[MD] Fred & Bob and Freshman Composition

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb,

..But it seems you have missed some of the boarder issues  at stake. You have ignored areas of disagreement between the two and ...

dmb says:
To point out area's of agreement between them is not to claim that they have no disagreements. And limiting my remarks to just a few issues isn't the same as "ignoring" the broader issues, whatever they are. It just means I'm sticking to the point. 
If someone asked, could you say what the point was? 


Krimel said to dmb:
Nietzsche and Pirisg are hardly alone in looking back to the Greeks as sources of today's problematic. 


dmb says:

Yea, I know. So what? I brought in two thinkers to contrast to Plato and Socrates. How does that entail any claims of originality? Pirsig's dramatic language, "only a madman centuries later"? C'mon dude. It's a novel. Let's keep things in perspective. The point is simply that Bob and Fred are both defending what was lost with the advent of rationality. 

I fail to see the relevance of your paragraphs on Husserl, Galileo, and God. Feel free to attempt a clarification.



Krimel said to dmb:
Neither of them [Plato and Galileo] set out to start a crisis in the future. They sought to end the crisis in their present. Plato saw the sophists appealing to the reptile brain. At the dawn of rationality he sought standards to measurement belief.


dmb says:
Of course Plato didn't AIM to start a crisis and nobody said otherwise. In fact, the point you offer as a correction is something Pirsig had already said in ZAMM. Gain something, lose something. It's a minor theme. 

That is the third piece of criticism and that is your third straw man. In each case, you IMPLY that I made some claim and then dispute this fabrication. Notice how every criticism is curiously detached from anything I actually DID say? I'll answer for my actual claims, but not the phony ones you attribute to me. That's only fair.




Krimel said to dmb:
..., your Pirisig appears as much the accidental Nietzschian as the accidental pragmatist. At least he acknowledges some dim awareness of James, of Nietzsche he shows no sign of familiarity. All I can say is I am glad you are digging this hole for your Pirsig not mine.


dmb says:

This piece of criticism contains an assertion. The criticism is that I'm using a few select quotes to make Pirsig look Nietzschian. As you put it in the paragraphs I deleted,  the quotes are just a cobbled "collage,"  "a hodge-podge" that's"been slammed together." The implied claim as that Nietzsche and Pirsig are connected by nothing more than my "blind use of other people's words." 

But actually, the affinity between Nietzsche and American pragmatism is widely acknowledged among those who study such things. Richard Rorty made a joke of this sympatico: As the Europeans see it, pragmatism is just what the Americans could get out of Nietzsche. It's a joke about the condescending attitude of Europeans toward Americans but it also suggests that pragmatism is an American version of Nietzsche's views. There are huge differences, of course, but your suggestion that these affinities are my "accidental" invention is an ignorant thing to say. These connections are already well documented and the only problem here is that you are you don't know what the scholars and you don't see the similarity yourself either, apparently.

In this case, your criticism doesn't have a straw man problem. It has a make-claims-on-matters-I-don't-know-about problem

You're just trying to pick a fight. But you never finish them. It's just more evasion in the form of snark and growl. Like that ever worked.

Some honest, intelligent remarks would be far more impressive.