[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
I'm curious: do you think we disagree on anything important in these last few cycles about amateur philosophy?  It isn't clear to me that we do.

dmb says:
Yea, a little bit and, as is so often the case, it pivots around DQ. I'll boil it down to the following...


Matt said:
...This is where the phrasing of standards gets weird, because it's theoretically paramount for me to say that "what you want to say" doesn't _have_ standards implied, but _are_ implied standards.  Weird, but also to my mind exactly parallel to the Pirsigian aphorism "we don't _have_ static patterns, we _are_ static patterns."  And to my mind, your second formulation is closer to what I'd prefer to say about amateur philosophy: "you build up a tailor-made set of standards as you go, alongside the actual empirical process."  The only minor difference is that I'd say that "building a tailor-made set of standards" _is_ "the actual empirical process."

dmb says:

I don't see how that aphorism is relevant here. Maybe that's a separate issue for another post but I think Pirsig is talking about something else entirely, namely the compound, complex, non-Cartesian nature of the self. In any case, let me just set that part of your comments aside.

Think about the relationship between "standards" and "the actual empirical process" in terms of the relationship between static quality and Dynamic Quality. Roughly, you could construe this as the relationship between the mechanics and the artistry, between theory and practice, between the conceptual and aesthetic. Pirsig's big break-through happened when he figured out that those freshmen back in Bozeman were having trouble precisely because the standard teaching methods in the textbook he was using privileged the theoretic over the aesthetic. It was only after he convinced them that Quality was their real goal that "the standard rhetoric texts came into their own," he says.

"The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques - Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it."  ...
"Now, in answer to the eternal student question, How do I DO this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, 'It doesn't make a bit of difference HOW you do it! Just so long as it's good.' ...The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write." (ZAMM 208)

The idea here is that we don't want to throw out the standard texts but their role is always secondary and subservient. The artful mechanic needs his tools but they serve his art, not the other way around. Excellence is rich, concrete and particular whereas standards are thin, abstract outlines. This emphasis on the empirical as primary is part of what it means to be radically empirical and so any abstractions or codifications are measured in terms of how well they serve and work when you put them to work in the stream of experience. See what I mean?


Matt said:
p.s.  Who's Ray Davies?


dmb says:

Front man for the Kinks. You know their big hit was "Lola", a song about a transvestite who talked like a woman but walked like a man. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, it was just a bad pun on "hammering out the kinks".