[MD] Creativity and Philosophology, 2 (from 2005)

[david buchanan]

DMB said:
Again, it's not that Pirsig has confused discursive and non-discursive disciplines.

Matt replied:
Are you even reading what I write? ...  Not _Pirsig_.  _He's_ not making the confusion, but his analogy _banks_ on that confusion, because that's what makes the art historian and musicologist telling artists and musicians what art and music are _look so stupid_.  What I'm pointing at is that, while on the one hand it is certainly true that analogies work with their power by drawing the seemingly different closer together, that analogy doesn't work--so it seems to me--because Pirsig never fills in the obvious difference between philosophy, which is about life, and philosophology, which is about philosophy.


dmb says:
Okay, but even if you qualify the notion so that Pirsig's analogy "banks" on that confusion I'd still disagree. And I think your response stopped short of the substance of what I was saying. Maybe you just ran out of time but the substance of my explanation follows that single sentence and I wonder what you found so lacking in it that it didn't even deserve a response. It's directly related to the point you're making here and yet it is omitted entirely. I thought it was pretty decent and would ask you to give it a thought or two. Brushed up a little, I'd said...

Again, it's not that Pirsig has confused discursive and non-discursive disciplines. He's saying that nobody becomes an artist by writing about their trips to the museum. If everybody agrees that it would be ridiculous to call such a student an artist, then why is it not ridiculous to call someone a philosopher when he has done the very same thing? If philosophy books are the museum pieces on display and the job of the students is to look at them and write about them, then what's the difference? Pirsig is saying that professional philosophers are in that same position but haven't yet realized that being an expert on what's in the museum is different from producing something that will end up in the museum. 
See, the analogy is a claim about the nature of philosophy. Pirsig is saying that philosophy is like art and music but not like art history or musicology. The apparent asymmetry disappears when this point is recognized. Or rather, the analogy doesn't work for those who think that philosophy is NOT an art form in that sense. The discursive/non-discursive distinction is one part of the analogy that does not translate, but that's not the important part. The point of the analogy is to claim that philosophy is a discursive art and that engaging in it is qualitatively distinct from the study of this art. You know, cause he's a rhetorician, a neo-Sophist and all that. 
How do you tell the difference? I don't know, but naming names and defending them would be a fun parlor game.

  

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