I shall define universalism as the philosophical position taken by any range of claims of which it is said that a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not. For a universalistic claim, truth swings free of belief.
To weigh the universalist claim, I would distinguish two questions: 1) Is it true? and 2) Is it effective?
On its face, to distinguish these two questions seems to concede the issue to the universalist—the effectiveness of a claim is its ability to claim belief. So to distinguish between effectiveness and truth as two different questions is to already claim that truth swings free from belief.
To justify this distinction, I would suggest that attempts to move around the distinction fall into two camps, two different reductionisms: Platonists and Sophists. The battle between Platonists and Sophists is the battle between Platonists who think that the second question collapses into the first (truth automatically produces effectiveness) and Sophists who think that the first question collapses into the second (effectiveness automatically produces truth). Each camp, however, needs to explain their own set of anomalous occurrences. The Platonist needs to explain why the truth isn’t always effective—why isn’t hearing a true statement always convincing? Why does it sometimes fall on “deaf ears”? The Sophist, on the other hand, needs to explain the smell of sulfur—why is her claim not just an excuse to tell lies, since we all know lies can be as effective as truths?
The way I’ve described both anomalies cues both camps to their own pernicious, and unsatisfactory, responses. The Platonist can claim that it is just deafness on the part of some, which at its extremes is a kind of willful plugging of the ears. The Sophist can claim that that’s all truths are—just lies we all believe, and the name of the game is getting people to buy what you’re selling, however you do it. Both of these responses are unsatisfactory for the same reason—they are too easy, both ending discussion with a dogmatic assertion of how things are. And if the retort from either is, “ah, but that doesn’t mean what I’m saying isn’t true,” then we’ve already moved further into the game I’m suggesting—that truth and effectiveness are distinct.
To defend their reductionisms without contradiction, without reducing and distinguishing in two separate, analogous breaths, both the Platonist and the Sophist need to suggest a mechanism by which we can tell when one side has been reduced to the other. This mechanism would then be able to suggest to us what cases of pernicious static do in fact look like. For example, for the Platonist to not look like a jerk who cries “you are deaf to the truth!!!” every time someone disagrees with him, the Platonist needs a method that’s publicly available that will tell us when a person really is just willfully plugging their ears or spitefully blinding themselves in order to hold on to some cherished, though now falsified, belief. Likewise, for the Sophist to not look like a devilish, insincere fraud who will say anything to get her way, the Sophist needs a method that’s publicly available that will tell us when a particular line of reasoning or justification that up-holds some particular belief is sincere truth and not simply convenient falsehood. In other words, the Platonist and the Sophist are looking for the same thing.
Since a search for a theoretical method or theorem that will ascertain truth is a typical trope for what we think of as Platonism, but not the Sophist, I will say a little bit more about the Sophist. For, have not philosophers occasionally argued that we do not need truth, that all we need is justification? Justification, when properly distinguished from truth, is relative to an audience in a way that truth is not. Your ability to justify yourself in front of an audience is relative to your ability to communicate with them, which means sharing a language, relevant concerns, and a sense of what counts as evidence and good and bad reasons. This means that you could find yourself in front of an audience that counts as a good reason a belief (e.g., in God) that you yourself do not hold. So what is stopping you from grasping at the disbelieved straw if it gets your audience to do what you want?
One might say the virtue of sincerity, but Platonists don’t think this option is available to the Sophist. They don’t understand why, if one really thought that all you needed was effectiveness, one wouldn’t grasp at whatever means were available at any moment to attain one’s ends. I don’t have an answer to this because I honestly don’t see the difficulty—it is unclear what the relationship is, to use Bernard Williams’s distinction, between truth and truthfulness (from his book Truth and Truthfulness). It is that relationship that further needs theoretical adumbration, a mechanism.
In my first formulation of Platonism and Sophism, I claimed they were reductionisms and that this reduction requires a mechanism. In this sense, they both deny the distinction between truth and justification. On this formulation, however, it makes as much sense to say that Platonists can use whatever justification they want, just so long as they know the true truth in their hearts. For if you know the truth, but have no mechanism available to convince other people, what aside from sincerity keeps you from grasping whatever means of persuasion you can? But this lack of mechanism includes the link between truth and sincerity, so if it is denied the Sophist, so too for the Platonist. And the fact of the matter is that I think there is historical precedence for both phenomenons—for pernicious liars who are pathologically only out for themselves (e.g., the Hitler administration) and for pernicious Holders of Truth who will do what they need to do because they know it’s true in their gut (e.g., the Bush administration).
I’d like to note that I modulated earlier from “truth reduces to justification” to “all you need is justification.” The “all you need” formulation is a modulation from the reduction-formulations to try and capture a wilier version of this problem, to try to avoid stawmen as much as possible. But look what happens when we apply both versions to Platonism and Sophism. The picture of the Platonist looks normal when wearing the notion of a mechanism, but the Sophist does not. So to help the picture of the Sophist I modulated from reduce-as-mechanism to reduce-as-“all you need.” But “all you need” is not a reduction in the strictest sense because what it requires is a firm distinction between two things (only one of which you need). The picture of the Sophist looks normal when wearing the notion of reduction, but the Platonist looks a little odd with “all you need” because we are used to associating the Platonist with Up-Holders of Truth. As I’ve suggested, though, without the “Up-” of mechanism, the Holders of Truth could produce just as much nasty material as liars.
So what is going on? James, Dewey, and Foucault all seemed to toy with the Sophist reduction. Foucault’s channeling of Thrasymachus in the formula “knowledge is power” is just the darker-seeming flipside of James’ more optimistic-seeming “the true is the good in the way of belief.” The more neutral formula of what both come to is Dewey’s “truth is warranted assertibility.” But what does this reduction amount to without the mechanism? So-called “postmodern” reductions of truth to illusions, of which Foucault’s is one of the more sensible (once you understand what Foucault means by “discipline”), themselves founder for the same reason the appearance/reality distinction does—if you aren’t going to offer a method for discerning truth from illusion, using the rhetoric of illusion for anything is self-referentially inconsistent at the level of theory.
I would like to say that the dialectic between Platonist and Sophist I’ve brought us through helps us better appreciate the situation we face when considering the universalist claim. The idea that truth swings free from belief is often associated with the Platonist side of the dialectic, but notice that if we don’t get a mechanism—which is what drove the seesaw—it is unclear what the universalist claim gets us: the Platonist wanted more truth, but without the mechanism, what more does the universalist claim give?
Rorty’s strategy for dealing with the situation was to claim that truth and justification are distinct, but that justification is the only route we have for making a claim of truth. I want to call this rhetorical universalism. By the time the Sophist side of the dialectic with Platonists reaches Dewey, it has become clear that Dewey would need a mechanism as much as the Platonist. This realization causes us to notice the similarities. Against reducing truth to justification that has been a typical strategy of pragmatists, Rorty sides with Donald Davidson’s claim that truth is a semantic and radically non-epistemic notion. Truth swings free of belief, but that tells us nothing about what to believe.
If we call the universalist claim—a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not—the realist intuition, we can see the impetus behind philosophical realisms and Platonisms and the force of Davidson’s theory as a way of paying homage to that intuition. The realist and Platonist want to emphasize that what we happen to believe now might not be the truth. Davidson is saying that it is the case that truth swings free of belief, but that there is no way to motivate this in a way that tells us which particular beliefs are false (aside from the universalist claim itself). The key is motivating truths—how do you motivate the realist intuition that is, e.g., housed in the semantic, disquotational theory of truth: “X” is true iff X. Davidson claims that the disquotational theory of truth is all the theory we are going to get. All it tells us is how the word “true” works: a sentence is “true” if and only if what the sentence says is the case. “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. What it doesn’t give us is a mechanism for ascertaining the truth of the sentence. What Davidson is saying is that the realist intuition is true, but that’s as far as it goes.
But say we accept all this—is there not still something left to account for in coming to terms with the realist intuition? For, where did the realist intuition come from? Even if we don’t believe in various supernaturalisms, positing various kinds of “intuitive” faculties; even if we are naturalist through and through, that still means the realist intuition came from somewhere.
In fact, intuitive faculty explanations turn out to be the easy way out. To say that an intuition of some kind, some belief you have about this or that which you have no easy explanation to offer about its source, to say that it came from a “direct” relation to reality is to basically halt the explanatory sequence at that the claim of directness. Doing this changes the subject of explanation from “where did this particular belief come from?” to “what is this ‘direct relation’ exactly?” The former question is a perfectly understandable, naturalistic historical-rhetorical question. The latter question is a perfectly suitable, specifically epistemological question. If your interests are to move from questions anybody can answer to a disciplinary question only specialists can answer, then this performs the delimiting magic required. However, to delimit the field of inquiry in this manner—to construct “epistemology” as a subject that asks questions which are not historical-rhetorical—is to revert to a Cartesian-Kantian understanding of epistemology. Specifically, I am suggesting that direct-relations claims will at some point need to fall back on a faculty psychology, one that is anti-naturalistic.
So to return to the difficult historical-rhetorical question (rather than posing a different, non-natural question)—where does the realist intuition come from? What is it about the world that produces the sense that some things are true whether or not you believe them (like snow being white)? The answer that I think Davidson would suggest is that to use “the world” in stating the question has been what has misled us into creating philosophical realisms all these many years. There is a hidden, pernicious distinction in the question between “the world” and “us,” how “the world” is that produces something “in us.” For Davidson, the fact of successful communication presupposes triangulation, an inseparable triad of person-community-world. So the best answer about where the realist intuition comes from may be “it comes from the fact that a single person is typically successful in her communicative negotiations with other people and the world at large, and that the idea of ‘success’ presupposes an occasional unsuccess, which produces in the single person a sense that she might be, on occasion, corrected in her attempts at communication.” Or to put it more simply: “I feel like I’m right, but I have to allow for the fact that I might be wrong.” The realist intuition is just fallibilism. Philosophical realisms have been trying to convert our occasional wrongness about the world into a theory. When the topic has been truth, it has taken the guise of a certifying theorem that will convert historical-rhetorical justifications into irrefutable, infallible true statements that are impervious to further inquiry. But we have found out—so goes the Rortyan story about the march of 2500+ years of philosophical dialogue—that there is no theorem that will relate justification and truth in this way. There is no route from fallibility to infallibility.
What I’m calling rhetorical universalism is the claim that we are always and everywhere situated in a rhetorical web, and that this is true whether or not you believe it. Davidson’s arguments about triangulation, the disquotational theory of truth, the principle of charity, the rejection of the scheme/content distinction—all of these dovetail into a description of how communication must work for something called “communication” to be said to be happening at all. And since we agree that we do most of the time successfully communicate, it follows from this very simple fact that we are always situated in a historical-rhetorical community—that “rhetoric goes all the way down.” This truth has not always been recognized, would not have always been justified, would not have always been rhetorically effective. But there is nothing contradictory between holding these two things, just so long as you distinguish between two questions: Is it true? and Is it effective?
Showing posts with label Sophists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sophists. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Thursday, July 16, 2009
A Spatial Model of Belief Change
I have three major goals in this discursus: 1) to explicate Robert Brandom’s technical vocabulary, 2) elaborate a spatial model of belief, and 3) apply that model to two different problem areas—A) Rorty’s Public/Private distinction and B) the Reason/Faith distinction (held in common by theists and atheists alike, two groups I specifically define as holding that distinction).
I. Logic and Making Beliefs Explicit
Brandom’s magnum opus without a doubt is his massive Making It Explicit. In that book, he develops in great detail an alternative philosophy of language (and much else) to replace the traditional representationalism that has been the paradigm of most philosophical work for the last 400 years, if not longer. Whereas Brandom’s teacher, Richard Rorty, spent most of his time making representationalism as a replaceable paradigm apparent, Brandom has done what Rorty only ever suggested and pointed in the direction of—developing an alternative.
I have not read that book, nor would I probably understand much of it if I tried, but thankfully Brandom has written an introduction to his systematic redescription of traditional philosophy, which he calls inferentialism, Articulating Reasons. Another helpful thing about Brandom is that he writes in such a way (befitting Rorty’s heir) where learning his philosophy is pretty much like simply “getting the hang of” a new way of speaking and thinking. He is also a brilliant expositer for what would otherwise be a tremendously difficult task—replacing one edifice with another. Since getting the hang of Brandom’s philosophy is synonymous with getting the hang of a new technical apparatus, one finds the tools he uses on almost every page, so there aren’t usually better or worse places to draw one’s attention to in Articulating Reasons, and for that reason I will mainly explicate Brandom without much reference to particular places in his text (most of the tools and orientations I will be referring to, however, come from chapter five, “A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing”).
Brandom is a pragmatist, and as such he wishes to follow out the Deweyan suggestion that we take thought to be a kind of practice. When you are thinking you are doing something, and Brandom wishes to describe what it is we are doing. One of the obstacles to viewing thinking as a kind of doing is the idea that our minds are passive mirrors upon reality and that whatever thinking is, we do it naturally. Brandom suggests, however, that thinking is like riding a bicycle—it is a social practice that we learn.
Two main pictures fundamental to Brandom’s view are from Quine and Sellars. From Quine we get the picture of the self (our minds) as a web of beliefs. Beliefs, however, are wont to be viewed as little static items that hang out unchanging if we aren’t careful. Following the pragmatist apotheosis of Bain, then, we can begin our analysis by construing beliefs as habits of action. For our purposes, which will eventually be to display belief change and the scope of rationality, there is a particular habit of action, called reasoning, that we want to understand. For that purpose, Sellars’ own spatial model, the space of reasons, comes in handy. This is the space in which we can say that we remain rational, for it is within this space that we play, in Sellars’ phrase, the “game of giving and asking for reasons.”
It is the explication of precisely what is involved in this game that Brandom is primarily involved in. I’ve previously reserved the “space of reasons,” or rationality, for Sellars’ picture (for reasons to become apparent later), but for Davidsonian reasons (which I will not go into), describing the space of reasons will be the same as describing how language functions. Thus, we get this description from Brandom:
The basic idea is that Brandom redescribes a belief (a term he amusingly says he does not officially believe in) even further from Bain’s definition of a habit of action. A belief, for Brandom, is a kind of commitment. When you assert a belief, you are committing yourself to the content of that belief. If you say, “I believe in God,” you are committing yourself to the consequences of believing in God—which is to say, you are committing yourself to act accordingly. And because of the pragmatist housing of thinking under the broader category of doing, part of the habits of action you are committing yourself to are habits of speech/thinking. To put it another way, saying belief is a kind of commitment is to make sense out of the form, “If you say X, you can’t say Y.”
As an example:
P1) Bob believes in God.
P2) God created the world and all of its inhabitants within seven days.
P3) Biological evolution created homo sapiens over millions of years.
P1 states that Bob is committed to his inability to believe in P3. If Bob does happen to believe in evolution, then a friend of Bob’s, Carrie, could point out to Bob that, according to the scorecard she’s keeping of his commitments, he’s not entitled to believe in evolution—he has broken the rules of the game (called “rationality”).
It is a common happening of the world that people aren’t always fully aware of cognitive dissonances in their web of beliefs, and that these can be pointed out. Because we have so many beliefs that we could be aware of, it is quite possible that Bob had simply never been confronted with the fact that he cannot believe both P2 and P3. On Mondays through Fridays, Bob works as an evolutionary biologist attempting to discover when homo erectus gave way to homo sapien. On Sunday, Bob nods approvingly when the preacher reads from Genesis. Bob didn’t notice anything wrong until Carrie said one day, “You know, Bob—if God created the world, including people, in seven days, then there’s no way evolution could be true.”
What Carrie has just done is make explicit and an implicit tension in Bob’s web of beliefs. Every belief in our web gets its definition by its relationship to every other belief in our web (and implicit relationships are just as much a real relationship as explicit, even if they look invisible to the naked mind’s eye). The tool that was used by Carrie to make the tension explicit to Bob was logic (specifically the logical connective known as the “conditional”). Traditionally, logic has been understood as a canon of right reasoning, but for Brandom it is an auxiliary vocabulary of explication—it helps nonlogical vocabularies (like talk about rocks, or God) go from implicit to explicit relationships.
To sum up the pieces of Brandom’s vocabulary I’ve been deploying: beliefs are like point-masses in a web. As point-masses, beliefs have no definition outside of their relation to other points. This is to say that to know what a belief is (whether for others or yourself) is to know both what else that belief allows you to do/say (your entitlements) and what allows you to say it (your commitments). Logic helps you make explicit what other beliefs you are allowed to have and what beliefs you are committed to keeping.
II. A Spatial Model of Belief Change
Part of what upsets people with Rorty’s argumentation (which becomes more and more pronounced as the years wile by) is that he seems to take positions, and make argumentative choices, for eristic reasons—“I would lose this debate if I didn’t take this position” (i.e. “if I didn’t take this position, I would have to agree with you—and abandon other positions”). Eristic reasons have traditionally been ruled illegal (i.e. sophistic) because they flout truth: one shouldn’t simply argue to gain ephemeral superiority over a transitory opponent, let alone take a position simply because you don’t want to agree with them—one should only take the best position available. However, part of Rorty’s philosophical point (which his practice mirrors) is that eristic reasons are legitimate reasons (though not the only kind of reasons).
The reason for this is the same reason that it’s tough to tell the difference between Sophistic eristic and Socratic dialectic. The Sophists were said to be simply scoring points on the opponents standing in front of them, but that’s what Socrates looked like he was doing, too. The positions exhibited by the characters in the dialogues take the shape they do because of the positions and intercessions of the others. This is to say, both exhibit argumentation spatially, as positions, where moving on the X-axis shifts—whether you know it or not explicitly yet—your relationship to Q (that’s what the “and abandon other positions” clause, usually hidden in people’s understanding of what Rorty means, conveys).
Fig. 1 pretty much represents the spatial model of belief that Quine thought of with his web of belief. In addition to the panrelational quality of beliefs, on the spatial model we can also represent the tenability of a belief by the length of the line between the different points. We can think of the lines as like rubber bands and if a line gets too long, it becomes easier and easier to snap. Facing belief change is sometimes done consciously, but even unconsciously it can be represented as a series of choices, various alternatives of what might happen given increased untenability.
With Fig. 1, say you are faced with A and B:
A) you believe P and Q.
B) you are either 1) confronted through persuasion with believing R instead of P or 2) suddenly find yourself believing R instead of P (through sensation or other dramatic life event, like death of a loved one)
C) What do you do?
Both (1) and (2) are simple rankings of importance. In (1), you concluded explicitly on reflection (or we are to assume you must have thought, given exhibited unconscious belief dumping) that R was more important to you than Q, and vice versa in (2).
By way of example, if Q is belief in God, you might change your relationship to God (in this case illustrated by the changing spatial inhabitation of your beliefs caused by the shift from P to R) without considering yourself to have shifted beliefs.
This (illustrated by the dotted line) is the psychological option—which is not an explicit option (for if it was, it wouldn’t be the option it says it is)—that Brandom’s notions of logic helping make beliefs explicit sheds light on formally (which is to say explicitly). Beliefs, for Brandom, are not rocks you pick up and carry with you in a bag that you can inspect at a moment’s notice. Beliefs, following the pragmatists, are habits of action, which is to say for Brandom habits of linguistic articulation. And unlike rocks, habits aren’t something you can just look at and inspect—you can really only get a good look at them while in the act of performance. Adding a new belief isn’t like adding a new piece to a puzzle, where you can kind of glance over the whole puzzle notice clashing colors. Belief tension is more like playing different sports: it isn’t apparent any of the skills you learn playing various sports would clash with each other—until you try hitting a baseball and swinging a golf club. (Or think of Happy Gilmore’s importation of hockey habits into golf.)
The explicit way you articulate a belief shapes exactly what the belief is, which is to say there’s nothing exact about anybody’s web of beliefs because I know of no one who articulates themselves in exactly the same way, even if seemingly talking about the same thing they did the day before. Part of this is memory and part of it is actually being in slightly different contexts (and so causing you to call up slightly different words to articulate just what you think). Either way, though, to say that Q is the same belief from moment of expression to moment of expression becomes a slightly trickier affair, even without the trouble of P and R.
I don’t want to meditate on this difficulty in the isolated belief (which Brandom accepts full, slightly paradoxical, responsibility for in his work), but simply massage it for now by remarking, 1) remember that there’s no such thing as an isolated belief and 2) since beliefs are all hooked up to each other, like in a web, just ponder on how webs billow in the wind with sometimes great flexibility without losing their, shall we say, identity. I bring up the billowy nature of belief simply to make explicit the often lost possibility that it makes quite a lot of sense that people sometimes don’t face up to tensions in their web until some distance after the fact of belief change, like Bob and God in Part 1. Tensions don’t arise until they are made explicit, which can be done by yourself (if you are reflective person), by others (if you are making an ass of yourself and people are sick of your hypocrisy), or by situations (if you find yourself suddenly wanting to say two contradictory things). Since beliefs are habits of articulation, all thinking is an activity, and like all activities, can be practiced.
III. What Are Private Beliefs?
There would seem to be a 5th option, based on Rorty’s work, which would be to:
Rorty’s notion of a public/private distinction seems to suggest that we can make beliefs not connect to each other (as when he suggests that we keep God and poetry out of politics), but under this model, it is understood that all beliefs are connected in some fashion. If it’s a belief, it’s a dot, and every dot has a spatial distance from every other dot.
Rorty’s been criticized in several different fashions on this score, some saying it’s impossible to keep beliefs out of each other’s way, some that he’s suggesting something like lying to yourself (an explicit (4)). If the former means “all beliefs are connected,” then yes it’s impossible, and then the latter collapses into the impossibility of the former (you can’t lie to yourself, at least not explicitly). But if the former is not construed that way, it is difficult on its face to see why we can’t keep our beliefs out of each other’s way. Does my belief that “God loves me” get in the way of my belief that “peanut butter is brown”?
What, however, if my belief was that “God loves me because peanut butter is purple.” Then there is a tension if I encounter peanut butter (unless my friends don’t let me open my PB&J sandwiches, and I just see the jelly trickle). What Brandom’s vocabulary helps us see, however, is that these two God beliefs are actually different because actually articulated differently. Articulation counts, big time. Further, we see that Rorty’s suggestion is itself about connections between beliefs, though it typically composes itself by saying it’s not (“God has nothing to do with democracy”). And here we see that Rorty’s strategy is (3).
It might be useful to see that Fig. 4 and Fig. 7 are both useful ways of describing the same change in belief, depending on perspective or attitude. In one regard, “Q to Q´” highlights the similarity between believing in God before and after disconnecting it from your democratic citizenship. One does this facing a community, so that if your membership in a community is at stake, you could suggest that it is a minor alteration within the pale, not a drastic shift beyond it (one might do this with belief in God or disbelief in a war). 
In the other regard, “Q to S” highlights the fact that in the previous, “Q” and “Q´” are actually different beliefs, and therefore occupy different spatial positions, and therefore have different consequences to your other beliefs.
IV. Faith and Reason
One thing I dispensed with early is the notion that Reason was a thing that could tell you anything, as in the phrase, "What does reason tell you?" There isn’t a faculty called “reason,” but there is an activity called “reasoning.” But, if we follow Brandom’s vocabulary for thinking of thinking, what do we do about faith, that traditional opponent to reason. What do we do about the person who says, “I believe in God based on faith, not a reason.” I do want to puncture the haughtiness of atheists, but we still must say something about it. The first thing to do is to realize that faith is—even if denied—a reason to believe, and so is an articulated reason. But that’s just a baby step: what kind of reason, what kind of seemingly homogenous, infinitely deployable reason is faith?
I think what we need to say about faith is similar to what Kant said about the transcendental ego—it’s that little “I think” that trails implicitly after every sentence. Now, in the case at hand, the reason known as Faith is something like a guardian angel attached to a belief. Remembering that beliefs are habits of articulation, a person is sometimes taught (as all beliefs are learned habits) that if asked for X’s commitments, to reply singularly with “Faith.” In other words, a person just simply learns that “faith” is the only commitment to some beliefs (though the entitlements are everlasting).
This is a fairly simple representation, but it doesn’t quite do full justice. While the above may be true for many simpler kinds of beliefs that some believers have, what are we to do with theology, or any of the sometimes massively articulated creeds of various religions? I think what we get is something like Fig. 9.
Remembering that a line is nothing more than an infinite number of point-masses, we might think of Faith as the shield that protects religious discourse from the entreaties of other discourses. In a way, this is very similar to Rorty’s public/private distinction. We could easily conceive it that way (see Fig. 10).
I’m not quite sure how to wind our way out of it, of what to say about dissimilarities between the two. One might be that the public/private distinction, while itself possibly based on faith (the faith of it succeeding, which is to say hope), is not itself a faith-shield. While the faith-shield in Fig. 9 is something like the ass-end of the outermost beliefs, showing off their commitments to incomers, mooning everyone else with their immunity, the public-shield isn’t exactly a commitment, but a prohibition, a stay-the-eff-out.
I’m not sure where this exactly plays out, but I do think that Brandom’s vocabulary helps us better understand what we are dealing with. We are dealing with people who think—just people who think a certain way. And it isn’t at all clear that us non-religious types, who out of force of habit exclude religious types from their “we’s” and “us’s” when talking about them, don’t ourselves have certain habits of thought similar to their’s with faith. I think that’s why Rorty talked so much about hope and ethnocentrism—what we do around here: both are conversation-stoppers, similar to faith, but it isn’t clear how, or why, one should continue a conversation on certain topics (like why yo’ moms so fat).
I. Logic and Making Beliefs Explicit
Brandom’s magnum opus without a doubt is his massive Making It Explicit. In that book, he develops in great detail an alternative philosophy of language (and much else) to replace the traditional representationalism that has been the paradigm of most philosophical work for the last 400 years, if not longer. Whereas Brandom’s teacher, Richard Rorty, spent most of his time making representationalism as a replaceable paradigm apparent, Brandom has done what Rorty only ever suggested and pointed in the direction of—developing an alternative.
I have not read that book, nor would I probably understand much of it if I tried, but thankfully Brandom has written an introduction to his systematic redescription of traditional philosophy, which he calls inferentialism, Articulating Reasons. Another helpful thing about Brandom is that he writes in such a way (befitting Rorty’s heir) where learning his philosophy is pretty much like simply “getting the hang of” a new way of speaking and thinking. He is also a brilliant expositer for what would otherwise be a tremendously difficult task—replacing one edifice with another. Since getting the hang of Brandom’s philosophy is synonymous with getting the hang of a new technical apparatus, one finds the tools he uses on almost every page, so there aren’t usually better or worse places to draw one’s attention to in Articulating Reasons, and for that reason I will mainly explicate Brandom without much reference to particular places in his text (most of the tools and orientations I will be referring to, however, come from chapter five, “A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing”).
Brandom is a pragmatist, and as such he wishes to follow out the Deweyan suggestion that we take thought to be a kind of practice. When you are thinking you are doing something, and Brandom wishes to describe what it is we are doing. One of the obstacles to viewing thinking as a kind of doing is the idea that our minds are passive mirrors upon reality and that whatever thinking is, we do it naturally. Brandom suggests, however, that thinking is like riding a bicycle—it is a social practice that we learn.
Two main pictures fundamental to Brandom’s view are from Quine and Sellars. From Quine we get the picture of the self (our minds) as a web of beliefs. Beliefs, however, are wont to be viewed as little static items that hang out unchanging if we aren’t careful. Following the pragmatist apotheosis of Bain, then, we can begin our analysis by construing beliefs as habits of action. For our purposes, which will eventually be to display belief change and the scope of rationality, there is a particular habit of action, called reasoning, that we want to understand. For that purpose, Sellars’ own spatial model, the space of reasons, comes in handy. This is the space in which we can say that we remain rational, for it is within this space that we play, in Sellars’ phrase, the “game of giving and asking for reasons.”
It is the explication of precisely what is involved in this game that Brandom is primarily involved in. I’ve previously reserved the “space of reasons,” or rationality, for Sellars’ picture (for reasons to become apparent later), but for Davidsonian reasons (which I will not go into), describing the space of reasons will be the same as describing how language functions. Thus, we get this description from Brandom:
“Specifically linguistic practices are those in which some performances are accorded the significance of assertions or claimings—the undertakings of inferentially articulated (and so propositionally contentful) commitments. Mastering such linguistic practices is a matter of learning how to keep score on the inferentially articulated commitments and entitlements [emphasis mine—MK] of various interlocutors, oneself included. Understanding a speech act—grasping its discursive significance—is being able to attribute the right commitments in response. This is knowing how it changes the score of what the performer and the audience are committed and entitled to.” (164-165)What follows is an attempt to unpack part of the preceding, dense paragraph.
The basic idea is that Brandom redescribes a belief (a term he amusingly says he does not officially believe in) even further from Bain’s definition of a habit of action. A belief, for Brandom, is a kind of commitment. When you assert a belief, you are committing yourself to the content of that belief. If you say, “I believe in God,” you are committing yourself to the consequences of believing in God—which is to say, you are committing yourself to act accordingly. And because of the pragmatist housing of thinking under the broader category of doing, part of the habits of action you are committing yourself to are habits of speech/thinking. To put it another way, saying belief is a kind of commitment is to make sense out of the form, “If you say X, you can’t say Y.”
As an example:
P1) Bob believes in God.
P2) God created the world and all of its inhabitants within seven days.
P3) Biological evolution created homo sapiens over millions of years.
P1 states that Bob is committed to his inability to believe in P3. If Bob does happen to believe in evolution, then a friend of Bob’s, Carrie, could point out to Bob that, according to the scorecard she’s keeping of his commitments, he’s not entitled to believe in evolution—he has broken the rules of the game (called “rationality”).
It is a common happening of the world that people aren’t always fully aware of cognitive dissonances in their web of beliefs, and that these can be pointed out. Because we have so many beliefs that we could be aware of, it is quite possible that Bob had simply never been confronted with the fact that he cannot believe both P2 and P3. On Mondays through Fridays, Bob works as an evolutionary biologist attempting to discover when homo erectus gave way to homo sapien. On Sunday, Bob nods approvingly when the preacher reads from Genesis. Bob didn’t notice anything wrong until Carrie said one day, “You know, Bob—if God created the world, including people, in seven days, then there’s no way evolution could be true.”
What Carrie has just done is make explicit and an implicit tension in Bob’s web of beliefs. Every belief in our web gets its definition by its relationship to every other belief in our web (and implicit relationships are just as much a real relationship as explicit, even if they look invisible to the naked mind’s eye). The tool that was used by Carrie to make the tension explicit to Bob was logic (specifically the logical connective known as the “conditional”). Traditionally, logic has been understood as a canon of right reasoning, but for Brandom it is an auxiliary vocabulary of explication—it helps nonlogical vocabularies (like talk about rocks, or God) go from implicit to explicit relationships.
To sum up the pieces of Brandom’s vocabulary I’ve been deploying: beliefs are like point-masses in a web. As point-masses, beliefs have no definition outside of their relation to other points. This is to say that to know what a belief is (whether for others or yourself) is to know both what else that belief allows you to do/say (your entitlements) and what allows you to say it (your commitments). Logic helps you make explicit what other beliefs you are allowed to have and what beliefs you are committed to keeping.
II. A Spatial Model of Belief Change
Part of what upsets people with Rorty’s argumentation (which becomes more and more pronounced as the years wile by) is that he seems to take positions, and make argumentative choices, for eristic reasons—“I would lose this debate if I didn’t take this position” (i.e. “if I didn’t take this position, I would have to agree with you—and abandon other positions”). Eristic reasons have traditionally been ruled illegal (i.e. sophistic) because they flout truth: one shouldn’t simply argue to gain ephemeral superiority over a transitory opponent, let alone take a position simply because you don’t want to agree with them—one should only take the best position available. However, part of Rorty’s philosophical point (which his practice mirrors) is that eristic reasons are legitimate reasons (though not the only kind of reasons).
The reason for this is the same reason that it’s tough to tell the difference between Sophistic eristic and Socratic dialectic. The Sophists were said to be simply scoring points on the opponents standing in front of them, but that’s what Socrates looked like he was doing, too. The positions exhibited by the characters in the dialogues take the shape they do because of the positions and intercessions of the others. This is to say, both exhibit argumentation spatially, as positions, where moving on the X-axis shifts—whether you know it or not explicitly yet—your relationship to Q (that’s what the “and abandon other positions” clause, usually hidden in people’s understanding of what Rorty means, conveys).Fig. 1 pretty much represents the spatial model of belief that Quine thought of with his web of belief. In addition to the panrelational quality of beliefs, on the spatial model we can also represent the tenability of a belief by the length of the line between the different points. We can think of the lines as like rubber bands and if a line gets too long, it becomes easier and easier to snap. Facing belief change is sometimes done consciously, but even unconsciously it can be represented as a series of choices, various alternatives of what might happen given increased untenability.
With Fig. 1, say you are faced with A and B:
A) you believe P and Q.
B) you are either 1) confronted through persuasion with believing R instead of P or 2) suddenly find yourself believing R instead of P (through sensation or other dramatic life event, like death of a loved one)
C) What do you do?
1) believe R and stop believing Q
2) forced with the loss of Q, reverse course to P
Both (1) and (2) are simple rankings of importance. In (1), you concluded explicitly on reflection (or we are to assume you must have thought, given exhibited unconscious belief dumping) that R was more important to you than Q, and vice versa in (2).
3) augment Q to Q´
By way of example, if Q is belief in God, you might change your relationship to God (in this case illustrated by the changing spatial inhabitation of your beliefs caused by the shift from P to R) without considering yourself to have shifted beliefs.
4) leave QR implicit, and thus unacknowledged and unfaced
This (illustrated by the dotted line) is the psychological option—which is not an explicit option (for if it was, it wouldn’t be the option it says it is)—that Brandom’s notions of logic helping make beliefs explicit sheds light on formally (which is to say explicitly). Beliefs, for Brandom, are not rocks you pick up and carry with you in a bag that you can inspect at a moment’s notice. Beliefs, following the pragmatists, are habits of action, which is to say for Brandom habits of linguistic articulation. And unlike rocks, habits aren’t something you can just look at and inspect—you can really only get a good look at them while in the act of performance. Adding a new belief isn’t like adding a new piece to a puzzle, where you can kind of glance over the whole puzzle notice clashing colors. Belief tension is more like playing different sports: it isn’t apparent any of the skills you learn playing various sports would clash with each other—until you try hitting a baseball and swinging a golf club. (Or think of Happy Gilmore’s importation of hockey habits into golf.)
The explicit way you articulate a belief shapes exactly what the belief is, which is to say there’s nothing exact about anybody’s web of beliefs because I know of no one who articulates themselves in exactly the same way, even if seemingly talking about the same thing they did the day before. Part of this is memory and part of it is actually being in slightly different contexts (and so causing you to call up slightly different words to articulate just what you think). Either way, though, to say that Q is the same belief from moment of expression to moment of expression becomes a slightly trickier affair, even without the trouble of P and R.
I don’t want to meditate on this difficulty in the isolated belief (which Brandom accepts full, slightly paradoxical, responsibility for in his work), but simply massage it for now by remarking, 1) remember that there’s no such thing as an isolated belief and 2) since beliefs are all hooked up to each other, like in a web, just ponder on how webs billow in the wind with sometimes great flexibility without losing their, shall we say, identity. I bring up the billowy nature of belief simply to make explicit the often lost possibility that it makes quite a lot of sense that people sometimes don’t face up to tensions in their web until some distance after the fact of belief change, like Bob and God in Part 1. Tensions don’t arise until they are made explicit, which can be done by yourself (if you are reflective person), by others (if you are making an ass of yourself and people are sick of your hypocrisy), or by situations (if you find yourself suddenly wanting to say two contradictory things). Since beliefs are habits of articulation, all thinking is an activity, and like all activities, can be practiced.
III. What Are Private Beliefs?
There would seem to be a 5th option, based on Rorty’s work, which would be to:
5) make Q and R not connect
Rorty’s notion of a public/private distinction seems to suggest that we can make beliefs not connect to each other (as when he suggests that we keep God and poetry out of politics), but under this model, it is understood that all beliefs are connected in some fashion. If it’s a belief, it’s a dot, and every dot has a spatial distance from every other dot.
Rorty’s been criticized in several different fashions on this score, some saying it’s impossible to keep beliefs out of each other’s way, some that he’s suggesting something like lying to yourself (an explicit (4)). If the former means “all beliefs are connected,” then yes it’s impossible, and then the latter collapses into the impossibility of the former (you can’t lie to yourself, at least not explicitly). But if the former is not construed that way, it is difficult on its face to see why we can’t keep our beliefs out of each other’s way. Does my belief that “God loves me” get in the way of my belief that “peanut butter is brown”?
What, however, if my belief was that “God loves me because peanut butter is purple.” Then there is a tension if I encounter peanut butter (unless my friends don’t let me open my PB&J sandwiches, and I just see the jelly trickle). What Brandom’s vocabulary helps us see, however, is that these two God beliefs are actually different because actually articulated differently. Articulation counts, big time. Further, we see that Rorty’s suggestion is itself about connections between beliefs, though it typically composes itself by saying it’s not (“God has nothing to do with democracy”). And here we see that Rorty’s strategy is (3).
It might be useful to see that Fig. 4 and Fig. 7 are both useful ways of describing the same change in belief, depending on perspective or attitude. In one regard, “Q to Q´” highlights the similarity between believing in God before and after disconnecting it from your democratic citizenship. One does this facing a community, so that if your membership in a community is at stake, you could suggest that it is a minor alteration within the pale, not a drastic shift beyond it (one might do this with belief in God or disbelief in a war). 
In the other regard, “Q to S” highlights the fact that in the previous, “Q” and “Q´” are actually different beliefs, and therefore occupy different spatial positions, and therefore have different consequences to your other beliefs.IV. Faith and Reason
One thing I dispensed with early is the notion that Reason was a thing that could tell you anything, as in the phrase, "What does reason tell you?" There isn’t a faculty called “reason,” but there is an activity called “reasoning.” But, if we follow Brandom’s vocabulary for thinking of thinking, what do we do about faith, that traditional opponent to reason. What do we do about the person who says, “I believe in God based on faith, not a reason.” I do want to puncture the haughtiness of atheists, but we still must say something about it. The first thing to do is to realize that faith is—even if denied—a reason to believe, and so is an articulated reason. But that’s just a baby step: what kind of reason, what kind of seemingly homogenous, infinitely deployable reason is faith?
I think what we need to say about faith is similar to what Kant said about the transcendental ego—it’s that little “I think” that trails implicitly after every sentence. Now, in the case at hand, the reason known as Faith is something like a guardian angel attached to a belief. Remembering that beliefs are habits of articulation, a person is sometimes taught (as all beliefs are learned habits) that if asked for X’s commitments, to reply singularly with “Faith.” In other words, a person just simply learns that “faith” is the only commitment to some beliefs (though the entitlements are everlasting).
This is a fairly simple representation, but it doesn’t quite do full justice. While the above may be true for many simpler kinds of beliefs that some believers have, what are we to do with theology, or any of the sometimes massively articulated creeds of various religions? I think what we get is something like Fig. 9.Remembering that a line is nothing more than an infinite number of point-masses, we might think of Faith as the shield that protects religious discourse from the entreaties of other discourses. In a way, this is very similar to Rorty’s public/private distinction. We could easily conceive it that way (see Fig. 10).
I’m not quite sure how to wind our way out of it, of what to say about dissimilarities between the two. One might be that the public/private distinction, while itself possibly based on faith (the faith of it succeeding, which is to say hope), is not itself a faith-shield. While the faith-shield in Fig. 9 is something like the ass-end of the outermost beliefs, showing off their commitments to incomers, mooning everyone else with their immunity, the public-shield isn’t exactly a commitment, but a prohibition, a stay-the-eff-out.
I’m not sure where this exactly plays out, but I do think that Brandom’s vocabulary helps us better understand what we are dealing with. We are dealing with people who think—just people who think a certain way. And it isn’t at all clear that us non-religious types, who out of force of habit exclude religious types from their “we’s” and “us’s” when talking about them, don’t ourselves have certain habits of thought similar to their’s with faith. I think that’s why Rorty talked so much about hope and ethnocentrism—what we do around here: both are conversation-stoppers, similar to faith, but it isn’t clear how, or why, one should continue a conversation on certain topics (like why yo’ moms so fat).
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense
*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.
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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.
Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.
Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.
These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.
What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.
The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.
Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.
While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?
Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.
With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.
It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.
Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?
One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.
With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]
Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.
There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.
My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.
Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”
I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.
Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.
Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.
There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.
Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.
If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.
Endnotes
[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.
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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.
Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.
Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.
These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.
What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.
The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.
Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.
While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?
Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.
With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.
It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.
Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?
One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.
With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]
Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.
There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.
My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.
Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”
I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.
Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.
Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.
There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.
Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.
If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.
Endnotes
[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Rhetoric and Dialectic in Plato
This was a paper I wrote in 2002. It is a fairly typical discussion of Plato's Republic in relation to the rhetoric/dialectic controversy and nothing very interesting happens in it. However, for all it's typicality, it is still more or less right, just boring. So in this respect, it might be a useful rehearsal for those who aren't familiar with Platonic scholarship (some of which is in a lot of ways assumed in many of my other writings).
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In the Republic, Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) is attempting to define what justice is when he begins to describe a city. His hope is that if he can find justice writ-large in the city, he can then find what justice between individuals is. In this section of the dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, Socrates uses an interesting rhetorical device: description/re-description. Socrates takes a description by Glaucon and re-describes it in his own terms. This simple rhetorical stratagem becomes interesting and problematic in light of Plato’s apparent relation to rhetoric in the Republic and elsewhere. We find that Plato continually disparages rhetoric and, in particular, its teachers, the Sophists. If we place Plato’s rhetorical device of description/re-description within a larger context of the nature of rhetoric and dialectic, we will find that Plato has an inherent tension between his espousal of dialectic and his use of rhetoric for which he never accounts. This tension produces two different definitions of dialectic: one as universal dialectic, the other as contingent dialectic. Plato espouses the first, but is continually in use of the second.
After Socrates and the others decide to find justice in the city, Socrates begins his “origin of cities” argument. He begins by saying that, “Society originates … because the individual is not self-sufficient, but has many needs which he can’t supply himself.”[1] (369b) Thus, the city or community is created out of necessity. People cannot survive on their own, so they form small communities to aid each other in survival. But then Socrates introduces the division of labor, the notion that people should specialize in that which they are best suited. “Quantity and quality are therefore more easily produced when a man specializes appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others.”[2] (370c) This inflates the population of Socrates’ formally small city of five into a community of many. This is Socrates’ healthy city or, in Solon’s sequence, the city of wealth or olbos.
Glaucon, however, interrupts and identifies this city as the city of pigs. (372d) The sequence of events that occur here is important. Socrates paints the picture of the city, Glaucon identifies it as the city of pigs, and Socrates then re-describes it as his healthy city. Glaucon then describes his luxurious city as having citizens who “recline in comfort on couches and eat off tables, and have the sort of food we have today.” (372d) Then, Socrates re-describes this city (“it will want couches and tables” (372e)) as a city with a fever, the city of koros. Socrates even quips, “With our new luxuries we shall need doctors too, far more than we did before.” (373d)
The struggle in this section is over who gets to identify the current description. If Glaucon had his way, Socrates’ healthy city would be a city fit for animals. Glaucon, clearly, is portrayed as an anti-primitivist. A tolerable, livable, civilized life begins with luxury. Socrates, on the other hand, is here portrayed as a primitivist, preferring a small, simple community and life. But this is simply one stage in a much larger argument for justice. Due to his superior dialectical agility and acumen, Socrates, as always, wins and moves on with his argument.
The rhetorical device used in this struggle proves interesting when sat side by side with Plato’s apparent distaste for rhetoric. In Book 6, Plato uses the allegory of a ship at sea to describe why philosophers are not the most important men in a state, in particular a democracy. The ship of state allegory is characterized by its three participants: the captain, the crew, and the navigators. Plato describes the captain as “larger and stronger than any of the crew, but a bit deaf and short-sighted, and similarly limited in seamanship.” (488a-b) The crew spends all of its time “milling round the captain and doing all they can to get him to give them the helm.” (488c) The true navigators, on the other hand, spend all of their time studying the weather and the stars. For this they are laughed at and reviled by the other crew. The allegory is simple: the captain is the voting populace, the crew represents the people running for office, and the true navigators are the philosophers. Where the philosophers actually know how to run a state, the crew is merely intent upon being put in charge to run the state. To do so they concentrate on trying to convince the captain to let them.
The moral of the story is that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is bad because it allows ignorant people to sound like they are not ignorant. The crew can convince the captain to let them navigate, not because they know how to navigate, but because they portray themselves as knowing how to navigate. The ship of state allegory does not stop there, though. The crew are masters of rhetoric and the true navigators are masters of dialectic (as philosophers modeled after Plato). The implication of the allegory is that rhetoric is bad because it supersedes the dialectic.
The tension between Plato’s distaste of rhetoric and his use of it becomes all the stronger as we find that Plato uses rhetorical methods all the time. In fact, a fortiori, Plato’s most famous pieces of philosophy are rhetorical in nature. The dialectic is the rigorous method of reasoning upon which one can find the true definitions of things, thereby discovering its Form. For Plato, it was the sole method by which truth was attained. But here we have Plato consistently using analogies, allegories, metaphors, and narrative themes to great effect.
The purpose of the Republic is to find the Form of Justice. As has already been pointed out, Plato hopes to,
“find justice on a larger scale in the larger entity [the community], and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our inquiry with the community, and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find in the conformation of the smaller entity anything similar to what we have found in the larger.” (368e-369a)
Plato wants to find something similar in community-justice to individual-justice. The entire argument of the Republic is cast in the form of an analogy between the two kinds of justice. An analogy is not a form of rigorous argumentation. An analogy is a pictorial or metaphorical mode of thinking.
Plato also uses allegories everywhere. There’s the allegory of the cave and ship of state in the Republic[3], the allegory of the charioteer in the Phaedrus[4], and, its been argued, the entire Phaedrus as a whole.[5] Allegories are clearly not included in the dialectic. Allegories are stories or narratives that carry a second metaphorical meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words. Plato also uses simpler metaphors as in the origin of cities argument. The “city of pigs” is not literally a city filled with pigs. Though this metaphor is introduced by Glaucon, Plato re-describes the metaphor in terms of the sickness or health of a city and ends with the metaphorical doctor of the city, in the form of the philosopher-king.
Finally, and most ambiguously, is Plato’s relation to writing. Christopher Norris, in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, points out that in the Phaedrus writing is,
“the dangerous ‘supplement’ which lures language away from its authentic origins in speech and self-presence. To commit one’s thoughts to writing is to yield them up to the public domain, to risk being misconstrued by all the promiscuous wiles of interpretation. Writing is the ‘death’ that lies in wait for living thought, the subtle agent of corruption whose workings infect the very sources of truth. Plato’s case against rhetoric is therefore of a piece with his attitude to writing. Both are seen as the rebellious servant to a master (truth or dialectic) whose authority they flout by setting themselves up as alternative paths to wisdom.”[6]
But here we have Plato’s vast body of writing. And not only did Plato commit his own thoughts to writing, he committed the thoughts of his beloved master, Socrates. The strength of this ambiguity between Plato’s professed distaste for writing and the existence of his own writing takes on new proportions when we consider the fact that Plato is no slouch when it comes to writing. Plato is considered an unexcelled Greek writer. The Republic is not only a series of metaphors and allegories within an overarching analogy, the entire narrative of the Republic is framed in a katebasis motif. As Voegelin says, “The first chapter of the Republic sets the dialogue into motion. Its opening passage … assembles symbols that recur in its course. And the first word, kateben (I went down), sounds the great theme that runs through it to its end.”[7] The theme suggests that saving knowledge is attained in another world and that one must go there to receive it. In the Republic, Socrates goes down to the harbor and engages in the argument for true knowledge of justice and so then returns with his friends back up to Athens.[8] This theme is even mirrored in the allegory of the cave.[9]
All of this suggests that Plato and Socrates were both distrustful of rhetoric and concurrently quite good at it. Many scholars have pointed out that Socrates is actually quite closer to his professed enemies, the Sophists, practitioners and teachers of rhetoric, then Plato would have liked. W. T. Jones says, in The Classical Mind, “[Socrates] must have seemed to his fellow citizens more like a Sophist than anything else.”[10] In the Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, Eduard Zeller says,
“Socrates had much in common with the Sophists; first a critical attitude towards everything that seemed to be founded merely on tradition; further the chief object of his thought—man as knowing, active, social being; thirdly, that in his philosophic reflections he always started from experience.”[11]
But as Paul R. Helsel says, “Socrates was born among the Sophists, he was educated by the Sophists, he used the method of the Sophists, but Socrates was not a sophist.”[12] The difference is that the Sophists did not believe in an ultimate truth, but Socrates (or, at least Plato’s Socrates) did.
The interesting inconsistency of Plato’s distaste for rhetoric and his use of it becomes even more problematic in light of this last statement: “he used the method of the Sophists.” This seems to obscure the line between dialectic and rhetoric, the method of Socrates and the method of the Sophists. The line blurs even further when we take into account Golden, Berquist, and Coleman’s rendering of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus in The Rhetoric of Western Thought. They characterize the Gorgias as a study of false rhetoric. “Rhetoric … was a pseudo-art of appearances rather than a vehicle for conveying truth.”[13] In the Phaedrus, on the other hand, Plato articulates “true rhetoric.”
“The second or ‘true rhetoric’ he himself exemplified. The rhetoric he embraced was truthful, self-effacing, and real. Plato’s noble lover [true rhetorician] was part philosopher, part logician, part psychologist. He must know the truth. He must be a master of dialectic, the Platonic instrument for the discovery and dissemination of the truth.”[14]
The problem with this description of “true rhetoric” is that it sounds exactly like the dialectic. In a systematic diagram of Plato’s true rhetoric, Golden, Berquist, and Coleman define rhetoric as “the art of winning the Soul by discourse” and that “it’s one and the same for every type of speaking.”[15] If that is not Plato’s definition of dialectic, then classicists have been translating dialektikē wrong for a long time.[16] Alongside this seeming equivocation of rhetoric and dialectic come the claims of Socrates and Plato being rhetoricians themselves.[17] So what exactly is going on here? The difficulty in placing Socrates and Plato as rhetoricians or not exists because of equivocations in defining dialectic. There are, in effect, two definitions co-existing at the same time: Sophistic dialectic and Platonic dialectic.
Sophistic dialectic is closely aligned to the original translation of the word dialektikē: the art of conversation or discourse. Following Protagoras’ famous saying, “Man is the measure of all things,” Sophistic dialectic depends on who the conversers are. Because of this, it is also contingent upon the conversers’ cultural background and place in history. Two Greek men from 440 BCE are going to have a much different dialectic then two American men from 2002 CE. Sophistic dialectic is a contingent, historicized dialectic. Definitions produced by the dialectic are stipulative, nominal definitions. Dialectic, in this light, is usually thought of as a branch of rhetoric.[18] Platonic dialectic, on the other hand, is the sole method towards universal truth. It’s “one and the same for every type of speaking.” It’s “the only procedure which proceeds by the destruction of assumptions to the very first principle, so as to give itself a firm base.” (533c-d) Platonic dialectic is a universal, eternal dialectic and is properly thought of as a branch of logic (or vice versa).
With these two concepts we can see two things happening in the Platonic dialogues. When a Sophist enters into an argument with Socrates, he is arguing contingently. He uses all of his rhetorical skills and abilities to win and, if he were to win, the position that won wouldn’t be ultimate “Truth”, but rather simply “true” of this particular moment. When Socrates enters into an argument, he also uses all of his rhetorical skills and abilities to win. However, the position Socrates is ultimately arguing for is the enshrinement of the Truth. Socrates is entering into a contingent dialectic to enshrine universal dialectic. Along the way, Socrates began to distinguish between good rhetoric and bad rhetoric, good dialectic and bad dialectic. Good rhetoric became simply dialectic and bad rhetoric became rhetoric. And because Socrates was so good at the branch of rhetoric known as dialectic, he won. At the very least, this is bad faith on the part of Socrates.
It is in this light, in the context of a battle over the definition of rhetoric and dialectic, a battle of competing descriptions of rhetoric and dialectic, that we should view his use of the rhetorical device of description/re-description. For, if viewed in this light, we can see Socrates using the same rhetorical tricks and gambits as that of his enemy, the Sophists, all the while denying its use and instead placing the success of his victories on the mantle of dialectic. As Norris says of Nietzsche:
“The dialectical method of eliciting ‘truth’ from a carefully contrived encounter of wisdom and ignorance was – according to Nietzsche – no more than a rhetorical ploy. Its persuasiveness, however, was such as to monopolize for itself all claims to reason, dignity and truth. … Behind all the big guns of reason and morality is a fundamental will to persuade which craftily disguises its workings by imputing them always to the adversary camp. … If anything, the sophist comes closer to wisdom by implicitly acknowledging what Socrates has to deny: that thinking is always and inseparably bound to the rhetorical devices that support it.”[19]
In this sense, dialectic is a tool of repression in the rhetorical game of persuasion. Dialectic forces people down one path of argumentation. Socrates’ game is to get his opponent to accept the opening points of his argument, force his opponent through a labyrinth of logic, and any objection he re-describes to either discredit it or force his opponent back into the labyrinth, thus fueling Socrates’ own argument. Norris describes a scene where
“Socrates is shown running circles of argument round one of their [sophists’] number in Plato’s dialogue The Gorgias. Here dialectic wins out, as always, by placing its questions with strategic skill and forcing the opponent into a position of weakness on Socrates’ terms.”[20]
This isn’t to say that the Sophists aren’t engaged in the same program. They also enter into the dialectic in the hopes of winning. However, their ultimate goal is not the enshrinement of some universal truth. Their goal is contingent upon the moment, as per their understanding of rhetoric and dialectic.
If we interpret dialectic the way Plato would want us to, as the logic of universals, the path to the Forms, then conflict occurs with other pieces of Platonic argumentation. However, if we interpret dialectic in Plato as a branch of rhetoric, as simply the historically contingent discourse of a particular time and place, then the problems with Platonic allegory and metaphor disappear, but we are left without universal Forms, which are instrumental to Plato’s systematic philosophy. Thus we have two descriptions of dialectic. If we take dialectic as the universal method towards truth, we must reject Plato as a practicioner because of his continued aberrations into rhetoric. However, if we take dialectic as a branch of rhetoric, contingent upon its every use, a description that Plato seems to, in some sense, have understood in his equivocation of rhetoric and dialectic in the Phaedrus, we will see how Plato was attempting to enshrine a method of truth by any means at his disposal. The use of description/re-description in the opening sections of the Republic is just one of many examples.
[1] All quotations of the Republic are from the Desmond Lee translation.
[2] It should be noted that this is the first appearance of Plato’s conception of justice. Compare “… a man specializes appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others.” (370c) with Plato’s ultimate construction “… justice consists in minding your own business and not interfering with other people.” (433b) The common principle to both is that a person should mind their own business and do their own thing. Plato seems to want us to believe that this justice is then naturally emergent, but, argumentatively speaking, it is not good policy to use what you are trying to prove in the proof, i.e. from a dialectical standpoint, Plato is begging the question. This becomes apparent at 374a when Glaucon asks if the people could not fight for themselves if attacked by another state. Socrates replies, “Not if the principle, on which we all, yourself included, agreed when we started constructing our state, is sound. And that was, if you remember, that one man could not do more than one job or profession well.” (374a) It is quite clear, at this point, that Plato is constructing a dialectical argument for justice. And since Plato’s professed method towards truth, in general, is the dialectic, this provision in the “origin of cities” argument becomes suspect. He is supposed to be proving his principle, not assuming it. However, as a rhetorical description of the origin of society, it proves effective or, at the least, relatively inoffensive.
[3] Book 7 and 6 respectively.
[4] 246a-247b
[5] James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman, The Rhetoric of Western Thought, (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1976), 20
[6] Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, (New York: Routledge, 1982), 63
[7] Eric Voegelin, “The Way Up and the Way Down”, in History-208 Course Packet, (Spring 2002), 139 (originally in the third volume of Voegelin’s Order and History)
[8] ibid.
[9] In the allegory of the cave, the katebasis theme is reversed so that the prisoner breaks free and travels up out of the cave, receives knowledge, and then travels back down to the cave, rather than down to the harbor for knowledge and up to Athens to spread it.
[10] W. T. Jones, The Classical Mind, (New York: Harcourt, 1952), 110
[11] Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 118
[12] Paul R. Helsel, “Early Greek Moralists,” in History of Philosophical Systems, ed. Vergilius Ferm, (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1961), 89
[13] Golden, Berquist, and Coleman, 20
[14] ibid., 25
[15] ibid., 26
[16] “Dialectic, in fact, is the only procedure which proceeds by the destruction of assumptions to the very first principle, so as to give itself a firm base.” (533c-d) The main thing to stress here is that dialectic is “the only procedure” and the first principle spoken of is the Form of the Good which orients the Soul.
[17] This includes Nietzsche’s attack, being “not to deny the potential aberrations of rhetoric but to argue, on the contrary, that Socrates himself is a wily rhetorician who scores his points by sheer tactical cunning.” (Norris, 61)
[18] Take for example, dialectic’s submersion under rhetoric in The Aims of Argument: A Brief Rhetoric: “The ancient Greeks called argument as inquiry dialectic; today we might think of it as dialogue, or serious conversation.” As a branch of rhetoric, dialectic becomes one of many avenues of inquiry, though for Plato, dialectic was the only avenue towards truth.
[19] Norris, 60-1
[20] ibid., 60
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