From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 05 2004 - 20:59:01 BST
I think SOM can pretty easily and uncontroversially be identified with
philosophy done in the Cartesian tradition. Iconoclastic philosophers have
always been good at coming up with idiosyncratic names for the problems they
see, and in this case Pirsig's doesn't even stray very far from traditional
appellations. The separation between subject and object has been explicit
at least since Kant, and Kant is typically seen as working out the
consequences of the problematic handed down to us from Descartes.
There's one scholastic problem, of course, with simply identifying SOM with
Cartesianism and that's Pirsig's ZMM tracing of the problem to the Greeks.
If you look into the historical studies on the subject, they'll usually tell
you that there were some significant changes between the two time periods,
typically something like the ascendancy of epistemology in Descartes. I
think what can be said, though, is that there are a whole host of problems
born of errant distinctions and that many of these distinctions orbit each
other. If you start with any one of them in a particular orbit, you'll more
than likely get weighed down with the others. It is certainly apparent to
me that Pirsig shunts a whole host of distinctions under SOM's canopy and
his narrative extending back to the Greeks simply helps show how Descartes
and his problematic were still working in Greek shadows.
Now, one thing I wish Pirsig would have done was distinguish more sharply
between the various problems that were included in his SOM. I think his
neglect to do so leads him to conflate materialism (an ontological thesis)
with epistemology in a less than helpful way. I think this conflation is
what leads him to say, fallaciously, that _any_ philosopher worth his salt
forwarded seriously the thesis that values are not real. The materialism
comes out when Pirsig identifies objects with the material realm and
subjects with the apparitions in our minds. It is only combining this
thesis, that the world is nothing but corpuscles bouncing in a void, with
the episteomological distinction between objectivity and subjectivity that
we get the absurd claim that rocks are real, but our desire for ice cream is
not. I don't think any of the great Western philosophers have ever
tendered such a suggestion. The two are obviously connected in important
ways, but not in the way that Pirsig claims. Pirsig aims this charge at the
logical positivists and I think this is why Galen Strawson, who should
otherwise have at least picked up from his dad, P.F. Strawson, a thing or
two about Kantian philosophy and the persuasiveness of a paradigm of
thought, says that SOM is a strawman. The positivists claimed that values
were cognitively meaningless, which leads to emotivism, not unreal and there
is big difference.
One thing that can be done in the way of breaking out of our sometimes
self-enforced ghetto (which I think refers to Pirsig's remarks about how the
academic community has ignored him, and he's returned the favour) is to
simultaneously engage the history of philosophy and contemporary debates
within philosophy. Because Pirsig doesn't engage in dialogue with any
contemporaries, its difficult to simply set Pirsig into the fray. There
needs to be some work done to have Pirsig say things in the idioms currently
dominating fields like the philosophy of science, mind, language, moral
philosophy, political philosophy, etc. I think the best way to engineer
this conversation is to trace back the roots of Pirsig's problems and of the
contemporaries because Pirsig _does_ explicitly engage the history of
philosophy in some small fashion, and he's certainly not making up the other
problems he doesn't contextualize in history. This way we can plausibly say
that Pirsig has things to say about, e.g., the modernity/postmodernity
debate when it isn't readily apparent, because of idiom differences, that he
does.
Matt
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