[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[david buchanan]

Ooops.

dmb corrects what he just said:


No, Pirsig was NOT surprised and pleased by Bradley's Absolute Idealism. It's precisely because Bradley - for a moment - was talking like a philosophical mystic and an advocate of the perennial philosophy and not like an Absolutist.

And you're glossing over the fact that James saw both Royce as Bradley as philosophers with a fundamentally different temperament than his own. Schiller, James's English bodyguard, attacked Bradley so mercilessly that James had to tell him to cool down. Repeatedly.

Schiller wrote hilarious and scathing parodies of his scholarly papers and mockingly attributed them to "F.H. Badly", for example. In any case, it's certainly NOT evil or slanderous to say James was "furiously against" his life long friend and sparring partner Royce. It's just a relatively strong way to characterize the fundamental differences between rationalists and empiricist, between romantic and classic styles of thought. 

Pirsig and James want to fuse these two modes and so they are NOT simply picking one side over the other. With the MOQ you get empiricism AND mysticism at the same time but this is accomplished by being radically empirical. The mysticism is IN the empiricism, not despite it or even along side it. They're fused.

But I think you are not fusing them. You're just confusing them. Big difference.