[MD] Philosophy as Biography

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Phaedrus to Lila:
"I've just had feelings that maybe the ultimate truth about the world 
isn't history or sociology but biography."

Steve said:
A statement that I always found curious is RMP's one to Bagini about 
the originality of the MOQ. He said that his philosophy is unique 
because it starts with a practical question about quality in rhetoric or 
something like that. When I read that I remember thinking, Why is 
THAT important??? Why should we care about the story behind the 
ideas rather than just the ideas?

Matt:
I think it's important to try and understand precisely why Pirsig's 
statement above has rhetorical force in the context Steve is 
wondering about.  The first place to start is to say that while Ian is 
saying something that seems obvious, we must also recognize that it 
hasn't always been taken as so obvious (and by certain, important 
individuals to be named later).  Implicit in Pirsig's assertion is that 
there is a resistance to this idea.  Ian said, "The reason for (say) my 
own biographical timeline work was precisely because the personal 
rhetorical story behind the philosophical output IS important. Where 
was the man (or woman) coming from ?"  The question Steve is 
allowing is: "okay, but _why_ is it important to see where the 
philosopher was coming from?"

Philosophy is the search for wisdom.  If this wisdom is going to be for 
more than just one person, then it must be able to take some sort of 
abstract form.  What is abstraction exactly?  The simplest definition 
we can offer that fits with the philosophic movement is that 
abstraction is the cutting away of features that ground a 
thought-pattern in its original context of production (the context that 
produced the thought).  Why would we do this?  For philosophic 
reasons: to be able to _transport_ the wisdom of one specific 
situation to other situations by a process of analogy (situation-X is 
_like_ situation-Y, so why not try Wisdom-A in Y since it worked for 
me in X).  If intellectual patterns are the abstract manipulation of 
symbols, then philosophy is in some sense the manipulation of 
abstract wisdoms apart from the original contexts.

So: why do we need to know about the original contexts?  That's the 
story of ZMM.  Plato started Western philosophy on its path by 
instantiating in its metaphysical description of reality the separation 
of Ideas from the Context-of-Their-Production (one way of 
understanding the Forms vs. Appearances contrast).  Plato, still 
writing in dialogues and logging deep concerns about writing vs. oral 
conversation (in the Phaedrus, of all places), yet kept an implicit 
sense of the dynamic of contextual production of ideas.  This was 
further erased by Descartes, whose method of doubt--while 
responding to the specific intellectual context of his time (a 
post-Reformation, anti-scholastic scientific crisis)--convinced 
philosophers working in his wake that philosophy is 
_paradigmatically_ done in isolation from the whirl of human 
realities, something that _can_ be done by anyone, and therefore the 
most abstract and therefore the most philosophical: one philosopher 
meditating by oneself, considering the possibility that every 
experience is fake.  

This, indeed, can be done by anyone.  Hence its seductive power.  
The question for philosophers like Pirsig is: _should_ this be the way 
philosophy is approached?

If we understand wisdom to not be first and foremost a thing that 
should be perfected in isolation from the whirl of human realities, but 
rather as something that must be _used_ in that whirl 
_to even call it wisdom_, then you'll begin to have a new respect for 
the consideration of original contexts of production.

I think the full answer is that biography can't be everything (nor do I 
think Pirsig thought that), but that good philosophy will be a weaving 
back and forth between contexts of intellectual production and 
abstraction away from those contexts.  If a bit of wisdom was 
produced in a certain kind of situation, it behooves us to remind 
ourselves what that situation was in order to figure out whether 
_our situation_ is analogous in the requisite way.  But 
_finding the analogy_ will require imaginative effort on our part in 
abstracting away features of both contexts to toy with them in 
abstract space.  So we should care about the story behind the ideas, 
but the ideas are not themselves reducible to the story.

I have another really old piece I kind of wrote about this:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/philosophy-and-biography.html

I'm not sure how much I agree with the end on systematic philosophy 
any more, but it still has a certain taste that I find useful.

Matt