Discussion With Dave Buchanan

Dave Buchanan (or "DMB" as he often goes by in the moq.org discussion group) and I have had several long-standing disagreements for over seven years now. I think it might be fair to say that we've had the longest running dialogue between two self-perceived Pirsigians, hands down. If one had all the time in the world, you could follow the history of our conversation in the moq.org archives (which oddly enough begins right at the cut between the old '98 to Oct. '02 archive and the Nov. '02 to '05 archive--right in November 2002 we have our first spat, though the real fight doesn't begin until December). I look back and cringe at how silly and arrogant I was then--oh, youth: some things never change.

The arguments have continued off and on all these years, on and off the list. Lately we've each become more reserved, taking on an aloofness more appropriate to the professional stances each of us wishes to take. Well--at least I have, though even through the professed swagger that Dave still takes pleasure in taking (below he refers to his "rudeness," which is more a nostalgic allusion to our history together than what usually goes on nowadays), I can tell he's changed, his style becoming more, well, professional--as much as he continues to articulate an overt aversion to "professional philosophy" that Pirsig makes central to his philosophy (most succinctly in his epithet "philosophology"), Dave is becoming a professional philosopher (which would be hard to help a little bit of in a graduate program), whereas I remain, and increasingly become more overtly in style, an amateur.

These are interesting changes for us, though probably only to us (and maybe only to me). A few years ago we stopped spending so much time on the moq.org discussion lists, and our engagements became less and less, though I think that's partly because we've found less and less new to talk about. Our positions have become fairly entrenched, and I think if one were to read our pieces towards each other over the last few years, one would find each of us at a loss for new words more than anything else. We fluctuate reasonably with the tide of new information, as our studies continue, but neither one of us has moved much on what has underlied each of our understandings of philosophy since the very beginning, December 2002: Dave's dislike and distrust of Richard Rorty and my tepid interest in mysticism-proper.

We've remained in contact off and on these last few years, sometimes at moq.org, sometimes via personal correspondence, sometimes here, on my blog. A few years ago, after a note from Dave about his experience with Prof. Hildebrand, I was moved to write "Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan," a kind of double apology--in the contemporary sense of an "I'm sorry" to Dave, and others, for giving Rorty such a bad reputation when I was getting the hang of him, and in the old sense of "I'm still, though, an unrequited Rortyan." It runs over more detail of how I was back in the day, and what I think divides us, and I think it's still up-to-date as far as my thinking goes. What follows, below, is our most recent dialogue, carried out in the comments section of "Heidegger, Dewey, Pirsig."). The main reason I'm posting it separately is because the response to his reply that I wanted to leave in the comments section there was too big. But, too, I've enunciated some things that I think are worth preserving in a more up-front format, about the Emersonian, antiauthoritarian strain of pragmatism (something I hope to write about a little bit more soon). I should remark that Dave, for his part, was held to the same kinds of space restrictions (which, not being his blog, he didn't have any other recourse but to adhere to) and that it's a comment section, he didn't ever plan on putting these up for show or anything. For a more patient articulation of his view of Rorty and James (and implicitly me), see his "Clash of the Pragmatists."

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Hello Matt:

Pirsig's claim, that the MOQ is "more empirical" than traditional empiricism, is best understood by way of William James' radical empiricism. (Dewey and Pirsig both subscribe to this brand of empiricism while Rorty finds nothing of value in it whatsoever.) The radical empiricist's claim to be more empirical than his opponent is not to claim "that there are obvious, neutral features of reality that his opponents are repressing". For a radical empiricist, there is no such thing as a neutral feature of reality. In fact, SOM and the correspondence theory of truth are rejected by radical empiricists and so the claim to be more empirical has nothing to do with traditional dualism like mind and matter, appearance and reality. What makes him more empirical than his opponents is the method of radical empiricism.

Basically, this method says that experience sets the limits for philosophical debate. It says that all experience must be accounted for and that anything that can't be known in experience must be excluded. The provision that excludes "trans-experiential" entities is the provision that puts the brakes on metaphysics, by the way. This method excludes theoretical entities such as Hegel's Absolute, Kant's things-in-themselves and Aristotle's substance. On the other end, the claim to be more empirical than even traditional empiricists is made on the basis of what James calls "the continuity of experience" or the "conjunctive relations" within experience. He calls attention to these transitional types of experiences because the epistemic gap between subject and object, he says, is a fake philosophical problem created by the failure to take them into account. By taking notice of these conjunctive relations, it can be seen that thoughts and things are just the terminal ends or pivotal features of experience and they are connected to each other already within the tissue of experience. Thoughts and things more or less correspond in a practical sense, not a metaphysical sense. James makes quite a big deal out of these conjunctive relations because, he thinks, they plug up a hole through which all the metaphysical fictions of philosophy would otherwise come pouring in. So the radical empiricist is also rejecting all the various attempts to cross the gap between appearance and reality by saying that experience and reality amount to the same thing.

Also, I'd argue that this empirical stance is not at all inconsistent with the claim that our understanding of reality is an evolved web of analogies. As is the case with the discrepancy between metaphysics and reality, between concepts and reality, it is simply a matter of distinguishing between static and dynamic. This is not to say that static forms such as concepts and the other analogies are unreal or outside of experience but they are still distinguishable from dynamic quality, 'immediate experience' as Dewey calls it or 'pure experience' as James calls it.

This would certainly be another area where Rorty is very much at odds with these other pragmatists. You could say they all took the linguistic turn but Rorty took his at a different angle. I mean, where some would say it's language all the way down, the radical empiricist says it's experience all the way down and there is a pre-verbal, pre-intellectual kind of experience that can only be ignored at a philosopher's peril.

Finally, this incorporation of the non-conceptual features of experience is part of a larger effort to re-integrate the affective domain within philosophy, within science and within rationality itself. This sort of philosophical mysticism hardly constitutes any kind of easy escape. Quite the opposite. It's an effort to broaden and deepen the intellect.

For whatever it's worth...

Dave Buchanan

December 20, 2009

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That's really creepy--I just started to rewrite some stuff on the "more empirical" claim in the hot stove passage. What a weird apropos.

I don't think I understand enough James to talk about radical empiricism as a method very well. It just doesn't sound right to me as a good philosophical stance (I'll concede to you what James really thought). For instance, I'd feel better if you said, "'more empirical' was a bad way of putting this other point he was making...," and then filling in the ellipsis with the radical empiricism as method thing. Because, as you say, everything is experience for these guys--so at the level of abstraction these guys are playing at, why does making a claim about X being more empirical than Y look attractive? It's all empeiria, right? But you don't seem very bothered by the "more empirical" claim, which suggests to me there's a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" lying around somewhere that I don't understand.

But even then, radical empiricism as a method looks very unattractive to me. Once everything is experience, how can anything be cut out at that level? Do we not experience theoretical entities through our experience of books? That seems really nit-picky, but take Aristotle's substance/form distinction: wouldn't an Aristotelian argue that, though we overtly experience only forms, because of a nettle of logical problems, there is also a substance underneath the form that we experience concurrently, though we are not overtly aware of it. We detect substance by inference (like most entities in physics). To reject things like Kant's noumena and Aristotle's ousia, which we might say were created because of inferential requirements based on the rules of logic, would seem to suggest that logic can't tell us anything about reality. That doesn't seem right. Wouldn't, too, logic need to be rejected as a theoretical entity that we don't experience? Because if one rejects junk you learn about in books and through inference, wouldn't that just tear down all of science and knowledge since the invention of writing (paper being where all these syllogisms got written down and thought about)?

As I see it, any entity is no more or less theoretical than any other (the "theory-ladeness" claim that attends the Kuhnian revolution), and the ones that we call fictive are the ones that aren't very useful. I don't see the need for a method to tell us ahead of time, or to principally demarcate a holding pen for, which kinds of things are real and fake. Call this my greater appreciation of Pragmatism than the posthumously collected Essays in Radical Empiricism, but it is unclear to me why I need a method, rather than regular ole' experience of what works and what not.

I also still don't understand enough about what you mean by "direct experience." I outline in "Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig," my last apprehension of what I think Dewey meant, but that still seems at odds with the interpretation you want to give it (the main claim is that Dewey shifted from "concepts" to "habits").

On the relationship between "language all the way down" and "experience all the way down," which I still don't think are antithetical, I wrote this a little while ago, probably based out of a conversation I had with you: "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."

And hey, don't blame me for the phrase "easy escape of mysticism"--that's Pirsig. I dare say there's nothing easy about mysticism.

Good to hear from you Dave.

December 20, 2009

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Hey Matt:

It's not that you've overlooked a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" but rather a distinction between two categories of experience. The common sense meaning or ordinary definition of "experience" is contrasted with abstractions, theories, concepts and such. Logical inferences and deductions are known in experience too, of course, but this fact does not defeat the distinction. The difference is between primary and secondary experience and is does not entail the claim that abstractions are not known in experience. It simply calls attention to the difference between conceptual and pre-conceptual.

This doesn't tear down all of science and knowledge but it certainly has a way of showing both the value and limits of our intelligible world. It puts that big pile of analogies in perspective. Cutting things up this way says that the world as we understand it is drawn from or derived from a richer, thicker, more primordial experience. You know, it's like the difference between all the sand on all the beach and that little handful we call the world. It's like the difference between a fun day with friends and the black and white snapshot you have of that one moment. The photo is real and it is known in experience too, but it was derived from something much richer than any 5" by 7" piece of photographic paper could ever be. Ironically, this richer, more basic form of experience is exactly the one that overlooked by philosophers and so it's not that surprising that you're having trouble with it. This bias toward anything intelligible and against everything that's not goes all the way to Plato. This bias doesn't seem like such a crime to those who can't see the difference between ineffability and mere stupidity.

Or think of the distinction the way Jill Bolte Taylor likes to put it. (She's the Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke and experienced nirvana.) She says the difference between these two kinds of experience is on display in the divided structure of our brains, in the fact that we have two separate hemispheres that process experience in very different ways. Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be. It's almost literally true that we think with half of our brains tied behind our backs. Similarly, meditative practices center on this distinction between primary and secondary experience.

Imagine if the Rhapsode had said to Socrates, "Man will please quit with all those $25 questions and just dig it?." Imagine if that Rhapsode had convinced him that his demands for intelligibility only showed that he was an uptight asshole incapable of appreciating art as such. That's pretty much what Nietzsche says and I think he's right. Imagine if the Sophists had answered similarly. We wouldn't need James or Pirsig if Gorgias had been as rude as I am.

Happy New Year.

December 30, 2009

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Yeah, but I don't think I do have a bias against unintelligibility. I think I have a better way of describing it (e.g., as metaphor), and I don't think my way slights or puts down unintelligibility, where it's appropriate, in the least (always leaving open the possibility, of course, that things might initially be inappropriate before becoming common sense for the next generation). In fact, I follow Rorty (argued most famously in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but also at the end of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) in thinking that unintelligibility is necessary to cultural progress.

I don't think I'm your enemy. I don't think Rorty's the enemy you want him to be. Or at least, I don't think Rorty is usefully rolled up with the Positivists and Platonists as you want.

For the last, geez, probably two, three years now, our conversations have taken on a remarkable consistency. You say, "Radical empiricism something-something, pre-intellectual something, and Rorty's just one more variation of positivist." Then I say, "Well, something-something, Davidson, Sellars, Myth, scheme/content something, and radical empiricism is basically the same as psychological nominalism." Then you say, "No, I'm just talking about two categories of experience something-something, what I'm talking about are just all these somethings [delineation to follow] something, and this way explains the world so much more beautifully." And finally I say, "Well, something-something, I'm happy with my way just now something, and it's unclear to me why I should pick up these distinctions you're offering."

I mean, you're right--saying, "No, Matt, I'm just talking about two categories of experience," does avoid my admittedly simple, artless and somewhat obtuse argument about it "all being experience--so what's the deal?" But the elemental motivation behind this silly-looking, endlessly reiterable argument is the monist-insight that James was attracted to, about half the time. James didn't want to be labeled a monist because British Hegelianism was still really big, but once you make the central pragmatist argument that there is no Way the World Is, that there's no "transcript of reality" or that in this area of philosophical discourse "everything here is plastic" (to steal a couple Jamesisms from "What Pragmatism Means"), once you do that you level the field of eternal dichotomies--which is the same thing the monistic idealists were doing. And James knew this--he wanted to be called, in "The Present Dilemma," a "pluralistic monist." His avoidance strategy was to say, "yeah, there are no metaphysical dichotomies, but we can make as many pragmatic distinctions as we want." (Putnam makes this distinction between dichotomies and distinctions early in his Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, a book I've tried to promote in the brief "Putnam and Pirsig.")

I like this strategy. I would be glad to call myself a pluralistic monist. (I've suggested here and there in posts over the years that pragmatism is a metaphysical monism, an idea I've never gotten further in describing than at the end of "What Is Quality?", though it was to be an entire subsection in an elaborate piece that began as an essay-length reply to your essay on Rorty, but billowed in the planning stages to a projected lengthy-monograph, before finally collapsing under its own weight of ambition. I had to put out to pasture, and I still sigh heavily over its cremains.)

Where was I? Pluralistic monism--whenever you, or Pirsig, or James, or Dewey, (or Whitehead, or Bergson, or Emerson, or Santayana, or Hildebrand, or John McDowell, or Steve Hagen, or etc.) start talking about the kinds of distinctions we can make within the flow of experience--I don't immediately start thinking about monism. I understand that the people in my list, by and large, are pragmatic distinction-makers. By and large. It's the "away and small" I worry about, particularly when those parts are the ones being played up.

I start leaning towards the monistic-solvent when pluralistic-distinctions are being made when I don't know why those distinctions are being made, but are being proffered anyways on their own merits alone rather than by what they can do for me. Because, as I understand pragmatic, pluralistic monism, the one thing that can't be said about them is that they are correct, that "I say there are two categories of experience because there are two categories of experience." As a pragmatist, that doesn't make any sense to me when it comes from another pragmatist. That only makes sense coming from a Platonist of some kind.

So, with your line of explicative examples, your "You know, it's like the difference...," I read them and I go, "Yeah, but I never had a problem with them." I never had a problem handling the sand on the beach vs. the stuff in your hand analogy, nor the two halves of the brain. I don't think I need your distinction to handle them quite well. And what we are talking about is an attempt to get me to think your distinctions are indispensable--you're trying to sell me on the utility of these distinctions. What I'm not sold on are: 1) the difficulty of using my instruments and 2) the ease of using yours.

In a lot of instances, I have no problem with you (or James and Dewey) using "experience-instruments" and me using "language-instruments" (to create two categories I have great qualms about). Once each of us takes on a whole raft of pragmatist theses, I think either one of us gets the job done on a whole host of philosophical problems. Intramural conflict involves pointing to problems where you suspect the other person's tools will rattle and shake under the pressure of getting the job done. The reason I don't move to an experience-only-toolbox is because 1) I don't see why I have to use only them, 2) I have a vague, nagging suspicion that there are certain jobs the experience-tool will have trouble with (which will cause problems for me if that's my only tool), 3) these suspicions are exacerbated when it seems like the experience-tool is being suggested, even demanded, for jobs that I think it's inefficient at best for (and really--it's the demand that exacerbates), and 4) I don't have any persistent doubts about my capacity to use language-tools to handle pointed-out jobs.

I don't see myself in your broad canvas--when you point to Greek Intellectualism, I don't see myself there, so I merely shrug: "yeah, I agree with Nietzsche, too. I don't see our differences yet." When you talk about a "richer, thicker, more primordial experience" I raise my eyebrows and say, "No, thank you. I don't really feel the need to say anything like that in a philosophical context. The metaphor of primalness is a big reason why I stay away from 'primary' as a term of endorsement." When you say, "Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be," I just think you're wrong. I think people realize for themselves that there is more than one way to be in all kinds of ways, and apparently a lot more often than you think (one way people suffer this realization is through the reading of other people's articulation of other ways of being).

What I do think is more rare than the realization itself is the decision to become some one other particular way to be. And that's what I read your "sadly" as. Because I'm more Emersonian than prescriptionally-philosophical, I like to flaunt the negative inducements to self-realization (what Emerson called "self-reliance," Nietzsche "becoming who you are," and Socrates "dialectic"), but downplay the positive steps I've taken on my own path. My steps, I like to think as a full-fledged Emersonian individualist, are but one of many kinds of steps one might make after the deconstruction of what Dewey called the "crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness." I like to think that the "pluralistic," positive, constructive side of pragmatism is too personal a project for it ever to coalesce as the stable center of a tradition called pragmatism. It is, rather, the "monistic," negative, destructive side of pragmatism, which simply consists in parasitic arguments against the past and exhortations to remake the future, that might only ever serve as the ramshackle commonality of individual pragmatists. Pragmatists, therefore, will always be fighting amongst themselves about how free of the past their individual proposals for new tools are.

I don't mind that other pragmatists are not fans of Rorty or Davidsonian/Brandomian philosophy of language (the latter being the only thing I can figure to be meant by what I referred to as "language-tools" in contrast to "experience-tools," which is just shorthand for variations on "pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinctions"). I don't mind if they are retro-pragmatists, combating the excesses of the present professorial malaise (something every generation will find) by returning to a (somewhat reconstructed, retooled, and slightly imagined) "Golden Age" of pragmatism. I don't mind if they are practicing Buddhists, or Christians for that matter.

What I do mind is when other pragmatists do mind what, exactly, other people are. I do mind when it's suggested, if ever so subtly, that I need to be a Buddhist. I do care, and become a little annoyed and full of the Emersonian-pragmatist spirit of individualist self-creative free choice, whenever anyone makes such arguments about what others should self-realize as. I listen carefully but am reasonably skeptical of suggestions that I've run afoul of pragmatist edicts against Platonism, but I do become annoyed when I can't tell what I'm running afoul of. And I become full of righteous pragmatist anger, the kind of piety that can only occur when there's a center to be hypocritical of, when self-professed pragmatists tell other pragmatists how they should create themselves.

As I see it, you have a choice as a pragmatist: 1) you could throw Rorty out of the pragmatist pantheon (thus avoiding hypocrisy), 2) stop telling people what kinds of experience are "richer," and other kinds of laudatory epithets expressive of what you like--at the abstract level of philosophical discourse that you're letting these fly, I think you're running afoul of the "create yourself" plank in the pragmatist platform, or 3) throw out the "create yourself" plank that is common to Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, and Rorty.

I read your commentary on Rorty, and me, as implicit versions of (1)--you haven't explicitly thrown him out, but you suggest that "real pragmatism" is "X, Y, and Z" (just as I do in my own way)--centered around the classical pragmatists, radical empiricism, and the pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinction--and then criticize Rorty for having fallen outside the circle. This is fair enough as far as it goes, but I think you need to say more about the Emersonian side of pragmatism I've hightlighted above, the side of pragmatism I spend most of my time promoting (and Rorty spent his). It is one thing to see Rorty as backsliding into Platonism (which is a reasonable criticism), but it is another, I think, to make Platonic-like authoritarian claims about how things are. You technically avoid them in the Emersonian spirit by telling me how beautiful things look from your perspective and how much sense of the world your distinctions make, but you have a problem on your hands if I reply, "Meh--I'm good." Such odes to your personal experience that opine the richness and freedom of tradition-weighted problems your way of being afford you are all fine and dandy as far as they go, but they are exhortative, not argumentative. If they were argumentative, they'd likely run afoul of Platonist intellecutalism--straight-jacketing the kinds of nonsense I want to make. You move from argumentative-criticisms of Rorty (which are permitted) to exhortative-songs of your freedom in such away that make me think that you think they are arguments--arguments that if I were a reasonable philosopher I would need to rebut or submit to. But I don't know how to rebut your affection for the way of being known as Buddhism without being a Platonist, and that's the only thing I know I don't want to be.

My suspicion is that if you tried to sing the song of Emersonian self-creation alongside your song of mysticism (which I still perceive as quasi-argumentative, as authoritarian edict), you'd run into problems. I suspect you'd find that you wouldn't be able to sing the song of mysticism in just the same way as you have before to hold the harmony of self-creation while remaining in tune. I suspect that the notes that would be modulated to stay in tune would be just those same ones that were previously the ones critical of Rorty. Which is to say: I don't think the modulated song of mysticism would have anything critical to say to Rorty's way of being, or his philosophy.

That's my suspicion. And for my own part (and from my own perspective), the disagreement we've had is that you think I'm singing notes that criticize your song of mysticism, whereas I don't think I am. Or rather, the song I'm singing only criticizes just those notes in the song that I think would have to be modulated away if you sang it in harmony with a song of self-creation.

Suggestions About Morality and the Metaphysics of Quality

Note: This first appeared in the moq.org Discussion Group on October 10th, 2002. It is very old. However, it reflects a few things I still agree with about discussion of morals and Pirsig. It has been edited mainly to eliminate direct reference to MD participants, which I thought suitably ossified to be expendable. It is still rhetorically directed to the MD and I have not altered reference to "the MoQ." Some may have noticed how little I otherwise use that particular handle here. That was a conscious rhetorical choice I made a few years ago, referring nowadays instead to "Pirsig's philosophy." Some will know why I do that. (Meta-comment: How many more pre-written sources will I be able to lazily dig from to pile up without much extra effort? Only time will tell.)

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What does the MoQ do for morality?

I have predominantly stayed out of such debates because I haven't known quite what to say, at least in relating it to the MoQ. I've always had an uneasiness with the discussions. It's not that our political dispositions inform our readings of the MoQ—that's an obvious truism. I don't think the MoQ has a true political undergarment that is waiting or needs to be discovered. What usually makes me queasy is when conversants start labeling such-and-such country as "biological" and this-other-group-over-here as "intellectual." But why should this make me feel queasy? Isn't this what the MoQ adds to the discussion of morals? Isn't this how the MoQ helps us make informed moral decisions?

The answer is, I think, "Yes, this is what the MoQ adds to the discussion," but the way in which it is typically addressed is why there have been so many heated and passionate exchanges between conversants about what exactly the utility of the MoQ is and what exactly the MoQ says. The problem is that the MoQ doesn't say anything exactly, rather it gives us a new way to contextualize things that will shed new light on the situation.

I've always felt queasy about chauvinistic, Lila thumping moral superiority because I think chauvinistic moral superiority is something to feel chagrined about. But even as we bow our heads, showing a little ironic humility, we shouldn't stop affirming our superiority. I believe this chauvinism comes out of the belief that the MoQ is the One Truth—that there is a True MoQ to be gleaned from the pages of Lila or from Pirsig's head and that once we have it, we will be able to solve the world's problems, once and for all. This, I believe, leads to a lot of pointless arguments about what the One True MoQ is during conversations about morals and politics.

The first problem people run into is the definitions of the levels. It's really not all that clear what the definitions are from Lila. I myself had a problem with this, particularly after I found out that Pirsig advocates only having humans at the social and intellectual levels (see, for instance, Lila’s Child annotation 49). In a past essay, before reading the annotations, I had set the bar with animals at the social level and humans at the intellectual (from "Absurdity and the Meaning of Life"). The problem is that our moral understanding arises from our interpretation of the MoQ. And detractors of the MoQ use the endless bickering that goes on about which interpretation is the true MoQ as a reductio ad absurdum argument for the uselessness of the MoQ as a tool for moral growth.

The problem is that, once we blur the edges of there being a "true" MoQ, we run into the problem of it being a metaphysics. Some think the object of the MoQ is to correctly correspond to reality and that's what some people think gives it its power. The levels of the MoQ are taken to be separate metaphysical kinds, not lines that can be bandied about. They have to be distinctly defined so that no wishy-washiness occurs when we dispense our moral judgments.

As a pragmatist, I don't think the levels in the MoQ are discrete or fixed: I think they should be fuzzy and ad hoc. I think the MoQ gives us a useful narrative into which to contextualize our moral judgments, a new perspective to compare the Middle East and the West, or the Catholics and the Buddhists, or the past with the present. I don't think the MoQ gives us a metaphysics at all. I think it just gives us a new vocabulary with which to frame our thoughts and which, hopefully, helps us make better moral decisions.

So, I have two suggestions, one philosophical, the other practical. The philosophical suggestion is simply my earlier suggestion that we pragmatize and historicize Pirsig (from “Confessions of a Fallen Priest”). That we treat the MoQ as an ad hoc taxonomy that splits the world into useful distinctions, not as a metaphysics that splits the world into discrete ontological kinds. That we use it as a narrative in which to contextualize the topic at hand.

My practical suggestion (and, to me, the more important one) is that, when debating moral and political issues in this forum [the MD], we refrain from argument over who has the MoQ correct. We simply offer our particular narrative on how the issue fits into MoQ terms. Someone can then offer an alternative narrative, perhaps using slightly different definitions. We can then contrast the narratives, see which ones suggest better outcomes or offer up keener insights to the situation.

Simply put, my practical suggestion is this: we suspend debate about the MoQ as a system during moral and political threads. This does not, of course, mean that we suspend debate about the system completely. I'm simply suggesting that we separate threads about moral and political MoQ applications (where we can discuss abortion, the death penalty, and Bush's IQ to our heart's content) from threads about the MoQ as a philosophical system (where we can discuss definitions, our favorite colligation, and the literal word of Pirsig).

To end, I would like to emphasize that these are not suggestions from someone-who-knows, like a teacher suggesting to her students that they refrain from talking during class. I'm not trying push an agenda as if, if everyone followed my lead, then the world would be alright. I'm merely offering a particular perspective from my humble, pragmatist viewpoint.

Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan

A little background: When I fell in love with Pirsig, it was for all the wrong reasons. Well, maybe not all the reasons were wrong, but I see much more clearly now that the biggest reason was because reading and liking him would piss off my teachers. Or, at least that's what I imagined. After all, it was my Phil 101 teacher, the petite, lithe, dancer extraordinaire, Kay Picart, who (re)introduced me to Pirsig. Reading Pirsig was more fun than Plato or Nietzsche, let alone Sartre or Russell (and god forbid, Heidegger), so when it came time to write a final paper for my Contemporary Philosophy class, I chose Pirsig and dove into Lila. And Pirsig told me that academic philosophers hate him. And lo' and behold, when I told my teacher (who, unlike Picart, shall remain nameless, though largely because she was forgettable and forgotten) that I wanted to write on Bob, she said that I should write a comparison between Pirsig and someone else more established. The Man was holdin' me down, a feeling I then transferred to Pirsig. The Man was holdin' Pirsig down. And really--neither of us were being held down.

Having aged a bit since then, I think it was quite nice that my teacher should even have let me write about Pirsig at all. And, more extraordinarily still, that my Existentialism teacher, Edward Beach, should not hold it against me when I turned a 10-12 page final paper into a 20 page monstrosity that contained far more excursus on one Robert Pirsig than one would expect in a paper on Albert Camus (though its not as if he even had any idea it was coming down the pike; he didn't "let" me, I just did it). I have a much greater appreciation for the role of the teacher these days, and sometimes kids just have to be reigned in. In the old days, I would've been cuffed up side the head, and I probably would've deserved it.

I think it was a total quirk of fate, a complete accident, that led to my obsession with Robert Pirsig. I read Pirsig saying he's being ignored and reviled by the institution, and then I immediately "see" first hand his backhand treatment. Being something of an outsider myself (a feeling that is itself paradoxically balanced by what you might call my cultural traditionalism), my mind latched on to this. Pirsig's philosophy inflammed my mind and I began the journey that has led me here. Before I became literally here, at this little blogspot I call my own, my obsession and meanderings in thought were housed by moq.org. That website is dedicated to Robert Pirsig, and anybody who lasts any length of time at its discussion groups is in some way obsessed with Pirsig.

Now, if Pirsig had been a putz, then clearly I wouldn't still be obsessed. But Pirsig isn't a putz, though I now see that he isn't everything I wanted him to be. Pirsig was a useful halfway point, a stepping stone, between the way I naively saw philosophy then and the way I see it now. As I see it now, Pirsig was a useful mix of old-school traditional style philosophy, the kind that dealt in big concepts and revolutionary changes, the kind that kids think of when they think of philosophy and Plato and Nietzsche, and the kind of pragmatic, ironic philosophy that makes fun of Plato and Nietzsche.

It is that kind of talk right there, of course, which has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years at moq.org. When I started evolving from Pirsigian monotheism into a more polytheistic, open-ended pantheon, I started making noise about this movement. And because everybody already talked about Pirsig, I began to talk about my new hero, Richard Rorty. And I talked a lot about him because I thought he could help us, all of us, in our shared desires of extending Pirsigian philosophy.

That was my mistake. Granted we should all talk about Pirsig at moq.org. But is it necessary that everybody be as excited about Rorty as I am? Granted he might yet be of interest, but I made a huge error in judgment in my angle of presentation: I criticized Robert Pirsig. A lot. For a long time. In the end, it was totally predictable. What led me to latch on to Pirsig is likely the same thing that led me to latch on to Rorty: I was bucking the establishment. I had illusions of grandeur that I was pissing off academia by writing about Pirsig, and now that there was a new establishment in my town, one fairly sedimented moq.org audience, I proceeded to piss them off.

But at moq.org, this was a little less than a complete illusion. I mean, on the one hand, who was I, a barely twenty undergrad at a minor, piss-ant state school in Wisconsin, going to piss off in academia? I didn't even know who they were (and that's the first sign that you're making up your enemy). But the ruckus I've caused off and on over the years at moq.org is a little more real and evident. Which isn't to say that I still don't have an overdramatization streak that extends to this very moment (just take a look at the title). I may have the memory of an elephant, but most people at moq.org forget all too quickly who was raining fire and brimstone a week ago if they're no longer writing. Such is the way these things are, and it's just as well for the discussion group, better in fact. Less anxiety about being the first to write about whatever. Let's you feel like a pioneer, of which, sadly though predictably, I wasn't even one of (though it's a trait Pirsig's commentators share with Pirsig). So, grant the fact that I'm probably indulging in a little hyperbole and just keep your saltshaker around.

Back to my "a little background" story which is supposed to be a small preface before I get to some actual philosophy: I made the mistake of criticizing Pirsig. That, of course, as any rhetorically sane person will tell you, is not a mistake. And yet on the other hand, Aristotle did tell us to know our audiences if you hope for any legitimate shot of being heard fairly. My audience, surprise, surprise, was a lot like me: Pirsig fanatics (or, "enthusiasts", to put it more politely) whose lives rose and set with ZMM and Lila and, most importantly, had an incorrigible cynicism, distrust, and almost preternatural revulsion for academia. They were outsiders. That's why they were there and not in universitity departments. You don't go into a Catholic Church and start badmouthing God and neither do you go to moq.org and describe yourself as a "fallen Pirsigian priest". On the one hand, I do think I wasn't treated fairly or understood, but in their defense, I was a little punchy. It would have just been plain smarter to sing the praises of Pirsig and Rorty together, in harmony, for a while before pointing out where I think there are some discordant notes. But no, I seemed pretty eager to kill my intellectual father at the altar of my new one.

Because I started by adopting a critical stance towards Pirsig in my post-Rortyan years, it became almost impossible to take any other stance. Every time I might open my mouth, I was taken to be a heretic. Rightly or wrongly, the rest is history. As I grew, though, particularly at those times when I was away from the hustle and bustle of moq.org, I began to see the error in my first, overly enthusiastic steps as a pragmatist. I saw why people reacted so vehemently, I saw where my original writings went askew. In moments of correction, though, my original sin was never fully forgiven. Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, I almost single-handedly gave Rorty a bad name at the moq.org discussion groups.

Thank God for short memories, right? Well, there are others who have longer memories. And those are my main interlocutors. What prompted this reflection was a letter from one of my most outspoken critics at moq.org, David Buchanan. David has taken up the study of pragmatism, particularly Dewey, and he has been pleasantly surprised at how much better he likes Dewey through the eyes of his professor, David L. Hildebrand, than through the eyes of Rorty (which are then filtered through my eyes). He is particularly excited by the fact that Hildebrand is critical of Rorty, giving voice to the same things he's been critical of me for over the years. So David invited me to comment on one of Prof. Hildebrand's short pieces about Rorty available at his website.

The paper is a short, succinct summary of things Hildebrand has expanded on elsewhere in his retreat from Rorty and it does sound like the things David and others have been telling me for years. But I still can't see my way around it. Hildebrand does a pretty good job of summarizing Rorty up and notes, more or less correctly, the sides of Rorty that would seemingly get in the way (for instance, what he calls Rorty's theoretical approach). I'm just not at all sure they do.

On the face of it, it all revolves around this term “experience.” I'm still not sure what people who dislike Rorty and love Dewey/Pirsig think it is. Take one example from the second page. Hildebrand says, “Linguistic pragmatism, then, eschews philosophical terms that refer to non-linguistic entities or effects.” This gives me a queer feeling because I feel like I'm being led into a trap. On the one hand, do I agree because the specifically analytic notion of “reference” never panned out (which is one reason the correspondence theory of truth can’t get off the ground)? Or do I disagree, noting that Rorty has no trouble with the word “rock”?

On the one hand, Hildebrand does specifically say "philosophical terms," which leads me to think he is talking about the whole reference problem. But what's the problem with that? After all, do a lot of people have "rock" as a central term in their specifically philosophical vocabulary? On the other hand, however, why would Hildebrand reference "non-linguistic entities or events" unless he was talking about rocks, which is the constant complaint about linguistic pragmatism--its solipsism by (only slightly) other means. But I've never been able to wrap my head around that complaint. Rorty isn't saying that we shouldn’t use words that don't refer, or even that words don't refer at all--all words refer to something.

The trouble was when philosophers tried to isolate one half of our language, the half that referred to non-linguistic entities (like "rock"), from the other half of our language, the half that only referred to other linguistic entities (like "good"). (I should add that that example isn't the only attempt to isolate language into types, just one example of isolation.) These philosophers then set up one side as "really referring" or some such better, or more assured, relation. Classic representationalism. On this formulation of Rorty's point, linguistic pragmatism isn't suggesting that we get rid of reference, its simply suggesting that we stop trying to figure out when we are referring or not--its pretty obvious we are always referring.

The "reference problem" is something that distracted positivists and we can use their example to see how this invidious distinction is created. For early positivists following the Vienna Circle, particularly Rudolph Carnap, propositions were broken into three different groups: analytic, cognitively meaningful, and cognitively meaningless (or emotive). Analytic propositions were those true by definition, i.e. they only referred to other language, the classic being "All bachelors are single." All non-analytic statements were then taken through the verifiability test: if they can be empirically verified, they are meaningful, if not, then not. Rocks yes, morals no (hence ethical emotivism). The positivists did this in part because they were a little tired of all the wide-ranging, completely unarguable metaphysical speculation. They wanted some results, like the sciences. This is why Carnap, and Quine for that matter, hated Heidegger.

This all fell apart for the positivists, of course, when you ask if the verifiability criterion for meaningfulness is itself verifiable. It is obviously not true by definition, but neither is it empirically true according to the definition of empirical that they were using. That is, of course, where Pirsig enters to hammer on how everything is empirical, i.e. experience. Blowing that door open, however, also blows many of the other walls on positivism off. (For more on verificationism, see my "Verificationism and the Shibboleth Problem".)

The reference problem comes in when you try to save the idea of empirical verification as a criterion for truth (something that Pirsig flirts with in his list of criteria for truth). How do you know your words are hooking up properly and accurately to non-language so that you know your statement "there is a rock" is empirically true as opposed to something less empirically true, like analytic statements? For common sense, asking the question just seems plain stupid, but for hi-tech analytic philosophy it became a major problem. The only reason they kept fighting about it, and using increasingly sophisticated, complicated, and remote tools and jargon, is because they wanted to save the correspondence theory of truth. They wanted to say that science (and rocks) are made true by something "out there" (because they obviously and commonsensically do) whereas morality and values are not (because it is not at all obvious what commonsensically “out there” “good” would correspond to). They expanded from the trivial sense that "there is a rock" is made true by the fact that there is a rock in front of me (which I can point to) to an invidious distinction between facts and values. This is where Pirsig steps in again. Pirsig did see presciently that knocking down the empirical/non-empirical distinction down also knocks the fact/value distinction--experience = reality = value. It should excite Pirsigians to hear Dewey say that reality is itself an evaulative term.

Once we free ourselves from representationalism, we can get along quite fine with the trivial sense in which "there is a rock" corresponds to the rock (or is isomorphic with the rock, as one of the hi-tech tools would have it). Rorty admitted as much many years ago, though people who fear the loss of representationalism still take his long-ago titled paper "The World Well Lost" (which even by the early 80s he thought was misleading) too seriously and think he's saying there's nothing at all out there, mysteriously or trivially, that we need pay attention to.

This is why I've probably done a great disservice to Rorty during my first year or two talking about him at moq.org. I understand why people like Platt Holden or the more recent Ham Priday don't like Rorty. They show all the reaction traits of representationalists, and are even explicit about it sometimes. But with David and Anthony McWatt, I think I've mislead them into a poorer image than need be. Anthony has usually harped most on Rorty's political philosophy, but I might be willing to say that that's a separate beast than his post-linguistic antirepresentationalism (besides which, I’m sure his image of Rorty was gained elsewhere). I've never been quite sure what I did that turned so many people off about it--no, wait, all that "language, not experience" talk.

Well, I really think it’s not as big a deal as I or anybody else has made it. What I think reading Rorty can do for pragmatist-leaners of all strips is give a number of argumentative tools that are useful in puncturing representationalism. I remember when I squabbled with Paul Turner for a while about Rorty some time ago. I think what happened is that he left for a while, read some Rorty away from my distracting taint, and came to his own appreciation for him. If you look at his blog, he considers Rorty and Pirsig to be two of his philosophical heroes. I think the big thing he gained was a bunch of tools. Stuff he doesn't like, he disregards.

Another way of getting at what I think makes many disgruntled with Rorty is taking the footnote that occurs directly before the line I quoted above from Hildebrand’s paper. In footnote five, Hildebrand quotes Rorty in response to Hartshorne (found in Rorty & Pragmatism):

"Because I think of the enrichment of language as the only way to enrich experience, and because I think that language has no transcendental limits, I think of experience as potentially infinitely enrichable."

Hildebrand himself emphasizes with italics this portion of Rorty, but does not comment any further. However, I can almost preternaturally sense what, I would guess, raised hackles on Hildebrand. Rorty says that language is the only way to enrich experience. Rorty's just plain wrong here. But as far as I can tell, it’s more like he misspoke than he was repeating for the 100th time a fundamental plank in neopragmatism. Who knows what new non-linguistic items we will create in the future that will expand and enrich experience? New metals, materials, activities, drugs—whatever. The invention of the activity of surfing expanded our experience over and against the invention of the word "surfing," which also then expanded our experience. There is nothing in Rorty's philosophy, as far as I can tell, that would necessitate the thesis that language is the only way to enrich experience. The thesis is obviously false on its face. Rorty's emphasis in this passage, and the part that is both indispensable to Rorty's philosophy and, as far as I've ever been able to tell, agreeable to Deweyans and Pirsigians alike, is the notion that experience is "potentially infinitely enrichable." I think everyone who likes Rorty or Dewey or Pirsig can get behind that.

What I think lays at the heart of Hildebrand's criticisms, which leads him to say (what I would call) quasi-dubious things about Rorty's philosophy (though as I suggested before, Hildebrand is refreshingly clean, fair, and agreeable in this paper, much more so than many, many I've read on Rorty) is his distinction between the "theoretical" and the "practical". Now, things get pretty hairy and nuanced at this point, and I don't think I have the time or energy or experience to get it right. But I would like to say this: I think we need to keep his distinction between Rorty's (supposed) theoretical approach to philosophy and Dewey's (supposed) practical approach distinct from his distinction between "reflective" and "pre-reflective". Hildebrand, following Dewey, raises this distinction, but I get the impression that people kinda' conflate the two: that because Rorty does (what we are calling) "theoretical" philosophy, he ignores the "pre-reflective". Hildebrand never does explicitly pull those two sets of distinctions together (I think wisely), but if he doesn't, then it isn't at all clear what the problem with Rorty's approach to philosophy is. (For more on what I currently think of "pre-reflective", see my "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience".)

Many people have criticized Rorty's approach, some fairly, most not so much. What I think people misunderstand about Rorty's approach is that it isn't exclusive. There can be many different approaches. Whatever this "theoretical approach" is that Rorty's engaged in (diagnosis of and elaboration of these differences being the hairy part and not something I have time to pursue currently), there is nothing in Rorty's writing that suggests that there is a right or wrong way to do philosophy--there is no first philosophy that all must pass through (as Descartes saw epistemology and Michael Dummett saw philosophy of language). There are only more and less efficacious and useful ways of doing philosophy for various particular things. Are Rorty's writings always the most efficacious and useful according to his own philosophy's lights? No. That's the part many people can't wrap their heads around. There are many things that Rorty leaves untouched. Rorty has always remained modest and always been surprised by those who attribtute to him prophetic or revolutionary sight, or some such thing. Many people, however, seem to think that the truth of, say, antirepresentationalism stands or falls on its espousers ability to say something about everything. Rorty, on the other hand, doesn't think he's equipped to be able to do everything. He writes about philosophy. He sometimes writes about politics, but even then most of that is advocation of the cool things someone else has said better in the hopes that he can turn a few people on to the other writer.

In his letter to me, David repeats an often applied diagnosis, one Rorty has acknowledged in a certain way: Rorty is a broken-hearted positivist. I think one of the bad impressions that I may have given (and that Rorty has regretted giving himself) is that, as David also says of Rorty, "the failure of the positivistic project is central in such a way that it changes everything about philosophy". It is a big deal for a certain kind of philosophy (the post-Cartesian "epistemology industry," as Dewey called it, and all the subsidiaries who work in its shadow), but philosophy is one of those things where there is always more than any particular, arbitrarily demarcated section of it (remember Pirsig's advice from Lila that Pirsig sometimes forgets: never define philosophy). Rorty's past works feed that image whenever he said something to the effect of "the linguistic turn was the greatest thing to ever happen to philosophy." Hildebrand picked out a quote like that in his paper: “By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition.” (from Rorty’s “Dewey’s Metaphysics”) Rorty regrets to a certain extent saying things like that now.

It is instructive to pick up the reprint of his famous anthology, The Linguistic Turn, and read the postscripts to it. The intro to the anthology is gigantic, judicious and extremely informative on what analytics thought of themselves at that period (reading it is as good as most classes on positivism). He says in it, though, that:

Linguistic philosophy, over the last thirty years, has succeeded in putting the entire philosophical tradition, from Parmenides through Descartes and Hume to Bradley and Whitehead, on the defensive. It has done so by a careful and thorough scrutiny of the ways in which traditional philosophers have used language in the formulation of their problems. This achievement is sufficient to place this period among the great ages of the history of philosophy.

In the "Ten Years Later" postscript, he talks less enthusiastically about analytic philosophy (he was writing PMN, the book analytics hate, at that time). But in the "Twenty-five Years Later" postscript, he says “What I find most striking about my 1965 essay is how seriously I took the phenomenon of the ‘linguistic turn,’ how portentous it then seemed to me. I am startled, embarrassed, and amused to reread the [above] passage…. That last sentence now strikes me as merely the attempt of a thirty-three-year-old philosopher to convince himself that he had had the luck to be born at the right time….” Or, “Er, yeah, ya’ know when I said linguistic philosophy was better than sliced bread? Yeeeah, that was a little overboard, wasn’t it?”

What I suggest what one does with all those passages where he lauds the linguistic turn is to read them as saying, "the linguistic turn was good for academic philosophy because it has led them to more and more doubt representationalism" (which we can see by the renaissance of pragmatism). There isn't any necessary reason for this to have happened. Becoming post-linguistic doesn't give you necessarily a better philosophy, nor does it necessarily make you immediately more predisposed to pragmatism. Many of the doctrines pragmatists call their own, for instance holism, were precursored by philosophers who didn’t think all that much about language.

Saying that, though, I do tend to agree with Rorty that antirepresentationalism does seem less counterintuitively when stated in "linguistic terms," or, as Hildbrand quotes him, “‘Language’ is a more suitable notion than ‘experience’ for saying the holistic and anti-foundational things which James and Dewey had wanted to say.” Again, “suitable” is perhaps the wrong word, but the point is that it really doesn't matter which notion we use. I suggest we read those comments as historical comments about the way things have turned out and progressed, not as statements about where we should necessarily go or how we should necessarily do things. Its philosophy: there are all sorts of things we can do and still stay out of the way of representationalism.

So when David defines radical empiricism in his letter as "there is no reality outside of experience AND that there is no good reason to exclude any kind of experience from an account of reality," I can only concur and say that Dewey, James, Pirsig, and Rorty would all fall into place, too. I think there are two things that bug Pirsigians about Rorty in this regard. One, he doesn't talk about mysticism, which Pirsig is quite focused. In this regard, the answer I've been trying to forward over the years is that Rorty isn't denying the empirical nature of mystical experience. He just doesn't have anything to say about it. He isn't offering a general account of reality, he's giving arguments against representationalism (which is very pervasive, far more than some think, though that's probably a debatable point). Like I said before, there are a lot more different kinds of philosophy than the kind Rorty and academics do and Rorty considers the function he plays is as an underlaborer (an image pioneered by Locke and used a lot by Dewey, and even by Pirsig at the beginning of ZMM) for clearing out all the arbitrary divisions that keep out stuff like mysticism. Its kinda' like Rorty engages the academics on the behalf of mystics (and others), though not as a mystic. He wants people to stop thinking that philosophy looks like this and not like anything else. It is possible that Rorty doesn’t find mysticism interesting, but surely it doesn’t follow that the effect is that he denies its possibility. If one can accept the idea of beer and not become a beer drinker, then one can find beer uninteresting and still find a place for it in their account of reality.

The second thing that I think gives Pirsigians a bad taste about Rorty is the fact that Rorty doesn't give a general account of reality. They see Rorty suggesting that Dewey's hankering after a general account of reality and experience in Experience and Nature is bad metaphysics and, because they like that kind of thing (which is what Pirsig does), they get the feeling that Rorty's doing something bad. What I want to suggest is that giving an "account of reality" is necessarily a never-ending task if one accepts what I suggested all pragmatists can get behind—experience is infinitely expandable. And if that's the case, than a non-exclusionary "account of reality" will look less and less like a series of propositions about reality and more and more like a series of history books that keeps adding volumes. If there is "no good reason to exclude any kind of experience from an account of reality," then because there will always be the open-endness of experience, there will always be the possibility of new kinds of experience. That means that a truly full "account" will look less like something you can do generally and more like something you need to stay in the particular about. That, I think, lays at the heart of Rorty's suspicions about Dewey's Experience and Nature, which is where most of Rorty's talk against the philosophical concept of "experience" comes from (and even Dewey later in life distanced himself from that book). And remember: it’s just about "experience" as a philosophical concept. He just finds it personally easier to stay away from it when attacking representationalism.

This aversion of the general is also what keeps me from sidling up easily to David’s sometimes virulent anti-theism. I've never been quite able to put my head around it, how one can stay pragmatist and not think that James was right in "The Will to Believe". Don't get me wrong: when it comes to politics, screw Bush, Robertson, and Fatwell. But when it comes to individual believers, and not politics and institutions, I have trouble dissociating what Christians would call an "experience of God" from what mystics would call a "mystical experience". I'm not saying they're totally interchangeable terms, that what Buddhists call Enlightenment, Christians call God. What I am saying, however, is that when we consider that what gets mystical experience in the door of radical empiricism is that it is reported as happening (because that is exactly what gets every experience in the door, from rocks to moral disgust), then I'm not sure how "experience of God" gets booted, thus making theism look stupid and making one an anti-theist as opposed to anti-Christian Coalition or anti-clerical (which is what Rorty has started to call himself in the last six or seven years). (For some other takes on mysticism and atheism, see my "What is Enlightenment?" and "How is Atheism a Religion?".)

Granted the above contains some possibly disputed points (like "reporting" being the door to radical empiricism) which can be discussed, but the simpler question is simply, "How can we say 'experience of God' has never happened and 'mystical experience' has?" As far as I can tell, when I go to write up my account of reality, I'll have to include both. I haven't experienced either, but other people have and I have no good reason to exclude them from my account.

One thing I really wish I could persuade people like David and Pirsig in doing is dropping talk about language's inability to capture an experience. I know what is being driven at: "beer" is not the same thing as a beer. However, I still think the idea that language cannot ever capture experience is the flip side of representationalism's idea that it can sometimes. What we ought to do is just drop the idea that it is in the capturing business. David and I have had a long conversation about this exact thing, and it spurred me on to what I consider some of my best writing, but as I said then, language is not a pirate. (See my "Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance".) I think that that generalization from the trivial and acceptable point that "beer" is not the same as a beer is the same kind of mistake that I suggested the representationlists made in generalizing from the trivial sense in which "there is a rock" corresponds to a rock to a full-blown correspondence theory of truth. I think both our flip-sides of each other and I think both are best left behind. Just as Rorty seems to be captivated by language, I think Pirsigians look like their captivated by its flip-side—not-language. We need to stop being enchanted by either notion. The movement from theoria to praxis, as Deweyans and Pirsigians might point out, doesn't mean we leave language behind or our ignoring it. But I think it should be stressed that it doesn't have anything to do with language at all—which is exactly what I take the point with the movement to be: we're no longer captivated by its image, pro or con. We don't occupy our time with thinking about the Forms, or God, or the mind, or language isolated from everything else. Instead we think about our practices in a society with other people. Those practices may make reference to any or all of the above, but the above are not in isolation from the practices that reference them.To bring it around again to Hildebrand, the distinctions between “theoretical/practical” and “reflective/pre-reflective” may lay at the heart of the dispute over "experience" as a philosophical term, the dispute between Deweyans and Rortyans. Is there a correct way of doing philosophy? What is theoretical philosophy as opposed to practical philosophy, and why is theoretical philosophy banned, or at least displaced? How does the notion of “pre-reflective” play into this?

I see two probable directions: either one defines "experience" as something less than completely synonymous with reality so that you can oppose experience to something that is not-experience and argue (initially plausibly given the baggage of the terms) that practical philosophy deals with experience (and is therefore good) and theoretical philosophy does not (and is therefore bad and disengaged), or one defines "experience" as totally synonymous with reality, which effectively makes everything an experience, everything a practical activity—theoretical philosophy as much as any other kind of philosophy. If the first direction, it would be easy to make Rorty look bad, but then it would be hard to justify the places in Dewey and Pirsig that suggest the second direction. If the second direction, then one has effectively disarmed themselves of the weapons they were using (the theoretical/practical distinction so conceived) and a new weapon must be taken up.

The first direction silently makes the leap from "experience" to "non-linguistic entities" which Hildebrand made in his paper, the same leap I silently left uncovered at the very beginning of my remarks about Hildebrand. The second direction says that talking and language is just one more facet of experience. Until somebody explicates the connection between experience and non-linguistic entities, one which does not hold between experience and linguistic entities and finally takes a stand and says that talking, reading, thinking, and language is not an experience, then Dewey and Deweyans like Hildebrand, Sleeper, Margolis, McDermott, etc., look like they're waffling between two definitions of experience, dipping into both, and claiming all the advantages and none of the disadvantages.

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This overlong meditation has functioned as something of a brief rejoinder to Hildebrand, a kind of elaboration on the continuities and discontinuities between Dewey, Pirsig, and Rorty, a furthering of my conversation with David, and as a personal apology to David and all others who despise Rorty because of me. No one should despise another because of what somebody else has said about them and I regret the actions that may have led anyone to a certain, despicable impression. One should be able to read Rorty, or anyone for that matter, without the persistent voice of another in their ear. Rorty should rise and fall on his own merits, not my meager ones.

David said to me in his letter that our conversations were helpful in preparing him for his return to academia. Indeed, our conversations have been an integral element in my own evolution. I thank David for his constant criticism. Though our conversations were often heated, unruly, and belligerently antagonistic, it is certainly an obvious and undeniable fact that he has been the direct impetus for many of the views I've developed, elaborated, and now hold. We may not agree, but David has certainly pushed me to greater and greater levels of writing.

Against Northrop

A month or two ago in the MD, some people were using Northrop in expositions on Pirsig's philosophy. Understanding Northrop should be important to understand how Pirsig's philosophy grew to be what it is, and I don't deny that, but from what I understand of Northrop, I don't like him much. I first read some sections of his books when I was writing a review of one of Anthony McWatt's papers and I didn't like what I found, and recently I picked up a book called The New American Philosophers by Andrew J. Reck ("new" circa 1968) that had a number of expositions on philosophers, including Northrop. What I read there did not please me either and simply deepened my suspicion that Northrop is a neo-Kantian. Which only deepens my suspicion that Pirsig is still caught in the philosophical web he hoped to rend and replace.

The first thing that makes me leery is that Northrop apparently is of the mind to make everything "scientific." This was a problem that Dewey had, too, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything really bad, it just means they are probably using a really wide sense of "science", probably as coextensive with "inquiry". This is all confirmed in the Reck book, but the way it is confirmed is not enticing. "...Northrop defines logic broadly 'to include any form of knowing in religion and art as well as the sciences,'" which sounds a lot like what Pirsig is up to in his redefinitions, but then Reck continues "closely linking it with epistemology, which examines the relation between the knower and the subject matter as known." (200) Knower/known distinction? Not a great sign.

Northrop adopts a "methodological pluralism," each appropriate to different problems or stages of inquiry. That sounds appropriate, but one repetitive note is sounded over and over again throughout the chapter: Northrop's distinction between the aesthetic and conceptual, the immediate and the postulate. This is what some expositers have been using with Pirsig and it is exactly that distinction that makes me so wary. Here's an instance in Reck: "Although the second stage of scientific inquiry opens with pure fact under observation, it terminates with described fact or classified fact, fact no longer pure but altered by concepts. Pure fact, 'defined as that which is known by immediate apprehension alone,' is 'a continuum of ineffable aesthetic qualities, not an external material object.' The bedrock of empirical knowledge is drenched with intuited quality, evincing an essential relation between fact and the sort of values mirrored in impressionistic art." (201)

The passage holds both resonance and dissonance with Pirsig and plays to some of the "red flag words" I've been suggesting people stay away from. Words like "pure", "immediate", and "ineffable". Pirsigians will think that "drenched with intuited quality" sounds good, but how they can coutenance an "essential relation" between fact and value is beyond me. I thought Pirsig's primary move was to make everything value. It is this kind of thing that suggests to me that Pirsig still, in the moments when he describes that which is most immediate to us (DQ), is reinscribing a fact/value distinction into his philosophy. And this is bad. Not good.

To just briefly attack Northrop's distinction between intuition and postulation, Northrop says that a concept of intuition is one "which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by, something which is immediately apprehended." (ibid.) Now, first realize that Northrop's philosophy seems to hinge on the notion of "sense data". Sense impressionism is way, way out of vogue these days, and with good reason. It is based on bad Humean psychology, which may have pushed us down the track to pragmatism, but is a ladder best left behind. Northrop may want to replace much of bad Humeanism, but I don't think he did it radically enough. Second, try and think of what "meaning" is given by something not under a description. As quoted above, "pure fact" is not "described fact," which means that a pure intuition is not under any description. Where is the meaning? This is one of the reasons why the "linguistic turn" became so popular. There seemed to be something funny going on when we talk a lot about "pure experience" and such. How do we get meaning if there is no language? Northrop and many others have forwarded answers, but I think all of them fall under Quine and Sellars' swords. It's just bad, Cartesian/Kantian-engendered philosophy.

Another thing that makes me leery is Northrop's attempt at "philosophy of culture." He suggests, reasonably enough, that ideologies underlie cultural beliefs and that we should understand these ideologies. (He also says, roughly, that a culture has an implicit philosophy, but this is either repetition of the first point or saying, very badly, that all cultures have philosophical presuppositions. I think he leans towards the latter.) But his notion of "scientific inquiry" comes lurching foward and leads him to suggest, in Reck's words, that "Consequently, world peace hinges upon the ability of men to understand the differing ideologies which motivate the behavior of nations, in order to reconcile them when they are compatible and to correct them in consonance with impartial criteria when they are incompatible." (204) Impartial criteria? Where the hell are we going to get those? Wouldn't any "impartial" criteria you come up with, when it goes against a given ideology's beliefs, be rejected as being partial, as begging the question over it? Isn't the point of Pirsig's attack on Subject-Object Metaphysics to disimbue us of the notion of an objective, impartial viewpoint? That we are all partial, valuistic?

All of this comes to a head in Reck's exposition of Northrop's legal philosophy.

If legal science is to contain objective norms for the criticism of living laws, it must include natural law ethics and natural law jurisprudence. To clarify and justify this claim Northrop distinguishes bewteen "first-order" and "second-order" facts. "First-order facts are the introspected or sensed raw data antecedent to all theory and all cultures, given in anyone's experience in any culture. Second-order facts are cultural artifacts; that is, they are the result in part at least of human theory of first-order facts. Nature and natural law are the names for all first-order facts and their relations. Culture and living law are the names for all second-order facts and their inner order." On the next page he continues: "Stated more precisely, therefore, natural law jurisprudence is the thesis that scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts provides the cognitive standard for measuring the goodness or badness of second-order artifacts. Thus just as sociological jurisprudence uses the scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of the living law to judge both legislation and the cases of positive law, so natural law jurisprudence uses the empirically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts to judge the goodness or badness of the living law." (214-5)

Do I even need to go over this? First, fact v. artifact. An artifact is an artificial fact, something made up, something not real. Second, we are supposed to get our second-order facts, the fake, artificial ones, looking closer like the first-order facts, the real ones. And a closely following third, first-order facts judge our second-order facts. The first-order facts provide the "cognitive standard for measuring goodness or badness." Cognitive standard? Again, doesn't Pirsig get rid of Kant's idea of a tribunal of pure practical reason sitting in judgement over us? Of an "is" imposing itself over our "oughts"?

I think Pirsig, in his better moments, does get rid of all those things. But I think Northrop works out fairly consistently what is required of an intuition/postulation distinction. Northrop is quite obviously trying to find that God's-eye point of view so we can find impartial criteria on which to judge other people and cultures. Pirsig says we can judge other cultures, but I hope to God there isn't any kind of notion of impartiality built in there. But I think that is exactly what is built into the intuition/postulation distinction. Things we gain by "intuition" are those things that everybody would gain in perfect symmetry, without variation.

Rocks may be such a thing, but are morals such a thing? This prima facie sense that we can get agreement on rocks and not on morals is what led to scientism. Northrop still has the sense of scientism in thinking that we can ultimately get morals to kow-tow the line. But pragmatists want to go the other direction and say that rocks aren't kow-towing any line and neither are morals. Its just the case that we can get agreement on rocks better than morals most of the time. That doesn't say anything about reality, that just means we're going to have to work hard to get people to start paying decent living wages and stop persecuting women. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time of Galileo and Newton to do to ethics and morals what they did to planets and rocks, but all that the attempts to do so have seemed to have shown us is that it wasn't, in fact, a good idea.

Pirsig, Ad Hominems, and the Three Rhetorical Archetypes

If you've spent any amount of time at moq.org's discussion group, you'll quickly become familiar with various styles of argumentative engagement. One of the topics that comes and goes on the MD is exactly that: how should we compose ourselves? And the double meaning in "compose" means a lot more than most think. Some people think that it doesn't matter, that all that matters is the truth of what you are saying. It doesn't matter if you wrap it in pretty or nice words, it only matters if its right or not. Of course, almost universally, the people who think this way are the ones who use arguments like battering rams. Often the topic comes to the status of the ad hominem argument. Often, those who use arguments like battering rams feel perfectly comfortable with ad hominems. These kinds of people often enjoy the battle for the sake of battle--and they really enjoy winning.

But--who doesn't enjoy winning? And nobody lasts long in philosophy these days if they don't enjoy the art and form of argumentative discourse, if the don't enjoy the battle, the engagement. But that still doesn't address the question of how we should compose ourselves, or the status of ad hominem arguments. Ad hominems are supposedly outside the bounds of rational argumentation. But we find them everywhere, both in the MD and abroad. They are, after all, effective. So what's wrong with them and who would use them?

I once said to someone on the MD that there were two main positions in favor of ad hominem attacks in philosophy: Socrates/Rousseau and Nietzsche. Socrates and Rousseau both thought that the Truth was out there and that we had a duty to speak the Truth no matter who feelings it hurt. Socrates is famous for making fun of his philosophical opponents, twisting them up in words, and Rousseau for being the great, paranoid Parisian pariah who never quite fit into salon life because he didn't think much of decorum or kind of dry wit Voltaire prided himself on. Nietzsche thought that a philosophical position was a reflection of a person. Before Wittgenstein suggested that philosophy was a therapeutic enterprise and around the same time as Pierce (stealing from Alexander Bain) suggested that thought was a habit of action, Nietzsche ran the two suggestions together. He thought it was okay to attack a person in order to get to their philosophy because the two were basically interchangeable.

This isn't quite right, though. It doesn't quite cut to the philosophical thick of it, for I think there might be something interesting philosophically about it. The first thing to realize is that Pirsig (philosophically) sides with Nietzsche. When Pirsig suggests that we are static patterns, rather than having static patterns, he's suggesting that attacks on philosophical positions are attacks on the person, at least a particular part of the person. Not every part of the web of static patterns that make up our "self" effects every other part. Many philosophical beliefs don't effect our other, more day-to-day beliefs. But they all, as a whole, make up who we are.

I've written several times over the years on the MD about this topic because various people over time have written that people who react violently to criticism are overreacting, usually because their egos are getting in the way. Most of the time, the ones who say this are the ones who use the vitriolic language to make their point. Something's not right. The thing is, egos are the whole thing. "Ego" is latin for "self". In Pirsig's vision of things, how could our egos not "get in the way" when our egos are the whole thing, the only thing, given the description of the self as a set of static patterns, including philosophical patterns. What they mean, of course, is inflated self-importance. Their claim is, "Hey, it doesn't matter how I say things. If you react poorly, it exposes you as an ego-manical lightweight." A very effective rhetorical ploy. But that still doesn't vindicate us acting vitriolically.

One reply to this line of argument is that in Pirsig's vision ego is the whole thing, but the object of the game is the Buddhist one of dissolving your "self". "There is no spoon" as the kid told Neo in The Matrix. So, goes this counter, when Pirsig climbs the mountain and describes one kind of climber as an "ego-climber," he isn't just talking about egotists, he's talking more generally about people who climb for their "self", people who haven't dissolved their "self" as the Buddhists say is a prerequisite for enlightenment. In this vision of Pirsig's philosophy, our egos do get in the way, but they can be gotten rid of by dissolving them. I think this vision involves the kind of seperation of ideas from people that I'm suggesting is counter to Pirsig. But the practical up-shot of this Buddhist dissolution is that, once we see that "there is no self," we can just sit around and talk about which ideas are the best ones. No one takes offense because there is no "one".

I don't think this quite works and I think it does a poor job of accounting for real life (which is rarely something you'll hear me say about a philosophical position, but when you start talking about real life deployments like "Your ego is getting in the way!", you start descending to an area where it makes sense to say). The philosophical problem with the above account is that, also in Pirsig's vision, intellectual patterns (or "ideas") don't hang around by themselves. They sit on top of social on top of biological on top of inorganic patterns. In other words, we can't seperate the patterns from the person--the practical up-shot is impossible because the patterns to be dissolved are the person. Any practical up-shot to Buddhist dissolution is more like death. The return counter is that the dissolution of the self is the Dynamic viewpoint. We don't actually "dissolve" ourselves, they're just two viewpoints, Dynamic and static. From a Dynamic viewpoint there is no self, so debating ideas is no rub against ourselves. It is only from a static viewpoint that one's ego might get in the way. My counter-reply is that from a Dynamic viewpoint, there is no self, and if there is no self, there is no self to have opinions about ideas let alone ideas to have opinions about--the self is static intellectual patterns. The only way to judge is from the static standpoint.

The poor account of real life objection is actually the more interesting one, though. It's one that Pirsig gives us, actually. In the very beginning of ZMM, Pirsig talks about "care". We need to care about the things in our lives. That is excellence. On the face of it, "care" isn't a very Buddhist thing. Care is the flipside of desire, and we are supposed to get rid of that. Isn't that always what they're telling us in the movies, that the hardest thing for someone turning into a Buddhist is getting rid of their attachments--particularly to other people? Pirsig is obviously involved in his own re-visioning of Eastern philosophy, but I'm not sure he gets it quite right all the time. He gives us all the pieces, but I don't think he quite fits them all together. So, we are supposed to care about our ideas, which is really another way of saying, care about yourself. If you can just talk nonchalantly about an idea (which seems to be the practical up-shot of the impossible Dynamic viewpoint), then obviously you don't care about it much. It isn't central to who you think you are. You're like the young mechanics who tear into Pirsig's motorcycle. The object of philosophy is to dig around at who you conceive of yourself centrally. I'm not saying you should care equally about all parts of yourself, or all parts of philosophy, but the really hard philosophy, the philosophy really worth doing, is the stuff that you care about most. So, in the end, because we are our ideas, the choice we do get to make (since we can't choose the Dynamic viewpoint, we can't choose to not be us) is about how we present ourselves, what rhetorical tact we take. Pirsig taught us that rhetoric is the father of dialectic, not some irrelevant brother. There are three general archetypes (and three contemporary manifestations) I'd highlight: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

A Socrates claims that he has no knowledge. He confronts and confounds his discussion partners without ever taking a position himself, dancing away lightly when pushed. His air of superiority comes from the fact that the only thing he knows is that he does not know--and he can show that you don't either. The contemporary manifestation is the Buddha (particularly a fat, pudgy, laughing Buddha). The Buddha does know something: that the Knowledge everyone is after isn't possible. When pushed on that, the Buddha dances away because all of this is an illusion. So, while we can talk about consequences and ideas, we shouldn't get all that worked up about it because it is all a mirage.

A Plato is an earnest seeker of Truth. Knowledge has to be possible and the Plato will find it--and do whatever it takes. Truth is the only goal and if people get hurt, its their own fault for getting in the way. The Plato will often us a Socratic mask to batter his enemies, make them look like fools, befor elaborating on the Truth that he has found. The contemporary manifestation is the Nietzsche. The flip side of the Plato, the Nietzsche doesn't think there is any Truth or Knowledge at the end of any Yellow Brick Road--there are only People. Truth is a power play, and ridiculing your enemies is the same as ridiculing their ideas.

An Aristotle is an earnest seeker of Truth, but he is fair-minded and contemplative. Not everyone else is wrong, sometimes they are right, and the rightness of everyone's ideas must be integrated together before moving on. The Aristotle is a sifter, a diplomat who sees the best in everyone, who knows that there are different tools for different occasions. Sometimes people need to get pushed, but sometimes not. If we are all seeking Truth, then we're all on the same team, so let's work together, pool our resources and brain power, and for a research team to find the Truth. The contemporary manifestation is the Pirsig. The flip side of the Aristotle, much like the Nietzsche to the Plato, the Pirsig doesn't think there is any Truth or Knowledge--there are only People. But truth isn't a power play. We are all in some sense on the same side, not in the sense that we need to form research teams to hunt the Truth, but in the sense that we are all fellow-travelers, wandering our way through life. The Pirsig's goal is to live an excellent life. He cares about other people and wants to help them live excellently, too.

These are all rhetorical tacts and they are, I think, bound up in some way with our philosophical positions. To be a Pirsig, you are polite, yet playful, and rarely are you vitriolic. We are all in the same boat trying to make the best of our lives. What's the point of aggressively attacking fellow-travelers?