From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 25 2005 - 21:38:10 GMT
Paul, Wolff, Marsha, all,
Maybe I should apologize to everyone if I sounded like an elitist prick in
my recent (or all) posts. I don’t intend to. However, it is difficult to
make my point without risking it. I could feel the catcalls coming, and
they did, but people have, in general, missed what I’m saying and attacked
what they hear me saying. We all do it, and certainly anybody involved in
the political discussions at this site (or anywhere for that matter) know
what its like.
So, I apologize if people think I’m belittling them or their philosophical
musings. That was never my intention. Nor was it what I said. I never
claimed to be an expert in Western philosophy. I never claimed to be an
expert in the history of World philosophies. When I was careful, I said I
had a certain familiarity with the Plato-Kant sequence. Though Paul thinks
I have a self-image as a “sophisticated academic philosopher,” I’ve really
only ever thought of myself as an “armchair dilettante.”
Paul didn’t do a bad job of summing up some of my positions on how I think
the history of philosophical discussions work. It’s a little exaggerated
(as most polemical descriptions are), but more importantly, I don’t think he
did a good job of panning out what I take the moral to be. My paper,
“Philosophologology,” was intended to see how Pirsig needs his epithet
“philosophology” to hang together conceptually for it to gain the required
strength he grants it in numerous areas. It is less that I collapsed one
side of Pirsig’s distinction into the other than that I simply threw away
the distinction to achieve a richer understanding of the various ways in
which philosophy works. My conclusion is that he doesn’t have the necessary
conceptual resources to hold the distinction (based on his pragmatism) and
that his “philosophologist” is basically just another name for an
“intellectual historian.”
My criticism, of course, is that rarely are the two confused, as he
suggests. There are bad teachers, there are bad professors, there are bad
philosophers, there are bad intellectual historians: but there is nothing
institutional about it. Contrary to what Wolff suggests, I say directly in
the paper that Pirsig is right: philosophy cannot be taught, it can only be
done. I say (and have said in many places) that philosophy isn’t something
we can pin down with any kind of accuracy, we can only pin it down for our
particular purposes and desires. _Never_ have I denied “the title of
philosophy to non-academic contemplation” as Paul suggested I have. _Never_
have I suggested that the conversation is over at any particular place
(though I may want it to be, just as others wish it over at other places,
just in the opposite ways). Paul suggests many times that I have a view on
how “proper” philosophy is done. But I have no such view and never have I
intimated one. The love of wisdom comes in many forms, if for no other
reason than wisdom is something you have about your experiences and there
are a potentially infinite number of experiences. What I have intimated is
that a “proper” course of action only appears when you become more specific,
when you make narrow, specific theses like, “Has Pirsig dissolved the
philosophical problems of the West?” Where my paper comes to the aid of the
bad-mouthed, mild-mannered, egg-headed academics is in saying, “Hey, these
cats study philosophy all the time. Why shut them out of the conversation
if its possible they might have some wisdom in how to maneuver?” And it
seems to me that everybody agrees with this sentiment: the professional
philosophers _are_ invited to the conversation, knowing a little of the
history of philosophy _may_ be helpful. So, what’s the deal with the animus
towards me? Is it just my possibly prickly nature or possibly inflated ego?
Paul suggests that I’m the type of reader who, when confronted with
something, must “categorise it or identify it with something else,” and that
this is bad. But I ask you: if we agree with Pirsig that everything is
relational, if there is no thing-in-itself, then how can anybody not? One
set of relations for Pirsig is the history of Western philosophy, a relation
Pirsig is at pains to set up. Why can’t I explore how this pans out? But
_never_ have I said this is the only way. _Never_ have I discouraged people
from taking other paths. We all have our hobbyhorses, particular ways of
relating that are idiosyncratic to us. Our hobbyhorses are what make us
_us_. If we didn’t have them, we’d be somebody else.
Paul suggests that my frustration is born of my inability to convince
anybody that Pirsig’s square peg fits into Plato/Kant’s round hole. But
that’s a non-starter; that sword cuts both ways. My frustration could just
as easily be described as being born out of other people’s inability to see
that Pirsig, unbeknownst to him or his most loyal followers, is using a
round peg some of the time. Blindness as an accusation is a last resort
because you can never really know at the time if the other guy is the blind
one, or you are.
Paul also suggests that I claimed “that one would not even be aware of
central philosophical questions unless you had directly studied them” and
that this “seems a little supercilious.” That is a little exaggerated. The
point is that the common guy on the street doesn’t always see the point of
these philosophical questions, he isn’t scared by them. He gets along fine
ignoring them. You ask rhetorically whether “philosophy invent[ed] the
contemplation of experience or did the contemplation of experience invent
philosophy?” I think the question too muddy and freighted. I think if we
asked, “Did philosophy invent the language we contemplate with, or did the
language we contemplate with invent philosophy?”, we get much closer to how
I think we should see philosophy working. I think the idea is that
philosophy tries to see how we make our way conceptually around the world,
and then tries to make suggestions about different ways to change those
conceptions. The guy on the street, when push comes to shove, will run up
against some ancient or modern philosophical problems, but that’s not
because they are “natural.” It’s because he’s using the concepts
philosophers are currently analyzing and suggesting changes in. As culture
changes, so do the concepts people use. The problems of the Greeks are not
necessarily the problems of 21st-century Americans. To think there are
“natural problems of philosophy,” as Paul seems to suggest, is, I would
suggest, to be Platonic. It is to think “philosophy is a natural kind.”
Both Paul and Wolff seem to suggest that I’ve stopped thinking. But where
is the evidence for that? And why can’t I suggest that its everybody else
that’s stopped thinking? I don’t think people have, so why would people
think it of me?
Matt
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