From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 17:21:05 GMT
So, Squonk, if I rescind on Rorty, would I be doing it for Quality or for you?
I thought about leaving my reply like this, as I've already wasted enough
time in meaningless replies to your vilification of me (which happened
quite rapidly after my first posting), but I figured I'd take the time to
say something constructive in my defense and about Quality.
The answer to the above question can be answered in two ways, but the more
pertinent question lying behind it is, "How would you know?" Is it just
from what I write? Or is the response to Quality a more personal thing,
one that's a bit more difficult to determine from the words one reads or hears?
Squonk says that I don't believe Quality comes first. On what grounds?
That I colligate Pirsig and Rorty together? That I said that I "was in the
process of carving out my own little place in the Forum"? Or maybe it's
that I don't talk about Quality enough.
The first two are easy. On the first, how would you get that I don't
believe Quality comes first from a simple colligation? Well, you'd have to
think that my criticisms of Pirsig count as criticisms of Quality and the
only way to do that is to think that Pirsig has sole ownership of Quality,
a very precarious inference and I won't take any more time dealing with it.
Any Pirsigian knows it's a load of bullocks. The second, well, if one
makes their decision from a throw away line in my very first paragraph,
then I doubt they read very carefully. Either that or they want all
writers of Quality to write so stringently as to only write about Quality
and in very careful and precise ways. That would stop the flow of writing,
obviously, and it would make writing on Quality very boring, let alone
static and uncreative. My essay was about to become boring enough, so I
thought I'd let a little levity in at the beginning.
The last one is possibly a good question: do we need to talk about Quality
to put Quality first? To put it another way, do we need to discuss Quality
to have a Quality discussion? I think Pirsig's answer would be "No." The
object is not to talk about Quality all the time, the object is to talk
with a high level of Quality. Pirsig would say that we are always
responding to Quality and, if you read carefully, it should become obvious
what the writer believes is high Quality, whether or not he actually uses
the word, "Quality." Now, naturally, people can dispute one person's
perception of what is high Quality (I hope we would all dispute Hitler's
vision of what is high Quality), but it is difficult to say that they are
not in touch with Quality or not giving priority to Quality.
So, I think it is quite infeasible to say that "Matt doesn't believe
Quality comes first." It would be a much better inference to say that
"Matt doesn't believe that Pirsig comes first." You could then build on
that with specific criticisms of the text as to why giving Rorty priority
over Pirsig isn't high Quality. This isn't about Quality, it's about
Pirsig and Rorty. To conflate Quality and Pirsig is the biggest mistake a
reader of Pirsig could make.
And just in case people don't think I talk about Quality enough, here's a
passage from the essay in question, "Confessions of a Fallen Priest," where
I talk about Quality. It comes as the conclusion of my section on what the
Pragmatized Pirsig would look like. If I remember correctly, much of the
first paragraph was also culled from a post to Squonk:
"What I want to suggest is that Pirsig would sympathize with my
(mis)reading of him. I think he would approve of my colligation of himself
and Rorty. I think his crucial mistake was buying into the Aristotelian
idea that metaphysics is the First Philosophy. What makes me think this is
the ease to which I think you can dispense with metaphysics and still talk
about Quality, still have all the freshness of air, the fragrant smell of
new, Dynamic directions and metaphors. I think that we can do without
metaphysics and still hold onto his crucial insights about Quality. What
Quality means is that we all make value judgments, everyday of our lives.
The various static patterns we’ve experienced is the context from which we
make our choices. They are the base set of values we have. Discussion of
how the MoQ helps moral judgments has faced problems because people see
Quality in different things. I think this is exactly the point. Our
contingent circumstances (read: our static patterns) are going to condition
us to see Quality in different places. The chief contribution Pirsig had
in Lila to overcome this so-called, seeming "relativism" was Dynamic
Quality. Dynamic Quality is the striving for excellence that cannot be
named, because as soon as you do, you've condemned it to staticness, as an
ahistorical truth. Dynamic Quality is the new metaphor over the horizon,
it's the invention of a new context that helps us see the low Quality of
our old context. Dynamic Quality is not absolute, objective Truth. That
would be naming it. That would be making the same mistake that Plato made,
which may have been a good idea at the time, but one we now need to overcome.
"Pirsig's thought, in this way, is inherently Oedipal. The goal of
excellence is to overcome the past, the low Quality of those that have
preceded you. It is a constant dialectical, dialogical interplay that
yields up new insights and allows you to move forward, up and beyond the
contingent past. There is no endpoint, no solid footing. There are only
new contexts that can, nay must, be overcome. This is why I want to get rid
of metaphysics. The goal of metaphysics, the onto-theological tradition
(to use Heidegger's term), the tradition handed down to us by Plato and
Aristotle, through Descartes and Kant, is to enshrine and hypostatize
Dynamic Quality (in the guise of the Good, Truth, God, Reason, Science,
etc.), and that is exactly what we must resist. When Whitehead said that
all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, Rorty says
that Whitehead's point "was that we do not call an inquiry 'philosophical'
unless it revolves around some of the distinctions which Plato drew."
Pirsig agrees with this assessment when he says, "Systematic philosophy is
Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent
stamp on it." Dewey called this stamp "that whole nest and brood of Greek
dualisms." We must repudiate the Platonic tradition, rid ourselves of
metaphysics, which brokers on the Platonic distinction between appearance
and reality, and forge ahead with Dynamic Quality. When Pirsig said, "It
was time Aristotle got his," I read Pirsig as saying that its time that the
entire Platonic tradition got its Oedipal comeuppance."
Matt
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