From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 23:05:00 BST
Hi Matt
Interesting post. What you say about central planning:
Always easy to dismiss something becaue of history,
but in a way history does not repeat itself. So maybe
tomorrow central planning would be useful. Or perhaps
if you go further back it was good, e.g. when everyone
makes a plan to use the same size railway lines. Or today
when we fail to use the same broadband width and it
is highly inefficient. Would you agree? Got to be careful
with thinking new=better.
Regards
David Morey
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: MD Evolution of levels
> 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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