[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

David,

David said:
I would have liked to have heard how MOQ can be seen in relation to 
empiricism more.  Any thoughts on this?

Matt:
My own view is that the 18th-century empiricists' fetish with sense data 
leads inexorably to Kant.  After Kant you have to make a choice between 
Hegel (and the trail that leads to Nietzsche and Heidegger) or 
Husserl/Russell.  The Hegel trail repudiates empiricism insofar as it stops 
fetishizing sense data and the Husserl/Russell trail takes the fetish with 
it.

I suspect that Pirsig still holds some Kantianism in him.  On the one hand, 
Pirsig repudiates it in the Hegelian mold (that leads to James and Dewey) by 
making reality = experience, thus relinquishing the fetish with sense data.  
On the other hand, though, some of what Pirsig says seems to suggest that we 
have "what the world hands over to us" and "what we do to what the world 
hands over to us," ala intellectual level symbolic manipulation.  This seems 
to me to be Kantianism, what Hilary Putnam called the "cookie-cutter view."  
I suspect that if Pirsig had been asked for his relation to empiricism, he 
would have answered more in the latter mold than the former, but I think he 
should stick to the former.

So, on the one hand, Pirsig should be an empiricist in the sense that he 
(along with almost everybody else) repudiates divine drops of a prioriness, 
going along with the old-school empiricist's suspicion of rationalism.  But 
on the other hand, he shouldn't keep up with talk about sense data.  There 
is nothing that philosophically interesting or important about sense data or 
experience that people deny and that we can regain by talking about it.  
Once you make reality = experience, then nothing important hinges on whether 
a philosopher talks about experience or talks about talking, the difference 
between pre- and post-linguistic turn philosophers.  As far as I can tell, 
Pirsig in his better (non-Kantian looking) moments is as empiricist as Rorty 
and neither of them, following Rorty, should place that much significance in 
empiricism.  It was a dialectical stepping stone in the conversation of 
Western philosophy, but one that doesn't have all that much to teach us 
anymore.

At least, that's why I don't use "empiricist" as one of the labels I attach 
myself to.  It just seems to old and outdated.

Matt

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