[MD] Philosophy as Biography

[Matt Kundert]

Ron said:
Because the story is the idea.

Matt:
That's a pretty good pithy summary.  It encapsulates Pirsig's mythos 
over logos argument.  The mythos/story is the logos/idea.

Technically, though, it should be--and this points us toward what 
Pirsig meant by a "new rationality"--mythos over eidos.  Mythos, 
where we get "myth," can just mean "story" or "narrative" in the 
Greek.  "Eidos" is Greek for "Form," and Plato oscillates in the 
Republic between the Greek "eidos" and "idea" to articulate his 
Theory of Forms, but both are from the same word-family, and 
rooted in the sense of sight.

Mythos, on the other hand, originally meant "a speech," just as 
logos does.  Logos is an exceptionally flexible word in the ancient 
Greek, meaning speech, story, discourse, word, argument, reason.  
It can also mean, as many translators of Plato's epistemological 
tract the Theaetetus have it, "an account."

If we see Pirsig as articulating a mythos-over-eidos argument, we 
can see him as trying to offer a new logos for logos--a new 
account for accounting.  A good account, on his new model, would 
include both a story and abstract reasoning.

Matt