Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency

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I.	Madness
II.	Menus and Maps
III.	Tears
IV.	At a Loss for Words
V.	The Feeling of Reality
VI.	Madness and Directness as Contingency
VII.	Spiritual Exercises

Madness
I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality (think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those who are out of touch with reality. So who is right?

So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and thus occlude ourselves.

Menus and Maps
To do this, I will recur to two analogies used by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig’s most famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), did yeoman’s work in bridging typical Western divides between mysticism, art, science, and technology. Its success lay in combining a sophisticated genealogy of the modern scientific mind back to the Greek logos (in the vein Heidegger pioneered) with a down to earth mapping of that mind in the everyday lives of us passive technological consumers. Part of his success, in fact, lies in the fact that he is not a pioneer in any of the vast areas he rambles through, but rather in his vast powers of distillation, synthesis, and communication, using tropes that have floated through the public consciousness but now become welded together as part of a single thematic. As Emerson said, “the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.”[fn.2]

The two analogies I should like to use come from Pirsig’s second book, Lila. The first establishes for Pirsig the mystic sense of reality he seeks to do justice to, which is difficult because for mysticism “the fundamental nature of reality is outside language”—“Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food” (72). What is nice about this figure is that it illustrates how the menu can get between you and the food. It also illustrates nicely the linguistic feature of what is between us and reality, and hooks up with the anxiety Plato inaugurated between onoma (name) and eidos (form) in which the lack of a link between the two eventually led to Saussurean declarations that language is conventional and thus arbitrary (because the names are instituted by us and not by reality).

Pirsig shifts his hold on this structural motif by moving to a second analogy: the map. Pirsig’s purpose in Lila is to create an alternative metaphysical understanding of reality (a “Metaphysics of Quality,” or MoQ) to the dominant understanding, which he calls the “subject-object metaphysics” (SOM). One problem with SOM is that it can’t recognize itself as conventional, and thus cannot have an alternative. The SOM version of the history of inquiry is a gradual unfolding of the single, correct understanding of reality. Pirsig doesn’t want to avoid the notion of a “gradual unfolding,” but he does want to say that our metaphysical assumptions are due for an upgrade:

“saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but it’s every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Artic it’s the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.” (114-5)

Pirsig, following a conceptual move prepared for by Mill and James, implies rather that it is the utility of particular conventions that should weighed, instead of thinking of an omnivorous Convention that is whatever is correct. The latter leads to the unhelpful circular logic of “whatever is correct is the Convention; and the Convention is correct, so you must be wrong.” This short-circuits inquiry, for every trendsetter was wrong before they set the new right.

Tears
Pirsig’s alternative seeks to include both conventions and mystic reality (which we might define simply and antithetically as “not conventions”). It has to do so in something like this manner: “this conventional understanding of reality includes both an understanding of conventions and of not-conventions, but because understanding is conventional, it can only indicate obliquely where not-conventions are, i.e. at the breakages.”

This is where the power of the map analogy comes into its own, for the notion of a map moves to alleviate anxieties about arbitrariness by tying us to a surface. In Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality is the primordial, mystic reality from which all unfolds. After the unfolding begins, the locus of any individual object as this particular object is defined as a static pattern of Quality—a rock is an inorganic static pattern, a person an entire rainforest of patterns, at the top of which are our intellectual patterns of conventional understanding. These intellectual patterns are our map. The map qua map does not respond to its environment, the person does. And the person has a pencil, and can keep erasing and adding topographical marks to better negotiate the environment as the person sees fit given the person’s experience.

In the Kantian version of this analogy that Pirsig aims for, however, though we are reacting to the environment, our face is always planted in the map—our mind is conventional, constituted by/as intellectual patterns. So how does one account for the mystic reality, for not-conventions? Not-conventions, in Pirsig’s vocabulary, are Dynamic Quality. Following the old mystic saw about pointing at the moon, think of the mystic reality’s inclusion as the words “Dynamic Quality” written on the map with an arrow pointing at a tear in the map it is next to. This gives us a way of interpreting the diction of directness: when you “look” at Dynamic Quality, perceive the mystic reality, you are actually looking through the map at the ground below. This is one way of describing how Dynamic Quality helps one change the map to evolving circumstances: it describes how we must perceive a hole in which we can fill in new conventions. No tear, nothing new; nothing new, no evolution. On the analogy of maps, one central concern of Pirsig has been to write into our maps a notion of change, of openness, of the element that will always escape Platonic encapsulation (what I've previously called "Quality as an anti-essence").[fn.3] Pirsig wants to bring back down to earth the notion of mystic experience, and one way to do this is to begin the rapprochement at the level of what we all do everyday without thinking: occasionally modify our habits of interaction with the world according to a world that is not our habits.

If this seems to eliminate a lot of the spice of mysticism, I’d like to move back the other direction by considering two basic kinds of tear in the map: perceptual and conceptual. By “perceptual” I mean considerations of reaction based on a novel stimulus from our nonlinguistic environment. Western mysticism has filtered down to us in large part through the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, which is more or less analogous to Pirsig’s reaction to SOM. Consider the similarities between Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Pirsig’s apotheosis of nature and the landscape (Pirsig carries, in fact, on his trip in ZMM a copy of Walden). The modern notion of “aesthetic sublimity” developed by Edmund Burke and Kant came about at the same time as the rise of landscape art as a popular medium. As artisanal technological grasp increased, alongside the spread of democratic egalitarianism (which consequently led to the rise of a customary, polite society), anxieties over a mechanized, conventional life increased. In reaction, we began to conceive of “nature” as an alternative.[fn.4] Though this has had a long tradition in the West, encapsulated by Plato’s antithesis between phusis (nature) and nomos (convention) and Virgilian pastoral, our specifically modern notions are nearer in development. Nature was to be both loved and feared—the sublime, as Burke and Kant conceive it, is scary for the exact reason that it spills over our conventions. “Wild” nature can still kill you. And we can easily see what they mean. Consider the Grand Canyon: the common experience of it is as a “blowing away,” leaving a person “at a loss for words,” “stunned.” These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”[fn.5]

At a Loss for Words
We might call being “at a loss for words” the state of being unable to constitute linguistic meaning. Another kind of experience of the world aside from the perceptual, nonlinguistic variety is the conceptual or linguistic. If regular, conventional, routinized linguistic communication is based on the mutual, correct transference of “what I mean” to “I understand what you mean,” then we can understand a breakdown in communication as itself a kind of tear in the map of understanding. On the Eastern side, we might understand this as the purpose of a Zen koan, what the Greeks called an aporia (literally: “with no way out”). Socrates’ elenchus, his dialectical method of cross-examination, functioned by taking conventional meanings and driving a person using those meanings to their natural ends, where they crashed against walls of conflicting answers—and that was it. Our best accounts of Socrates are that he never moved beyond his professed ignorance, even if Plato did. Partly, no doubt, from his masterful and obsessive use of elenchus-directed-at-aporia, but partly too due to the mask of irony he always kept over him, one of the recurring descriptions of Socrates is of his strangeness: atopia, “being out of place.” Pierre Hadot says of Socrates, with adjectives every one of which link with what I’ve been talking about, “he is atopos, meaning strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, disturbing.” Hadot then quotes Theaetetus 149a: “I am utterly disturbing [atopos], and I create only perplexity [aporia].”[fn.6]

Socrates’ strangeness is distinctively in language. The tear in the fabric of the map that Socrates represents through irony is a linguistic tear—what has been described as his “silence” is a distinctive kind of linguistic silence, constituted only by the language that surrounds it.[fn.7] Alexander Nehamas heightens this tear when he emphasizes that the peculiarity of irony is that it does not simply “mean its opposite,” but rather more difficultly “not this.”[fn.8] Socrates will always remain a mystery because we will never know what he meant because he never came out from behind his mask. In fact, Nehamas argues that it is the irony—the mask that hides meaning—that produces his reality to us:

“Incomprehensible and opaque, to his author as well as to us, Plato’s early Socrates has acquired solidity and robustness few literary characters can match. That is why he appears more real than fictional. Plato’s implicit admission that he does not understand him, his amazing success in reproducing Socrates’ irony not only toward his interlocutors but also toward himself, is the mechanism that explains why generations of readers have inevitably returned to these texts, convinced that they provide a transparent window that opens directly onto the light of reality.”[fn.9]

The Feeling of Reality
How can this be? How can a conventional creation feel real? This conundrum for literary artists gives us a good window onto the general problem of conventions and mysticism. For “reality” becomes a creation. “Reality” becomes something people sense, and the pattern of that sense becomes the earmarks of a conventional understanding of reality. The gradual unfolding of a better conventional articulation of our sense of reality is partly what a metaphysics is for. As Nehamas points out, we have come to see that it is because Socrates is ultimately unclassifiable, which is to say something that will always escape classification, that we feel he is real, a “transparent window.” This gives us a sense of reality as unpredictable—Socrates lives like a real person because like them he will respond to you occasionally in ways you did not expect.

Frank Kermode charts something analogous to this in narrative fiction. Narrative fiction functions on plot, on the “transformation of mere successiveness” into a meaningful temporal unfolding. The latter is “our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future.”[fn.10] Mere chronicity, the mere succession of one damn thing after another (as the old bit about history goes), has no meaning: it is just one thing after another. What creates meaning is a tie between one thing happening and another, causal or otherwise. This creates a past, and as human life moves forward in time, we are always looking forward to another thing happening, and not just any thing (like the endless myriad of occurrences we don’t even register as happening to us everyday) but something we are tied to.

Plot, however, is something artists create: it is a convention. Human meaning, once again, becomes conventional. Kermode recognizes this pattern and calls chronicity, “mere successiveness,” our human sense of reality. As I said, the amount of things we don’t notice and tie are infinitely greater than that which we do, and those unnoticed parts are the overflow of reality over the borders of our conventions. As human culture has progressed, we’ve become more self-conscious about how we are creating the meaning, and this stage is “marked by an understanding that this play of consciousness over history, this plot making, may relieve us of time’s burden only by defying our sense of reality.”[fn.11] So our articulated conventions of meaning “will be humanly serviceable as models only if they pay adequate respect to what we think of as ‘real’ time, the chronicity of the waking moment.”[fn.12] At the same time, we cannot go too far the other way, and Kermode marks both with metaphors of madness. “Schizophrenics can lose contact with ‘real’ time, and undergo what has been called ‘a transformation of the present into eternity.’”[fn.13] This is the collapse of temporally demarcated moments into one single enduring moment, eternity. But too: “To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane.”[fn.14] To see no connections is to behave like no normal person, to function without meaning.[fn.15]

Madness and Directness as Contingency
Partly as a response to triumphalist stories of all kinds, especially of liberalism and its converse Marxism, Foucault theorized and attempted to write his intellectual histories in a way to emphasize the disjuncts, the radical ruptures, of history—to eliminate the connections other histories emphasized. In a Kuhnian vocabulary, this gave the sense of paradigms shifting from one to another for no internal reason (a misunderstanding once foisted on Kuhn that he always had difficulty rubbing away). In an Aristotelian vocabulary, it reinjected what were seemingly accidental features of the essence of a subject (like the history of psychiatry or jails) and showed how they played a live role in their constitution and evolution. In Rorty’s jargon, Foucault emphasized the contingency of events on vast vicissitudes that are only uncovered by the use of a particular vocabulary—and now, after years of recorded history, we can see quite clearly how these particular vocabularies come and go and uncover and recover (both senses) new and old things. Rorty once said that Foucault gives you “a kind of know-how, a way of looking askance and obliquely at contemporary institutions and practices.”[fn.16]

If we put together Kermode’s sense of “mere successiveness” as a kind of madness with this sense of contingency, I think we have a philosophical map for what directness is in the map analogy. What is often qualified as “brute” or “sheer” contingency is the impress of the unclassifiable—you have never encountered it before, but you must encounter it. A vocabulary, on the Kantian version of the map analogy, plots (topographically and in Kermode’s narrative sense) what you see, what you are aware of, but moments of evolution are moments when the map breaks down, when something tears itself through the map unavoidably into your sight.

All of this emphasis on the metaphor of vision will make many post-Heideggerians suspicious (a well-earned suspicion). If we shift from the mode of considering both perceptual and conceptual rifts in a vocabulary (in which it makes perfect sense to say that the sight of the Grand Canyon startles you), we can consider Rorty’s way of describing conceptual contingency: metaphor. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty famously follows Shelley in saying that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”[fn.17] Rorty expands this notion of poet (Greek for “maker”) to include any “person who uses words as they have never before been used.”[fn.18] This allows him to follow Nietzsche in seeing intellectual history as “the history of metaphor.”[fn.19] So—what is a metaphor? Rorty here follows Davidson in describing metaphor as sheer noise—complete meaninglessness.[fn.20] Pure noise is sheer contingency, a linguistically unclassifiable experience. You can talk about noises, of course, but they don’t mean anything in the sense that you can’t talk with noise. However: talking about the noises, and increasingly with them—as in using them for particular purposes—crushes the metaphor under the weight of intelligibility, thus eventually making it a “dead metaphor” (like the foot of a mountain or the mouth of a river or the purity of a soul). Metaphors, like irony, are linguistic silences, tears in the fabric of meaning, dynamic introductions into a static topography. In terms of our map analogy, the death of the metaphor is the sewing up of the tear in our map, the dynamic, new classification used to pattern our experience.

There’s a sense, then, in which we’ve now classified the mystic tear in reality, or in Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality. But what kind of classification is this? I called Quality an anti-essence before, and even in the limited Aristotelian sense in which we can still get mileage out of referring to irrelevant accidents, Quality is still an anti-essence: the sense of directness mystics are talking about is that sense in which your sense of relevance changes, in which you notice that which you had previously been blind to. Quality, in another way, is a pure metaphor: so new that it startles, but always just that—the new that startles, the new that calls for attention. If we have a handle on the reality the mystics are concerned about, it is only in the sense of knowing that it is out there, potentially just around the corner, waiting to leap out at us.

Spiritual Exercises
This leads me to the function of mystic practices, which include such sentential attitudes as Zen koans. These practices are what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” Hadot, in turn, links the notion of a spiritual exercise to the Greek Christian term askēsis, which means in that context (in Harold Bloom’s version) “self-purgation” or (in Hadot’s) “self-transformation.”[fn.21] In Bloom’s ratios of poetic anxiety-management, an askēsis is the willed curtailment of oneself. One does this, as a poet (always remembering Rorty’s widened understanding), to avoid simply being the repetition of a previous, powerful poet. This, I believe, is the same basic premise of what Eastern traditions call “beginner's mind.”[fn.22] If we are thrown into the world and socialized, then one way to understand the process of individualizing ourselves to break free of the happenstance education we received is to empty ourselves of that which we’ve learned.

If we think of a literal, perspicuous sentence—a sentence that has a “clear meaning”—as having an inferential path from this particular sentence to another (from the first sentence to its meaning, a second sentence), then we can think of poetic metaphor as a moment of dynamic self-creation, a moment in which all of your education fails you and you are allowed/forced to supply something for yourself. For the sentence “love is a battlefield” has no single clear meaning—many paths are available. And even more, “blue is a tree”—what on earth could that mean? The purpose of a mantra in meditation is to help clear your mind, to eliminate it, by saying a phrase over and over until it loses meaning, until what used to be sounds that had meaning become pure sounds, phonemes qua phonemes, not phonemes qua words. And in that moment, when it loses all public meaning, it attains total private meaning for you and you alone, a completely inarticulate meaning lost the moment you turn to articulate it. The practice of attaining inarticulate meanings is thus a purely private exercise—or rather, an exercise of achieving pure privacy. The public benefit of such inarticulate meanings are not the same as those meanings we get from such sentences as “God is Love” or “America is Freedom,” for an inarticulate meaning is nontransferable. Its only public benefit is on the life of the person as a whole. The notion of “inarticulate meaning” is about as close as we are going to get to a meaningful notion of ineffability, which when push comes to shove is the last conceptual bastion of the mystic notion of reality.

Endnotes

[1]E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 70-75—and the whole chapter, “The Blessings of Madness,” generally—is invaluable on the Greeks.

[2]Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series

[3]See "Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston," particularly para. 6-8. For "Platonic encapsulation," see ZMM, 388. For an early use in an exposition of a couple Rorty essays, where I articulate some qualms I had about Pirsig's position, see "Hediegger, Dewey, Pirsig" (I'm not sure I still have these qualms). See also my "Introduction to Pirsig" for a short exposition of what I take to be his philosophical fundamentals (in terms of theses he holds, at least).

[4]This summary discussion is indebted to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. In particular, on landscape painting see 88-90 and his discussion of Tench Coxe that builds up to his emblematic discussion of Carlyle’s disgust with mechanism 162-80.

[5]Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. This famous passage that Rorty popularized as “breaking the crust of convention” occurs at the end of his chapter, “Search for the Great Community,” in describing the place of the artist in the community.

[6]Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 30. See also his Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158. John McDowell translates this as “What they do say is that I’m very odd, and that I make people feel difficulties.” Cornford as: “the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.”

[7]Stanley Fish argues in an analogous way about freedom of speech and first amendment law in the eponymous essay in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Part of Fish’s point is that if silence (i.e., the mystic reality for our purposes) is surrounded by intelligibility, then unintelligibility/silence surrounds intelligibility: “Without restriction, without an inbuilt sense of what it would be meaningless to say or wrong to say, there could be no assertion and no reason for asserting it. The exception to unregulated expression is not a negative restriction but a positive hollowing out of value—we are for this, which means we are against that—in relation to which meaningful assertion can then occur. It is in reference to that value—constituted as all values are by an act of exclusion—that some forms of speech will be heard as (quite literally) intolerable” (103-4). Compare this flip-flop perspective on meaning and unintelligibility to my description of Dynamic Quality as a tear in the map and Pirsig’s picture of Dynamic Quality as surrounding the static patterns in his SODV,13.

[8]The first three chapters of Nehamas’s brilliant The Art of Living are about the different kinds of irony at work in the Platonic dialogues, but see especially on this particular kind 52-7.

[9]Nehamas, The Art of Living, 91. When Harold Bloom discusses the aesthetic power of particular characters he describes them in the same kind of way, as remaining hidden from their authors, which like Nehamas is what then makes them appear more real, as living, breathing personalities than other kinds of characters. The common denominator is that the creation cannot be reduced to this or that description, something always escapes, is unclassifiable. The ability to represent the unrepresentable is the ultimate task, on a Bloomian aesthetics, of every artist—once a culture has learned how to encapsulate a figure or a text it becomes a “period piece.” This is why Bloom argues, for example, that Shakespeare is our mind and that he has not found his “reader”: to be the mind is to do the reading, and to “read” in this sense would be to reduce and thus to kill what was living and irreducible.

[10]Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 46

[11]Kermode, 57

[12]Kermode, 54

[13]Kermode, 55

[14]Kermode, 57

[15]I would go further and argue that, for all practical purposes, the notion of continued "pure immediacy" is both a feeling of eternity and "mere successiveness." This is too large a subject to wade into, but see my discussion of Wyndham Lewis in "Lewis and Ulysses" about what I call "fish-blink" time. See too my discussion of Jameson in "Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia" for another metaphorical use of schizophrenia and the linked notions of intelligibility and unintelligibility.

[16]Rorty, “Reply to Jacques Bouveresse” in ed. Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, 149

[17]From the close of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.” Rorty does not explicitly refer to Shelley in this regard in CIS, but it was undoubtedly on his mind and became an explicit invocation in his writings at the end of his life.

[18]Rorty, CIS, 28

[19]Rorty, CIS, 16. The allusion to Nietzsche is of course to his famous passage about truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” (Portable Nietzsche, 46).

[20]For the Davidsonian account of metaphor, see CIS 18-9 and the longer defense in “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” in ORT.

[21]See his essay “Spiritual Exercises” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, particularly 82. See also the chapter “Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse” in his What Is Ancient Philosophy? If we were to embark on an attempt to distinguish between theoretical exercises and spiritual exercises (such that we take on Nehamas’s note that philosophy is a way of life that includes the having of theoretical theses—see The Art of Living, 1-6), we will want to take note of Hadot’s suggestion that physics, for the Greeks, was a spiritual exercise and not an attempt for greater control (even predictive) over nature. This is one issue that animates Hans Blumenberg’s attempt to demarcate the ancient Greek from the medieval, and thence the modern. See especially his discussion of Epicurus in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 145-79.

[22]See ZMM, 291-3.

Are There Bad Questions?

Richard Rorty spent the last ten years of his life redacting some of his more controversial rhetorical strategies, which included endlessly apologizing for hyperbole. One of his favorite strategies was to say that there were bad questions: to pursue a certain line of thought was to put yourself on the path to a conversational cul-de-sac, ending in aporia, a seeming inability to get anybody to agree to an answer. This inability to find criteria that you could get people to agree on to explain what a good answer would look like was the tell-tale sign of a bad question. The “bad question” approach to philosophical disagreement is hiding in his earliest writing, but began to truly flower when Rorty first formulated the groundplan for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1970 with “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” became solidified in that book, and most famously codified in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. In that intro, the bad-question approach becomes entwined with another strategy Rorty came to embrace: the I-don’t-have-a-theory approach. “[The pragmatist theory of truth] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about” (CP xiii).

The ironic self-contradiction has always been plain to people, though most who have taken to pointing it out leave out the irony and what it means: the pragmatist theory of truth is one about why we won’t have an interesting theory about truth. That’s important, though I’m not sure Rorty always understood quite how important. For a page later he says, famously:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the Truth or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. (CP xiv)

This “I have no theory” approach gets broadened into “and neither arguments nor theses,” as when he said in the late-70s, “Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses” (CP 93). This eventually turns into his claim that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity contains no arguments (evidence to the contrary). The interrelationship between what Rorty means by “theory,” “argument,” and “thesis” at any given moment can be parsed, and I think it would show that it depends on which direction he’s facing—whether towards Platonists, who think we must have a theory, or towards pragmatists, who think they are optional. This can be a complicated needle to thread (principally because it involves the fact that people have, e.g., selves though having a theory or thesis about that fact is optional), but to make the first pass in knitting the row, I would point out that Rorty doesn’t mention who finds the essence of Force or definition of “number” interesting. Because I certainly don’t. There are two different audiences for “number” and then “truth.” In the former case, the audience is likely mathematicians. In the latter case, Rorty’s audience is professional philosophers. And it is those who disagree with how interesting results about truth have been. So what does Rorty mean be “interesting”?

Rorty usually means by “interesting” in these contexts “discernable effect on people’s lives.” In the case of numbers, though non-mathematicians could care less, the fact that mathematics professors do and keep producing results that pan out into the warp of society means that the woof of what they do has interest. This is not the case with “truth” and “good” as of yet, for Rorty’s claim is that inquiry into Truth has not helped people produce more true statements. And by and large (emphasis on the “large”) this is true. The trouble is that Rorty has to admit that for philosophers, inquiry into Truth has helped them produce more true statements—for example, Davidson’s claim that “most of our beliefs are true.” This, as Rorty admits, is interesting and could not have been done without the context of logical positivism and their unacknowledged Platonic goals.

Being forced to face this equivocation in his rhetorical stances, Rorty began to finally admit that he does have theses, or theories, or pictures, of this or that philosophical-looking kind of object (“the self” or “reality” or “experience” or “language”). This means a disentangling of the bad-question approach and no-theory approach. “I have no theory” is really code for “you are going to be really disappointed when I tell you what it is…,” and this because of the Platonic expectations typically carried by people asking for one. But this means that “bad question” isn’t inherent, but rather a conversational stability produced by the instability of criteria for what counts as a good answer. Rorty can answer the question of what truth is, but because of the wildly ranging differences of opinion over what it is good for, it will seem a bad answer to somebody. The light in which Rorty’s answer, or anybody’s, can appear good is a stipulative light—“if for the moment we agree on X, Y, and Z, then this theory will satisfy it.” Rorty’s stipulation on truth has been the stipulation that truth, properly speaking (which is to say “for the occasion of my theory”), is a semantic and radically non-epistemic concept. That is not the only way we use the word “true,” but when push comes to shove, we should stop trying to incorporate those uses, e.g. the endorsing use, into our theory of truth because doing so is what leads to bad questions that we can’t seem to answer, or would have any practical consequences even if we could (like how we know when “snow is white” corresponds to the fact that snow is white). When Rorty would say, “That’s a bad question we shouldn’t ask,” he was suggesting there might be other, more profitable questions to discuss. And when Rorty gave an answer to the bad question, e.g. a disquotational theory of truth, it was intended shut down avenues of thought that have proven interminable cul-de-sacs (hence the epithet for disquotationalists of “deflationists” and, more generally on Platonic questions, “quietists”).

Rorty had begun sorting out these equivocations and changes in stances in his last ten years, but in Rorty’s reply to Jaroslav Peregrin in his installment to the Living Library of Philosophers, Rorty says most clearly what I’ve articulated above (and what produced the impetus to further articulate this point on the scope of his writing):

I should also have been careful not to invoke Wittgenstein’s contrast between “advancing theses” and “practicing therapy.” Doing the former now seems to me a perfectly legitimate, and often useful, therapeutic technique. Peregrin cites Wittgenstein’s claim that he was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another.” He says that this would be a good description of my preferred mode of philosophical activity. I am happy to accept the suggestion, but less happy about this suggestion that “neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty thinks that it is possible to give a theory answering ‘philosophical questions’.”

Consider Davidson’s thesis that most of our beliefs must be true, or Brandom’s inferentialist theory about the origin of singular terms. Such theses and theories provide answers to questions like, “Well, what will we say about the relation between language and nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar ‘realist’ account?” By providing the pragmatist with such answers, they facilitate his propagandizing efforts. Not everybody feels it necessary to pose such questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be able to gratify her. Though sometimes it works best to say, “that’s a bad question, one that we pragmatists don’t ask,” with some interlocutors it is more effective to reply, “here’s an answer to that question, since you insist on asking it.” (The Philosophy of Richard Rorty 247-8)

If I had to speculate on what most produced this change in Rorty, I would have to say it was the work of his student, Robert Brandom. Rorty grew up, philosophically speaking, on Davidson, who was at Princeton for a time in the late 60s. Rorty spent much of the 60s retooling as an analytic philosopher, which meant falling in love with Sellars and becoming acquainted with Davidson’s cast of mind. Rorty was left to his own devices after Davidson left, and the formative 70s—when Rorty was drawing out the consequences of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson—were also the years Brandom was at Princeton, ’72-’77.

Rorty’s fall from analytic-grace was initially a souring with “system,” with the hopes of pay-off attending all the work that must be done to create a system. Rorty was first and foremost a voracious reader, and he loved reading systems in the hopes there has a hidden source of power in them (he wrote his master’s thesis and dissertation on Whitehead). In the end, I think Rorty liked reading too much—sitting at a desk, pouring energy into getting the system just right, didn’t seem appealing because it took him out of the library stacks too long (or away from the forests where he loved bird-watching). And combine this with his reading of so many systems, whether Kant’s or Hegel’s or Carnap’s or Whitehead’s (or Dewey’s, for that matter), all claiming to have the hiddern power, and all of them contradicting each other, and you have a recipe for someone with a pretty good self-justification for not writing a system himself. Rorty’s disagreement with Davidson throughout his career pretty much amounts to the fact that Davidson always wanted to write a system, but never got around to it—so Rorty would always wonder about the aspiration, since the work he was doing in essays was so good itself. Brandom, however, is a brilliant systematizer, and has done in Making It Explicit what Davidson was never able to do and Rorty never thought worth doing. From the time of that book's publication in 1994, you can see a slow slide in Rorty’s responses to Brandom, beginning with a queasy reaction to his rehabilitiation of “representation” to a final “I still don’t think regular people need a system, but if you want one, get a load of this…totally worth it.”

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Addendum on Pirsig

What does Pirsig think about bad questions and systems?

I think it’s important to notice the course of events and presentation. In ZMM, Pirsig describes the S/O Dilemma as an aporia created by a previous agreement on the terms of debate. Pirsig later describes “truth traps,” on the analogy of the “old South Indian Monkey Trap”—which is similar to Chinese finger-cuffs—and interprets the Japenese word “mu” as “unask the question.”

And then ZMM ends (there’s a chance I might be forgetting something). The trick is that Pirsig offers a few half-hearted stabs at sysematizing his thoughts about Quality (don’t forget the diagram in Ch. 20), but the point of the story doesn’t appear to be a replacement system, but rather the resurrection of Phaedrus after chasing down the ghost of reason to Plato. When we move to Lila, I think we should pay close attention to how the Metaphysics of Quality is introduced. Pirsig quickly presents us with the quandry of SOM, a sort of recapitulation of the point of ZMM, and begins to describe his metaphysical answers. What happens then is that Rigel intercedes and objects (Ch. 6). Pirsig then bemoans his answers given, and the problem turns out to be a pernicious understanding of virtue—Pirsig let Rigel and the Victorians decide the terms of debate (the definition of the terms) and so lost before the fight even began.

The Metaphysics of Quality takes flight after a conversational difficulty. Pirsig writes that Phaedrus “realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change” (Lila 123, Ch. 9). Why? Because “he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality” (124), he’d already said something positive rather than sticking to the via negativa that mystics, particularly in the West, typically force themselves to stick to, a route that after Hegel (and particularly Adorno) became more and more prominent in non-theological metaphysics, too. Pirsig realizes that he has to say something, even that saying things are good. And this is where the presentation is interesting. The two paragraphs run like this:

By even using the term “Quality” he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term “Quality” set up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unaswered. Even the name, “Quality,” was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were “Quality” meants weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phaedrus had no answers.

. . . [ellipsis Pirsig’s] That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phaedrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phaedrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit. (124)

Pirsig considers metaphysics to be a good thing to do because it gives you an answer to people like Rigel, people who insist on certain questions. The analogy with Catholic practices in particular highlights what Pirsig has in mind. “Catechism” is from Greek roots that mean an “indoctrination.” This has bad connotations to our ears now, as does the other name Catholics have for it: dogma. But all Pirsig is highlighting is how what he is lacking is a systematic way to keep things straight in his line of thought, and how to answer people who press him.

Pirsig immediately goes on to analogize metaphysics with chess, and writes this:

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon. (125)

I’m not sure Pirsig ever comments further on the purpose of this paragraph. But we might notice that Pirsig’s subsumption of “reasonable” to “good” from ZMM should still be in effect, which may explain why “illogic” does not always hold sway. And further, we might imagine that Pirsig did have his Catechism of Quality at the ready when Rigel comes calling—would Rigel have been blown away? Should he have? There is no indication in these early pages, and particularly with the above paragraph, that Pirsig believes that had Phaedrus the MoQ ready to snap, it would have changed Rigel’s mind. It would have, rather, continued the conversation (until, perhaps, Rigel tired out first). Consider, too, the fact that when Rigel returns at the close, there’s no indication that any of Phaedrus’ “answers” are what lead Rigel to come back (for more on this curious aspect see my “Prospectus”).

What sometimes gets lost in metaphysical system-building is the person doing the building, and what the building is for. For Pirsig, there is a strong indication that metaphysics is for keeping yourself straight in conversation—consider Pirsig’s introduction to Lila’s Child where he picks up the chess metaphor again and says that “real chess is the game you play with your neighors. Real chess is ‘muddling through.’ Real chess is the triumph of mental organization over complex experience. And so is real philosophy” (viii). “Muddling through” is one of Dewey’s favorite images, one that Rorty loved to promote. Between Pirsig’s lament about getting broad-sided by Rigel and the Catechism of Quality, there’s Pirsig’s chapter on metaphysical platypi—the outcome of previously made cuts in the metaphysical firmament, previously made choices about which questions deserve answers. Pirsig says early in that chapter that “saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false” (Lila 115, Ch. 8). Both are used, are determined better or worse, relative to the purpose with which you are using them. The figure standing there weighing the options between the two alternatives is the philosopher, who sometimes goes missing in the attempt to limn the structure of reality.

And if someone insists on asking whether Quality is in the subject or object? Just say, “both—the object’s made out of inorganic, and maybe biological static patterns of Quality, and for the subject just tack on some intellectual and/or social static patterns of Quality.” And then you have your answer to a bad question. The questions won’t stop, but do they ever?

What Is Metaphysics?

Here are two definitions of metaphysics:

1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious and in some cases modify (this activity is also known in some circles as “philosophy”).

2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this activity is also sometimes known in some circles as “Platonism,” and in a few circles the acronymic “SOM”).

The above are designed for one purpose—to elaborate my position on “metaphysics,” which is Janus-faced because I have two philosophical parents. Mom (Pirsig) likes the word “metaphysics” and uses it freely to describe his philosophy. Dad (Rorty) doesn’t like the word “metaphysics,” generally because it causes headaches, and occasionally uses it to describe what he’s critiquing. What to do?

Well, it turns out that if you look closely, they are generally using two different definitions of what “metaphysics” is. With these two definitions we can split philosophers up into four groups:

A) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (1).
B) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (2).
C) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (1).
D) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (2).

Exemplars of each type:

A) Pirsig
B) Logical postivists
C) Rorty
D) Plato

The first side of the classifications, who likes which definition, is intended to display which definition of “metaphysics” people are wont to use when they are doing philosophy. The second, who does which, is intended to display—whether or not they understand themselves as doing so—which kind of metaphysics they were enacting. Hence: Pirsig likes and does the first definition and Rorty likes the second, but does the first. This happens because people who like the second definition fall into two categories: 1) unabashed Platonists/SOMists who fight against pragmatists/Pirsigians (D, above) and 2) pragmatists/Pirsigians who use “metaphysics” as the handle on which to grasp their enemy, Platonists/SOMists (C, above). Pirsig doesn’t use the word for that purpose, but I understand his purpose and so don’t get too upset what he uses the word neutrally and Rorty uses it pejoratively. (Also note the logical positivists, who thought they’d swept aside metaphysics, but were later shown to be enacting Plato’s involutions just as assuredly.)

At any rate, classifying stuff, slicing and dicing data, can be fun, but it must always be for some purpose—there is no neutrally motivated cut of the analytic knife (“neutral motivation” being in this context something of an oxymoron). Mine was to move Pirsig and Rorty together, but some questions arise as too how close that can be, and to how useful metaphysics(1) is in capturing the field of metaphysicians who aren’t Platonists. For, surely, metaphysics isn’t a turn inward, a personal investigation as metaphysics(1) seems to imply, but rather is about reality, as metaphysics(2) says. This objector may be quite noncommittal about Platonism, but they are interested in displaying the basic features of reality, not our minds or interpretive structure (or some other clever arrangement of words conveying the same thing). They are interested in creating a linguistic model of reality, much as physics creates a mathematical model of reality. These take seriously the etymological roots of “metaphysics,” noting that, alright, physics can do its thing, but metaphysicians still have to come in and mop up by noting, roughly, what makes physics possible—the structure of reality that escapes the mathematical models of physics.

This thought still seems to run in two different directions at once: in “mopping up,” does the metaphysician describe the basic structure of reality lurking behind the math, or do they describe the interrelation between physics and the rest of the world, or even, the interrelation between the disciplines that describe the world (which includes such “disciplines” as our regular effort at getting by day to day, i.e. “common sense”). After all, isn’t what escapes physics the stuff that chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc., do? Isn’t that why other disciplines got set up in the first place?

The fear of floating down the path laid out by metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward to the way that we, I, understand my relation to the world? Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, my relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the question of how our understanding relates to reality, and the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we understand it)?

The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises with the snide comment: “You seem to want to talk about how we talk about reality, but I want to talk about reality.” This is often punctuated by referencing, for example, the difference between tigers and talking about tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it be better to know about tigers, rather than how National Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how National Geographic and other professionals talk about tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a lot about the activities of zoologists without learning anything about what they study?

What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch with reality because we are focused on something other than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup called “Reality.” There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the other person believed about reality, then the communication would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more systematic anomalies might be taken to be different languages, with attendant “difficulties in translation” for persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between people might be labeled “insanity” and tremendous discontinuity is likely to be referred to as “noise.”

This is the conclusion that was reached by Donald Davidson in his work on philosophy of language, and its coordination with communication and truth. Davidson concluded that most of anyone’s beliefs must be true for communication to work—though that still leaves us in the dark about which ones are the true ones, let alone the problem of figuring out, with significant mismeasure, which person the crazy one. But Davidson’s conclusion does help dispel the Cartesian fear of solipsism—as long as communication works, we have as much certainty as we need that there is not only an External World, but also Other Minds.

So: we can investigate our understanding of reality and not fear subjectivism because it is our understanding we are investigating, most of our beliefs having been engendered by the community we grew up in, and we need not fear losing our grip on reality because this community’s understanding is its reality, in the sense, a very Darwinian one, that an understanding of the world that is around after all this time is one that works, and one that works must be one that largely teaches people how the world is.

A non-Platonist may still have some objection to metaphysics(1). After all, is not Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality more appropriately seen as a model of reality and not simply an understanding through which we see the world? Isn’t it a splicing of reality with Phædrus’ analytic knife, not just a splicing of our assumptions? The feeling behind this objection is that, yeah, investigating the way we individuals function in the world is good, but we also need an ontology, an investigation into how reality is apart from us. “You can show how reality, on the one side, and our experience of reality, on the other, must converge all you want, I think you can still talk about both of them separately and doing so will give us slightly different pieces of knowledge of the world.”

Ontology, study of the reality half of the experience/reality equation, is roughly the study of being, and it is often seen as the investigation into different kinds of being, or existence. Reading a random selection of writings on this topic over the course of the last 2,500 years will get you, not just different answers, but different kinds of answers. The metaphysical imagination has, however, been reigned in over the years, as some of its early speculations, say, in suggesting that water or fire was the root of all existence, were a little wild, indeed. In trying to circumvent all the speculative, metaphysical nonsense of preceding generations, Kant said that, rather than explain what kinds of existence there were (rather more poorly than other disciplines like the New Science), philosophy needed to show what was needed for existence to exist: what are the underpinnings, the structure that shapes the way this house exists?

There are a few problems with transcendental philosophy, but the broad thought—what has to exist for us to be able to do all of the things we are doing—is largely something that can, and should, be done. There is an infinite regress problem that arises, though, if you aren’t careful: unless a Pirsigian, for instance, is going to posit a non-physical kind of existence—which is a dangerous proposition—when somebody asks you what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, one of the few routes people feel comfortable anymore with is “it has the existence of a metaphysical proposition,” i.e. it’s something stated by people (which is Pirsig’s answer with “Western ghosts”). This, it is true, creates a circle that some people think is damaging—people need to exist for metaphysics to exist, which needs to exist for physics to exist, which needs to exist for people to exist—but pragmatists think that the circle becomes damaging and silly in equal measure: only by taking it too seriously. Part of what the word “universe” means is “that which would exist whether people do or not” and the only sense in which the universe is dependent on people is the sense in which “universe” is a word, and only people use words.

In the end, we are driven back to the Davidsonian outlook I described earlier: what we say about reality must converge with reality because there is no way we would keep saying these things if they weren’t useful, if they didn’t work, if they got reality drastically wrong. If what I said about the tiger got the tiger wrong, that way of speaking about tigers wouldn’t last. If I said, “tigers are cute and nice and love to play with me,” then I would likely get eaten upon meeting a tiger, and eventually everybody who believed that would get eaten, and thus nobody would be left thinking that about tigers. Forms of life, in Wittgenstein’s sense, evolve just as readily as biological life.

Some recalcitrant might still object, though, that just because a model of reality works doesn’t mean it is the right model, the correct model of reality. Shouldn’t we be searching for this model? Isn’t that what physics does? Since physics searches for the correct model of physical reality, shouldn’t metaphysics search for the correct model of reality in general?

The motivation behind “metaphysics,” under all definitions, but in particular those who want something more reality driven than my potted definition of metaphysics(1), is that there is more to the world, reality, and life than science. We need models of reality that display what this “more” is. This is all well and good, but the analogy with what science still displays the two sides of metaphysics, Platonic and non-Platonic. If metaphysics, like physics, is both a proliferation of hypotheses, of models, of how reality works and a winnowing of better ones, and we are willing to say with Davidson that these models do tell us how reality is, this doesn’t mean that our better and better models get closer to how reality is actually apart from our descriptions, how it should correctly be modeled. Not just Pirsig’s youthful fear of infinitely proliferating theories gets the Platonist here: how does the scientist, or metaphysician, know that he’s found the correct model, as opposed to the best one so far?

The origin of metaphysics, we say following Aristotle, was in trying to explain how reality was, like “water” (Thales) or “fire” (Anaximander) or “One” (Parmenides). The Greeks started to offer models of how reality worked. As some of the cosmologists got better and better at explaining how the “stuff” of the world worked, Plato said grandly that they were merely Giants, and that we should instead hope to be Gods. Plato saw clearly the rising tide of what we now call “science” and staked out quickly that there is more to the world than what it can tell us.

The trouble with Platonism—Plato worked out through history—is that it reduced to, not a set of hypotheses, but a method with which to tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. And since philosophy—the original inquiry—kept spinning out different disciplines that worked out according to their own particular methods the difference between a good and a bad hypothesis, philosophy had to look for a job that it could do. Platonism, distinguished carefully from philosophy/metaphysics(1), settled on looking for the way to tell the difference between a hypothesis that worked (which is what a non-philosophy discipline will tell you) and a hypothesis that is correct—a certification procedure that has itself nothing to do with, say, what physics, psychology, or history does.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between Platonism and metaphysics(1). Metaphysics seeks to investigate our models of reality because they don’t always work the greatest. For instance, some philosophers have thought that Plato was wrong, that all we need are Giants, science, physics (call some of them "logical positivists"). We have learned, however, through experimentation and the testing of models, that Plato was probably right that there was more in the world than what science can describe. But the heart of a pragmatist philosophy of science is, roughly, “Of course, there’s more in this world than what science can describe because we still need more descriptions than scientific ones.” As long as there’s an audience for baseball, there will be a need for more than physics.

Platonism wants more, however. They want to know why and how these models are correct, as opposed to just the best ones available. This aim at correctness is what Pirsig and Rorty both want to deny. Pirsig's journey in ZMM was from the contemporary Subject/Object dilemma to the more deeply rooted problem of dialectic, “the parvenu.” SOM is paradigmatic of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, but it has first been infected by the larger problem of the Platonic search for basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings to reality-as-such, a search that, given the production of individual disciplines of inquiry into how stuff in reality works (physics, psychology, history, etc.), will naturally give way to the production of a method—the dialectic. This is Pirsig's enemy in ZMM, and it is an enemy that is multifaceted in intellectual history.

Some Pirsigians think that materialism is the pernicious enemy that Pirsig was fighting with his philosophy. They believe that the growth of science was the growth of SOM, and both were the growth of our alienation from technology and, ultimately, our world. There are subtle connections between science, technology, SOM and alienation, but I don’t think Pirsig ever quite reduced SOM to what science does—SOM is an add-on to an otherwise wonderful tool called “science.”

In my view, one very general way to recapitulate the movement of ZMM is 1) Pirsig got caught in problems in the philosophy of science: what is a scientific theory? His solution was to say that a theory is a ghost generated by our evaluation of reality. 2) Pirsig got caught on the horns of the S/O Dilemma: if we have an evaluative relationship to reality, is the value in the subject or in the object? Pirsig's solution was to wonder how everything got split into subject and objects in the first place. 3) Pirsig trails the source to Plato: Plato thought there was a method, dialectic, that could detect Truth wherever it was. Pirsig sided with the Sophists who thought that Truth was an interplay of opinions, i.e. evaluations, between people.

It is the movement from (2) to (3)—or rather, history’s movement from Plato to Galileo’s science—that Pirsig leaves relatively obscure, and it hasn’t helped interpretations of him. With regard to the question of how the activity of science and the philosophical outlook of SOM relate, I would distinguish between two modern manifestations of what I’ve been calling “Platonism”: 1) scientific materialism and 2) Kantian realism. The first is the idea that science is a) the only route to Truth and b) everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. The second is the idea that a) Truth needs a foundation and b) both the mind and the world can only exist because of the other.

The Platonic common denominator of both scientific materialism and Kantian realism are contained in the (a) clauses. I would suggest that the (a) clauses can safely be detached from the (b) clauses, and that doing so eliminates the pernicious enemy Pirsig found in Plato and leaves us with two rather boring propositions. On the one hand, the first (b) clause: everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. Some may recoil, but I would pause and suggest that everything can be reduced to physical descriptions, but we also need more than just these physical descriptions to describe our world. (On reductionism generally, see my “Parable of the Reductionist”.) A metaphysical proposition can be reduced to the physical description of the breath leaving my lungs or the chemical properties of ink or the electrical properties of computer hardware, but doing so wouldn’t tell us anything about what the metaphysical proposition means and so we still would need metaphysical descriptions. The first (b) clause reduces to a bland physicalism which basically says, “Science is great, but we need more than physics to talk about what we want to talk about. Science isn’t the only Truth.” And the second (b) clause reduces to the tidy little transcendental circle I talked about earlier: people need to exist for language to exist, language needs to exist for physics to exist, physics needs to exist for people to exist.

I think the ultimate lesson to be drawn from this discussion is that it is difficult to answer the lead question: what is metaphysics? It is difficult because there have been many historical understandings of what the activity is and how it should be done. Any answer has to deal with a number of objections from slightly different understandings. The route with which I have dealt with the problem of what we are doing when we do philosophy/metaphysics is the route of finding a common enemy—it is a problem-oriented understanding of philosophical discourse. Every language has their own word for “tiger,” but somehow both the English and the French are able to deal with tigers—for the most part. Though I think there is an analogy between natural languages and the idiosyncratic philosophical jargons every particular philosopher develops in isolation from every other philosopher, I do not think everybody must be talking about the same exact thing. Davidson points towards this truth—most of our beliefs must be true, not all of them. This means that Cartesian skepticism is lame, but it does not mean that inquiry into better and better beliefs, better models of reality, must stop, or is pointless.

Philosophical discourse makes progress by assessing how individual jargons deal with the problems of reality. This problem-oriented understanding of philosophy and metaphysics allows us to see that, while Pirsig, Rorty, and Plato all talk differently, there are certain things that can be intertranslated well—and things that cannot. I have named a root that is untranslatable into the languages of Pirsig and Rorty—though they between them speak differently of it—Platonism. Seeing this root well, I think, is a precondition for understanding what more can and cannot be translated between the two, and this general process goes for philosophers generally.

Pirsig, the MoQ, and SOM

Note: This has been culled from moq.org Discussion Forum postings that first appeared beginning October 14th, 2002 under the same thread name. It represents an angle of criticism that has since receded in my thinking about Pirsig. I do not agree with everything here anymore, but there might still be some fruit to pick from this branch. My alteration process was to change phrasing if it was easy, but large scale things got left as is, even if no longer current.

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In the past (primarily in "Confessions of a Fallen Priest"), I've put forth a thesis that Pirsig can, and should at times, be seen as a Kantian philosopher. He can be seen following many of the same metaphysical moves that Kant made. On the surface, this is bad because Kant should be seen as one of the primary stakeholders in the Subject-Object Metaphysical Industry. This is, in that sense, a not-so-tiny indictment against Pirsig's view of the MoQ as repudiating SOM.

I must confess, in my first readings and exegeses of Pirsig, I was never very comfortable with what a subject-object metaphysics was supposed to be. It seemed to be a lot of things to a lot of people. I don't mention subject-object metaphysics very often in my early forum essays because, other than a very specific criticism of Sartre as using that splicing of reality, I'm not sure why so many things fall under the "evil of SOM." SOM for Pirsig is the heading that many of us (including Pirsig) throw the bad things we see being done. In this case, it is much like Derrida's "metaphysics of presence": they are what's been wrong with traditional philosophy as passed down to us from Plato. I prefer, to these broad signifiers, Dewey's "whole brood and nest of dualisms" which we inherited from Plato. I think that calling each dualism as we see them makes it easier to tackle them, even when they are tangled together.

I would like to sketch a short, simplistic narrative of the history of philosophy. It will be very short, but I hope it will contextualize my thoughts about Pirsig.

During the Pre-Socratic period of philosophy, many philosophers were embroiled in a debate about cosmology and other topics. These were the first philosophers and they tried to establish the immortal truth about these things. Thales wanted everything to be reduced to water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus flux, Anaxagoras nous, Pythagoras Number, etc. They argued and argued, but more and more hypotheses were being offered rather than any particular hypothesis zeroing in on truth.

Plato (who also represents Socrates) entered the scene and separated true knowledge from opinion. He established the dialectic as the method with which we could find the truth. With this sure path towards true knowledge, he divided Reality into two: the Realm of Ideas (or Forms) and the Realm of the Senses. This is the first systematic appearance of the appearance-reality distinction: the Realm of Ideas are real and are our foundation upon which we have true knowledge. Info we gain from the senses simply give us opinions about appearances, rather than penetrating to the truth. In the inflection I would like to give it, we can see the Realm of Ideas as being "out there" waiting to be discovered and the Realm of the Senses as something closer to us, something immediately sensed.

Fast-forward many years. Europe's intellectuals are embroiled in a skeptical crisis, quite reminiscent of the one that raged before Socrates and Plato. Descartes entered the scene and continued the Greek project of searching for a foundation for knowledge and truth, though he was one of the first to dispense with the Greek way of doing philosophy (i.e. following the direct footsteps of either Plato or Aristotle). The Rationalists and Empiricists of this time can be seen as trying to fill in the blanks of what this foundation is. The Rationalists said the foundation came from reason, but they had a hard time applying the "truths" they discovered to the world around us. The Empiricists said the foundation came from our senses. Locke and Berkeley, though, had God on their side and, essentially, this is what kept the world from falling apart. Hume, however, stepped up and said, no, we cannot have the certainty and foundation that the Greeks were looking for. It is not logical to infer universality from an empirical experience. Hume, in this light, is something of a proto-pragmatist.

Right after Hume finishes his attack on the possibility of a foundation, Kant famously steps in. Kant picks up the project to lay a foundation from which we can attain absolutely certain, true knowledge. For Kant, the real world is "out there." Kant makes an inner-outer distinction which is essentially the subject-object distinction. Objects are "out there" and when the subject represents the object correctly, then we have true knowledge. While Kant's arguments for absolute certainty are generally supposed to have failed, between Kant and the Empiricists, experience of a real world that is "out there" is solidified as our connection with Reality. Experience, in some sense, becomes our gateway to a foundation. This sets the stage for 20^th century realists, many of whom believe that science is the great excavator of Truth.

Parallel to this debate in professional philosophy was an increasing sense during the 18^th century that there were two tracks of life for humans: an inner, moral track and an outer, material track. The material world is "out there" and supplies us with food to eat. Morals, on the other hand, are felt in the heart, inside with our connection to God. We don't experience morals like rocks. That these two tracks were becoming increasingly divergent was also becoming more and more important and apparent. While science and economics helped us get we wanted on the material track, what would help us get what we wanted on the moral track? Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment helped solidify the new economics. The bourgeoisification of people made them more comfortable, eased their material concerns. But what would ease their moral concerns? Hume suggested that people would just gradually become more sophisticated and gradually turn their attentions to more "high-minded pleasures." Rousseau suggested that the sciences were corrupting and that we turn away from luxury and material things. Benjamin Constant emphasized the need for a moral education.

This is the ground upon which Pirsig entered. We have an outer track and an inner track and never the twain shall meet. Given this context, we can see that Pirsig’s solution was to move everything to the outer track. He made morals experiential. He saw that the outer track was where Reality was, where people placed great importance (be it in the metaphysical sense or economic sense), so he collapsed everything into Reality. Pirsig usurped the realist answer. By this token, the MoQ isn’t a kind of idealism at all—it’s a realist hybrid.

According to this reading, Pirsig believes he's repudiating subject-object metaphysics, but I find that he is still caught in it in the following way: he follows the Kantian inner-outer distinction, which leads people to interpret an appearance-reality distinction. Reality is still "out there." It’s just now, morals are "out there."

To support this reading, I would draw attention to the turning point in ZMM: Chapter 19, the subject-object dilemma. Pirsig is very correct in his diagnostic of the problem. In the Platonic tradition, there are two options: out there in the object, or in here in the subject. Pirsig goes on to give a pretty good description of what would happen to either of his answers: a demand for empirical verification or the charge of idealism. Pirsig's Gestalt switch, his Copernican revolution, is best seen as a redescription of what is being empirically verified, rather than falling into idealism.

One objection to this line is that Pirsig says, "he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn't reside in the material world. Then: he rejected the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn't reside merely in the mind. And finally: Phaedrus ... said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two." (240) This is Pirsig's definitive move away from SOM. The equivocation that I see is that when Pirsig describes our relation to Quality it is almost always, "When we experience Quality" or "Why does everybody see Quality differently?" Pirsig always uses language in which an ego (or subject) is experiencing reality (or object). There is still an inner-outer distinction in which reality is still "out there."

I don't think Pirsig sees this because he too hastily assumes that objective reality in SOM is considered to be material or matter. I don't think this is an assumption he should make. A realist doesn't assume that reality is corpuscularian, he simply assumes that it is "out there." This makes more sense, when we contrast the realist with the idealist who thinks that reality is "in here."

To add to my critique, I would draw attention to Chapter 5 and 6 of ZMM, the chapters in which Pirsig begins his description of the romantic-classic division. This division is, firstly, very Kantian. One of Kant's divisions was between intuition (romantic) and understanding (classic). When Pirsig describes "immediate surface impressions [as] essential for primary understanding," (75) Pirsig could be quoting straight out of the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, the classic mode of viewing things views itself as reality, and the romantic mode as appearance. You can hear the naïve scientist saying, "The atomic structure of the table is the real table, not your sense impressions of it." Pirsig wants to counter both the classic, square privileging of reality and the romantic privileging of appearance. In other words, Pirsig wants to counter SOM.

However, when we turn the classic-romantic lens back on the rudimentary metaphysical hierarchy that Pirsig sets up in Chapter 20 (much like Pirsig's own analysis of analysis, turning reason back on itself), what appears is an appearance-reality distinction. Reality is now Quality and the appearances of Quality are either romantic or classic. There is still a reality behind the appearances that is privileged and that we must correspond to. Quality is Reality prior to any division, but it would seem to be Reality, "out there," behind the appearances of any division. This is where Pirsig's mysticism comes in. Mystics who lean on the concept of maya utilize the appearance-reality distinction, otherwise they wouldn't think of language as obscuring anything.

The appearance-reality distinction is in play if you think, not just that there is something real behind appearances (like real motivations between apparent altruism), but that there is a systematic distance between reality and our perception of it. For instance, Plato believed that the Realm of Forms was real and the Realm of the Senses were simply appearances. Kant believed that objects had a real essence and that this essence could be falsely represented (Locke believed this, too). Christians, too, in a way, believe in this distinction insofar as they believe that Heaven is real and Earth is simply a passing stage. Mystics believe in this distinction when they say that language obscures reality. You believe in it when you think there is something else, something more real, lurking behind whatever it is now that you are sensing or experiencing.

To take up the last example, that language obscures reality, the trouble is that if Quality is simply the environment around us, reality around us, then that is suitably pragmatized. But to say that "Quality is what exists before you say anything," to say that language gets in the way of Quality, is to take an SOM stance. The pragmatist is going to say that, in addition to Quality being what exists before you say anything, Quality is also what exists during the speaking and after you say something. The reason this is is because the pragmatist line is that us speaking does not somehow distort our connection with Quality. We are always connected to Quality, but the Quality we perceive will be different depending on how we speak. This makes Quality different for different people. It’s still Quality, our environment, but it will be different depending on the static patterns we've been born with. The conception of a "static filter" is another SOM signifier. The pragmatist wants to replace wholesale the metaphor of a static filter with static patterns. We directly experience the static pattern and which static patterns we experience determines which other static patterns we experience. Dynamic Quality is the effort in changing our static patterns, so that we may experience new and better patterns.

Metaphysics, by a conventional definition, falls into an appearance-reality distinction because it assumes something is "beyond" reality (by strict definition, if reality were gleaned by physics). A conventional notion of metaphysics hopes to incorporate an "ultimate reality." "Ultimate" is superfluous unless "ultimate reality" is contrasted with "reality." This retains the appearance-reality distinction. Some routes around Pirsig’s use of “ultimate” in his descriptions of Quality have been to emphasize who it is undefined. This leaves a formless, ineffable, universal, ahistorical, foundational ultimate reality, while leaving all formulations of it as contingent. One could make the case that this is what both Plato and Pirsig were trying to do. Plato's instrument of irony is Socrates. David L. Hall attempts to make this case (as a strike against Rorty's narrative) when he says, "Socrates is made to play edifier to Plato's systematic aspirations. This involves the institutionalization of doubt." This makes Plato's writings "permanently ironized." Pirsig can be seen as doing the same thing with Phaedrus as his mouthpiece. It is, perhaps though, a juxtaposition of the roles Plato and Socrates played because Phaedrus seems to be the systematizer and Pirsig (as narrator of ZMM or simply as writer) the edifier.

This, I think, is the best way to try and do justice to the historicist elements of Pirsig while remaining an essentialist. However, my question is: "What good is an ultimate reality if you can't correspond to it?" Pirsig keeps Quality undefined, but I can’t understand trying to correspond to it and I can’t understand keeping around a terminology that creates metaphysical distance. It’s the same thing that Locke did in explaining the difference between real essences (or definitions) and nominal essences (or definitions). Locke thought that real essences existed, but he didn't think we'd ever know if we correctly corresponded with them. He thought that all we'd ever have were nominal essences, which we defined. The question to Locke and Pirsig, in the name of Ockham's Razor, is why keep the real essences or undefined ultimate reality? In Locke, at least we could correspond to the real essences, we'd just never know it. In Pirsig, we can't correspond to Quality because it’s not defined and never can be defined. The definition of Quality is "undefinable."

The use we get out of Quality as ultimate reality is as a foundation for universality and ahistoricality. The appearance-reality distinction is retained so that we can touch something universal: a replacement for God. The retainment of the appearance-reality distinction, even when we can't ever correspond to reality, is a statement for the demand for a foundation. This is a foundation that pragmatists dispense with, something we do not think is needed. So we are quick to pull out our razors.

A textual example in Pirsig from Chapter 8 of Lila is very revealing. Pirsig begins a section by saying, “This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash all subject-object thought but that’s not true.” (114) Most of that paragraph sounds like Pirsig is discarding a correspondence theory of truth. He sounds like an antiessentialist when he says, "One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along." However, two lines before, he sounds like a confused metaphysician: "But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist."

This I take to be Pirsig's hubris. He believed he could succeed where Plato failed. He believed he could encapsulate the Good. Pirsig thinks he can have an ultimate reality and not expect people to want to correspond to it. He says, one line before that, "If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things—that which corresponds to the "objective" world—and all other constructions are unreal." Well, my question is, what good is an ultimate reality if you can't correspond to it? If Quality becomes the ultimate reality then it tempts people to come along and say, "Hey, the MoQ is universal and ahistorical." But then, in the same breath, Pirsig trys to say that "No, it isn't." By retaining a fairly traditional formulation of what metaphysics is, he's retaining rhetorical facets of SOM. The point is that Pirsig doesn't have to retain metaphysics or SOM: Nietzsche and the pragmatists show him a way out. They show him a way in which he can retain the second and fourth quote without the need for the third. In fact, to be more precise, the fourth quote should read: "If we retain an ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things."

In contrast to Pirsig's solution to the problem of SOM, the metaphysics of presence, or that whole brood and nest of Greek dualisms, the pragmatist suggests a rhetorical answer that Pirsig both considers, thinks is the best stratagem, and others apparently counseled him in doing: refuse to enter the arena. (233) Following Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, and Wittgenstein, throw out the tradition of even considering these things as problems. Dissolve problems by making them disappear, rather than solve problems which gives them more credence than they deserve. But Pirsig doesn't do this. In attempting to get people to start to care about the material realm, in getting them to start to view morals as just as real and important as motorcycles, Pirsig pushes everything "out there" into reality.

If I'm right, that in setting up the MoQ Pirsig ressurects the Kantian inner-outer distinction, then this gives credence to universalist, right-rendering-of-reality readings of Pirsig. The question that this reading brings up is how dedicated you are: do you love the MoQ more than you hate SOM? If you're like me, you start to read the MoQ like a pragmatist would. If not, then be prepared to face the problems of realism, which are much like the problems that Pirsig levels against the whole scientific establishment. This is the problem of ZMM and Lila: some of what he writes can be subjected to the same criticisms that he brings up.

This is why there are so many wildly differing readings of Pirsig and the MoQ: there is ample room for wildly differing readings of the MoQ. Just like Kant, who can be read as an idealist or a realist, I think Pirsig can be read as a realist, an idealist (or anti-realist), or a pragmatist. So, the moral of this story is that, if you are looking for a foundation, a true, ahistorical MoQ to set your feet upon, you are following in the footsteps of Kant and a tradition of Platonic dualisms, three of which are the entangled appearence-reality distinction, the inner-outer distinction, and the subject-object distinction. If you repudiate the need for foundations, you are following Dewey and the pragmatists. Both can be found in Pirsig. The question is, who's side are you on?