[MD] knowledge

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

Steve said:
> I'm trying to sort out epistemology (Pirsig's idealism where quality
> gives rise to ideas which gives rise to matter) from ontology (radical
> empiricism, reality = quality cut into dyamic/static) and cosmology
> (evolution of value patterns) in the MOQ. Maybe you can help? DMB says
> that in the MOQ epistemology IS ontology and that radical empiricism
> is epistemology, but I can't see how it makes any sense to say so
> since epistemology and ontology are answers to different questions.

Matt:
I tend to think that Dave is somewhat right--which is to 
say, I think Pirsig somewhat blurs the two.  But I haven't 
a systematic overview of the question, just an ad hoc 
sense.  Paul Turner once started down this path of 
systematically separating the two, and like I say, I think 
it something of reconstructive surgery (not much, perhaps 
just cosmetic), but there would certainly be a payoff in 
at least getting clear on certain questions in Pirsig 
interpretation.  And I agree with you, blurring the two is 
philosophically unhealthy.

Steve said:
> I don't think we can make any more intellectual sense of
> "pre-intellectual" experience epistemology-wise than we can about
> "pre-social" or "pre-subatomic particals." I take the pre/post
> business to be about ontology.

Matt:
That's even worse, isn't it?  Is Dynamic Quality a place?  A 
state of being?  I think I like DQ qua epistemology (breaking, 
crashing, un-ing patterns) better than ontology--which 
follows out on the Whiteheadian "dim apprehension" 
side--because if DQ is a state of being, then wouldn't we 
disappear, or fade a little like Marty McFly, when we 
become Dynamic?

Pirsig's descriptions of DQ have all the traits of 
Wordsworthian Romanticism, of becoming One with the 
Universe.  This is good for poetry, but what, exactly, are 
we talking about here?

Steve said:
> In LC, Pirsig comes to find a lot of value in idealism which
> presupposes that ideas comes first which gives rise to matter. Of
> course, in the MOQ, Quality comes even before ideas, but I see that as
> a metaphysical rather than an epistemological primacy. In epistemology
> there are always "ideas that have been previously assumed" so knowing
> is never pre-intellectual.

Matt:
Yeah, it's Pirsig's approaches to idealism that leave me the 
most queasy about Pirsig having separated out epistemology 
from ontology cleanly.  Leaving the oddity of Greek idealism 
aside, modern idealism was after Descartes and Locke 
invented "inner space" always a befuddled mix of ontological 
and epistemological theses.  And after Kant, it was mainly 
an alternative metaphysics to materialism.  On Rorty's story, 
about the same time philosophers in Germany began seriously 
motivating idealism as a metaphysics, Romantic poets in 
England began toying with it in a more epistemological 
manner.  So, then we get Rorty's crowing of Romanticism to 
be the intellectual tradition of the future, particularly after 
idealism as a metaphysics crashes and burns (largely 
because the attempt to pierce behind the appearances to 
reality as a whole does), but this also leads people 
nowadays to call Rorty a "linguistic idealist," which is a kind 
of metaphysical groin-kick. (People interpret his purified 
epistemological theses as metaphysical, and so think Rorty 
thinks that the only thing that exists is language.)  
However, combine those historical pieces about confusion 
over modern idealism with Pirsig's distaste for materialism 
(which, on Rorty's view, has no taste at all metaphysically 
speaking), and I think we have even more reason to think 
that Pirsig goes back and forth as the occasion demands.

But then again, I don't have a lot of Pirsig in my mind 
these days, and don't plan on systematically pursuing 
these kinds of questions.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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