Hey Sam,
I'll jump in the pool: my take is Pirsig would be
somewhere in between realism and idealism. He's a
sooty sort of chap with smells of Ayn Rand, Sartre,
and James. What are their shibboleths? "Rational
self-interest", "bad faith", and "cash value radically
empirically there." I love Rand's rant against Kant as
the most evil man to have lived. Ultimately, Rand
would claim, there is an "IDENTITY" that is knowable
but knowable only by the self. She's a radical
Aristotlean. Sartre says existence precedes essence
but I think he would update that to existence
coincides with essence. I think Pirsig says this,
again, because of his issues with Lila Blewitt. I
mean, a book about a man reconciling his issues with a
b*** j** deserves poor book sales, statically
speaking. But a man dealing with adolescent desires is
Pirsig's "identity" so he went with it. There is a
world where we create make believe and that is the
static world, and there is the world where that is the
identity of who we are, the dynamic world. Pirsig
calls us back to the dynamic world, which is an
identity which is real. But the static world is fake
for sure, and is an idealism. A paradox, no? He should
come out and call it that, call it "complementarity"
or something other than "Quality". There is an
individual qua static which is the ideal and there is
an individual qua dynamic which is real. It's all in
how you extract it.
Angus
>do
> you think that Pirsig
> claims that "the physical world is somehow unreal"?
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