[MD] Are There Bad Questions?: Pirsig

[John Carl]

Matt,

Maps?  Caught my eye cuz I came across something the other day...

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8588855/Resemblance-made-absolutely-exact-Borges.html


Article Excerpt
Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher (1855-1916), is best known
to readers of Borges in connection with a recursive map-within-a-map drawn
upon the soil of England. Indeed, Borges ranks "el mapa de Royce"
side-by-side with his beloved Zeno's paradox in "Otro poema de los dones"
(336), a Whitmanesque catalog of a few of his favorite things. Borges
appreciated Royce as a fellow-wanderer through the late nineteenth-century
thickets of both Anglo-American idealism and the new mathematics of
transfinite numbers. Royce was not so much an influence on Borges as a
fellow-traveler who had arrived in a somewhat similar place after passing
through Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Cantor.


Who was Royce? Royce is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the
philosophical sparring partner of William James, as the inventor of the
concept of the "community of interpretation," and as an advocate of the
metaphysical position of absolute idealism, a stance that may well have no
living advocates on the planet today. As Royce himself noted one century
ago: absolute idealism "is, I admit, a thesis which many of the most
distinguished among my colleagues, who are philosophers, nowadays view
sometimes with amusement, and sometimes with a notable impatience" (Royce,
Loyalty 315). James's companionate polemics against Royce were part of a
two-sided dialogue, but most of us know Royce only through James, which can
make him look vaguely ridiculous. Royce is much more than a gaseous
Hegelian. Though his prose style can wax pulpity in a King James register
and his buoyant tone can put off readers whose tastes have grown used to the
more nihilistic mood of twentieth-century thought, Royce anticipates
existentialist and poststructuralist themes, and his last great work, The
Problem of Christianity, is a rare amalgam of pragmatism and idealism that
leans in weirdly wonderful semiotic directions. We should follow Borges's
example and read Royce, who Charles Sanders Peirce called "our American
Plato" (CP, 8: 108).

Royce's importance for modernist literature is not confined to Borges but is
equally notable for T. S. Eliot, who wrote his doctoral dissertation under
Royce's supervision. Eliot's poetic method in The Waste Land owes much to
the idealist notion (deriving more, however, from Royce's colleague and
rival F. H. Bradley) of a transpersonal locale of consciousness from which
the span of human experience may be imperfectly viewed, embodied in that
poem's narrator Tiresias. Needless to add, Borges and Eliot both pushed
idealist themes in stranger directions than Royce ever did. Borges and Eliot
stand to Royce as Marx and Kierkegaard stand to Hegel: post-idealist
radicals who remove the triumphal affirmative cork of absolute
reconciliation and let the spirits flow freely where they will. Royce loved
to hike through metaphysical wastelands, frequently drawing on the
geographical imagery of the American west across which his English parents
had ill fact trekked to his native state of California. But however far he
hiked, he always arrived home with a bang and never a whimper. Compared to
Royce's stamina, Borges and Eliot sport a greater load of metaphysical
weariness.

One of the remarkable things about Borges is his lack of jealousy about
literary priority: once Borges read Royce, he was happy to attribute ideas
to Royce that he had long been thinking for himself. Idealism is a check on
the ego's pretension of being original: it teaches the irrepressible joy of
being a copy.


 I didn't know  Royce was T.S. Eliot's Thesis advisor and influence.



The stuff you find on the internet...

I liked the "our American Plato" comment too.

John