[MD] What's up?

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to David Harding:
...You say that Pirsig has greater explanatory power than James, but I'd propose that Pirsig + James has greater explanatory power than either one solo. Reading Dewey, James, Nietzsche, Northrop- and I'd suggest Vygotsky, Hofstadter, Campbell, Bahktin, Giddens, and other anti-S/O authors (as well as those working in other, non-text, media) all leads to a greater illumination than dismissing everyone that does not use Pirsig's chosen words. One goal of academia is to suggest and encourage this syllabus, say "Anti-SOM 101". This is why I find it frustrating when people say or imply that Pirsig's voice should be dissected from the ongoing historical dialogue, to the point where other authors (as if all other authors are "SOM" by default) are not only passively but actively dismissed.


dmb says:
I think that's exactly right. 

Pirsig's work will clarify James and vice versa. This is not a winner-take-all contest. The purpose of side-by-side comparisons is simply to get clear about what these guys are saying, to fully grasp their meaning. It's not that we must use James, pragmatism, or radical empiricism to illuminate the MOQ. There are other valid options, like Northrop's work or books on Buddhism, for example. But James is the easiest and most obvious simply because Pirsig explicitly identifies his MOQ with mainstream James and mainstream pragmatism and gives us a chapter full of clues to follow. It's the easiest and most obvious because Pirsig gets us started in that direction and connects the terms for us. He tells us how they both reject SOM and they both move to radical empiricism instead. Instead of dividing reality into subjects and objects, they distinguish static concepts from dynamic experience. 

Pirsig tells us what James’ radical empiricism means and what it means is a rejection of SOM:
"...he [James} meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this distinction.” (Pirsig 1991, 364-5)

James said, " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." (Pirsig 1991, 365)

Seriously. How can anyone read these quotes from Pirsig and still conclude that James's work is anything other than helpful? That conclusion, one held by Marsha, isn't even remotely plausible. I think it's so obviously wrong that it's not even worth disputing and yet here I am disputing it. It's like having to argue that a mechanic need wrenches and screwdrivers and such. It's such a no-brainer that I resent spending time on it and I'm kinda horrified that this is not already completely obvious to every single MOQer. If you don't understand this, dear reader, then you just don't get what Pirsig is saying. (I can see that Arlo totally gets it and that Marsha totally doesn't.)