From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 12 2005 - 18:51:44 BST
Steve, Erin, David H, Robin,
This also didn't go through the first time I sent it this weekend, so I've
also chopped this one into two.
Steve said:
For me the distinction is obvious. Doing philosophy amounts to being able
to put together your own argument, doing philsophology amounts to reciting
other people's arguments. It doesn't matter that the problem addressed by
the argument is a perennial problem addressed by many published intelligent
others, or that your argument is based on your accumulated experience which
includes reading all those other guys. Philosophy is a creative endeavor of
a higher order than 'mere' scholarship. It is the same as original
composition compared with plagiarism.
MOQ has been depicted as warmed over Zen combine with some pragmatism, etc.
All that doesn't matter. What matters is Pirsig thinking it out and
experiencing it on his own, even if the end concepts are similar in some
respects to other Wisdom Traditions. It is this internal struggle that
generates Quality.
Matt:
I think this misses the point of both Pirsig’s argument and my argument.
Sure, I absolutely agree that philosophy is in some respects a personal
endeavor in which you struggle with your own inner demons, but in other
respects its an interpersonal endeavor in which you try and bring everyone
to a higher state of wisdom. But nobody simply recites somebody else’s
arguments. A well-worn argument is always being used in a slightly
different context, and so will always be a little different (and sometimes a
lot different, until you bend it so out of shape it becomes a new argument).
Since we already have strictures against plagiarism, let’s ask this
question: what if somebody did just recite somebody else’s arguments (given
proper citation and the like)? What if they recited them and the other
person couldn’t respond adequately to them? What then? It seems to me that
you’re highlighting a choice between wisdom (denoted by the successful
argument) and cleverness (denoted by the creative self-reliance) and
choosing cleverness. This seems to me to be wrong. This is why I suggest
thinking of arguments like tools. Why invent the wheel all over again when
you can just pick it up and modify it for your own purposes? In the end,
you’re still being clever by the modifications and adjustments. As this
goes on, though, eventually somebody’s going to throw you an argument that
you have no tools handy for. Then you create your own argument. To me, it
all depends on what’s demanded of you. Why throw out the Wisdom Traditions
when some of the stuff is still working? I mean, Pirsig does it all the
time. Is he a philosophologist?
You say “it is this internal struggle that generates Quality.” But I would
ask you to reflect on this “internal struggle.” What is it? In Pirsig’s
terms, it’s the interplay of static patterns. What we call a “person” is
nothing more than an aggregation of static patterns. These static patterns
are the unconscious history of humanity, as Pirsig calls it in ZMM, “the
whole train of collective consciousness of all communicating mankind.” (Ch.
27) This is Pirsig owning up to the contingency of life. So when somebody
comes at you with a low Quality static pattern/argument, why not just whip
at him a higher Quality static pattern/argument? It’s right there, why not
use it? And if you’re successful, the other person will be at a higher
level of Quality. But, again, what happens when you are faced with an
argument that you see as low Quality, but you don’t know how to defeat it?
Well, either, upon reflection, you accept it as high Quality or you invent a
higher Quality argument then was previously available to the train of
mankind. This is what Pirsig would call responding to Dynamic Quality.
So, in the end, I think your distinction, Steve, between clever creativity
and mindless repetition isn’t so obvious. As you say, a historian could
point out that “your argument is based on your accumulated experience which
includes reading all those other guys,” which includes pointing out all the
predecessors to your clever, “new” argument. I think, ultimately, the
distinction breaks down as a way of distinguishing between philosophers and
non-philosophers. Upon reflection, most of the newness doesn’t last and in
the end, if you line up historically conscious philosophers with
non-historically conscious philosophers and see which side created more
clever new tools to advance wisdom, I doubt you’d find that the
non-historical side had more. My guess is that the breakdown would be
pretty even. And if you push this historical/non-historical,
repetitive/clever distinction too far, eventually you’d eliminate the entire
field of entries because, as I’ve repeated and Pirsig’s repeated, we all
receive our history lessons when we are socialized into being human beings.
If you pushed the distinction too far (as you’d have to to get it to say
anything about who is and who isn’t a real philosopher), you wouldn’t be
able to construct _any_ argument, let alone a new one, because you’d have no
basic tools of construction—like language.
continued....
Matt
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