but I'm afraid I haven't got the chance to go through the archives (and in any case, I'm quite interested to know what the *current* participants think about the question).
So, Struan: do you think that Pirsig is an Idealist?
Sam
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