[MD] Transhumanism

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Arlo:
... whatever clear, articulable understanding of Pirsig I have, it is predicated on my occasionally and deliberately _ignoring_ some passages of Pirsig in order to articulate a clear, consistent understanding of what Pirsig "meant."  Mr. Buchanan is good at bringing up these ignored passages.


dmb says:

I don't see how that could be possible regardless of the ideas in question. How likely is it that a clear understanding of any theory will result from ignoring some parts of it? The notion strikes me as absurd. When you say stuff like this, it's hard to believe you're not just joking or something. 



Matt said:
...Since both of us understand Pirsig to be rejecting SOM, I view those passages as backsliding because I am unable to glimpse a coherent understanding of the two kinds of passages together.  Mr. Buchanan--able, he thinks, to construct a consistent sense in which Pirsig isn't a backslider--is correct, it is an inability on my part.  What I remain unconvinced of is that there is an overall, consistent context in which all the parts can be made sense of in the way Mr. Buchanan suggests (in other words, I remain unconvinced that his interpretation is successful and coherent), and that my inability to do it, because of my unconvinced state, isn't insufficient imagination, but the inability of putting oil and water together.


dmb says:

Well, I guess the coherent picture is my interpretation in some sense but the oil and water metaphor suggests that the MOQ itself has parts that will never go together. That would be a claim that Pirsig has created an incoherent picture and your unwillingness to put oil and water together suggest that my interpretation forces a coherence upon an otherwise inherently contradictory system.  Obviously, I disagree. 



Matt said:

I might be wrong on this score, and Mr. Buchanan right, but as an honest inquirer I have to confess my recalcitrance.  This also means that if someone asked me, "given your brilliant and correct interpretation of Pirsig's philosophy, what did he mean by 'pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience'--and let me stipulate that you cannot  say it is a Platonic wild oat or explain it away in a gloss that ignores the role of 'direct,' 'philosophology,' the glasses metaphor, and the menu metaphor--now: go, tell me," I would likely have to confess, "I don't know what he meant by it, not if it means knocking over the other  things you stipulated as 'correct' already in my understanding--because as far as my imagination and ingenuity will let me, I do not see how they can be put together while holding on to Pirsig's visionary status."



dmb says:

Well, that's just it. The "pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience" is a phrase that describes the central term of the MOQ. How can anyone have a brilliant and correct interpretation of anything without a solid understanding of its central terms? See, it's not that I'm some neat freak who needs every word to be properly accounted for. Ignoring the passages that talk about pre-intellectual experience is really quite epic because it is so central to everything else in the MOQ. I suspect your real trouble with such notions is simply that they don't appear on Rorty's radar. It's not just a co-incidence. He ignored the same sorts of passages in James and Dewey that you ignore in Pirsig. 

Matt said:
Calling me short-sighted, unimaginative, and un-understanding because I am unable to so, while impolite, would be more or less right.  However, it would also be rhetorically silly to do so because such epithets rest on the question-begging claim that one has already offered that visionary and coherent understanding.  This claim is no more question-begging then the one that carves out two halves and says they are oil and water, but showing enough fallible foresight suggests stopping at the part where you notice that your conclusion begs the question over the opposite understanding. 


dmb says:

It only counts as question begging if I don't offer an answer to the question but I do offer answers. Lots and lots of them. Usually you refuse on the basis of your interests or my rudeness. Either way, you simply refuse to get into it. That's your choice, not mine. 



 		 	   		  
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