I think the aim in both of our cases was to kvetch about the seemingly purposive obscuritanism displayed in some of that work, which all too often can hide vapidity.

Naturally any guest is going to be in the role of questioned for much of the time, though I hope that this is less the case for our format than for a straight-up interview show. She had plenty of room to steer the conversation.

Or am I misunderstanding you completely?

“His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose.”

He beats you to the punch on the obvious critique of his own work from within the same text and leaves seemingly no further way out of it. What then was the purpose of the long narrative, if he always had this disasterous fault in mind ready to be deployed? It’s exactly as in soap operas when at the end of an episode, you are told it was all just a dream. Or if Wittgenstein had discovered early in life that by writing the Tractatus he not only was working to toss aside the ladder, but would spend all that time merely climbing it to nowhere. Maybe the obsession with quality is ironic in this sense, and so he attempts to communicate through fiction that we’re always going to be making value judgments, and formal arguments, based on the primary irrational presence of undefined qualities. This happens despite reason’s inability to resolve the value judgments we happen to make with their necessarily nonconceptual component, and the romantic’s unwillingness to even so much as confront this distinction, in doing so robbing their own value judgments of any potentially intentional quality. Given these inconsistencies, we can still at least begin to deliminate in action through regular practices the method by which we do eventually come to a deficient conceptual understanding of the absolute persistence of Quality. This moment reminds me of the way in which Heidegger abandons the totality of his original project as being unreasonable, and we’re left to try and formulate something coherent out of the untenable remnants of their combined theses.

…
I’ve spent way too much time with “followers” of Pirsig, virtually speaking. Sadly, very few have any background in philosophy. And for fairly obvious reasons, Pirisg attracts more than his fair share of cranks and nuts. Apparently, this is what happens when an “insane” man is cast as the hero of a book – a book that sells in the millions. I’m talking about people who genuinely feel persecuted unless you accept their incoherent drivel as philosophical gold.
…

So, this is how the quotation scheme works on this web site.

Are you describing Pirsig’s followers or are you describing the followers of Ayn Rand? Rand shamelessly cribbed the concepts of established philosophers, but she and her followers describe their creation as essentially Thus Spake Zarathustra moments of divine inspiration, which is odd since she was an atheist.

If I have an adequate understanding of the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ), then I must conclude that it is ultimately nonsensical. If Quality is something that cannot be defined but can be observed by everyone, then it becomes simultaneously everything and nothing.

Continuing to the motorcycle analogy. Everyone, trained or untrained, can tell when a two-stroke motorcycle engine is not performing correctly. Two-stroke gasoline engines, especially high performance engines, are designed to operate with a certain rhythm and timing that humans can automatically relate to the rhythms of their own body. No undefinable metaphysical concept like MOQ is needed to understand why this is so.

I also feel like virtue ethics has been done before, and sounds hysterical coming from the mouth of a self-portrayed badass.

so for better or worse ends my live commenting of the podcast

We’re already up a tree a bit in that we associate our being with our physicality. Thus, if we find out that we’re physically pre-disposed toward on thing or another, we tend to say that’s what we “are”. Additionally, we are also inclined to not hold people responsible for what they “are,” only what they can choose to be. The insanity defense rests on this notion — if you were insane at the time of your crime, your culpability for its consequences is different.

A similar issue is at play with children, particularly recently in the question of trying teenagers as adults for serious crimes. Some argue that the very seriousness of the crime (generally murder) warrants increasing the severity of the potential punishment — if you play like and adult, you get treated like an adult. Others argue that the minds of teenagers are simply different that the minds of full-grown adults (25+), that there are demonstrable chemical differences, that ought to make them less culpable for very bad decisions/actions.

In either case, we’re asking the question as a community what we should do about an individual based upon how we understand what an individual is.

Anyways, I’m a big fan and I’m looking forward to the podcasts to come.

From the rainy city of Vancouver.