[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mary,

Mary said:
people here tend to fall into one of three camps.  There are 
those who feel the philosophy fulfills a need in their lives or 
answers an important question, another group views it as 
an academic philosophy to be evaluated against its 
predecessors, while  a third rejects it yet finds value in taking 
the time to ridicule or oppose.  No matter which group you 
are in, you will find yourself offended by the point of view of 
the other two.
...
And so you have revealed yourself to lie within the second 
camp, Pirsig as academically interesting.

Matt:
I'm not so sure I quite agree that your tripartite camp 
demarcation catches all the interesting differences.  For 
example, I'm not offended by people in Camp-1, though I 
am generally annoyed by people in Camp-3.  And Camp-3, 
while perhaps catching the point of view of They Who 
Shall Not Be Named (Struan Hellier and Glenn Bradford), it 
doesn't seem to really catch, say, Ham Priday, who also 
isn't really offended, but more just wants somebody to 
talk to, and look, here's a stable, persisting group of 
people.  (Though, even here, that doesn't do justice to 
either Struan or Glenn, whose strident tone in their later 
years came about, not because they were offended by 
Pirsig, I take it, but by the pious tones of some of his 
defenders.)  And why should being in Camp-1 preclude you 
from evaluation against other philosophers?  Why should 
thinking that Pirsig's philosophy is great and helps you 
with spiritual questions (however one defines "spirit") 
preclude you from reading other philosophers, or taking an 
interest in the history of philosophy?

To say that my interest in Pirsig is "merely academic" kind 
of misses the point of people who like to read.  The mind 
for such people is like a Homeric battlefield, with forces 
constantly arrayed against each other, fighting for victory.  
And reading and thinking about philosophy keeps the field 
dynamic, with occasionally new armies appearing out of 
nowhere, and you don't know until later whether they fight 
for Good or Evil (well, I guess it's more like a Miltonic 
battlefield).  And sometimes people change sides, or 
double-cross their comrades occasionally.  Pirsig's mind was 
like this, and it's how he thought of philosophy in the 
philosophology chapter (Ch. 26).  Pirsig wasn't against 
reading, he was against leaving them in a museum, instead 
of animating them for battle.

I may have a curious relationship to Pirsig because--what 
is easiest to say--I'm an academic.  But to sniff, "Oh, he's 
a philosophologist," doesn't do justice to the spiritual quest 
people who like to read are on.  I read and compare 
because I want the better.  And I'm impatient.  I don't look 
down my nose at people who like Pirsig, and just want to 
use him for themselves.  Because in both cases, the person 
in a monogamist relationship with Pirsig and the whorish, 
polygamist (like myself) are out for themselves--they are 
on their own spiritual journey, and who am I to tell them to 
sow their wild oats?

I think the better distinction to get started splitting people 
up into groups is between philosophy and biography, 
between asking "What's the better thing to think?" and 
"What would X think?"  A purely academic relationship to 
Pirsig would be if one were writing a history of 20th Century 
X (philosophy, literature, popular culture, American 
Buddhism, etc.), and had to take his books into account.  
That would be pure biography.  Pure biography is open to 
anyone--you don't have to be a true believer to do it.  (For 
example, I know a lot more about Christianity and what 
they are supposed to believe than some of my Christian 
friends--that neither invalidates my knowledge, nor does it 
say anything about their faith.)  Pure philosophy would be 
something like being on a battlefield without anybody to 
fight (this image is an extension of my argument that you 
can't evacuate history from philosophy as "philosophology" 
seems to suppose, part of my argument in the MoQ.org 
essay "Philosophologology").

The tricky question is for those of us who have a battle 
commander--or, let's say, a wizened advisor.  When you 
ask for advice, you do need to carry out the instructions 
correctly--so you need to be able to do biography.  And in 
this sense, you can be corrected by the non-believing, 
infidel pure biographers.  But, when you are on your own 
spiritual quest, rather than fighting someone else's, you will 
sometimes find yourself in disagreement with your spiritual 
advisor.  Having a wizened advisor that you find yourself in 
almost complete agreement with might be like having a 
book of proverbs, but probably is more like sharpening your 
mind against a trusted whetstone.  To figure out what you 
think, you always go back to the whetstone to sharpen 
your thoughts, but you always try to remember that the 
stone is not you.

Am I a believer?  That's complicated, but probably no more 
complicated than assessing whether individual Christians are 
authentic or not--unless you're in the Catholic church, 
there's no real authoritative body to throw you out if you 
self-identify, in whatever weird way you think.  I have no 
trouble calling myself a Pirsigian.  Perhaps it's just habit, but 
I don't think so.  I have a "spirit before the letter" approach 
to his corpus, have no problem distinguishing between 
getting Pirsig right and getting what I think right, have no 
problem ignoring parts I don't like, and get tired of orthodox 
readers who want to throw me out of their church, just 
because I ocassionlly like to pray in front of the cross.  

Yet, on the other hand, I do seem to have that annoying 
tendency to throw Pirsig under the bus every time things 
get hot--"hey, what do you make of the levels?"  "Eh, I 
don't go in for that kind of thing...."  I seem like a 
convenient Pirsigian, which appears to the disciples like a 
Historian of Religion who only goes to church on Christmas 
and Easter (analogous to ZMM and Lila, and _man_ do I 
think Christmas way cooler).  Yet, because the Master 
preached tolerance and goodwill, and that faith in him was 
really faith in yourself (i.e. philosophy is something you do, 
a spiritual quest of which everyone must necessarily have 
their own), I can't help but think that my path is as 
legitimate as anyone else's, and that--biographically 
speaking--I'm right in thinking that the Master is on my 
side on this score.

Mary said:
I liken this [the three camps] to religion, where the most 
maddening thing you can say to a religious person is that 
Jesus was nothing more than a wise man with valuable 
insights to make.

Matt:
The religious metaphor is always at hand for these kinds of 
things, though there is something wrong with it, as "disciple" 
seems to cast doubt on how "free-thinking" the Pirsigian is.  
I have no wish to cast that kind of doubt generally (only on 
a case-by-case basis), but I think I gained whatever 
notoriety I somewhat egomaniacally assign myself in my 
original coming out party in July 2002, "Confessions of a 
Fallen Priest."  Not a good rhetorical strategy, I came think 
later.  I think this description of angst, in my "Open Letter to 
New Participants of the MD" in the Essay Forum, captures 
without religious metaphors what's going on around here 
pretty well:
----------
I can, however, offer two explanations to explain this 
phenomenon [of sometimes virulent antagonism] that swing 
free of both the competitive nature of inquiry and the 
possibility of participants simply being assholes. The first 
only holds for some participants. Pirsig’s writings try and 
place their finger on a “spiritual crisis” in our society. Pirsig’s 
proposed solution is almost entirely individualistic (meaning 
centered on each person taking care of themselves) and 
almost entirely philosophical (meaning we have to change, in 
a large, general, broad-scale way, many prevailing attitudes). 
People who find themselves here, then, are by and large 
taken by Pirsig’s diagnosis and wish to search for the solution 
and for ways of disseminating it. This is a large task and 
clearly of the utmost, dire importance (at least for those who 
think this way). Because of the importance and because of 
the fact that we, apparently, are the only ones who take 
Pirsig seriously, reaching consensus on Pirsig’s philosophy 
and then moving on to dissemination is intensely important, 
and time is being wasted. In other words, the antagonism is 
marked by impatience.

As I said before, that explanation holds for only some. But 
because everyone was attracted to Pirsig (and, what’s 
more, then this site) for some reason, everyone probably 
falls on a continuum between “What spiritual crisis?” and 
“The world is about to end!!!” with most people somewhere 
in the middle. The second explanation is much more basic 
than our peculiar affinity with and love for Pirsig, though it 
is tied to the notion of a “spiritual crisis.” People do 
philosophy for various reasons, but people who are drawn 
here typically do it because they are interested in the way 
our beliefs hang together and how this affects our lives and 
the world at large. Philosophy is used as a way of 
excavating our own most deeply held beliefs and then 
asking, “Should this really be all that deep?” In other words, 
we do philosophy Socratically, taking the Delphic Oracle’s 
“The unexamined life is not worth living” as our modus 
operandi. This means, though, that people here are at their 
most exposed and naked. When the smoke gets thick, it 
means that the propositions and theses being kicked around 
aren’t simply hypotheses with which we are going to 
gradually eliminate until there is a winner. That is exactly 
what’s going to happen (given the ideal of inquiry), but it is 
an excruciatingly arduous and torturous affair when these 
theses are deeply held and deeply believed. Saying that the 
ideas we kick around are simply “truth candidates” doesn’t 
quite grasp the event that is taking place. These ideas are 
us (this also being a basic position of Pirsig’s). The event of 
philosophy is the event of reshaping ourselves, not in some 
cosmetic sense, but in the sense that after we are done we 
are not who we were when we started.
----------

Mary said:
The crux of my question goes right to the heart of the 
differences between the three groups I've described. 
Depending on where you are in your journey, you either will 
or will not find value in seeing the nature of SOM as an 
insidious destroyer of equanimity.  If you find personal 
meaning in the MoQ, the purpose of the Intellectual Level 
looms large for this reason.  It is perhaps the central concept 
you have attachment for.  You think that everyone should 
feel the enormity of Pirsig's insights that you see, and are 
offended that they do not.  But this is a mistake.  To rail 
against others who have not is unfair.  Would I be 
understanding of that which I had not experienced?  If not, 
why should I expect that of others?  The MoQ can be 
understood on many levels, and any of them are better 
than none.

Matt:
Heh, ya' know, I appreciate the attempt at tolerance and 
goodwill at the end, but funny how the implicit path of the 
journey leads to a specific interpretation of Pirsig's 
philosophy.  As in, one can only be part of Camp-1 if one 
agrees with you that the intellectual level is the "central 
concept."  Whereas, if I'm not mistaken, Marsha has 
recently emphasized how Quality is numero uno, and Joe 
Mauer put in a bid for Lila to be replaced with the words 
"Dynamic Quality."

What kind of goodwill is it if I say, "No, it's okay, Mary, I 
understand why you don't agree with me--you just aren't 
as far down the path as I am."  Maybe I'm more sensitive 
to this because I get called a philosophological elitist 
every couple days on the MD, but I try to avoid as much 
as possible the appearance of condescension in the 
shaping of Pirsigian philosophical individualism.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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