[MD] Another parallel

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
It just seems to me that you avoid the content and 
substance of things
and prefer to examine the forms or 
packages that the content comes
wrapped in. The analytic 
bent refers to your style, characterizes the
mode of 
conversation you're employing presently. I was trying to 
convey
the idea that you like to talk around things while I 
prefer to try to
get to the substantive heart of the matter, 
and here you're responded
with an analysis in terms of 
rhetoric tactics. Before that, your
response was to introduce 
distinctions, the question of contexts and
similar lines of 
thought that all strike me as formally rigorous but

conceptually empty. That's what I mean by an analytic bent.

Matt:
Oh, well don't forget that Pirsig - Phaedrus - is of an 
analytic bent and that he questions to a significant degree 
the tidy distinction between substance and content (Ch. 28), 
and that he was a rhetorician who thought it was quite 
important to have the right rhetorical footing -- remember 
the S/O Dilemma? -- before wasting your time trying to argue.

I appreciate your view of the matter--mine is similar.  
Which is why I keep trying to repair the distance between 
our very different views of who's doing what to whom.

But--and maybe _this now_ is the major different between 
us--you think this is all pretty simple stuff that I keep 
making difficult, and I think it's not as easy as it looks and 
you're a Bigfoot dancing the ballet.

DMB said:
If one reads The American Scholar without the mysticism, 
for example, it's little more than flag-waving nationalism. 
Without the mysticism, Emerson's essay on self-reliance is 
just Reaganism.

Matt:
Oh, god.  See, now, that's a great response for _my_ point 
of view because if that's what you see sans mysticism, then 
you ain't seein' what you should.

Matt said:
_That's_ a major difference--your primary reference point is

a philosophical system called the Metaphysics of Quality. My 
major
reference point is a philosopher named Robert Pirsig, 
who wrote two
books, in one of which he embedded a 
loosely fleshed philosophical
system. The writings swing 
around the center of the MoQ for you, while
the MoQ swings 
around the center of the writings for me.

DMB said:
I honestly have no idea what that means. 

Matt:
Really?  Hmm.  I'm not sure how to swiftly help you with that 
one.  One way is to say that Rhetoric is the master of 
Dialectic, but that won't help because you think you 
understand what that slogan means, but not in anyway by 
what I just said above.  However, that's the gist.  How 
about this: it's the difference between defending an ism as 
an ism (you) and liking an ism for what it does for you (me).

Nah, that won't help, it's too epigrammatic.  I don't know.

DMB said:
Again, I'm quite sure that the
difference "swings" around 
radical empiricism. I think that the MOQ
can't be understood 
coherently without it, that you're reading the MOQ
without it, 
thus your reading produces apparent "tensions". I really
wish 
you'd address this objection directly and explicitly.

Matt:
Well, now I'm helpless because there's no flesh on your 
objection to be (freshly) direct or explicit about (though, 
personally, I don't think I've ever been as indirect or implicit 
as you make me out to be, but that's like a Democrat trying 
to rebuff Rush Limbaugh).

I mean, you do realize you just asked me to defend myself 
against an attack on my reading of Pirsig while 1) there has 
been no reference to my own texts under discussion for me 
to defend nor 2) been an articulated argument for me to hang 
onto, to engage, to address.  You do realize we've both been 
fairly abstract, general, and just exchanging assertions, right?

And, after all, I have said some explicit and direct things 
about radical empiricism (or so I've thought).

For instance, not even speaking to writing here, try any of these:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/03/notes-on-experience-dewey-and-pirsig.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/10/dewey-pirsig-rorty-or-how-i-convinced.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/language-som-and-pathos-of-distance.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/dynamic-quality-as-pre-intellectual.html

Also, I apologize, but you had a lot of circulocuitous words 
after that bit about being direct and stuff, so I didn't read 
any further.  Sorry.  I'm not much of a reader.

Thank you so much,

Matt

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