[MD] [Bulk] Re: empathy

[david buchanan]

Mary said to Arlo:
I'm exposing the idea that Pirsig's MoQ offers a metaphysics with much greater explanatory power than James'.  James' ideas are provincial. If you were not human, you would find his theories quaint and limited. The MoQ, on the other hand, proposes a static evolutionary system that would be true no matter what the starting point of a universe.

dmb says:
That's not true, actually. James says that we can think of the entire universe as noetic all the way down, but not in a grand unified way. It's a Pluralistic universe in which "everything gets known by something". Also, James and Pirsig are both radically humanist but neither is a subjectivist or a solipsist.

Mary continued:
Let's say time and mass were not the initial SPOVs in some alternate universe.  I am suggesting that the SQ evolutionary logic Pirsig has employed would hold equally well under any conditions while James' would not have relevance.

dmb says:
Actually, that's not true either. James talks about how some genius in the distant past invented the idea of objects and he says that it could have turned out differently.
I strongly suspect that you don't know much about James and you've certainly offered no reason or basis for making these claims. And I happen to know that they're simply wrong.
Besides, since Pirsig it was himself who decided to write and published those chapters in Lila comparing James with the MOQ, dismissing James is to disrespect and disregard the views of the thinker you are ostensibly defending.