[MD] The Futile Quest for Academic Approval

[david buchanan]

John said to Matt:
Oh Pbbllllpt-t-t-t. to your "professional-looking argument".  You're just arguing for YOUR brand of sophistry, YOUR preference of rhetorical combat. Meanwhile demonstrating absolutely NONE of what you state you value!  Your reply is full of assumption, opinion and prejudice with no real philosophically sound argumentation to any of the myriad offerings I've posted.  And yet you hold up the flag of "professional-looking arguments".



dmb says:

I think that's about right. But what bother's me most is not Matt's style so much as the substance of it. In a small but important fragment of the case Matt says, "antiprofessionalist rhetoric just sounds like whining". There is the overwhelmingly dismissive quality in calling it whining and in calling it rhetoric but when you put the two together the thing just drips with contempt. Then there is the matter of characterizing Pirsig's complaints about philosophology as "antiprofessionalism". That's just not Pirsig's point at all and such a characterization only puts him on the side of all the knuckle dragging know-nothings. That phrase and the case against "antiprofessionalism" is not much more than baseless slander. 

When Emerson said, in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, that "man should not be subdued by his instruments" he was talking to professionals and he was calling on them to not be bound by the past, to be creative and original in their thinking. He was saying don't get hemmed in by books and ideas from the past. Use them as tools for your own work but don't be controlled by them. I think it's pretty easy to see that he was saying we ought not be too static, that we ought to be more dynamic. This is what's at the heart of Pirsig's complaints. Art is to art history as philosophy is to philosophology. The first in each pair is about originality and creativity while the second is... well,..  secondary.

This is not to say that we ought to be OPPOSED to art history or philosophology. It's a pretty safe bet that Pirsig would like the MOQ to find a latch in the professional academic world and was quite happy when Ant became a Doctor or when Granger published his book. The point of his complaints is simply that we ought not confuse art and art history anymore than we should confuse philosophy from philosophology. Like dynamic and static quality generally, you can't have just one or the other. Without dynamic quality nothing can grow or evolve and without static quality nothing can last and all is chaos. 

It's not antiprofesssionalism. It's just anti boring and stale ism, which Matt seems to take as a personal insult. I don't get that. It's only a matter of being consistent with the static/dynamic treatment that the MOQ gives to everything from A to Z.




 		 	   		  
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