[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

Mary said:
For any story to be compelling, it must have drama and 
psychological tension, but how do you build suspense, 
drama, and tension into a metaphysics?

Matt:
If you ask Hegel, he'll tell you add in history.

I started a project a year ago that got put aside, of writing 
mini-commentaries on each chapter of ZMM.  It was part of 
a larger attempt to read Pirsig into the history of philosophy 
(a project I've put aside indefinitely), and I'd hoped to 
someday finish these mini-comms and begin an MD 
experiment, of posting one each week (for 32 weeks) and 
inviting everyone to reread ZMM with me, using the 
mini-comms as conversation-starters.  I still want to do it, 
but I haven't been able to put aside enough time to make 
sure there's no pause in the 32 week period.

At any rate, I've been contemplating what it means to read 
Pirsig as a philosopher for some time, and a lot of it has to 
do with the drama, as you call it, Mary.  I've tried out some 
answers to the question in these three places,

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/prospectus-part-ii.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-quality.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/reading-pirsig-as-philosopher.html

but this is the first paragraph of the mini-comm for the first 
chapter of ZMM:
----------


When you read allegory, you’re
always supposed to remember that, while on the surface you’re reading about
mechanics fixing motorcycles, what you are really reading about is Platonic
Reason.  We might think of allegory as
“prose argument by poetic means,” and if our chosen arguments are about
abstract concepts, we might think of it, as in Spenser, as philosophy by any
other name.  The genius in Pirsig is in
uniting prose philosophical argument with narrative symbolism, blurring the
boundaries and showing us how—in a deep and material sense—we are both talking
about why these particular motorcycle mechanics suck and what went wrong with Plato: symbol and material, theory and
practice collapse into one.  Pirsig
brings philosophy home by showing how it affects our lives, and one life, by
telling the story of his life and the life of philosophy in one narrative, and
displaying how the life of philosophy—both
the history of philosophy and living philosophy as a form of life—affected his.

----------

Mary said:
For Pirsig to say that the Intellectual Level is thinking itself 
when this seems to surely fly in the face of all he has said 
before must mean something

Matt:
Heh, I suppose, but we have very different senses of the 
obvious.

Adrie said:
one of the treads displayed, is that Matt uses content , 
and Mary is building content.

Matt:
That's not a bad way of putting it--it connects with what I 
said about philosophical rhetoric, the choice of vocabulary, 
and how, once somebody's assured me that we agree on an 
issue, there's not a lot more to say (other to repeat my 
skepticism if the rhetoric continues).  For as Mary said, we 
often get caught with our foot in our mouth when we assume 
we understand somebody else too soon, but the real trouble 
is that even if you are patient, what do you do when the 
person doesn't sound right?  When the content says one 
thing but the form's telling you something else?  To remain 
patient, you have to at some point shrug and admit you don't 
get it (which is what I think Mary was saying earlier).

Matt
 		 	   		  
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