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

[Matt Kundert]

Ron,

There's no need to apologize.  The rhetorical malaise that Pirsig created, 
though, summed up in his section on philosophology, is one that makes it 
easy not just to lampoon academia, but throw it out entirely.  I think a lot 
of it is misguided.  I certainly was aggressive in the paper, and in my 
response to you, but that is due in part as a response to the aggressiveness 
Pirsig, if not displays himself, at least inspires in some of his readers, 
some of my interlocuters.

When you say that you "see nothing wrong or inherently bad about academic 
work, although I do feel it incomplete," I can wholeheartedly agree in this 
sense: no activity, except for the broad activity known as "living life," is 
complete, and anybody who says otherwise certainly deserves a little 
ridicule.  The sense I get from Pirsig and others is that they are reading a 
little too much into academia themselves, that something inherent in 
academia makes them think that this is it, this is all we need.  Maybe it 
was Aristotle's suggestion that the best life was the life of contemplation. 
  It makes sense to make fun of Aristotle for saying that, but it doesn't 
make sense to make fun of people who simply enjoy contemplating--which they 
do alongside everything else in their life, though it may go unnoticed if 
all you had access to was their written contemplations.  I think Pirsig, as 
I said, may go a little overboard.

You said this:
I taught graphic arts for a few years and saw first hand what pirsig was 
speaking of. Perhaps that is why I do not percieve it as an attack.I saw 
pirsig wanting acadamia to lean more On the tech school level, which I 
totally aree with, why keep cranking out people with degree's Who do not 
have the practical skills to get a job and perform well in their field?

Matt:
This I don't really see much in Pirsig.  That's a very specific rendition of 
what Pirsig is saying.  I mean, I don't necessarily disagree (though it 
might, depending on emphasis, underappreciate what a good liberal arts 
education means for an educated, voting populace), but I'm not sure Pirsig 
was suggesting that we need colleges to focus more on practical skills.  I 
don't know, I'd have to see some passages that would support that.  If there 
were, it might help shift the meaning of sections like the philosophology 
one.  The only thing I can think of is when he talks about the kid who drops 
out of college, in ZMM, but then returns when he finds that there is 
something he wants from college.  But I'm not sure that does the kind of 
support you'd need.

About the apples and pineapples: this type of comment always gets under my 
skin (usually causing me to lash out at people who don't necessarily deserve 
it) because it makes me wonder what I've said to require that to be said to 
me.  After all, didn't we all learn in kindergarten that we are all unique 
snowflakes?  The truth of that mushy-mushy saying is that, yes, indeed we 
are all in our way utterly unique and dissimilar from any other human being 
who has every existed (physiologically, no less culturally in these latter 
stages of evolution for homo erectus)--but at the same time, tremendously 
similar.  I take Pirsig to be overreacting to others when he suggests, 
facetiously, that he can't be compared to anybody else.  He does suggest it, 
and it is pretty silly on its face.

What I think he's reacting to is in part, as he suggests in Lila, the 
tendency in Philosophy Departments to teach the history of philosophy.  I 
have arguments in the paper for why this is (and would more or less need to 
be) done, but Pirsig seems to think, wrongly, that that's all philosophy 
professors do--and, that it's not useful.  As DMB suggested, he could give a 
damn what music critics think (ah, but Lester Bangs was brilliant).

My standard reply is this: the only way to back up a claim of Pirsig's 
uniqueness is to do the thing reviled, to read the history of philosophy.  
We acknowledge that each of us has our own peculiar taste: why repeat it 
unless somebody was denying it?  But to actually figure out what that taste 
is, you need to be able to differentiate that taste from other tastes.  In 
my view, reading the history of philosophy, the thing some Pirsigians think 
is superfluous, not only is a requirement for moving from a hip-shot opinion 
to a justified opinion about _how_ unique a taste is, but it in fact makes 
Pirsig taste _more_ unique--it _enhances_ the taste.  The rhetoric that 
Pirsig created suggests that knowing about history _diminishes_ your ability 
to appreciate tastes, but, I would argue, it is in fact the opposite--having 
tasted more, you are then able to know better what you are tasting, and have 
a better grasp on why you like certain tastes better than others.

The question then becomes: why would Pirsig get it backwards?  My answer for 
some time has been that Pirsig, as it has been with many of the strongest 
writers and poets, is desperate--more than most regular people--to acheive 
brilliance and uniqueness.  Borrowing from Harold Bloom, he suffers from the 
"anxiety of influence."  Pirsig fears, as all poets do, that they will be 
judged harshly by history and will fail, not be originally strong as they so 
greatly desire.  And so they preemptively lash out at history.  I said this 
some time ago:
---------------
Kant said that you can't learn philosophy, you can only learn how to 
philosophize. Philosophy is an activity. Pirsig brings that out well when he 
says in the introduction to Lila's Child that philosophy is like chess and 
"real chess is the game you play with your neighbor." Some of those 
neighbors we play against, of course, are those who are no longer alive, 
those great masters of the tradition. We cut our teeth on their books, we 
engage them to learn how to philosophize, we engage them to steal their 
wisdom. Baggini's interview brings out strongly Pirsig's desire to not 
engage with those of the past, but it also shows him not really engaging 
with those of the present, like Baggini. Pirsig's sometimes refusal to enter 
the "Western conversation" isn't really to be explained by some specious 
contrast between Pirsig's Dynamism and the Western tradition's staticness, 
between philosophy and philosophology. I think it's to be explained by 
Pirsig's incarnation of rugged, American hyperindividualism, which toes 
along the fear of being influenced.

Pirsig's desire to ignore other philosophers, other chess partners, is tied 
into the anxiety of influence, Pirsig's unwillingness to see himself in 
anybody else's eyes. But unlike strong poets like Socrates, Nietzsche, and 
Hegel, Pirsig's tactic sometimes seems more like closing his eyes then 
staring down his predecessors and saying with Nietzsche, "Thus I willed it." 
Pirsig does indeed want to be original and, like Nietzsche, not owe it to 
anybody, but without engaging in the conversation, how are we to know if it 
is indeed wisdom? Wisdom arises through the conversation, not outside of it.
---------------

I think this anxiety is inevitable for the strongest of creators, but it 
creates in them a blindness (a blindness that is needed, Bloom argues, for 
the creation).  While Pirsig may have needed to blind himself to create ZMM 
and Lila, we do not in fact need to be blind to appreciate them.  And the 
only reason I attend to Pirsig's blindness more harshly than, say, Wallace 
Stevens' is because Pirsig was writing philosophy, and that blindness 
produced philosophical side-effects, side-effects that I wish to expunge 
from the great stuff that the blindness in fact helped create.

I don't want to diminish Pirsig.  My intent is, in fact, the opposite.  But 
I hear from many that all I go on about is useless and pointless to what 
Pirsig was all about.  I'm not so sure, and I tend to lash back.  In fact, 
I'm pretty sure that what I go on about is part of the inquiry into "what 
Pirsig was all about."

Matt

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