[MD] To Matt from A Short History of Decay

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Marsha,

Heh, very nice riposte to the questions-thing.  Obscure, 
but I think know what you are saying.  Or at least, since 
this version wasn't attached to the thing with Craig in 
"[MD] Decisions," I think I know why you read what I said 
and thought of Cioran.

I find it too intimidating to try and explicate my sense 
that I can be both a Hegelian semanticist (someone who 
thinks that meaning is generated by words and that there 
is real evolution) _and_ agree with nearly everything 
Cioran was writing, but it has to do with my sense that 
Cioran is holding two distinct visions of Hegel in his mind 
at the same time, and that if we disentangle them, we 
can have most of his entertaining polemic along with 
thinking that we have better beliefs than people in the 
past.

I would pair this line:

"Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism.  How 
could he have failed to see that consciousness changes 
only its form and modalities, but never progresses?"

with this line:

"That History has no meaning is what should delight our 
hearts."

Those two thoughts, that there is evolutionary progress 
_and_ no meaning in History, are both, I would suggest 
(though I can do little more than that), attributable to 
Hegel's influence.  What is meant by "Absolute Idealism" 
(which Pirsig refers to in both books, I think) is that 
there is a perfect whole to which we are evolving.  What 
is that whole?  Whatever it is that greets us at the End 
of History.  And that means that the _beginning_ of 
History holds the seeds of the End of History, and that 
nothing _really_ changes because History is just the 
unfolding of a preordained internal logic.  (Think of the Big 
Bang in physics.)

I think that's bad philosophy, and I think Pirsig thinks so, 
too.  However that may be, when we take the widest 
view--Universe-as-a-whole, or History-as-a-whole--it 
seems damn well unavoidable (as it did to, e.g., 
Parmenides, Spinoza, and Horkheimer and Adorno).  What 
I think that should suggest is that _if_ we are going to 
talk about retailing various beliefs as being of higher or 
lower value (which Pirsig seems to suggest is a person's 
default position), then we cannot very well take "the 
widest view": taking that view (in Pirsig's vocabulary) just 
yields you "Quality" (or in Joe Mauer's suggestion, 
"Dynamic Quality" over and over).  And _that_ means that 
delimiting what view you are taking is a prior commitment 
to the weighing of higher and lower values, which _then_ 
means that to take "the widest view," as the Buddha did 
and Pirsig sometimes does, has a specific, 
conversational-contextualized meaning-effect: which in 
its essence, I think, is "mu."  When hearing someone's 
"smaller view," and not liking the options it accords you 
as available for choice, you might pop out a Zen koan to 
suggest that the smaller view defined by the kinds of 
questions it implicitly is answering are the wrong kinds 
of questions.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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