[MD] Nagarjuna and the MOQ

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Ham:
...I've found not one single post that could be construed as supportive of Pirsig's MOQ in any conceivable way.  You want to play the 'renegade dissenter', that is your own business. Horse allows you here, and I have no problem with that. My comments were only that I can not fathom why anyone would join a forum dedicated to discussing an idea they reject. ...And you are here not to discuss Pirsig, but to promote "Essentialism", which is what you do in every post, in response to any topic, and at every turn.  ..You want to paint this as "dissent", knock yourself out 'cowboy'. But don't pretend for a minute you are here to talk about Pirsig, except to reject his ideas and soapbox 'Essentialism'.


dmb says:
Right. Ham acts like a gentleman and his sentences are grammatically correct. He is polite and intelligible - and yet there is something outrageously self-indulgent about the way he uses this place and he seems quite oblivious to the fact that he is "essentially" advocating the views of Pirsig's worst enemies. His presence here is strictly self-serving and he's made it abundantly clear that he just doesn't care what the MOQ is all about - and he doesn't give a damn what the MOQers think either. After all this time, he still seems to be guessing rather wildly about the MOQ's meaning. It's oddly insensitive, isn't it? 

If the MOQ is my favorite thing to chat about, why would I want to join an anti-MOQ chat group? Chances are good that I won't learn much, that I won't enjoy it, and the chat group isn't going to appreciate it much either. It's not a crime but it's wrongly weird and weirdly wrong. To cut against the grain and sing a different song is fine. Real dissent is interesting. Oblivious irrelevance, on the other hand, is not interesting. 

What if we had real dissent of this sort? What if we had an unapologetic Platonist here? What if an essentialist who really understood Pirsig's arguments were here to defend the real thing? Then he'd be pushing back against postmodern thought in general, not just Pirsig. He'd have to reject pragmatism and radical empiricism too. If somebody had good reasons for pushing back against all that, and really understood what they were push back against, that would be very, very interesting. That would be an ideal form of what real dissent looks like. Who wouldn't learn something from that kind of exchange? I imagine that would be great fun.