Anders Nielsen (joshu@diku.dk)
Wed, 5 Nov 1997 16:41:42 +0100
[....]
> What do other philosophers think of his work?
>
> The reaction that he foresaw for his anthropological venture has
> more or less been fulfilled by LILA too. Academical philosphers
> seemingly don't want to look into his Quality idea. Usually new ideas
> or paradigms are supposed to start within the academical circles and
> spread into society, not the other way round. The few
> reviews published have been overwhelmingly negative - outright
> vicious - and far too violent for a "mere" philosophical idea.
> Perhaps the unheard of magnitude of what Pirsig is saying and the
> frustration over not finding the weak point of his MOQ is the
> reason.
This explanation doesn't ring quite true to me.
First and foremost I think the reason that big P's ideas hasn't caught on
with academic philosophers is that he published his ideas in two novels
instead of papers. It's perhaps not easy to put one's finger on what
difference that makes, but a paper is usually "tighter" argument-wise in a
certain sense and Lila is just too much of a novel. You have to be ready to
accept anything from the start, and then you have to sit down and think
rather hard to find out what P means precisely. Also the whole tone of Lila
is quite anti-academia, so anyone with a nice position at some university,
who starts reading Lila will feel offended within the first 50 pages (as
will pretty much any European until you realise that Pirsigs view (as
expressed in Lila) of Europeans is quite limited and that whole discussion
should be taken with a grain of salt). The second thing is that noone has
responded to the criticism Lila was met with, there is noone to discuss the
finer points with (until TLS came along, but we're still not ready for
public appearance). Big P himself didn't (for reasons which are not
entirely clear to me) respond to anything, and subsequently went into
hiding (alright Wittgenstein did the same when he had published the
Tractatus, but he came back and there were no criticism to speak of at the
time).
Academic philosopher's isn't just one big coherent mass that collectively
decided that P wasn't one of them and that his ideas should therefore be
dropped. This is an overly simplistic and romanticized view.
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