[MD] Pirsig, Peirce and Philosophologology re-establishing pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

x,

Your reply is the classic reaction to my thoughts on Pirsig's term 
"philosophology," or in general to most of what I do.  I certainly drove 
Pirsig around in the paper: I forced him to say things I would think he 
wouldn't want to say, but I certainly wasn't doing it out of spite: I think 
I was fairly justified in the extrapolations I made from the things he has 
said.  Most simply put, my thesis would be this:

Pirsig himself says in the chapter he introduces "philosophology" that 
philosophy cannot be defined.  However, you cannot distinguish between two 
words without defining _both_ of them.  This is inevitable, with biology, 
philosophy, or Quality.  This also isn't bad in and of itself.  We must 
inevitably delimit our area of inquiry to even have an inquiry, which 
therefore defines it in a certain way.  The trouble with Pirsig's way of 
defining it is that he enters in the time-honored, but ugly practice of 
philosophers claiming of other philosophers, "Those other guys aren't even 
_doing_ philosophy!  Don't pay attention to them, they're full of crap."  
You can just say they're full of crap because of X, Y, and Z, you don't have 
to try and bully them out of the field entirely.  That would be too easy.

Pirsig's attempt to free up what we think of as philosophy (not just what 
those stuffed shirts in the ivory tower do) ties him into saying that what 
the stuffed shirts do _isn't even_ philosophy, which is overkill, a kind of 
overkill that I think is symptomatic of something else, but one we can 
settle on for right now as just overkill.

This overkill creates tension, as when one says "you can't define 
philosophy" and "those guys aren't doing philosophy" only a few pages apart. 
  I think saying that Pirsig is antielitist is fair enough, but I never make 
fun of the way Pirsig does his philosophy.  Part of the point of my essay on 
Pirsig (all of my writing on Pirsig, really) is to praise the way he does 
philosophy--I just happen to do it in what you call "a formal academic" way. 
  But why is that bad?  Tell me what is inherently bad with academic work 
and I'll show you a person who said that Pirsig is "not saying get rid of 
academics!"  And if there is nothing inherently wrong with it, why make fun 
of me?  Am I holding Pirsig down?

You might say that I am, that all the formality is stifiling, but I should 
remind everyone that _no one_ here is doing philosophy the way Pirsig did: 
autobiographically or in a novel.  Is that bad?  No, I shouldn't think so.  
But I think we should be a little more cognizant of where our missiles of 
disapprobation come from and where they are going.

For instance, what I do when I write is exactly what Pirsig tells me I 
should do: I write what I like.  I'm not trying to conform to an Academic 
Style Book or something, I just write.  I do know how to vary style, and I 
have several different ways in my toolbox, but I don't think one of them is 
better in the way that Pirsig obviously prefers what he calls "philosophy" 
(in invidious opposition to "philosophology").

And if you agree that, yes, yes, Matt, I agree that the "academic style" 
shouldn't be gotten rid of, and may have its purposes, I would ask how my 
paper didn't serve my purposes.  What was wrong with it?  If Pirsig was just 
talking about arrogance and sloppy thinking, why didn't he just talk about 
arrogance and sloppy thinking?  Why did he start firing shots at 
professional philosophy?  Are some of them arrogant and/or sloppy?  Sure, 
but show me a profession that doesn't have those in there.

Another way of putting my disagreement with Pirsig's rhetorical generation 
of philosophology would be to look at this peice of your post: "The cycle 
you work on is the cycle of your mind (us older Harley Owners know what this 
means) you are always working on your bike is What it means. Pirsig wrote 
from the craftsman stand point, working with your Hands, participating in 
the 'quality' process, caring, using words like 'Gumption traps' infusing 
learned classical knowledge with practical learned Hands-on experience. No 
substitute. It all is a process of caring Fusing thought with matter."

I can't say I disagree with the spirit of anything you've said here.  
However, it was said in counterdistinction to my paper, as if my paper 
lacked care and craftsmanship.  What I want to say, counter to the rhetoric 
Pirsig employs and that others like yourself pick up on and use, is that 
philosophy, whether academic in style or otherwise, is itself a craft that 
requires care.  If it's a garden that you prefer to stay out of, that's 
fine.  But why piss all over my garden--particularly if you can't define the 
garden in any suitable way to allow the pissing.

So, again, as you were saying with Peirce, "knowledge is not a body of 
certainties but A body of explanations and the growth of our scientific 
knowledge does not Consist in adding new certainties to a body of existing 
ones, it consists in Replacing existing explanations with better 
explanations."  Nothing could be more Rortyan than that.  Or academic, for 
that matter.

Your most facetious remark, however, came at the end: "To compare him to any 
philosopher is comparing apples to pineapples."  The only way to back that 
claim up is to do what Pirsig has relegated and reviled as "philosophology." 
  Nothing has been more harmful to Pirsig or his fans than the thought that 
Pirsig simply cannot, tout court, be compared to anybody.  It's so silly as 
to defy comprehension.  _Nothing_ gets done if it is not by comparison.  
How, after all, would you replace all those sedimented explanations with the 
new, better ones if you weren't comparing?  The only way to establish 
Pirsig's originality is _by_ comparison, not by denying it.  I said this 
some time ago during the Baggini controversy:
------------
One of the things that I learned early on in engaging Pirsig's philosophy is 
that the status of Pirsig's originality swings free from the status of 
Pirsig's arguments and theses being any good.  One way to formulate the 
distinction between philosophy and philosophology is between the assertion 
of philosophical theses and intellectual history.  This means that the 
difference between doing philosophy and doing philosophology is the 
difference between being able to tell whether a thesis, or position, or 
argument is any _good_ and being able to tell if its _original_.

This means that when Pirsig says that his philosophy is original or 
revolutionary _he_ is doing philosophology.  This also means that I think 
Pirsig himself is distracting attention away from where he thinks attention 
should be paid: the merit of his arguments, not their relations to others.  
When Pirsig claims that his philosophy is original or revolutionary he is 
making a claim that he has no intention of backing up.  From Pirsig's own 
point of view, to back up that claim would be besides the point, so he 
doesn't feel the need to bother with it.  But Pirsig baits the trail by his 
continued insistence on these claims and so distracts his interlocuters.  I 
surely doubt Pirsig does this on purpose, but by baiting the trail he opens 
up space to berate his interlocuter from missing his point by focusing on 
philosophology instead of philosophy.
------------

I think one can play fast and loose with that kind of distinction between 
philosophy and intellectual history, but the point of my paper is that such 
a distinction doesn't hold up that well under scrutiny, and certainly won't 
hold up as a way of distinguishing real philosophy from false.  How do we 
tell a good thesis from a bad one?  The good one works better.  However, 
that means that there has to be a bad one to compare it to (as Dewey said, 
the bad is simply a rejected good), and where would that bad one come from 
other than past experience?  All "philosophology" is is the "past experience 
of philosophizing."  Isn't that what we should be using our better stuff to 
kick ass against?  And how would we do that if we didn't compare?

Matt

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