From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 27 2003 - 18:12:48 GMT
DMB,
DMB said after well timed quotes from Pirsig:
Perhaps these comments from the author do not satisfy, but at least we've
found some common ground with which to discuss it.
Matt:
Its true, I'm not completely satisfied with those quotes from Pirsig. I
think he's much too ambivalent in other places. In an essay that will
appear shortly at the Forum, I spell out more explicitly (hopefully?) that
I think Pirsig is too ambiguous to be read either as a straight pragmatist
or a straight absolutist and I address several of the quotes one could use
for either side (the Hegelian Aboslute quote, I believe, makes an
appearance, for instance). And I haven't been convinced yet that he's
found a third path. Because of this, I contend that to read Pirsig as a
pragmatist (which I've been trying to do and I think you would be on your
way towards doing if you try and hold Quality as a metaphor inspite of the
MoQ's attempts to define it) or as some sort of metaphysical absolutist
(which Platt and others have been trying to do) is to misread him. It is
to pick a position on either side of the fence, which forces you to ignore
other passages. I think misreading him is fine, if not great, because I
think Pirsig has too many internal tensions to take straight as is. I
happen to choose the pragmatist reading and Platt happens to take the
absolutist reading (sidenote: I don't like calling the reading Platt's
giving the "absolutist" reading. I much prefer the "Kantian" reading, but
people don't like it when I do that so I've stuck with the second-rate and
not very descriptive term "absolutism" because I can't at the moment think
of anything better to call it. If anybody has any ideas, particularly
those who want to read him that way [other than the "correct" way ;-)], I'd
love to hear them.).
Matt
Addendum: My project is reading all of Pirsig's works together and drawing
a picture. As I read them, Pirsig moves from favoring the pragmatist side
in ZMM to the absolutist side in Lila. But I think that both sides are in
both books. Because of this, I don't just discard Lila and I don't just
discard ZMM. When assessing his mature thought, I don't think we have to
discard whole-sale ZMM, though we may have to misread it (as people like Bo
have suggested).
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