[MD] Overcoming the System

[Matt Kundert]

Steve said in a different thread:
Pirsig never expected the MOQ to be the final word on reality. His work is a contribution to an ongoing cultural process of self-creation that cycles from such innovation as his MOQ to criticism to revision to the next innovation. That the MOQ is not immune to this historical process does not diminish Pirsig's genius, it is just to say that Pirsig is a "finite, historically situated being."

Matt:
This is one of the interesting dynamics in Pirsig's written work--his movement between wanting to say, "Continue the MoQ, the _MoQ_ will help us, the _MoQ_ is the best metaphysics around" and wanting to say, "Every person needs their own philosophy, because the arc of America is our individuality."

When you put the two together, that's when you get a weird monster like, "The MoQ was created to be transcended.  Let's work _on the MoQ_ so that we can transcend it."  That's when you get the weird dynamic from people telling you at one point that you're rejecting the MoQ (and that's bad) and the same people telling you at a different point that you're mired in other people's philosophy.

Steve, I think, has given us the exact circumlocution for this problem in Pirsig.  _The MoQ_ has no entity outside of Pirsig: it is _his_ philosophy, _his_ writing.  For Pirsig, or anyone, to say that the MoQ recognizes it's own contingency, or that it will itself be transcended, is just to say that _Pirsig_ is a finite, historically situated being.  It is just to remind us of the fact that the system was created by a person responding to his own personal, unique problems, which as general as they sometimes may appear to be, may not always be our own problems, particularly in the new, yet unforeseeable future.

We _have_ to come back to the individual a lot more often than we do when reading Pirsig.  Pirsig himself would seem to suggest it, and the conceptual machinery is important, but it is _not_ the end, it is only the _means_, in the bigger picture of life.

Matt

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