From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2005 - 10:01:37 GMT
Matt,
If you're an "armchair dilletante", I dread to think what that makes me.
Nothing to apologise for. What we have is the usual e-mail forum problem of
absence of body language, whereby "attitudes" can be grossly misunderstood
in the words if we're not careful and respectful of each other.
Ian G.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 9:38 PM
Subject: RE: MD Them pesky pragmatists
> 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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