[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Marsha:
What you've presented are two conflicting passages from Pirsig. ..How I deal with the conflict: I don't take his statement in 2005 seriously.  I think his blanket statement that the MoQ is "not intended to be within any philosophic tradition" is true but misleading: I think it only means that he didn't intend the MoQ to be pragmatism, but rather found pragmatism to be helpful in explicating it for a certain kind of audience.  I also think his claim that the "central claim" of the MoQ is "not part of any philosophic tradition" is terribly misleading at best.   ..So, my strategy is to largely explain away the passage, to ignore it in a sense. ...

dmb says:
I don't think there is a conflict. As the story is told in ZAMM, Pirsig's exploration of "Quality" began almost accidentally and, as the story is told is LILA, we know that he discovered the MOQ's resemblance to James and pragmatism only after the fact. I look at these two passages and I'm thinking they reflect Pirsig's point about NOT putting the philosophological cart before the philosophical cart. In other words, Pirsig came to his own conclusions without any intention of fitting himself into any particular school of thought or tradition. In ZAMM, he introduces the reader to Hume and Kant, Plato and Aristotle because he is responding to the history of philosophy. Despite the fact that Pirsig lands in very much the same place as James, he and his radical empiricism are never acknowledged or even mentioned. That how Pirsig's MOQ can be identified as a form of mainstream pragmatism even though it is not "intended" to be within any tradition. He didn't start out with the aim of landing there but that's where his quest led him. He developed his philosophy and then found the philosophological label. 

I can see how these two passages might seem contradictory to those who haven't read Pirsig's books, to those who don't know this story. But you and Marsha should clearly see that this is an imaginary problem. 




RMP( 1991): "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy, It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience." (Lila 366)


RMP (2005): 
"The Metaphysics of Quality is not intended to be within any philosophic tradition, although obviously it was not written in a vacuum. ... The Metaphysics of Quality's central idea that the world is nothing but value is not part of any philosophic tradition that I know of. I  have proposed it because it seems to me that when you look into it carefully it makes more sense than all the other things the world is supposed to be composed of. One particular strength lies in its applicability to quantum physics, where substance has been dismissed but nothing except arcane mathematical formulae has really replaced it."  (RMP, 'A Brief Summary of the MOQ')