From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 18:04:31 GMT
Matt,
For the last 7 months I have been engaged in an attempt to colligate
together Pirsig with my favorite "post-modern" philosopher Richard Rorty.
I have been arguing that Pirsig does open himself up to some of the
critiques of SOM he uses in ZMM and Lila when he tries to reconstruct a
metaphysics. People like Platt have argued that making Pirsig look like a
post-modernist is an attempt to degrade him. Platt is, to say the least,
deeply skeptical about post-modern philosophy. For a few of the ways I've
been attempting to flesh out certain tendencies and tensions that I've
found in Pirsig (tensions that others deny for one reason or another), I
would look at my "Confessions of a Fallen Priest" in the moq.org Forum. I
don't talk about many of the other post-modern philosophers other than
Rorty, but the way in which they can be seen as saying relatively the same
thing should be evident.
Specifically to your query, I don't think the MoQ can "survive on only one
level - the material." I say this because I take one of the innovations of
the MoQ to be that we shouldn't think of the world as either material OR
ideas OR spiritual OR valuistic. I take the example of the MoQ, after
we've purified Pirsig through pragmatic waters, to be an example of how we
might view the world as valuistic, but this is not to delve into
metaphysics and claim that the world IS only made of values. It is simply
to say that sometimes it may be helpful to think of the world as made of
values. Sometimes not. When doing physics, it might be easier to think of
the world as corpuscularian. But that doesn't mean the World as It Really
Is is material. That is only to say that it is helpful when seeing how
chemicals and particles react that we think of them mechanistically.
Thus, I don't see the introduction of the intellectual level as dangerous
to Pirsig's project. What I see as dangerous is the idea that he is doing
essentialistic metaphysics, that he is attempting to get at what the World
Really Is outside of our attempts to cope with it. As I see it, the
intellectual level (setting aside my own problems with it, for the moment)
is simply the "level" that we describe some of the innovations we've come
up with when using language.
Matt
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