From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 21:59:26 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
Sometimes it's more important to pursue a path than to spend time comparing the merits of different paths. Novelty is not the only quality; see Pirsig's comments on 'deepening' rather than 'widening' the river bed in ZMM.
Matt:
Interesting that you should say this. The first thing that popped into my head was, "Hey! I'm a comparer. That's a shot at my enterprise!" Naturally, you did say "sometimes", and that's the important part.
What I think interesting is how various concepts line up with "comparing" on one side and "pursuing" on the other:
pursuing v. comparing
deepening v. widening (Pirsig)
normal science v. revolutionary science (Kuhn)
normal discourse v. abnormal discourse (Rorty)
common sense v. irony (Rorty)
hedgehog v. fox (Archilocus, popularized by Berlin)
static quality v. Dynamic Quality (Pirsig)
I could go on for a while longer, but the point that Sam is drawing our attention to is that what Pirsig, Rorty, and Kuhn help us realize is that we need both pursuers and comparers, deepeners and wideners: we need the static and the Dynamic.
I don't know why the hedgehog/fox analogy popped into my head, but Isaiah Berlin took it from the Greek poet, Archilochus, who said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin developed it as a dichotomy between pluralistic thinkers and monistic thinkers. Pluralistic thinkers think that there are many equally valid paths to be followed (which sounds like obscene relativism, but Rorty helps us see past that), while monistic thinkers follow just one principle.
We can develop this analogy in many different ways to express a number of different ideas. The one I want is comparer v. pursuer. To use Rorty's language, the fox compares vocabularies, looking for better and better ones, while the hedgehog uses one vocabulary and develops it. In Pirsig's language, the split shouldn't really be made between two different types of people, foxes and hedgehogs, because we can't help but follow static quality for most of our lives. The idea of only living Dynamic Quality, I think (this is obviously my interpretation), is incoherent. So, instead it makes the split in terms of how a person acts: when they are acting like a fox and when they are acting like hedgehog. Following Sartre, we shouldn't identify ourselves as one or the other.
When we line the concepts up like I did, I think the most interesting corrolary to pop out is that Pirsig, when he writes ZMM and Lila, is developing static quality. He initially widens the river with the idea of Quality and then of Dynamic and static, but then the writing of the books and the development of the MoQ are static enterprises, the static latching that Pirsig thinks necessary. And it is necessary or else exciting new ideas simply fade away.
Another corrolary from this angle is Rorty's harping on people who simply criticize what's going on in politics, for instance, so-called "Marxist critiques" (think Eagleton, Jameson, Culler, etc.). Rorty's hang-up is that, yeah, so there are flaws in the system, but what are we going to do about them? He doesn't want critiques, so much as he wants proposals and alternatives for what we are going to do instead. It does no good to criticize capitalism. You need a proposal that shows some signs of being able to work. We need that static latching. That's why Rorty is a Cold War leftist who is perfectly comfortable with ruling out centralized planning as an economic strategy: we have historical examples of nations that tried it to scare us away from jumping wholesale into it.
Well, that's enough tangents for one post.
Matt
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