From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2005 - 03:00:21 GMT
At the end of DMB’s post he had this to say: “We can understand Pirsig
better if we CONTRAST his MOQ with what Kant says.”
Traditional Pirsigian philosophy tells us to contrast Pirsig with Kant.
What is important for people to understand about the critical projects Sam
and I (and others) are involved in are that we are purposefully reversing
this assumption (or others), we are _purposefully_ comparing Pirsig with
Kant (or others) _against_ his explicit wishes. We do this because, while
reading and rehearsing Pirsigian philosophy, we began to smell something
fishy. And as a way of investigating the matter, we began comparing him to
some of his own express enemies. And I, for one, have found that I am
unable to give Pirsig a clean bill of philosophical health _even on his own
terms_.
The reason why I said Paul simply denied Sam’s accusations was because he
did. If you read his post carefully, that’s all you’ll find. He offered no
arguments. This is fine, though. We don’t offer arguments all the time,
particularly in a discussion forum. I said that one reason why Paul’s
comments may not have contained any arguments was because Sam’s account was
light on argumentation: it was mainly a highly suggestive geneaology. So
Paul denied involvement, and then expounded the traditional, mainline
Pirsigian postion, sometimes by providing quotes from Pirsig.
But this isn’t a dialogue. In the hopes of starting a dialogue, I provided
the argumentation. DMB, all appearances to the contrary, continued Paul’s
original stance of denial (I have no doubt that Paul himself will engage my
arguments as I have had many fruitful dialogues with him in the past).
Quoting Pirsig at us won’t make us go away. The denial position makes it
look like we haven’t done our homework, as if we haven’t read the books and
all we needed was the relevant page number to alleviate our worries and
dispel our confusion. Expounding the Pirsigian philosophical line won’t
work because we understand that much already—we’re just not so certain that
everybody understands how that line _works_. What we need is an engagement
with our arguments, we need someone to explain to us why our concerns, our
questions, don’t count. We aren’t confused, and for anyone who thinks I,
for one, haven’t done my homework, I’ll simply direct you to my two most
recent essays on Pirsig in the Forum. They may yet be wrong, but I think
they’re sufficient in showing that I have done my homework, I have read and
thought about Pirsig—_a lot_.
So, in an attempt to engage with DMB, I want to move past his denial of
denial and his quoting of Pirsig in denial to the section where DMB claims
that Pirsig has an epistemology. DMB says, “From a static point of view,
the MOQ employs what we can call epistemological pluralism, where we allow
different kinds of verifiable experience.” I’m glad he brought up
verification, because this is the crux of the issue. In DMB’s exposition,
what DMB did not offer was an answer to the skeptic, which is all I required
and was asking for. Here is the question, “How do we know when we are being
Dynamic? How do we know when we are following Dynamic Quality and not
static patterns? How do we verify it?”
You know what I think Pirsig’s answer is? It’s one of two things: 1) you
just do or 2) you don’t and you won’t. The first answer places emphasis on
(what we might call) Pirsig’s doctrine of epistemological individualism,
which traces back to ZMM (“And what is good, Phaedrus, and not good—need we
ask anyone to tell us these things?”). The second answer places emphasis on
(what we might call) Pirsig’s doctrine of the indeterminancy of Dynamic
Quality, which is an innovation in Lila (“The problem is that you can’t
really say whether a specific change is evolutionary [Dynamic] at the time
it occurs. It is only with a century or so of hindsight that it appears
evolutionary.” Lila, p. 256), an innovation made specifically to ameliorate
the problems of his epistemological individualism—except that I can’t see
that it does anything but obliterate any possible (epistemological) answer.
So, if I’ve successfully shown that DMB’s “blundered into having to answer
the skeptic,” the next move is to either attempt to appease the skeptic
(which I would maintain is impossible, though I’m always happy to play the
part of the skeptic to show people why I think this) or deny the existence
of an appearance/reality distinction in Pirsig. If you do this, the
question that I then want answered is: Why do we need a mediated/unmediated
distinction? What part does it play, what work does it do? Because if we
look at what work it is intended to do in DMB’s post, it looks like the
epistemology blundering work I pointed to before in Pirsig. DMB continually
equivocates which term, “Quality” or “Dynamic Quality,” the “undivided
reality” is predicated on. This equivocation isn’t a mistake or an
ambiguity, it is Pirsig’s explicit directions. But what I want to know is:
_why doesn’t this create an appearance/reality distinction?_
Matt
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
hthttp://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
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 : Tue Jan 11 2005 - 03:27:32 GMT