[MD] Another parallel

[david buchanan]

Ron said to dmb:
Boy, you captured the view perfectly in that analogy. You could run the guy over with an electric car and he STILL would'nt accept it. THAT sort of thing just blows me away, especially here. ... Thank you, by the way, for the clarification of the intellectual level. Everything just snapped into place after that.

dmb says:
Thanks, Ron. That's very satisfying. All I ever hope to get from my efforts is to hear the sound of things snapping into place. It's also nice when a bad argument gets run over by car. 
This is what I was trying to say to Matt the other day. He finds "tensions" in the MOQ, which means "contradictions". He seems pretty confident that he has spotted contradictions that Pirsig wasn't quite smart enough or careful enough to notice. I suppose that's possible just because nobody is perfect. But when it comes down to specific cases where one Pirsig quote seems to contradict another Pirsig quote, I think they only seem contradictory because the quotes are not properly understood. I do not recall a single case where the alleged contradiction can't be resolved by a better interpretation of the quotes, or by a better reading of at least one of them.
And so I've been trying to make a case that radical empiricism is the means by which the MOQ can be read as quite coherent. Until I understood it, there were some statements from Pirsig that baffled me and which seemed to contradict the MOQ. It's not an accident that the most baffling quotes could only make sense after I studied radical empiricism, even if they didn't refer to it explicitly. The quote where he says that ideas come before matter and yet the idea that matter comes before ideas is a good idea, for example, struck me as way too weird. Now it makes perfect sense and everything clicks into place quite neatly. Now I sincerely wonder if there are any contradictions that couldn't be explained away. There could be some that I haven't considered yet, and I'd even invite the challenge if anyone thinks they got an irreconcilable pair of quotes or set of quotes. But so far, I only see the "tensions" as a product of the reader's error rather than the writer's.  
In fact, the more I learn, the more I appreciate Pirsig's accomplishment. The more I learn, the more I realize that what he said is very much on target with what's currently happening in the world of academic philosophy. His books engage the main issues that are so hot and sexy in pragmatism right now. Before I got started I was under the impression that the dominance of SOM would make my job nearly impossible, that mysticism would get me laughed at and kicked out, that all my teachers would be bullies and tyrants like the Chairman in Chicago. But, as it turns out, the task of finding a place for Pirsig's thinking in the academic world is an intellectual thrill ride. I find myself surfing a wave that was already in motion. Lucky, lucky me.
  


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