[MD] Doug Renselle & Language

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Krimel,

Matt said:
I wasn't playing too close attention to Krimel and Magnus' discussion, 
but it appeared as if Krimel was lobbying on the side of common 
language and Magnus on the side technical community.  But when 
you put the point in terms of dynamics between these two things, 
I'm not sure either Krimel or Magnus would disagree, just perhaps 
in where the energy should now be applied.  Maybe.

Krimel said:
My point, restated goes something like this. The MoQ as I read it 
was never aimed at a technical audience of any kind. It was a mass 
marketed attempt to raise a few philosophical issues. Turning it into 
a formal system with technical jargon seems at odds with that.

Matt:
Oh, I think I see: you're making a point specific to Pirsig's choices as 
a philosopher, as opposed to general points about philosophical 
process.  Something like that?

I think you're right that Pirsig wrote for a mass audience, but I'm not 
sure you're right that Lila, or ZMM for that matter, didn't deploy a 
technical jargon, as lightly as it in the end might have been 
comparatively (to, say, Carnap or Heidegger).  I used to like to say 
to people, when they would complain about my jargonizing, that 
"metaphysics" is a jargon term, so they can't rightly think that Pirsig 
was jargon-free, in spite of the stuff about "plain speaking" in Lila.  
As I see it, Pirsig had a two-step job: 1) as you say, "raise a few 
philosophical issues," which meant working his layperson audience 
into a minimum level acquaintance with philosophical jargon and 
then 2) deploying his own to resolve some of the problems at that 
loose stage.  And because of his audience/goals as a writer, he 
could have--and we can--move past that loose stage and become 
more technical.  Doing _that_ however also means an 
audience/goal augmentation, which I think is the consideration 
sometimes not pondered enough about by Pirsig enthusiasts.  It 
should be the first thing every amateur philosopher tangles with: 
"who are you writing for?" and "what do you hope to achieve?"

Krimel said:
I have repeated complained about, for example, Pirsig's choice of the 
term Quality. He uses it to mark the undefined but in so doing he 
uses a term loaded with denotations and connotations which we are 
supposed to set aside. But we don't; we can't. So in effect the term 
has a special technical meaning within the MoQ but the net effect is 
mere ambiguity.

The term "dynamic" fairs much worse, especially in the hands of 
many of Pirsig's interpreters. The whole AWGI school seems to think 
the term means something wonderful and magical. It is always 
something "good" or "better", something to relish like serendipitous 
snatches of melody floating through an open window and arresting 
our steps. But in common usage "dynamic" means fluid and 
changing, something unpredictable and often disastrous. Here I 
think the common usage is far more accurate than the imagined 
technical meaning.

Matt:

Meh.  I can't get too excited about that as a problem.  I tend to think 
the advantages of "Quality" and "dynamic/static" as choices in terms 
for Pirsig's purposes far outweigh the disadvantages.  Those terms 
are like Hegel's Geist or Heidegger's Dasein: stuff you get to play 
with when deploying the vocabulary.

However, the point you bring up about "Dynamic Quality" being a 
conflation of two things that seemingly must be kept logically distinct, 
"new" and "better," is a serious philosophical point.  I haven't gotten 
to the bottom of Pirsig's Big Thought on how he starts ZMM the way 
he does (in specifically distinguishing between the two, in terms of 
the depth versus width of the cultural river) to the conceptual 
binding of those two ideas in the form of DQ.  Pirsig was consciously 
dancing, for sure, with those ideas, but I haven't a clear picture of 
what Pirsig saw clearly in his dance, nor the ultimate utility of that 
dance.  I just don't know.

Krimel said:
But the larger issue is the problem of developing a metaphysics of 
the undefined rooted in precise technical meanings. There is 
something creepily oxymoronic in that.

Matt:
Meh.  As you were noting about Mr. Buchanan (which is a point I 
used to make more often back in the day), there's something like a 
time-warp feel to the content of Pirsig's philosophy: it's more like 
what was going on in the 19th century.  The paradoxical starting 
point of those grand metaphysical systems, and the moody writings 
of others reacting to them (and sometimes the system-builders 
themselves), seems somewhat quaint now, but it did, I think, lead 
to some advances once we learned that the paradox at the 
beginning leads to an outgrowth that is an oblique rethinking of the 
starting point.  And since Pirsig was cognizant of the oxymoronic 
quality, it should just lead one to wonder why Pirsig, at least, 
didn't find it creepy.

On days I'm feeling generous, I tend to read Pirsig that way--you 
grant him his style, and see what nuggets of wisdom pop out.  
The other three days of the week, I take that part of Pirsig which 
seems to take very seriously the idea that the technical work he 
began developing must be developed for the world to heal, and 
frown.

Matt