[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[david buchanan]

David, Matt and all MOQers:

Last Sunday Matt said to David M:
I think you did a seamless blending of Heidegger and Pirsig in the middle 
passage.

dmb says:
Firstly, I wanna thank DM for sending me info on Heidegger and Pirsig. 
Secondly, I gotta say that I just don't see it. It seems to me that the 
similarities are superficial and are pretty much overwhelmed by their 
differences. I've only just begun to look into it, but it seems to me that 
Heidegger was an anti-humanist, a crypto-theologian and a NAZI while Pirsig 
is the quite the opposite. And, as Richard Wolin writes in the February 20 
issue of THE NATION, "According to Heidegger, Being determines everything. 
The contributions of individual men and women is epiphenomenal and, for the 
most part, pointless. Hence the only thing we can do, as Heidegger once 
claimed, is patiently wait for God, who 'can save us'." "By the late 1980s 
the moral vacuity of Heidegger's philosophy stood fully exposed. Above all, 
it lacked an ethics." I'm trying to keep an open mind on this point, but at 
present I'm of the opinion that if Pirsig was ever in the same room with 
Heidegger he would have punched him on the nose, so to speak. But, again, in 
the interest of keeping an open mind, here's a question for either of you; 
In what sense is Being like Quality? I mean, what sort of description does 
Heidegger himself use for that term? Are you telling me that he indentified 
it with the Tao? Nirvana? Zen sitting? Please, be specific.

Matt said to DM:
...What I don't like is reading Being as being reacted to by beings, DQ by 
static patterns.  I'd prefer to say that beings react to each other, and in 
their expansion, in their creativity, they acheive Being.  Being and DQ 
represent creativity and openness, but I don't think they represent 
another--and here's where the concepts we're using to start to muddy 
up--kind of being. ...I guess that's a good way of putting the way Heidegger 
and Pirsig sometimes look to me (or at least Pirsig does).  It sometimes 
looks as if they create two different ontological categories, being and 
Being, static patterns and Dynamic Quality.  I'm not sure what that's 
supposed to suggest other than an
appearance/reality type situation...

dmb says:
OK Matt, I'm gonna try this again. Maybe this time it WON'T be like water 
off a duck's ass. In various ways, you keep saying that the MOQ's 
distinction between static and Dynamic is "an appearance/reality type 
situation". And I keep trying to explain why its not, but it always seems to 
slide right off your back. For example, a week before you wrote the section 
above you posted this brief exchange...

DMB had said:
What if the mystics' distinction between the menu and the food is NOT like 
the appearance/reality distinction?

Matt replied:
After Pirsig gets done with that section, yes, you're right.  That's what I 
was saying.  Because I think its pretty clear from _that_ section that the 
mystical position Pirsig creates is textbook appearance/reality distinction. 
And Pirsig amends it.

dmb now says:
The mystical position is a textbook case? No, Matt, this is exactly where we 
disagree. And, as I already said in the very post you were responding to, I 
don't think Pirsig amends it. I think he simply adopts it. He doesn't need 
to amend the mystic's position to get out from under the appearance/reality 
distinction BECAUSE the mystic's positon does NOT entail that distinction. 
For a reality check, I literally went to the textbook. Since you apparently 
refuse to acknowledge this point when I make it, maybe I'll let the OXFORD 
COMPANION TO PHILOSOPHY make this point for me.

"...transcendentalism is belief in the existence of things that transcend 
sense-experience or, more reflectively, belief in the possibility of 
transcendent metaphysics, that is to say, philosophial reasoning which aims 
to establish beliefs about transcendent entities. *God might seem an obvious 
example of a transcendent, but those who accept religious or mystical 
experience might resist that. The *Forms or Ideas of Plato, which are not in 
space and time and not encountered in the world of the senses, are more 
incontestably transcendent."

dmb resumes:
See it yet? What I keep saying is that the static/Dynamic split is not like 
the appearance reality distinction because DQ is not like a theistic God nor 
is it like Plato's Forms. You may recall that Pirsig explicitly announced an 
anti-theistic stance and attacks Plato for converting Quality into a fixed 
and rigid thing. In both cases Pirsig is rejecting any kind of transcendent 
ontological reality. As I said over and over again in the "Rhetoric" thread, 
the DQ and sq are categories of experience. There is nothing to suggest any 
ontological reality behind or beyond these categories of experience. Pirsig 
won't even accept Kant's things-in-themselves because that is really just a 
kind of place holder for these same kind of realities beyond experience. 
Basically, I think you're looking at the MOQ's empiricism and reading it as 
ontology. Pirsig is so NOT doing ontology here, that he is even rejecting 
the idea of matter and substance because it is basically asserted as the 
CAUSE of experience, an ontological reality behind experience. Instead, he's 
saying that experience is the CAUSE of objects, so to speak.

As I understand it, you think the mysticism and/or the MOQ has to be altered 
in order to avoid making the appearance/reality dististinction. But I'm 
repeatedly trying to tell you that the MOQ contains no such thing in the 
first place. I think the only thing that needs to be altered here is your 
understanding of the MOQ's central distinction. And when this point is 
properly understood, there is no longer a need to reduce DQ to some 
epiphenomenon of creativity or otherwise distort its meaning. I mean, the 
thing that really kills me, is that you want to alter the MOQ to remove 
something it doesn't have in the first place because DQ is misconcieved in 
your imagination. And I think if you understood it rightly, you'd see that 
such an alteration would be a disaster perpetrated for a false reason.

I'd sincerely be happy to have a real disagreement with you about this, but 
at this point I'm pretty well convinced that when you and I talk about DQ we 
are not even talking about the same thing. At this point I'm pretty well 
convinced that you have no idea what I'm saying. Or rather, I see no reason 
to believe that you've heard this point.

Thanks.
dmb

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