Reading and Writing

So, Sam Norton said to me the other day, "When are you going to start blogging?" It actually hadn't really occurred to me. Besides, websites and all that stuff were for people who had more skill on a computer than copy and paste. I told him, "Blogging? That's far too hi-tech for me. I can barely run the internet to e-mail." And what would I do with a blog? But then I was tooling around at Ian Glendinning's blog and noticed a bunch of links to other blogs, including another moq.org compatriot Paul Turner. I've thought Paul had been developing very nice insights about Pirsig for some time, so I took a look. His very simple blog was basically a working tool of investigation. That piqued my interest. That's something I could use. And then a few days ago I noticed at the top of Paul's blog a little button calling to me: "Create your own blog." I thought I might as well explore how its done. Two minutes later I had a blog.

Like Paul's first entry, I thought I would just give my mission statement. The trouble is, of course, that I don't really have a mission statement. I'm not really pursuing any problems or lines of inquiry with philosophy. I don't really think about philosophical problems by themselves. I think about philosophers to be sure, but I don't think about problems in isolation of any particular writer. I think of philosophical problems as analogous to psychological problems. They just need to be massaged out by the proper therapy.

However, I am plagued by philosophical obsession. The title of my little blog here, "Matt Kundert's Pirsig Affliction," expresses succinctly what I think about because "Pirsig" for me is coextensive with "philosophy." In high school, when Mr. Waldeck first assigned me to read Pirsig's ZMM in his philosophy/religion class, I was already of a "philosophical disposition." Ya' know, the kids who like to think abstractly, if a little dumbly, about really large ideas. I had grown up Midwest Methodist, which essentially means I grew up to be a well-mannered atheist (when I told the Board Director that I probably shouldn't be the Youth Representative because I was an atheist, he said that it wasn't that biga' deal: "You were chosen because you're an upstanding gentleman and the other high schoolers talk to you and like you. We all go through phases when we are young. Maybe someday you'll come back to the fold."). In the High School Sunday School Class, we were provoked by our teacher (a Baptist-turn-Jewish philosophy PhD, something else that might only happen in Midwest Methodist churchs) to think about and defend our faith in God. Sunday School class was never easy on the brain for us. Naturally, upon entering the class I quickly decided that it would be easier to shed the mouthed I-believe-in-Gods and come out of the atheist closet. But I still went to Sunday School because I enjoyed the experience of being intellectually challenged.

And then came Pirsig. Well, actually I only read the first fifty pages of ZMM the first time. I wasn't much into high school, particularly reading things I was told to read, and the book really didn't catch me. Not that much did. It wasn't until I got to college a year later, and entered my Philosophy 101 class with Kay Picart, that the fire that was already lit began to be fanned. I remember walking into the University Bookstore the first week of classes to pick up my books and groaning to my friend, "Oah, I have to read ZMM again. Er, rather a first time." But following an interesting semester, we ended with ZMM, I read it, and was quite attracted to it. Soon after I read Lila for another class and that was it. The fire of philosophy, and Pirsig, was a bonfire.

Pirsig is my obsession and my muse. My interests in Pirsig and philosophy have changed, but the fact that I think about Pirsig hasn't. The main thing that has changed is that I've read Richard Rorty's entire corpus. But unlike Pirsig, rather than providing a fixating focus, Rorty has more provided me with tools. Most, if not all, of the philosophical ideas and moves I use are inheirited from him (and if not him, someone else). I'm not very original. I don't have any striking insights to unleash upon philosophy. I'm an amateur who enjoys reading philosophy. If there's anything I have, it might be a knack for putting writers together, seeing how they fit together, how bridges might be drawn between them. That's all I really know how to do, so that's all the meager wisdom I forsee offering here.

So that's really what all I guess will be offered on this little blog I now call home. I'll comment about what I read. One of the first things I might do, though, is go back through Rorty's writings, more or less as I read them, and connect the interesting spots with Pirsig. Things that made me go, "Oh, he's saying something that effects Pirsig." I get questioned a lot about this bridge, so I might as well provide more of a road map. It'll give me something to do.