From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 05 2005 - 19:03:40 BST
David,
David said:
I don't get it. It sounds like you're refusing to admit that there is a
difference between a film maker and a film critic. These two very different
activities are not mutually exclusive but that does not mean there is no
distinction to be made between them.
Matt:
I agree, there is a certain difference between a film maker and a film
critic. But the way Pirsig constructs his distinction between philosophy
and philosophology and tries to use it doesn't make sense if we use
conventional, non-metaphysical categories of understanding. In fact, I
might even argue that using a conventional distinction doesn't make sense.
I said this in my paper:
The first difficulty we've arrived at is the tenuous analogy that Pirsig
draws between philosophology and art history. After lambasting the entire
field of academic philosophy in two paragraphs, Pirsig draws a picture that
no one can help but laugh at:
"You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his
students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or
technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this
giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. … Yet,
ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology
that calls itself philosophy." (Lila, Ch 26)
It would be ridiculous for an art historian to do that. But us
delivering ridicule upon the head of the lame-brained academic seems to
hinge on his confusing a discursive subject for a non-discursive one. The
reason the art historian seems so silly is that writing a thesis on art is
clearly different than painting. So what about literature? Though both
creative writing and literary criticism are discursive, the line between the
two does seem to be relatively easy to draw. It's the difference between
Hamlet and Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, between Wordsworth's The
Prelude and M. H. Abrams' Natural Supernatural. Though the line can
obviously get a little blurry given my present object of inquiry, the line
that is usually to be drawn is fairly clear.
In philosophy, distinguishing between the discipline's history and
its substance becomes nigh impossible. Going back to our two subsets of
philosophology, philosophy history and philosophy criticism, its difficult
to separate where people are doing philosophy and where they're criticizing
other people's philosophy. The difference between philosophy and literature
is the difference between an assertive discipline and a non-assertive one.
If you assert X, you are implicitly denying Y and Z. This immediately fits
you into an historical narrative of people who have asserted X, Y, and Z and
has you criticizing people who have held Y and Z. Pirsig himself shows that
Plato's position is defined in part by Socrates' criticism of the Sophists.
And we can keep going further back: the Sophists by opposition to the
Cosmologists, the Cosmologists by its opposition to Homer, and on and on, ad
infinitum, as far back as recorded history will take us, though we can
surmise that it goes back even further than that.
Matt:
I'm not arguing that you can never make a distinction between people who
_do_ something and people who _criticize_ something. But it is specific to
what you are talking about. I'm arguing that you can't make the distinction
in philosophy because of the peculiar (wide) thing philosophy is. It just
seems asinine to say that professional philosophers are only criticizing
philosophy, and not doing it, particularly when only a cursory glance at the
20th century will show you that the logical positivists and their students
got the same idea that the history of philosophy was completely superfluous
to actually doing philosophy.
Granted, for very small, specific, almost purely pedagogical reasons, you
can make a distinction between philosophy history/criticism and
substance/problems. For instance, between classes called "Modern Moral
Philosophy" and "Kant" or "Free Will" and "Kant." But I'm also arguing that
you can't press that distinction very hard at all, like using it to
determine which people are philosophers, because it will completely break
apart when you do. The only way, I'm arguing, you can make a distinction
between criticism/history and substance/problems is by defining philosophy's
substance. And outside of defining it historically ("this is what modern
philosophers took to be their focus"), you have to make it a natural,
ahistorical substance that is conspicuous to all. This is, I think,
completely pointless to do in philosophy (not to mention in general).
Philosophy is a discipline that has changed so much in its history that the
only way to give it a suitable definition that wouldn't just uncharitably
throw out some of its practitioners is to give it something very, very wide:
like "seeing how things, in the broadest possible sense, hang together, in
the broadest possible sense."
The only reason it seems to me to define philosophy in a less than
ubiquitously wide sense is for reasons of expediency: political reasons as
Ham said. For instance, when you're teaching a class on Modern philosophy
you might want to limit the lectures to only those philosophers that
followed after Descartes, rather than those who followed after Montaigne.
Or if you're writing an essay, you might limit your inquiry to only those
philosophers who answered the Problem of Free Will after 1950. But my
advice is to not fool yourself or anyone else into thinking that you have
any reasons other than expediency for such limitings. There is no substance
you are paying homage to by limiting philosophy.
Matt
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