From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 23 2005 - 20:10:41 BST
DMB,
DMB said:
It seems to me that Pirsig is not attacking the professor's professionalism
or anything like that [in the passage about Benares]. He leaves because,
from a certain perspective, the professor's answer is morally outrageous.
From a static point of view, if you will, the professor's answer is
downright freakin' evil. He left in disgust over the professor's apparent
lack of concern for all that death and destruction. And personally, I felt
the same way. A wave a disgust washed over me when I read that passage.
Matt:
Yeah, but if you read the section of the essay that Anthony pulled that
snipet from, I'm not saying that Pirsig's attacking the professor's
professionalism at that point. The section that Anthony pulled the quote
from was attempting to establish a mood in Pirsig's writing, which I was
doing by putting together a few of the more obvious places where Pirsig
talks about his teachers and education. That's it. The paragraph that the
apparently contested quote comes from is this:
"Pirsig doesn't blame the university for failing him, but he cannot help but
feel as though it was an injustice. There is a better way if only they'd see
it. Pirsig continually reflects the antiestablishmentarian mood of the
sixties and seventies by fighting every authority figure he comes across.
Pirsig says that “he felt that institutions such as schools, churches,
governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct
thought for ends other than truth….”45 The mood of Pirsig's stories are
highly antagonistic, in particular his education stories. His science
professors are stuck in an unreflective abyss, so, not knowing what else to
do (what teenager would?), he despairs and flunks out. Finding perhaps a
better fit for his speculative and reflective interests in philosophy,
Pirsig still says that “he's such an abominable scholar it must be through
the kindness of his instructors that he passes at all,”46 (which is probably
the nicest thing he says about any of his teachers) suggesting a constant
struggle between Pirsig and his teachers. Pirsig goes to Benares Hindu
University and just gets up and leaves because he was tired of the
philosophy professor “blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the
world.”47 Pirsig never even feels comfortable himself in his own role as
part of the establishment, always favoring the outcasts in the back of the
class. His Church of Reason lecture, in fact, is in no small part a
reflection of his pessimism for the educative act.48 And then comes Chicago,
probably the most famous section of ZMM. His war with the Professor of
Philosophy and the Chairman (Richard McKeon) have become legendary. A
reading of the Chicago episode, and his peculiar relationship with McKeon,
is surely outside the bounds of this paper. But I think it might be
sufficient to note that Pirsig, reflecting on the incident almost forty
years later, says that he “was an outsider who seemed more interested in
attacking what was being taught than learning from it. My hyperactive mind
seized upon this [the analogy between himself and a wolf] as my definitive
relationship to the school….”49 I think this simple rehearsal of Pirsig's
educational history supplies us with the antiauthoritarian context with
which to fit Pirsig's comments about philosophology."
I was just trying to establish a mood, and I think the incident at Benares
falls within a noticable pattern or leit motif.
Matt
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