From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 00:07:58 GMT
David,
Dave Thomas, formerly a regular poster, wrote Rorty a year and a half ago asking what he thought about Pirsig. He wrote back, "I thought there were some good lines in 'Zen and...', but I never quite saw why people liked the book as much as they did. I tried to read 'Lila', but didn't get very far. I guess Pirsig and I just aren't on the same wavelength."
The post is located at Friday, May 17 2002 from 3dwavedave (I have a few replies surrounding that post that are interesting from a biographical point of view, on how my view of Rorty and Pirsig have changed (and not)).
I've never gotten that excited about the comment because I think it simply strikes up Rorty's claim that different people are going to be excited about different books. No big deal really. He also calls a paradigm of imagination the colligation of hitherto unrelated texts (from "Inquiry as Recontextualization"). Now, the funny thing is that I don't claim much imagination at all for my Pirsig/Rorty pairing because of Pirsig's explicit linking of the MoQ with pragmatism.
I explain Rorty's uncomprehendingness at ZMM's popularity as analogous to Jonathan Marder's lack of excitement over Rorty. Jonathan has said that he never got into Rorty because he's, basically, already assimilated all of Rorty's points (which as far as I've been able to tell, he has). Same thing between Rorty and Pirsig. David, your comparison between Heidegger and Pirsig was not the first time that that has occured here. Long-time posters will remember one guy who came on blasting Pirsig because he was really Heidegger in disguise (which is a very boring thing to say, and a very weak criticism). Well, for Rorty, who already had his Heidegger, he just might not have gotten very excited. Its up to people like Anthony McWatt and others, who have one foot in the academic door, to get people in the academy excited by somebody outside of it. Its a very political thing, but it just doesn't pay for academics to search for battles outside of itself--it has enough inside. We
can deplore this fact, but I think it merely a reflection of efficiency. If you have other pressing problems (defense of your interpretation of Dewey and Davidson, participation in battles of post-modernism, defenses against charges of relativism and irrationalism, etc.) that will eat your career and intellectual legitimacy alive if not taken care of, why would you try and extend yourself to a controversy over the Metaphysics of Quility?
You'd do it only if you were grabbed by the book somehow, which is almost inevitably a very inexplicable occurence to predict for any particular person for any particular book.
My prediction is that Pirsig's book will never make it into the philosophical mainstream. Its just too different. But then, I don't find its importance in what it has to say to the philosophical community. I locate its importance elsewhere, like in its ability to grab the non-academic.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 03 2003 - 00:42:09 GMT