From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 02:49:30 BST
Hullo Sriram,
You are quite wrong to take my critique of Pirsig as an 'ad hominem' attack.
If you take the whole context of my supposed 'attack',
JOHN B: "our own incorrigible final vocabularies have closed our minds in
advance to information and ideas that offend our value systems. The MOQ does
not offer much help here. Pirsig pursues his own demons, be they the issue
of insanity or the death of his son Chris, through his books, and all too
often we sense that incorrigibility behind the 'rational' facade."
then it is a very relevant point to what extent Pirsig's arguments are
influenced by his private demons, and I offer one example of where I believe
this is evident.
You say "Pirsig's social status is being attacked by calling him insane and
chasing demons of his past, in order to deny the truth of the intellectual
ideas." Nonsense. Pirsig goes on at length about his insanity, and in the
postscript to ZMM about Chris's death and its effect on him. This is not
only in the public domain, but the issue of insanity occupies a large
portion of both books. If Pirsig can talk about it, why can't I?
I offer three different perspectives on why the MOQ is not of much help in
sorting out issues of morality in a complex world. The first is that it is
difficult in practice to assign such complex notions as 'nations' to a
discrete category, be it biological, social or intellectual, since all three
are at play in disputes between nations.The second is that we, the people
debating the issues, rarely know the facts, or even what facts are relevant.
And the third, which has been debated quite a lot in this forum over the
past month, in the Rorty material particularly, is that people are driven by
incorrigible final vocabularies, or more crudely, by prejudice, to see what
they want to see and ignore what doesn't suit them.
My pointing out that this also applies to Pirsig may offend you, if you are
a true believer, but has nothing to do with seeking to defame him. Had I
said "Pirsig was insane, so his ideas don't count", that would have been an
ad hominem attack. What I said was that in seeking to debate current issues,
our incorrigible final vocabularies get in the way of quality debate, and
pointed to an example in Pirsig's own writing where I believe that applies.
Pirsig certainly does not refrain from debating current issues, and I am
arguing that at times his argument is driven by the hurts he has suffered
more than by the logic of his position. That point may be debatable, and I
would welcome debate, but calling it "a minor form of evil" seems quite over
the top.
For your information I find Pirsig a more credible writer and thinker
because of his having experienced what was labelled 'insanity', than had he
not been through that period of his life. I suspect he does too. As to
whether he was 'really' insane, that becomes a matter of definition, and I
find Pirsig does quite a good job of pointing out the close connections and
significant differences between insanity and deep involvement in dynamic
quality. That doesn't always mean that he is always right about particular
social issues.
John B
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:37:58 GMT