From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Oct 23 2004 - 17:05:32 BST
Sam asked two questions a couple weeks ago to stimulate discussion: 1) what
is the Greeks' relation to SOM? and 2) is Pirsig consistently non-SOM in his
thinking? If you've followed my posts in the past two years, clearly my
answer is no to the second question. The assumption that has guided my
inquiries has been that Pirsig's SOM is sufficiently like the
appearance/reality distinction to warrant a charge of inconsistency (or as I
like to put it, to force us to make a choice between two irreconcilable
Pirsigs). To properly answer the second question, though, we need a close
textual analysis of Pirsig's varied uses of SOM. And then to relate it to
the focus of the month, we need to travel through the first question.
Though I've made more than a few suggestions about how I see SOM hanging
together, what I haven't done is package it all together. I won't be doing
that here (if you want a quick gloss on how I see Pirsig's relation to
philosophy, see my recently posted review of Thomas Op de Coul's essay,
"Herds of Platypi?"). To fully succeed in the aforementioned task we need
1) a close textual analysis of SOM, 2) a narrative of philosophy to situate
SOM, and 3) an evaluation of how Pirsig fits into this narrative.
To fulfill 2 and 3, I would suggest looking at the way Pirsig lines up Truth
and dialectic on one side and the Good and rhetoric on the other. Pirsig's
analysis of Plato, I think, is dead on. He says that Plato ostensibly sets
the Good as the highest Form, as the highest principle in his system. But
if you look closer, the highest principle is subservient to the dialectic
because the dialectic is how the Good is discovered. Dialectic, or Method,
attains priority over the Good. I would suggest that this analysis gives us
the first suggestion that epistemology must have priority over metaphysics,
though this became apparent (or at least pressing) to philosophers only
after Descartes. I think the historical reasons for this, and its run up to
contemporary times, are excellently given by Stephen Toulmin in his
Cosmopolis. In the absence of his book, I would give this passage from the
end that should have no small amount of resonance with Pirsigians
"Throughout history, the development of philosophy has displayed a sequence
of pendulum swings between two rival agendas. On one agenda, the task of
philosophy is to analyze all subjects in _wholly general_ terms; on the
other, it is to give _as general an account_ as the nature of the field
allows. Theoretically minded Platonists speculate freely, framing broad
generalizations about human knowledge; practical-minded Aristotelians
hesitate to claim universality in advance of actual experience. So read,
the move from 16th-century humanism to 17th-century exact science was a
swing from the practical, Aristotelian agenda, to a Platonist agenda, aimed
at theorectical answers. The dream of 17th-century philosophy and science
was Plato's demand for _episteme_, or _theoretical grasp_: the facts of
20th-century science and philosophy rest on Aristotle's _phronesis_, or
_practical wisdom_. When Wittgenstein and Rorty argue that philosophy today
is at "the end of the road", they are overdramatizing the situation. The
present state of the subject marks the return from a theory-centered
conception, dominated by a concern for _stability_ and _rigor_, to a renewed
acceptance of practice, which requires us to _adapt_ action to the special
demands of particular occasions."
At this point, I can give a small suggestion about Sam's second question: is
Pirsig consistently non-SOM? I would simply point out that in ZMM, he
attempted to attain a balance between Phaedrus (who was "a Platonist by
temperament") and the narrator (who was "pretty much Aristotelian in this
sense"), but Part IV of the book centers almost entirely on Phaedrus'
Platonic obessions. The end of the book sees the Platonic Phaedrus
triumphing psychically over the narrator and in Lila, of course, there is no
narrator, only Phaedrus. I think Pirsig's mistake was to gradually
overemphasize his theoretical obsessions in place of his practical
aspirations and this plays out thematically in his books and particularly in
his creation of a systematic, wholly general "Metaphysics of Quality".
Matt
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