From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 19:52:12 GMT
Platt, DMB
>From the following quote from Pirsig in Lila's Child I must admit to being
>mistaken in challenging your assertion that the MoQ is a throwback to
>the 18th century and asking for evidence:.
>
>"I have read that the MOQ is the same as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
>Hegel, James, Pierce, Nieztsche, Bergson, and many others even
>though these people are not held to be saying the same as each other.
>This kind of comparison is what I have meant by the term,
>"philosophology." It is done by people who are not seeking to
>understand what is written but only to classify it so that they don't have
>to see it as anything new."
>
>While I appreciate your explication of Kant's influence and encourage
>you to follow your muse in annotating ZMM, perhaps you'll agree that
>further discussion along the line of "How new is the MoQ?" to be less
>fruitful than time spent on subjects more directly related to the content
>of the MoQ itself.
>
>I plead guilty to throwing down red meat in claiming the MoQ breaks
>new philosophical ground. I'll try to refrain from that particular challenge
>in the future. Of course, it's still open season on Rorty. :-)
I have never wanted to discuss the question "How new is the MoQ?" I think
the question is pretty well answered by "Well, when were the books
written?" The points I was trying to get across are that people are always
affected by the historical contingencies that came before them. By tracing
out their influences we can trace out similiarities and then try and
progress farther then they did. That is the dialectic of history, the
interplay of Dynamic and static. It is what Hegel called "holding your
time in thought." I realize that Pirsig is hostile to this, that he thinks
you can be creative without coming to terms with the past. But we disagree
on this. And he's certainly being a little naive to say that Plato,
Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, James, Pierce, Nieztsche, and Bergson have
never been compared to each other. One of Rorty's projects is comparing
Continental thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Bergson to Anglophone
thinkers like James and Pierce. The fact is, I nor anybody else worth
their salt would never claim that Pirsig is -simply- one or another of
these guys. That's naive. That would be simply classifying it without
trying to understand it and that's not something I wish to do. But placing
Pirsig into context's is exactly what I think we should be doing here and
so I think it is directly fruitful for us to study Pirsig in relation to
intellectual history. To say that this doesn't have a place on this
discussion list I think is a grossly injust hampering of discussion material.
Nobody's completely original. I think we have to own up to that fact. But
people can be original and I think Pirsig does have some originality. To
find that originality, though, we have to do a little history. In
particular, I think Pirsig was taking Kant as one of his leaping off
points. Now, DMB's absolutely right in saying that, "saying that Pirsig
belongs [in the 18th C.], even if it were true, would be far too vague to
have any meaning." Its my fault for not simply stating my thesis whenever
this comes up. Maybe I should just have them auto-attached to all of my
e-mails from now on ;-) As for my carefully laid out, explicit thesis
statement, I don't have one yet. As I claimed in my previous post, I don't
have the necessary expertise, yet. While I explore the topic, whatever
thesis is there will organically arise from the material I'm studying. And
it probably won't be what I think it might be now, so I'd rather not blow a
lot of useless smoke, since people are already fairly hostile to my
particular brand of smoke.
But, by way of one passing puff of smoke to tide you all over, I'll grant
you that Kant is the keystone at the end of the path that modern philosophy
was travelling (I've read my Cassirer;-) and that wildly different
directions spring up in response to him. The two I noted, dissolving the
Kantian value spheres or reinforcing them, are associated with
post-moderism and a continuance with modern philosophy, respectively. I
take Rorty's remark that "Kant was a turning point in the history of
Western philosophy because he was a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to
distinguish between the role of the subject and the role of the object in
constituting knowledge," ("A World without Substances or Essences") to be
indicative of the post-modern reading of the history philosophy and P.F.
Strawson's updating of the Critique of Pure Reason in The Bounds of Sense
to be indicative of a modern reading of the history of philosophy. I've
already noted the ambivalence Pirsig seems to show to the issue and I take
it to mean a complex position that needs elucidation. To do this, I need
to do my homework. Further complexities arise when you find traces of
Rousseau and Heidegger in ZMM (two that happen to come to mind). I find
all of these traces to be fascinating and fun, but maybe that's just me.
Matt
p.s. I didn't mean to make myself look arrogant or to partake in an act of
hubris by saying, "I'm pretty sure that nobody at this site right now has
the necessary background in intellectual history to be able to make either
argument, or at least to do it right." The sweeping statement included me
and I said "pretty sure" because I'm not sure. If DMB says he has the
necessary background and expertise in intellectual history (in the history
of philosophy and, in particular, modern and Enlightenment philosophy) to
perform the type of placement of Pirsig I was implying then I'll take him
at his word for it. The fact that he doesn't think it will be fruitful
will just mean that there's more work for me to do.
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