[MD] Re Arlo

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:
'Shop Class as Soulcraft'?  I've read Kant, Nietzsche, Hume, Descartes and others when I was taking philosophy classes as an undergraduate student and many others since, am I going to need to read 'Shop Class as Soulcraft' too?

dmb says:
Crawford's book is well worth reading but I posted a quote and offered an explanation of it simply to make a point. I also think it's pretty neat that the Crawford quote refers to a point Pirsig made in his book. I'd be happy if you simply read the post and got the point. This is a simple matter of joining a conversation, a matter of grappling with some common ideas, ideas already in circulation. I'm sure others have made the same point too and in a very real sense it hardly matters WHO said it or WHERE it was said. Your job is simply to understand WHAT is being said. This is just as true if you're a waitress, a mechanic or a philosopher. Since you have apparently missed the point - again - I'll repeat it.

"Pirsig's mechanic is, in the original sense of the term, an idiot. Indee, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios mean 'private', and an idiotes mean a private person, as opposed to aperson in theior public role - for example, that of a motorcycle mechanic. Pirsig's mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entail, or shold, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot.This still comes across in the related English words 'idiomatic' and 'idiosyncratic', which similarly suggests self enclosure. For example, when a foreigner asks him for directions, the idiot will reply idiomatically, rather than refer to a shared coordinate system. H ealso lacks the attnetive oopeness that seeks thing out in the shared world, as when Pirsig's mechanic 'barely listened to the piston slap before saying, 'Oh yeah. Tappets'. At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist." (Matthew Crawford, "Shop Class as Soulcraft", page 98.)  dmb explained: Rather than refer to a shared coordinate system - for example the english language - the idiot will respond with idoisnycratic meanings and defintions of her own. She might, for example, define 'patterns" as "amorphous" or use "static" to mean "ever-changing". This is a cognitive failure as well as ethical failure. Plus it's really annoying and it's likely to draw unflattering comments from anyone who sees this idiocy.