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It's a problem.
Jan. 13th, 2006 09:54 pm
High temp today, here: 10. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpoint: 7.
High temp today in TO: 10. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpont: 5.
Low today on the balcony: 3.8. High: 8.2. Current: 8.
Spent a large part of this afternoon reading about the odd matter of the Pirsig Conference Hoax, having followed the links from an e-mail interview of Robert Pirsig by Julian Baggini, which was one of today's offerings from politicaltheory.info. I was curious as to what could possibly have occasioned the interview; apparently, it was the fairly recent awarding of the first ever philosophy Ph.D. on the Metaphysics of Quality (TM). (I wonder how many dissertations there have been on Ayn Rand. I bet there have been a few. There is, anyway, a small Ayn Rand cottage industry, though not much of it seems to take place on the premises of philosophy departments.) To celebrate the fact of the first Pirsig doctorate, the first Pirsig doctor threw together a Pirsig miniconference, inviting members of an online Pirsig discussion forum--which happened to include presumably the world's only Pirsig troll, who had been thrown off the Pirsig forum a year or several previously, but had come back under another name, for kicks, as a Pirsig true believer. The troll submitted a Pirsig pardoy to the conference; the parody was accepted, but the troll declined to go and read it, so someone else read it, to some acclaim from, among others, Pirsig himself.
It's been a long time since I read Pirsig myself, but I have to say, there doesn't seem much parodic about the parody. It reads like a pretty good ape of Pirsig. But, you know, if you think Pirsig is ridiculous, well, then, it's ridiculous. (I have to wonder, though, why on earth you'd devote so much time and effort to being a Pirsig troll. There's a resident troll on The Heidegger List, and I always wonder that about him, too. It's something to be, I guess.)
In the interview with Baggini, Pirsig doesn't do much to make himself not sound ridiculous. But it's a problem (oh dear--"it's a problem" is something I picked up from Zen and the Art, and my brain just spat it out there), what to do, if you're an academic philosopher like Baggini (who is the editor of The Philosopher's Magazine, which is something akin to philosophy's Psychology Today), with someone like Pirsig, who isn't interested in engaging with the whole tradition of philosophy (but--paradoxically, as Baggini points out--desperately wants the respect of academic philosophers, and resents that he doesn't have it), but might have something to say anyway. You hope that it might be possible to have something to say without having gone through the whole academic meat grinder.... (Kind of like you hope that an artist, today, might be doing something important without having gone to art school and all that. Pirsig reminds me of no one so much as Robert Bateman.)
Also read an interesting article, linked off of aldaily.com, in the Boston Review, purporting to explain the frequent leftward drift of US Supreme Court judges. The one striking thing it neglects to do is ask any of them--it's all armchair speculation. But the most intriguing bit of that had to do with the fact that the US Supreme Court, unlike European courts (and unlike the Canadian Supreme Court) is constitutionally constrained never to offer an opinion except where an actual case is involved. The article's authors suggest that this forces doctrinaire conservatives to confront the practical implications of their doctrines, and that this has a moderating effect. Well, could be, could be.
High temp today in TO: 10. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpont: 5.
Low today on the balcony: 3.8. High: 8.2. Current: 8.
Spent a large part of this afternoon reading about the odd matter of the Pirsig Conference Hoax, having followed the links from an e-mail interview of Robert Pirsig by Julian Baggini, which was one of today's offerings from politicaltheory.info. I was curious as to what could possibly have occasioned the interview; apparently, it was the fairly recent awarding of the first ever philosophy Ph.D. on the Metaphysics of Quality (TM). (I wonder how many dissertations there have been on Ayn Rand. I bet there have been a few. There is, anyway, a small Ayn Rand cottage industry, though not much of it seems to take place on the premises of philosophy departments.) To celebrate the fact of the first Pirsig doctorate, the first Pirsig doctor threw together a Pirsig miniconference, inviting members of an online Pirsig discussion forum--which happened to include presumably the world's only Pirsig troll, who had been thrown off the Pirsig forum a year or several previously, but had come back under another name, for kicks, as a Pirsig true believer. The troll submitted a Pirsig pardoy to the conference; the parody was accepted, but the troll declined to go and read it, so someone else read it, to some acclaim from, among others, Pirsig himself.
It's been a long time since I read Pirsig myself, but I have to say, there doesn't seem much parodic about the parody. It reads like a pretty good ape of Pirsig. But, you know, if you think Pirsig is ridiculous, well, then, it's ridiculous. (I have to wonder, though, why on earth you'd devote so much time and effort to being a Pirsig troll. There's a resident troll on The Heidegger List, and I always wonder that about him, too. It's something to be, I guess.)
In the interview with Baggini, Pirsig doesn't do much to make himself not sound ridiculous. But it's a problem (oh dear--"it's a problem" is something I picked up from Zen and the Art, and my brain just spat it out there), what to do, if you're an academic philosopher like Baggini (who is the editor of The Philosopher's Magazine, which is something akin to philosophy's Psychology Today), with someone like Pirsig, who isn't interested in engaging with the whole tradition of philosophy (but--paradoxically, as Baggini points out--desperately wants the respect of academic philosophers, and resents that he doesn't have it), but might have something to say anyway. You hope that it might be possible to have something to say without having gone through the whole academic meat grinder.... (Kind of like you hope that an artist, today, might be doing something important without having gone to art school and all that. Pirsig reminds me of no one so much as Robert Bateman.)
Also read an interesting article, linked off of aldaily.com, in the Boston Review, purporting to explain the frequent leftward drift of US Supreme Court judges. The one striking thing it neglects to do is ask any of them--it's all armchair speculation. But the most intriguing bit of that had to do with the fact that the US Supreme Court, unlike European courts (and unlike the Canadian Supreme Court) is constitutionally constrained never to offer an opinion except where an actual case is involved. The article's authors suggest that this forces doctrinaire conservatives to confront the practical implications of their doctrines, and that this has a moderating effect. Well, could be, could be.
