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

[david buchanan]

Dearest darling Matt and x:

As I understand it, the difference between philosophy and philosophology is 
like the difference between art and art criticism, which is far more than a 
difference of style. See, its not that intellectual history is bad or 
unimportant. Its just that creativity is different from the analysis of 
creativity. But think about the huge amount of historical analysis Pirsig 
engages in. He says that Plato made a huge mistake in trying to depict 
reality in a fixed, static way. He says Aristotle was an asshole and the 
Hegelian dialectic is asinine. And one of the things he likes best about 
James was his decidedly non-academic, and non-snobby attitude about what was 
and wasn't interesting to contemplate, such as the squirrel going round the 
tree for example. I think the idea here is simply that a philosophologist, 
an academic professionally, can't really get away with this level of 
hostility toward these figures. It seems to me that the philosophologist is 
going to have to immerse herself in the so-called philosophical questions.

It seems to me that this can be seen in the issues you've been working on 
and these same issues strike me as odd and weird and pointless. The 
appearance/reality distinction, for example, never made any sense to me. The 
notion of Absolute Truth never made and sense to me either. I mean, in what 
sense is appearance not real? I'm learning about the continental 
philosophers these days and its very clear to me now that Hegel was a 
theologian. I mean, the notion of finding the absolute truth is just more 
religion in a tux. This is why I was so baffled by your approach and why I 
asked so many times and in so many ways, "What in the world are you talking 
about?". Your pal Rorty thinks these questions get us nowhere. The 
difference is that he spent a lifetime on them anyway. In the piece from 
Rorty that was central in my paper, for exampe, he makes a case against the 
idea that critics can obtain the objective truth in a piece of writing. I 
don't disagree with Rorty on the point, per se. But I kepts thinking, "Well, 
of course not. What reason do we have to think otherwise? Who ever said we 
could? It seems to me that your pal spends a lot of time on problems that 
seem meaningful within an academic context, but they're total nonsense to 
most everybody else. By contrast, Pirsig just says, "What an asshole! That's 
asinine. That's a ridiculous fiction and here's why." By contrast, if 
philosophical ideas have no bearing on the quality of our lives, then forget 
it. Its a waste of time.

I love music. I can't live without it and yet I could count the times I've 
read music critics on one hand. I just don't care what they say. And I can 
understand why musicians might have nothing but contempt for music critics. 
They're thinking, "Shut the hell up and go write your own song, you freakin' 
parasites!"

He is not just critical. He is not just clearing the way for something new. 
He offers an alternative of his own design. It can be compared and 
contrasted with the ideas we find in the history philosophy, but this is a 
secondary activity insofar as we have to have the MOQ before it can be 
compared to anything. And comparing things is not the same as creating them.

I used to think Pirsig was exaggerating the case for dramatic purposes, but 
now that I'm required to read this stuff and pass some kind of judgement 
upon it I can see that he was only being accurate. Its true. Some of the 
most respected figures from the history of philosophy were putting out some 
really crazy stuff. And these grandiose notions usually have very little to 
do with life as its lived. Its so abstract that it hardly relates to 
anything a normal person would care about. I think that many of our 
disagreement spring from this difference.

But if you ask me about this in a couple years I'll probably have a 
different answer.

dmb






>From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>Subject: Re: [MD] Pirsig,Peirce and Philosophologology re-establishing 
>pragmatism
>Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:47:36 -0600
>
>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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