From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Fri Jan 02 2004 - 16:37:49 GMT
>Ant: Despite this, maybe we'll see some original >philosophy from Matt in the new year?
Scott: I find this request to be rather over the top.
Ant: Scott, you’re right about this of course, though my request was an ironic one.
Scott: Of course Matt is "rehashing" Rorty, since what he is doing is comparing Pirsig's X to Rorty's Y and finding Rorty's Y to be preferable, much as in the past I have "rehashed" Owen Barfield since I found his treatment of the intellect to be much better than Pirsig's.
Ant: Barfield seems an interesting philosopher (re: the history of SOM) so I’d certainly would like an expansion of your point concerning his treatment of the intellect.
Scott: Should I ask you to stop rehashing Foucault and Habermas (or Best & Kellner)?
Ant: Well, I’m not declaring myself as some sort of Rortyan. If I was I’d possibly have more of a case to answer concerning the originality of my work.
Scott: To something more substantive, you say:
>To put it in his words, Rorty is still too much of a metaphysician and not
>enough of an ironist. I guess he may have dropped LILA after starting to
>read it as he realised that his philosophy is less viable as a genuine final
>vocabulary than the MOQ.
Scott continues: I think you guess wrongly. More likely is that he got to where Pirsig starts hypostasizing Quality, and decided that Pirsig was being metaphysical, and
gave up on him.
Ant: Well, the case is that we don’t actually know why Rorty stopped reading LILA after just a few chapters. I wasn’t necessarily presuming (as Matt did) that it was because of any limitation of Pirsig’s.
Scott: For what it's worth, I think Pirsig and Rorty both get "it" wrong: Rorty for being too secular to appreciate the value of Buddhist irony...
Ant: The philosophy of East Asia seems to have been completely overlooked by Rorty and is one of the primary reasons I don’t particularly like his work. At least, I've bothered to read a substantial amount of Rorty's work (as well as Matt's essays and e-mails) before reaching this conclusion.
Scott continues: ...and Pirsig for not being ironical enough (e.g, his DQ = nirvana overlooks the Madhyamika point that nirvana = samsara).
Ant: It maybe not be obvious in Pirsig’s work but I don’t think he overlooks that nirvana = samsara because the bottom line, in the MOQ, is that all static patterns are essentially manifestations of Dynamic Quality. I have mentioned this in previous posts and also briefly allude to this in Section 5.5. of my PhD textbook where I discuss the relationship between Nagarjuna and Pirsig.
Best wishes,
Anthony.
“I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha,
The best of teachers, who taught that,
Whatever is dependently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihlated, not permanent.
Not coming, not going.
Without distinction, without identity,
and free from conceptual construction.”
Dedicatory verse from Nagarjuna’s “Mulamadhyamakakarika”.
-----------------------------------------
Email provided by http://www.ntlhome.com/
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 : Fri Jan 02 2004 - 16:39:27 GMT