From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Mar 18 2005 - 18:43:08 GMT
Hey Ham,
I really wasn't going to say anything about the matters you brought up,
which shouldn't be surprising for people who know my general philospohical
strategy, principally because pragmatists don't see the point in doing
ontology after the destruction of epistemology.
The short of it, on the issue of existence and essence, is that pragmatists
side with the existentialists. We take the gist of what the existentialists
were up to to be the reversal of the primacy of essence to existence, that
existence mirrors already in place essences (like Plato's Realm of Forms
being mirrored by the Realm of Phenomena). Existence is primary to essence,
which means that we create essences, which, following the line of thought to
completion (which many of original existentialists didn't do), means that
talk about "essences" and "primacy" doesn't make a lot of sense anymore.
So, on the issue of Pirsig, you said, "Pirsig has rather arbitrarily tossed
out Quality as the MOQ essence." While obviously it isn't arbitrary given
any particular person's travels to a theory, you think its arbitrary given
all the other equally plausible possiblities, and in this rarified air of
generality (and without a "metaphysical ontology"), why not any of the
others? The problem, I think, is that to characterize Quality as an essence
is to miss the point of using Quality. I've come to characterize Quality as
an anti-essence, that part of the reason Pirsig uses it is to dispel the
notion that we should search for essences, and therefore, that we should
even need a "metaphysical ontology." Which is also why I think Pirsig
calling his project a "metaphysics" is sorely misleading.
That's the short of what I think.
Matt
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