[MD] Bo's right! For all the wrong reasons? (Part2)

[Krimel]

[Dave]
1. Pirsig is a highly skilled writer and rhetorician.
2. The primarily value of his work is that it makes field of philosophy
accessible to a much broader audience than a majority of "real" academic
philosophers.
3. While his writing skills attracts a broader audience, that audience, you
and I, is in general less skilled in philosophy than either Pirsig or people
who pursue the field as a life's work.
4. Unfortunately he is a much less skilled scholar, philosopher, and
metaphysician than he is a writer. Because of this the metaphysics he
develops creates as many, or more problems than the system he is trying to
replace. More dangerously he attempts to create a naturalistic moral
metaphysics, one in which all of reality is a moral order based on a
hierarchical system domination and dependence, that when applied by
neophytes, such as a majority of the people here including me, leads to
conclusions I find morally objectionable or just plain wrong.

[Krimel]
Excellent set of posts here, Dave. I have been beating away at most of this
for a long time but you have summarized it all very nicely. I also agree
strongly with what you said about the relationship of ZMM to Lila. ZMM is
almost universally regarded as the better book. I see it in almost every
bookstore I wander into and while Lila is there sometimes it is nowhere near
as ubiquitous. I would almost recommend the opposite of what Paul Turner
suggested. He claimed that since Lila was later than ZMM, whenever there was
a conflict Lila should be regarded as taking precedence. I think Lila is
full of errors from the making of up of James quotes but the failure to
understand the basics of evolution.

Here is an example of that which I haven't heard mentioned before. Take
Pirsig the social critic. He spends a lot of Lila talking about Victorians
and hippie and the radical social transformations of the '60s with very
little mention of civil rights and feminism. These were far more profound
and radical changes in the American way of doing things than the peace and
love anti-war movement of the hippies. It is hard to take serious any
analysis of trends in American culture of the 1960's that ignores civil
rights and feminism especially in a treatise on morality.

I particularly agree that to the extent that Pirsig is trying to lay an
intellectual foundation for morality, he fails utterly. He doesn't even
address Mill and doesn't talk at all about Kant's ideas about morality other
than to call them ugly. He doesn't mention at all any contemporary thinkers
in morality. How are we to take this seriously?