From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 14 2005 - 19:29:36 BST
Robin,
Oh, Christ, sorry about that. I'm not sure if you left any gender
indicators lying around your posts, but if you did, I'm sorry for not being
more attentive. I have to remember to imagine you as Batman's sidekick, not
my former high school Sunday School teacher.
In your last response, you still want to use the distinction, but I'm not
sure that we should. In fact, I'm positive we shouldn't. The first problem
is that, given Pirsig, you are right: everyone will try and see themselves
and all of their favorites as philosophers. And because of the studied
ambiguity of the distinction, its hard to say their wrong. The second is if
it still has originality connotations, then I want to know why. We already
have an originality/unoriginality distinction and it seems to have very
little to do with historical consciousness. The third is if it still has an
historical connotation, then I want to know why we should replace
"intellectual historian" with "philosophologist."
The biggest problem is the first: no matter what you do to the distinction,
it will always carry negative connotations. I think the biggest reason is
that I see no way to make a principled distinction between
historically-conscious philosophers and non-. You say, "if there was a way
to have an infant understand what Pirsig ment in his distinction between
philosophologer and philosopher, then the child would probably say that you
don't need any books to be a philosopher." Part of my analysis, though, is
that in helping the infant understand what Pirsig meant, you'd effectively
educate it, which means the same thing as having read books. Its true, we
don't need books to be a philosopher in the unprincipled sense that some
people might be trying to gain wisdom by hanging together things like trees
and sunsets and hot dogs. But if a philosopher is taken in the wide sense
of hanging together whatever you want to gain wisdom, whatever your
"subjective value perception" tells you you should, then why should we
separate out one particular branch? Etymologically, it would mean the
branch that studies the productions of the other branches. But that's what
an intellectual historian does, so again, why the new term? And there's
even worse turns in the dialectical conversation than that.
It just doesn't make any sense if we accept the historicism that's latent in
Pirsig's description of Quality.
Matt
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