From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 19:45:13 GMT
Matt
Entirely agree with your take on this below,
Also Rorty probably would not want his own work
entangled with the non-analytic style of Pirsig.
Very much agree that Pirsig is important due to his
capacity to be understood by non-philosophy
students. Probably a shame Rorty did not do the
whole of Lila.
So anyone know who did and when some postings about
Heidegger and Pirsig, there is certainly little in Pirsig
that Heidegger has not covered in his hundreds of volumes.
regards
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 12:07 AM
Subject: Re: MD What makes an idea dangerous?
> 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
>
>
>
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