Dreams, Narrative Structure, and Epistemological Authority in Wieland

This was a final for a seminar in sentimentalism and sensationalism in antebellum American literature, dressed up as a conference paper (we faked one at the end of the course, a great idea and experience for getting the swing of professional practices). What was interesting about the course was that it tried to find parity between a number of axes of discourse and debate: popular vs. high-brow (e.g., is Uncle Tom's Cabin a great piece of writing?), historical (what's going on in America?), theoretical (how does our understanding, then or now, of morals and/or emotions tie into the texts?), political (does Lippard's Quaker City say anything about his surroundings, and how should we care?).

My attraction to Charles Brockden Brown, known as America's first professional novelist, was because of the way his Wieland seemed to register on two valences I'm interested in: philosophical and political. In particular, we might shake out two different epistemological projects begun in the 17th century (and for which we identify as the beginning of "modern philosophy"): personal-epistemology and state-epistemology. Descartes is the paradigmatic father of the former, and Hobbes of the latter. What I have in mind is the well-known idea that Descartes was after certainty in our reasoning: how do we authorize the premises of our reasoning? By taking this to be radically unclear, he hoped to find a foundation to begin building from: the birth of modern foundationalism. My smallish claim is that Hobbes' project is the exact parallel of Descartes': the quest for legitimation of a government in the face of radical doubt about any such legitimacy. My sense is that the connections between these two different projects has largely been unexplored in the philosophical literature (though a good place to start is Toulmin's Cosmopolis).

What I found in Brown's Wieland was the embodiment of the kind of explicit philosophical work I think needs to be done on the connection between how an individual's practical reasoning interacts with the body politic. I was so excited that my first attempts (an initial presentation, an initial abstract, and my first draft) came out as gobbily-gook. I had the good fortune of having a professor who was experienced in putting together philosophy and literature, and who have me great advice for how to shape something presentable. What is below simply approaches the issues I've outlined as the interaction between personal-epistemology and state-epistemology (and what I really want is the historical reconstruction of the common underlying motive that produced two disparate strains of philosophical inquiry that rarely coincide: for some fanciful reflection that begins with the Greeks, see "What Happened to Political Philosophy?"). In particular, the notion of the dream as a metaphor for radical non-constraint can be developed much, much further, and I really did very little to truly capitalize on this potentially rich thought, and it might be a very fruitful historical project in tracing how the dream-metaphor has functioned in intellectual history (I suspect it has played similar roles as that of madness, and seeing both histories together would be interesting).

Since nobody's read Wieland, and I'd at least like to make the issues I try and explore accessible, I'll begin with Tompkins' pithy summary of the plot, which she claims (rightly) is central to understanding the meaning of the novel (not in the obvious way). The fact of the matter is, the plot is simple and bizarre, which makes it inaccessible to a modern reader wondering how on earth somebody could go from a coolly rational person to massacring their whole family because an unknown voice told him it was God, and what God wants, God gets, and God wants'em all to die. Bizarre, frustrating, and hilarious at times, though I'm not sure Brown meant it to be, it also--if read right--provides insight into the process of slipping down slopes that happen because of bad, previous assumptions about what's going on. And for this insight, it isn't the content of the plot that must be emphasized, but the form of the narrative. At any rate, here's Tompkins:

This is what happens in Wieland.

Four young adults--Theodore and Clara Wieland, and Catherine and Henry Pleyel--are leading the most rational and harmonious existence imaginable on a country estate on the banks of the Schuylkill River. One night, after the arrival in their midst of a mysterious person named Francis Carwin, one of them hears a strange voice and after that, it is no exaggeration to say, things go rapidly downhill. Theodore Wieland, who heard the voice, becomes introspective and morbid. Clara begins to hear voices too--men in her bedroom closet threatening to rape and kill her, other men warning her to keep off her own cottage grounds. Pleyel overhears someone say that his fiancee in Germany is dead (she is alive), and later he hears someone say that Clara, whom he loves, has betrayed him with another man (she has not). The climax comes when Wieland is visited by an apparition (he thinks it is God) commanding him, as proof of religious devotion, to kill his wife--which he does--and then demanding that he kill his children--which he also does (he has four of them). Upon learning of this, Clara falls desperately ill, but recovers in time for Wieland to break out of jail in order to kill her, too. She is saved, however, by the interposition of Carwin, whose confession that he is a ventriloquist causes Wieland to doubt whether it was indeed God's voice that commanded him to murder his family. He kills himself. Clara's house burns down. Somehow, the misunderstanding between her and Pleyel is cleared up and they go off to Europe. End of story.

This summary of Wieland's main narrative exaggerates its craziness only slightly. (40)

I might also add that the argument below embodies an increasing reliance on a critical vocabulary that emphasizes the role of inference: my increasing appreciation of Robert Brandom's pragmatism is evident in my construction of how epistemological authority works. And if I'm right about Brown, then Brown knew as well as Kant (if perhaps not as explicitly, which is Brandom's fascinating new interpretation of Kant in Reason in Philosophy) that the content of thoughts depend on their inferential connections to each other (which is my slide between "descriptions" and "deductions" below).

*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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The dominant interpretation of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland since the mid-80s has been as political allegory.[fn.1] Lifting off from Brown’s ironic invocation of the Platonic analogy of scale between city and soul, of making “the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (Brown 34),[fn.2] and grounding the allegory’s presence in facts like Brown’s membership to the largely Federalist-leaning Friendly Club and that Brown sent a copy of Wieland to Thomas Jefferson upon its completion,[fn.3] this interpretation seeks to explain the presence of the many kinds of uncertainty in the text as emblems for the dissolution of traditional kinds of authority in a pure democracy. Federalists like Adams and Hamilton thought that a strong central authority was needed to lead and control the passions of the populace, whereas Republicans like Madison and Jefferson were quite sure that a strong central authority was the key impediment to freedom that the recent Revolution had been designed to overcome. And while in political terms this was a debate about how strong the national government should be, the Federalists and Republicans also saw it as a struggle over truth: Republicans believed that truth would come out in the free proliferation of opinions and Federalists thought that was just a screen to believe whatever you wanted.[fn.4] Wieland, on this interpretation, intersects this debate by showing three generations of Wielands progress away from aristocratic, traditional boundaries into a free, idyllic conversational paradise, which suddenly implodes with the introduction of an eloquent outside element that does not have their best interests at heart.[fn.5] Without any central authority to reign in speculation on the mysteries of the voices, Carwin stands as an emblem of the problem of rhetoric in a free-for-all of competing opinions and Wieland as an emblem of the problem of the authority of God in a secular, pure democracy.

I think all of this is right, but the emphasis on the narrative content of Wieland—the story, the plot—tends to de-emphasize the text’s radical penetration into the uncertainty about authority produced by pure democracy. We should understand ventriloquism as a metaphor for secularization,[fn.6] which means not just the difficulties of taking God as an authority in a democracy, but the problem of the general human condition under the auspices of the nebulous authority-structures of democracy. Not just those who claim God as an authority are affected by democracy, but all claims in general are subjected to the uncertainty of decision resulting from democracy’s cherishing of unconstrained conversation. Thus Brown’s allegory ultimately grounds itself in the very real practical situation of making decisions in a democracy. To show this, I will first focus on the narrative structure of Wieland (as opposed to content) in order to suggest that Brown’s choice of how to tell the story of the Wieland family was not haphazard but central to his point. And secondly, I will focus on the metaphor of the dream as a fiction of radical non-constraint to show how deep Brown’s epistemological nightmare goes.

Brown chose the epistolary form as the vehicle for his narrative, and by making the story of Wieland unfold from Clara’s retrospective pen, Brown is able to place us inside of an active mind still entangled in past events. However, Clara not only provides us with her retrospective feelings about the events (as in the beginning of Chapter 6 when Clara struggles for a page gathering “strength enough to proceed” (56), before ushering Carwin onto stage), but Brown also has Clara narrate in the past tense her then understanding and movements of mind at the time of the occurrences. This intimate view of Clara’s mind, where we are allowed into her most private of thoughts and struggles like the close friend we, as reader, have the pretence of being, allows Brown to emphasize the importance of description to the unfolding of events. Clara’s past-tense narration gives us a special view of a person’s mind as they experience an event, but her present-tense narration of the past as she now sees it gives us a view of how descriptions of events evolve, an “if I had only known then…” quality. The important point here is that descriptions change. And while this may seem a platitude, Brown wants to emphasize to us how Clara’s actions at the time rested on her description, her understanding, of the events at the time and how the knowledge of potential change in description creates the precarious feeling of basing actions on mutable reasons. For the reason why you do something is based in part on your understanding, your description, of what the event you're responding to is.

To concretize what I’m suggesting about Brown’s motives for choosing the epistolary form, let me quote a passage (just after Clara has heard the first whisper in her closet):

The maid was my only companion, and she could not reach my chamber without previously passing through the opposite chamber, and the middle passage, of which, however, the doors were usually unfastened. If she had occasioned this noise, she would have answered my repeated calls. No other conclusion, therefore, was left me, but that I had mistaken the sounds, and that my imagination had transformed some casual noise into the voice of a human creature. Satisfied with this solution, I was preparing to relinquish my listening attitude, when my ear was again saluted with a new and yet louder whispering. It appeared, as before, to issue from lips that touched my pillow. A second effort of attention, however, clearly shewed me, that the sounds issued from within the closet, the door of which was not more than eight inches from my pillow. (65)

The narrative grammar of typical passages in the novel is such that events are not shown, but tightly bound to Clara’s acts of showing. Clara does not just tell us what happened, but argues for her description, littering the narration with “hences,” “therefores,” “persuasions,” and “conjectures.” This gives us the odd spectacle of not just a fallible narrator, but an argumentative narrator, and the reader is made to actively question the description of events by the narrator’s own active interrogation. As thinly veiled as Brown’s use of the epistolary form is—which unlike William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy or Samuel Richardson’s Pamela carries none of the accoutrements of a letter, like salutations, dates, places of origin, or names of correspondents—it does allow Brown the pretence of a reading audience, of somebody specifically being communicated to within the frame of the story. This gives Clara motivation within the frame of the story to argue for what she describes. What is heightened by Clara’s argumentativeness is cognizance of the chains of inference that lead us to conclude that a scene should be described as such and such, an event being this and not that.

The narrative action in Wieland, I’d like to suggest, is on the model of a practical syllogism. Syllogisms are short, inferential proofs of two premises and a conclusion, and for my purposes the length of Clara’s mental machinations matter less than three propositional forms typical of a syllogism: descriptions of a scene (“the maid … could not reach my chamber without previously passing through the opposite chamber”), conditional statements to set inferences in motion (“if she had occasioned this noise, [then] she would have answered my repeated calls”), and conclusions resulting in action-outputs (“No other conclusion, therefore, was left me, but that I had mistaken the sounds…. Satisfied with this solution, I was preparing to relinquish my listening attitude”). At one point in the novel, Clara says: “The will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusions on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved, it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding” (39). This is Brown’s epistemological situation in a nutshell. The understanding receives sensory inputs and must fashion them into descriptions, “deductions” as Clara puts it, before it is able to tell the will what action-outputs it should perform.

This situation, however, is not simply a private one—it is affected greatly by public discussion. The ongoing public discussion of the voices between the Wieland family, with Carwin being added to the discussion in Chapter 8, mirrors the ongoing discussion of public policy carried out by the Democratic Clubs that came into existence at the close of the 18th century. Defending their right to exist, the Democratic Clubs articulated the idea of a “public sphere” where the citizen, because not at the direct helm of the ship of state as in ancient Athenian democracy, could remain constantly involved in public affairs. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 passed by the Federalists—the same year Wieland came out and Brown’s club, the Friendly Club, dissolved—attempted to suppress this newly created sphere, but Republicans Madison and Jefferson came to the sphere’s aid by repudiating, in historian Eric Foner’s words, “the common law tradition that the national government enjoyed the power to punish ‘seditious’ speech.”[fn.7] In Wieland, Brown is articulating first-hand anxiety over the form of social life that comes about in repudiating traditional sanctions on conversation. To Jefferson’s Miltonic echo of “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,”[fn.8] Hamilton would reply skeptically that “Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.”[fn.9]

The Wieland family is a double for both the Friendly Club and our national culture. The horror of what happens to the Wielands depends on both the care-free attitude of the Wieland family’s discussions and consequential decision-making. The Wieland family’s attitude to life, where most outside events like war or Louisa’s story contribute “in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity” (29), and providing “a copious theme of speculation” (33), mirror the Democratic Clubs’ discussions insofar as they are carefree because they lack power—the Clubs are precisely not at the helm and so not responsible for actually making any decisions. However, due to the nature of democracy, public discussion is consequential, which is why the Federalists feared the Democratic Clubs’ very existence.[fn.10] Likewise, the Wieland family does make consequential decisions, like the debate between Pleyel and Wieland about whether to go to Europe. It is the insertion of meaningful consequence into unconstrained conversation that turns the secret knowledge of God’s will into a potential slaughterhouse just waiting to happen. Without any outside authority to restrain Wieland, he’s at liberty to pursue the consequences of his belief. The slim figure that connects the double role of the Wieland family, as both idyll of unconstrained conversation and the potential horror of pure democracy, is that of the reasoning-not-reasonable individual—Clara: the embodiment of a person grown into a culture of unconstrained conversation, unused to the authority of anything but her own senses, and without recourse when those senses fail her, and who, as narrator, is constantly emphasizing this point to the reader in her narrative grammar.[fn.11]

The figure of the dream serves to deepen the problem contained in the authority of the senses. At the beginning of Chapter 7, Clara tells us of a dream she had, in which she sees her brother:

As I carelessly pursued my walk, I thought I saw my brother, standing at some distance before me, beckoning and calling me to make haste. He stood on the opposite edge of the gulph. I mended my pace, and one step more would have plunged me into this abyss, had not some one from behind caught suddenly my arm, and exclaimed, in a voice of eagerness and terror, “Hold! hold!” (71-2)

Clara says that “images so terrific and forcible disabled me, for a time, from distinguishing between sleep and wakefulness, and withheld from me the knowledge of my actual condition” (72), and until Carwin finally corrects her, she believes that the voice was internal to her dream. When Clara hears the words “Hold! hold!” again later, she recognizes them as from her dream and says, “There are means by which we are able to distinguish a substance from a shadow, a reality from the phantom of a dream” (99). Yet, this belief that she indeed possesses these means are what lead her to believe that she heard a supernatural agent come to her protection in telling her to “hold.” In practical terms, we believe that we have these means available (for example, Clara says after Pleyel first confronts her about imputed improprieties with Carwin, “I moved that I might banish the doubt that I was awake” 119), but these means are predicated on a fairly stable reliance on our senses, which is exactly the problem throughout the novel. Brown’s reference to “reality” and “dream” heightens the problems of the Wieland family to an almost Cartesian level given the actual problems they encounter in taking the authority of the senses.

What is interesting about the interaction between the dream and the voices is how, once one has softened the distinction between dream and reality, more and more of what was previously a dream becomes interactive with reality. Upon hearing the dream-voice again, Clara immediately takes stock of the items in her dream, saying her brother, seized arm, and the voice “were surely imaginary”—“yet the words and the voice were the same” (99). As soon as this move has been made, picking away at her certainty about what is on which side of the line between dream and reality, she begins contemplating this “monstrous conception” of her brother from the dream. And though she promptly dispels this “strange and terrible chimera,” she also immediately follows that with “yet it would not be suddenly dismissed” (99). Just as the Federalists feared, in historian Gordon S. Wood’s phrase, the “democratization of truth” that Republicans cherished because there would be no agreed upon method for determining who was right and who was wrong—just a war of opinions, all against all—so does the lack of method in distinguishing dream from reality exemplify this fear, and land Clara in a slippery slope of allowing into her practical syllogisms all kinds of riff-raff. For example: that she has an invisible guardian. Even before Carwin has solidified this belief in Clara, by pretty much out and out stating that she has an invisible guardian, the way was paved in Clara’s own mind by just contemplating the voice and then the dream. She says, “My belief that my monitor [i.e. the mysterious voice telling Clara to hold] was posted near, was strong, and instantly converted these appearances [i.e. shadows in the room and curtains swaying in the breeze] to tokens of his presence, and yet I could discern nothing” (98). As Carwin says in his confession to Clara: “I had filled your mind with faith in shadows and confidence in dreams” (241).

The way the dream is able to seep into Clara’s waking life, the way ambiguity over what parts were dream and which not, serves to make the dream a figure for the Friendly Club, for the dream of democratic society. For Clara’s “fancy” (71) is given control and free reign over Clara in her dream, unconstrained allowance to do what it pleases. The ability of the fancy to do as it pleases in a dream mirrors Federalist fears over the Democratic Clubs. What they feared was that the Democratic Clubs were bypassing politicians in power and making direct appeals to the people, bypassing the traditional currents of power. The Democratic Clubs, in effect, were able to think what they pleased and then set these ideas loose on the American public. This breakdown between a populace that can think whatever it wants because it has no power and a power-controlling inner circle is the parallel breakdown of the distinction between dreams and reality. As the breakdown begins when the “Hold! hold!” moves from dream to reality and Clara’s “horrific conception” of her brother then begins affecting her life, her “reason” flees her. She says her “actions were dictated by phrenzy” and “surely I was bereft of understanding” (101). As the boundary between dream and reality breaks down, Clara turns into the passion-fueled mob Hamilton and the Federalists feared.

In an early essay, “Walstein’s School of History,” Brown comes down on the side of narrative as a better instrument of moral education over “abstract systems and intellectual reasonings,”[fn.12] and this, I think, because narratives are able to embody intellectual reasoning, show its processes and inner workings. In Wieland, the display of the process of reasoning becomes, not just a better didactic tool, but central to his purpose. By showing Clara’s sometimes fantastic movements of mind, Brown is able to show what one person’s mental state is when bereft of traditional authority-structures. When Carwin says that he had filled Clara’s mind “with faith in shadows and confidence in dreams,” I think this is a nod not only to the dream-voice turn invisible guardian, but the dream of democratic society that Republicans were trying to promulgate. Repubican-leaning deists—like fallen Calvinist preacher turned deist orator Elihu Palmer—would speak of the coming “new religion” which taught of the “perfectibility of man” and would usher in the “universal reign of reason, peace, and justice.”[fn.13] We can see Pleyel, “champion of intellectual liberty” (28), especially, in this description, but the Wieland family generally. The nightmare scenario of the plot of Wieland is intended to dissolve an easy faith in this dream. While on the one hand, Brown’s metaphor of ventriloquism strikes at the heart of those who speak in the name of God—placing him in camp with Republican deists—on the other, Brown, in part through the form of the narrative, through Clara’s constant mental deliberations, is able to push this metaphor so that it cuts into any private store of knowledge.[fn.14] Private deliberation becomes an echo-chamber where the slightest push in the wrong direction can send you tumbling down a chain of bad inferences.

Bibliography

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Ed. Jay Fliegelman. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Fischer, David Hackett. Liberty and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Waterman, Bryan. Republic of Intellect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 1993.

Endnotes

[1]I take the two major documents of this shift to be Jane Tompkins’ chapter on Wieland in her Sensational Designs and Jay Fliegelman’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Wieland. Tompkins refers to Fliegelman’s earlier interpretation of Wieland in his Prodigals and Pilgrims, published in 1982, as having independently developed an “almost identical” (Tompkins 208n4) approach to her own, and so I read Tompkins’ book as having tipped the scales in favor of political allegory, prompting Penguin to ask Fliegelman to introduce their edition. Bryan Waterman’s book on the Friendly Club, Republic of Intellect, offers a significant revision of this political interpretation.

[2]The allusion is ironic because Pleyel offers the formula in order to say that it “was absurd” (Brown 34).

[3]Tompkins’ attempt to shift interpretation of Wieland begins with this “single fact” (Tompkins 43).

[4]David Hackett Fischer’s “visual history,” Liberty and Freedom, contains a good example of this sentiment, showing a print drawing from 1793 entitled “A Peep Into the AntiFederal Club,” with part of the club’s creed on the wall of the drawing being “liberty is the power of doing anything we like” (Fischer 204).

[5]Tompkins emphasizes the function of the first two Wielands on 56-7.

[6]Jay Fliegelman says this in his introduction to Wieland (Brown xxxix).

[7]Foner 43

[8]Quoted in Wood 363.

[9]Quoted in May 254.

[10]May 254

[11]Wood describes the general milieu of the “democratization of truth”: “Most ordinary people were no longer willing to defer to the knowledge and judgments of those who had once been their superiors. Perhaps plain people did not have the college education, the extensive travel, or the intellectual power of their aristocratic neighbors, but, their spokesmen said, they had eyes and ears, and they knew what was true for them better than some ‘commanding genius’ or ‘learned sage’ did” (362).

[12]Quoted in Tompkins 46.

[13]May 231-2

[14]Waterman, 50-91, expands on the perceived difficulties of knowledge-production entertained in the conflict between Federalists and Republicans, particularly in relationship to Illuminati conspiracy theories, saying that the conflicts between Federalists and Republicans on the one hand and deists and religionists on the other “reveal late-Enlightenment crises of epistemology and public intellectual authority as they raised questions about who had avenues to knowledge adequate to warrant the public’s trust” (53).

Absolute Truth

The notion of Absolute Truth began from the conviction that, though what we are justified in believing changes, what is in all actuality true stays the same. We can imagine its origins in the notion of a supreme being that looked down on the affairs of humanity from on high and had, because of its omniscience, an invariable sense of truth. Plato still had this notion of omniscience when he suggested that the affairs of humanity were a pale reflection of what was really going on, mere shadows of the actual objects. So, Plato said, we could follow the Sophists and play with shadows if we wanted, but true philosophers seek the actual objects standing behind them.

Plato, however, didn’t just posit his notion of the Realm of the Forms as some explanation of why things change, of why we used to think kings or democracy were good, but now we don’t. Plato also had a much more practical goal in mind. Plato had learned from his teacher, Socrates, that doing what you believe is pious conversationally amounts to the same thing as performing the will of the gods. And yet, Plato thought that we could find out what the will of the gods was. He thought he had found a method, a way of cutting through the thick veil of appearance. This was Socrates’ elenchus transformed into the dialectic. The exercise of the Republic was to show that if we found out more about the Form of Justice, we could be more just to our fellow citizens, more about the Form of the Good, more ethical to other people, more about Truth, less wrong.

If we could find out more about Truth, which is invariable, eternal, and absolute, we could have more true beliefs—truth is the ultimate justification. The trouble that immediately confronted Plato’s project was the sense that its aspirations and ambition was enormous. To undertake the project of looking for the ultimate justification was to bypass run-of-the-mill justification, which we can see in Plato’s bitterness in describing the ship of state—nobody bothers to ask how to run the ship the only people who really know how to run the ship. The problem, of course, is that the Platonic philosopher’s faraway gaze tends to gloss over the here and now. Plato thought that in the long run, philosophers were the only way to go. But in the short run, Aristotle’s practical philosophy took over the hearts and minds of intellectuals.

I follow Stephen Toulmin in thinking that Descartes marked the resurgence of the Platonic desire to bypass the here and now of justification to attain the always and forever of Absolute Truth. This desire is marked by the priority of epistemology, of figuring out and getting straight in advance what the foundations and criteria are for truth and justification. By figuring out in advance what the criteria of truth are we could short-circuit the need to justify for particular audiences. Descartes, like Plato, knew that any particular person or audience could be flawed, though both supposed that every person, deep down, has the same unequivocal capacity to see the Truth.

Post-Cartesian epistemology has struggled long and hard in the face of a seemingly insurmountable difficulty: all criteria are stated by people, people who belong to audiences, audiences that are transitory and perhaps flawed. The counterinsurgency to Cartesian philosophy, led by philosophers from Bayle and Hume to Hegel and Nietzsche to James and Wittgenstein, has been a long trail countering the idea that we may yet erect an ahistorical boundary-water for what we may think, for what truth may appear as to us. The trail has taken many turns and forms, but one thing is worth highlighting here: every step of the way, every counter to proposed methods and criteria, has forced Cartesians further and further away from the lives of their fellow brethren. Cartesian philosophy became more and more insulated from the concerns of humanity the harder they tried to formulate this foundation for Knowledge and Truth. And this surely makes predictable sense: one can imagine that reformulating and refining a project who’s goal is to bypass the need for any particular, historically instantiated audience’s assent (because an audience’s assent is the devil’s curse of transitory historicity) will eventually become remote from what the rest of humanity is doing. As every branch originally grown on philosophy’s tree fell to the earth, from astronomy to physics and psychology to intellectual history, philosophy happily waved good-bye and focused on what increasingly became its only purpose: the search for Absolute Truth, though in these latter days we prudently call it something like the search for independent criteria of veridical validity.

As the 19th-century strolled into the 20th, in the anglophone world old-school system building waned in the face of the waxing of what is now called “analytic philosophy”. Philosophers put the sloppy and tidy speculations aside in favor of the solution to definite and discernible problems. Everything, however, still revolved around the search for criteria. After all, without criteria for the solution of problems, arguments would continue on for centuries—like they had been. Philosophers began to feel anxious about this. What’s more, the movement that many early analytic philosophers had pinned their hopes on, logical positivism, began to fall apart by the middle of the century. Logical positivists had thought that they had finally found their way to Truth. Their first move against the muddy tradition of criterionless, speculative philosophy was to pin all of their hopes on science. The New Science changed philosophy irrevocably in Descartes’ time, but the logical positivists thought that the philosophical proposals marshaled by the descendents of Descartes and Locke, and even Kant (though especially evil Hegel), had fallen away from the science bandwagon and had hoped for something special for themselves. Oh no, said the logical positivists, science is where it is all happening and the sooner we figure that out the better we’ll all be. Science gets results. They have criteria. So, positivists said, the sooner we start acting like scientists, the sooner we’ll solve these trifle things we call “philosophical problems.”

Having already peremptorily relegated themselves to a status lower than physics, they set about trying to help science by getting straight what science was doing. This prompted the second move against the tradition, the move towards the study of language. Since everything has to be stated in language, the sooner we get a rigorous, scientific study of language off the ground, a set of logical and grammatical rules, the sooner this mess will all end—hence the rise of symbolic logic in philosophy departments.

To pull it all together, both the obeisance to science and the lynchpin of language, the logical positivists proposed their great criterion for truth: the verifiability criterion. If what made science so lovely was that it was verifiable, and science got us truth, then shouldn’t the great criterion for truth be verifiability? This wasn’t a bad idea at all, except for one thing: how was the criterion itself verifiable? By any of the interesting versions of the criterion’s own lights, the criterion itself was unverifiable and therefore cognitively meaningless. This broke one of the first rules of philosophy: don’t deny anything you’ve presupposed.

Logical positivism never really recovered and through the fifties and sixties was subjected to continuous attacks by an ever more bolder subsection of the analytic establishment. This subsection began to increasingly identify as pragmatists. The pragmatists from an earlier generation, Peirce, James, and Dewey, were famously reviled by the up and coming analytic movement. Russell said of Dewey that the pragmatist theory of truth amounted to “the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety.” The pragmatists were famous for returning to the realm of human praxis, in focusing on justification, rather than truth. Platonic realists like Russell feared that such an exultation of the powers of humanity might bring the hubris of future generations declaring that Caesar never crossed the Rubicon.

Analytics who led the attack on logical positivism were those like Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty. Rorty in particular became a poster-boy for the attacks because of his combination of acute analysis and argumentation, breadth of historical knowledge, range of philosophical acquaintance, and, perhaps unfortunately most of all, his penchant for bombastic turns of phrase. Rorty linked most explicitly the movement away from logical positivism to the movement towards pragmatism, but, like James and Dewey before him, became attached to such notions as relativism, irrationalism, nihilism, and the end of philosophy. For our purposes at hand, he was taken to deny truth. By attacking the notion of “absolute truth,” the Platonic notion of theoretically outlining where and how truth occurs and therefore what is true, Rorty suggested that truth is not a philosophically interesting topic that inquiry into could help in the living of our lives.

Lately Rorty has come to grips with the idea that some of the suggestions proposed by pragmatism are counterintuitive, which itself seems counterintuitive to the idea of pragmatism. Pragmatism was supposed to be about the elimination of extraneous philosophical attachments, appealing to the common sense of our practical lives. But Rorty agrees with Feyerbend that, for instance, as long as we have common speech, we are going to have the idea of “mind,” that which philosophical wrecking balls like Ryle and Dennett have been trying to demystify. Rorty has generalized this sentiment (along with Nietzsche’s that as long as we have grammar, we’ll have God) by suggesting that Platonism is built into our common sense. But philosophy since Plato has been not just about summarizing the way we think, but also suggesting changes in the way we think. In philosophy, the intuitive has always been commingled with the counterintuitive to create a new intuition, a new common sense that is perhaps better than the old.

One of the ways in which this is given effect is by making a distinction between commonsensical conversation and philosophical conversation, so-called “speaking with the vulgar” and more sophisticated, specialized talk. As I suggested above, philosophy has become a highly technical enterprise that has been disengaging itself from everyday life for many, many years. Some people, however, are suspicious of such a distinction between two conversations, seeing it as breeding pointless jargonizing and instead valuing “plainer speech.” However, I think one can still keep, for instance, Pirsig’s criticism of pointless Victorian circumlocutions while acknowledging that, for instance, scientists keep the kind of distinction I’m talking about between their activities at work and at home (by calling it a “table” instead of a “cloud of electrons between vectors X, Y, and Z”), or between writing articles for scientific journals and writing a “popular science” book.

The point is the common sense one that our words gain resonance and meaning from the contexts in which we use them. A great impetus for 20th century analytic philosophy was the notion that the problems of philosophy (so-called “metaphysical problems” like free will vs. determinism) were created by taking words like “freedom” out of the original, common sense contexts in which they arose and creating a new context for them, one that warped their original meaning until it had little to do with the original context, thus creating pseudo-problems—in other words, metaphysics was simply a set of pointless circumlocutions that just confused things.

The subsection of the analytic movement that was based on the above impetus became known as “ordinary language philosophy”, or Oxford philosophy (because of the residence of its most well-known gurus, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and P. F. Strawson). On the one hand, Oxford philosophy foundered just as logical positivism did, but it does create added pressure for us philosophers in justifying some of the contexts we deal in. How does, or could, this effect us? What I think we see in the rise of neopragmatism, basically pragmatism in the analytic idiom (i.e., post-linguistic turn), is the rewrapping of the upshot of both Oxford philosophy and logical positivism. Logical positivism was also known in a slightly wider sense as “ideal language philosophy”. Their goal was to create a language that made it impossible to state or make sense of philosophical problems. They looked to the future, to possible innovations in language to relieve us of these problems, whereas ordinary language philosophy looked to our past, at the ways in which we use words in common sense contexts. I think pragmatism combines these two directions by playing them off of each other. We look at the way in which we currently use words, we look at our current contexts, and if we see problems arising, we either 1) eschew the context as being extraneous, as serving a pointless purpose or 2) change the language we use, change the context so that it may serve its purpose, but without the problems. (This distillation of wisdom from mid-20th century analytic philosophy comes out strongly when we retrospectively read Rorty’s judicious introduction to his 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn.)

With the notion of “absolute”, I would like to say that there’s nothing wrong with it in common sense contexts, but that there is something wrong with some of the notions created in philosophical contexts—that the effects in such contexts do not extend to everyday life at all. As James said after likewise dismissing the free will/determinism problem, it makes a difference that makes no difference. So, on the one hand saying that “my cat absolutely died by hanging itself with its leash” is true and perfectly understandle, saying that “we have to believe in Absolute Truth to be truthful”, while possibly making sense, cannot ever effect our practice. Plato created an activity, that of inquiring into Truth, of creating a theory of Truth that would surround all true statements, that cannot end, and cannot therefore cash out for us in everyday practice, because treating truth as an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for, an activity that would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction is the right direction to go hunting in. Absolute Truth, as an object to be inquired into, theorized and philosophized about, is a wheel that spins idly by itself. And if it is dead weight, it would be best to cut it loose from our philosophical language, thus trimming our own philosophical language and not letting it get away from us with pointless jargonizing.

The reason why pragmatists have often been excoriated about truth is because the so-called pragmatist theory of truth is said to prove its own falsity—if the true is what works, then the pragmatist theory of truth is false, ‘cuz it don’t work. Pragmatists like Rorty and Davidson have learned that this is right, that as a theory of truth it doesn’t work. One of the formulations that Dewey gave is that truth is warranted assertibility. If truth is warranted assertibility, then “truth” becomes the same thing as “justification”. That conflation is exactly what leads people to call pragmatists relativists, because while we see that justification is relative to audiences, communities, contexts, truth is separate from it for the exact reason that relativism is absurd.

So pragmatists should be willing to admit that justification is different from truth. What they’ve realized though is that the problem is with thinking we need a theory of truth, that we need (or can have) an interesting definition of truth. As Davidson says, truth, like good, is indefinable. The development of theories of truth are exactly those philosophical activities that treat Truth as an object of inquiry, inquiries through which we could learn more about truth and therefore, ideally, the application of “true” to particular linguistic items like “Slavery is wrong”. But how can we learn anything if, in such an inquiry, we appear to be in an endless sea with no compass?

In recent years, Rorty has learned to be content with the notion that truth is an absolute concept. Rorty is splitting the difference between common sense and the counterintuitive suggestions of pragmatism. It makes sense to say that justification is relative, but not truth. So we can say in perfect coherence that the Greeks were justified in practicing slavery, but they were still wrong. Truth may be an absolute notion, but pragmatists think we should give up the hope for a theory of it, that we should stop treating it as an object of inquiry. Justification (by such earmarks as Pirsig’s “tests of truth”) is our only criterion for truth, but that shouldn’t lead us to think they are the same, though likewise we shouldn’t hope for some other criterion. Justification is relative to community, but that doesn’t make us relativists because it isn’t clear what other criterion we could have for truth. It simply makes us fallible experimentalists, always in search of betterness. There are no theories for truth, justification, or betterness. We simply accrue them by the living of life.

Rorty's Myopia

I've read numbers of reviews of Rorty's work over the years and I've never been very satisfied by them. Maybe that shouldn't be very surprising. One of the things that is given often is the accusation that Rorty's a little myopic. This happens most often in reference to Rorty's take on the history of philosophy and on political philosophy. For a long time I've thought that comment to be unfair: Rorty delineates what he's going to talk about, and the range of material he feel's comfortable in being authoritative over, so it seems unfair to demand that every person do everything--doesn't it?

The first type, philosophers who think that philosophy-as-epistemology is too narrow a view of philosophy, is given good voice by Susan Neiman. But there are many others. The trouble with this critique is that is true but unavoidable. Philosophy is the kind of thing that you have to delimit the area you are working in. All things are like that, but philosophy is so amorphous that in no other subject can so many things fit under its mantle comfortably and not connect up to each other. For this very reason Rorty has been shunning the idea that he's an "end of philosophy" philosopher. He intimates such things every so often, but the reason latent in his writings (sometimes quite explicitly) is that he's talking about philosophy that looks to epistemology first. That is the kind of philosophy he's deconstructing. So philosophers who take other kinds of philosophy as primary, and criticize Rorty for missing them, are cutting him at cross-purposes. It's why we see on the backs of the best of these books (like Neiman and Toulmin's) Rorty's praise.

The second type, philosophers and others who that Rorty's political philosophy is too narrow or shallow, is given good voice by people like Richard Bernstein. Like the first, I think it's true, but it again cuts Rorty at cross-purposes. Rorty's political philosophy is very general and rarified and I don't think it cuts us off from anything more we would like to see done in political and social criticism, so-called criticisms of Rorty (and pragmatism) being not radical enough or in favor of the status quo.

In thinking about these kinds of critiques and how I view them is when I realized that thinking that Rorty is mypoic is the exact response he is looking for. When we look at the way Rorty is suggesting that we change the conversation, the response that Rorty isn't talking about the things he should be by his own lights tips us off to the idea that--if that's the only response you have--his work has done its magic. Rorty wants us to shift our attention to the construction of different narratives of philosophy, narratives he doesn't always offer us. Rorty wants us to concentrate on the more concrete in political and moral philosophy. Rorty's myopia is only a bad thing if one also thinks that a philosopher, or any other person, must do everything. Rorty has suggested that what he does is more like what Locke conceived of philosophy, as an underlaborer clearing away conceptual debris. After the debris is cleared, one is opened to the construction of better responses to problems, problems that will be different than the ones engendered by the epistemological debris.

If one is bored by Rorty or thinks he doesn't go far enough, that is not a bad response to have. It means that whatever in Rorty or pragmatism that one might have learned has already been internalized. Rorty wants to induce boredom in the problems he deconstructs so people will move on to other things. Rorty's simple dichotomies are there to be rejected because a good rejection of them will mean that one has evacuated the area in which Rorty was occupying, at which point there's nothing to criticize Rorty for because you've done what Rorty wanted. The only point of criticism is to say that Rorty should move on, too. That Rorty's effectively worked himself out of job, so why doesn't he get a new job? But that might only prove strong if there weren't still people who ended up on the wrong side of Rorty's simple dichotomies, the same people the person bored by Rorty would still need to fight. It's like Rorty's got the backs of all those wanting to do something other than epistemological philosophy, defending their right to do it, and in fact commending them for it.

Towards a Narrative of SOM

One of the pressing problems in Pirsig is what SOM is and where it fits in with the history of philosophy (something I tried to cover one side of, the textual side, in "Excavating SOM"). This is something that needs to have more attention paid to it, but all I can offer is this kind of summary of what I currently think. I think SOM can pretty easily and uncontroversially be identified with philosophy done in the Cartesian tradition. Iconoclastic philosophers have always been good at coming up with idiosyncratic names for the problems they see, and in this case Pirsig's doesn't even stray very far from traditional appellations. The separation between subject and object has been explicit at least since Kant, and Kant is typically seen as working out the consequences of the problematic handed down to us from Descartes.

There's one scholastic problem, of course, with simply identifying SOM with Cartesianism and that's Pirsig's ZMM tracing of the problem to the Greeks. If you look into the historical studies on the subject, they'll usually tell you that there were some significant changes between the two time periods, typically something like the ascendancy of epistemology in Descartes. I think what can be said, though, is that there are a whole host of problems born of errant distinctions and that many of these distinctions orbit each other. If you start with any one of them in a particular orbit, you'll more than likely get weighed down with the others. It is certainly apparent to me that Pirsig shunts a whole host of distinctions under SOM's canopy and his narrative extending back to the Greeks simply helps show how Descartes and his problematic were still working in Greek shadows.

To help see this, I would suggest looking at the way Pirsig lines up Truth and dialectic on one side and the Good and rhetoric on the other. Pirsig's analysis of Plato, I think, is dead on. He says that Plato ostensibly sets the Good as the highest Form, as the highest principle in his system. But if you look closer, the highest principle is subservient to the dialectic because the dialectic is how the Good is discovered. Dialectic, or Method, attains priority over the Good. I would suggest that this analysis gives us the first suggestion that epistemology must have priority over metaphysics, though this became apparent (or at least pressing) to philosophers only after Descartes. I think the historical reasons for this, and its run up to contemporary times, are excellently given by Stephen Toulmin in his Cosmopolis. This passage from the end should have no small amount of resonance with Pirsigians:

Throughout history, the development of philosophy has displayed a sequence of pendulum swings between two rival agendas. On one agenda, the task of philosophy is to analyze all subjects in wholly general terms; on the other, it is to give as general an account as the nature of the field allows. Theoretically minded Platonists speculate freely, framing broad generalizations about human knowledge; practical-minded Aristotelians hesitate to claim universality in advance of actual experience. So read, the move from 16th-century humanism to 17th-century exact science was a swing from the practical, Aristotelian agenda, to a Platonist agenda, aimed at theorectical answers. The dream of 17th-century philosophy and science was Plato's demand for episteme, or theoretical grasp: the facts of 20th-century science and philosophy rest on Aristotle's phronesis, or practical wisdom. When Wittgenstein and Rorty argue that philosophy today is at "the end of the road", they are overdramatizing the situation. The present state of the subject marks the return from a theory-centered conception, dominated by a concern for stability and rigor, to a renewed acceptance of practice, which requires us to adapt action to the special demands of particular occasions.

One thing I wish Pirsig would have done was distinguish more sharply between the various problems that were included in his SOM. I think his neglect to do so leads him to conflate materialism (an ontological thesis) with epistemology in a less than helpful way. I think this conflation is what leads him to say, fallaciously, that any philosopher worth his salt forwarded seriously the thesis that values are not real. The materialism comes out when Pirsig identifies objects with the material realm and subjects with the apparitions in our minds. It is only combining this thesis, that the world is nothing but corpuscles bouncing in a void, with the episteomological distinction between objectivity and subjectivity that we get the absurd claim that rocks are real, but our desire for ice cream is not. I don't think any of the great Western philosophers have ever tendered such a suggestion, though vulgar, commonsensical manglings of the great philosophers may generate such a position. But we should be a bit more sophisticated than that. The two are obviously connected in important ways, but not in the way that Pirsig claims. Pirsig aims this charge at the logical positivists and I think this is why Galen Strawson, who should otherwise have at least picked up from his dad, P.F. Strawson, a thing or two about Kantian philosophy and the persuasiveness of a paradigm of thought, says that SOM is a strawman. The positivists claimed that values were cognitively meaningless, which leads to emotivism, not unreal and there is big difference.

I would maintain, then, that the road to modern philosophy (and Descartes in particular) was begun by Plato's attempt to combine Euclid's geometrical method with Socrates' conversational style, or to put it another way, as Rorty says, his attempt to combine the Greek's love of argumentation with their love of wisdom. ("Philosophy as a Kind of Writing") The earlier Greek philosophers had taken the first tentative steps by attempting to assert what was really going on behind the appearences (which Parmenides made explicit). But Plato took the decisive step by arguing that we needed something to decide between all these competing hypotheses. Plato's alteration of Socrates' dialectic (the elenchus) from a searching conversation between several people into a method by which Truth is ascertained was the push needed to solidify Method's grip over philosophy, taking us down the path towards epistemological priority. It only stalled in the bed because Aristotle's philosophy, with its emphasis on practical wisdom, took hold of the Romans' minds, before all of it tumbled into obscurity for a thousand years.

The rise of Descartes marked the rise epistemology. Richard Popkin argues that Descartes, like Plato before him, was involved in a program of cooptation. The patriarch of Renaissance philosophy was Montaigne. He exemplified the skeptical tradition of Pyrrho that had blended with Aristotle's philosophy. Descartes took this skepticism and pushed it towards his own ends. By coopting something like the skeptical devices used by these earlier philosophers, Descartes tried to say something positive. He used it as a method to reach his Archimedean foundation. The actual skeptics during this time were outraged that Descartes would call his philosophy "skeptical." Pyrrhonian skepticism doesn't say anything positive, it only provides the negative point that maybe we shouldn't be trying to say those positive things. They vigorously attacked Descartes, but to no avail. As Toulmin likes to say, "Descartes' coup d'etat" was complete and his program of philosophy captured the imaginations of European intellectuals.

Between Descartes and Locke, modern philosophy saw the rise of what Quine calls the "idea idea," the idea that we have ideas over here in the mind and the material world out there. This was the first step towards divorcing man from the world, observer from the observed, subject from object. Rorty suggests that, if we accept Descartes' representational problematic (as opposed to sticking to Berkeley's dictum "ideas can only represent other ideas"), modern philosophy can be seen as a series of attempts at trying to get the subject and object back together. This is why Pirsig can be seen to have so many prima facie similarities with 19th century philosophers (particularly Hegel), because the "subject/object" idiom was in vogue after Kant put his stamp on philosophy.

However, this idiom never really took that strong a hold in Britain. The beginning of the divorce between Anglophone philosophy and Continental, Franco-German philosophy was with the rise of linguistic philosophy. The triumph of Russell over Anglo-American philosophy was matched by Husserl's triumph over Continental. In the subsequent decades, analytic philosophers began focusing more and more on matters that were dry and remote, stuff that simply seemed "academic" to laypeople, talk about predication, modal logic, etc. It didn't have the world-historical verve and romance that Kant and Hegel gave to Continental philosophy, which continued in mutated form the subject/object idiom. But despite these superficial differences, both idioms have held to an essentially Cartesian picture of philosophy. Some philosophers like Rorty, Robert Brandom, Samuel Wheeler, and Henry Staten among others in the late 20th century, have been able to transcend the differences in idioms and show how paradigmatic philosophers like Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida are making essentially the same points.

I think by the end of this story we can begin to see why Pirsig's SOM raised so many hackles. I would contend that SOM is the product of Plato and Descartes, but it is the divergence in philosophy since Kant (either towards Hegel or towards Frege) that tells us something about the reception of Pirsig's philosophy. Pirsig is reacting to the logical positivists, a camp of Anglophone philosophers (despite the most famous ones being German), but he assigns the problem dramatic importance, which is entirely Continental in demeaner. This is why we get Galen Strawson going, "What the hell are you talking about?" Its not that SOM as a target misses its mark, or is completely incoherent, its that analytic philosophers can't imagine why Pirsig talks about it like its a world-historical conspiracy. Foucault and other Continental philosophers, however, might have been perfectly happy with the kind of spin Pirsig puts on the story.

In a qualified sense, I think SOM is just another name for Cartesianism, but I also think its just another name for Platonism and Kantianism. The reason is that I think SOM is just one more signifier for a tradition that stretches from the beginning of philosophy to our current stage. The original battle lines were drawn between rhetoric and dialectic, and though the battles have changed over the years, essentially the same war is being fought. One of the great facets about intellectual history is that at every stage in the sequence, we always find a Sophist, or Pyrrhonian skeptic, or pragmatist to counter the Platonist, Cartesian, or Kantian.

Philosophy and Biography

I can't remember when I started distinguishing between philosophy and biography as shorthand for two different intentions with a thinker. I can't remember if it had a lot to do with what I was reading, Rorty or Pirsig or maybe Toulmin or someone else. I assume it arose in dialogue, as a riposte to some interlocuter, but it is a contrast that holds a lot of resonance for Rorty and Pirsig and much other philosophy I read. It's a contrast I ponder about often, though nothing in significant form.

Biography is the easier term to handle, it being roughly coextensive with intellectual history, scholarly work of the type Pirsig made fun of with "philosophology". Once one realizes with Wittgenstein that the history of ideas is the history of the way in which words have been used, and that words don't use themselves, only people do, then describing the excavation of a philosopher's philosophy as biography, by attending to any and all facets of his life and where ideas arose and how they impinge on other ideas (i.e., other philosophers' uses of words), seems a natural progression.

Philosophy, though, is a much more nebulous kind of thing. The more I read, the more interesting kinds of ways I find that one could define it for one's purposes. There's the extraordinarily broad etymological conception in which it's simply the "love of wisdom." Thus broadly employed, there are many, many philosophers if for no other reason than there are many, many places one can find wisdom. One can define philosophy as it has been employed since Descartes, which is essentially an armchair, theoretical discipline of some kind. Alexander Nehamas taught me to not be so suspicious of this kind of philosophy, that not all of it is degenerately epistemological. That what Rorty, for instance, is doing is largely a kind of theoretical philosophy (though therapeutic in nature).

Nehamas and Pierre Hadot also taught me slightly different ways in which to think of philosophy as a form or way of life, Hadot in a broader sense as the "art of living" (though still Nehamas' term), tying how we live in with our theoretical scruples, and Nehamas in a more narrow sense of self-making, a tradition begat by Socrates and carried out dialectically against him by Montainge, Nietzsche, and Foucault. And then there is my own favorite sense of philosophy which I first read in Rorty, Sellars' "seeing how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term."

What I also learned from Rorty is how history ties into our present projects. "Ties" is almost exactly the wrong word, for it almost seems to imply to me a kind of volitional act, as if one could tie it or not. That is, of course, my claim in various places (particularly the essay "Philosophologology"), that we can tie in history to our philosophy if we want to, but the claim underneath of that one is that we are always and everywhere as tied to history as we are to Quality. Without Quality there is no history, but without history there is no Quality. I learned from Rorty to read philosophy as Harold Bloom reads poetic history, as a Freudian family romance, one of tremendous agon and anxiety over influence. As I read more and more Bloom, I see that demand placed more and more heavily.

For, another sense of philosophy is that of autobiography, the obvious flipside if we are going to call unearthing somebody else's philosophy biography. And if our own philosophy is a kind of testament of ourselves, if philosophy is a kind of autobiography, a written record of where we find value (as Pirsig's surely and explicitly is), then philosophy, and autobiography, must surely travel through biography. And if this is the case, then Pirsig's contrast between philosophy and philosophology looks ever the more specious. One cannot just write the testament of themself ex nihilo, not if one is at all anxious, one must first clear out the conceptual space around them. Just as our banal autobiographies would consist of struggles with those around us, so does our philosophy consist of struggles with those philosophers around us. To grab a word, and make it central and important, is to grab a word with a history, a history of use by other people, and so to grab that word is to grab it and wrestle it away from others.

I remember when I first started taking philosophy classes and we were asked to write papers about really large topics. It always seemed so awkward to me, and it still does. How does one write an answer to the problem of free will and expect it to pass muster? My mind works argumentatively, and so writing any particular thing down, in the middle of a battlefield that was shrouded in darkness, seemed to me to be the stupidest possible thing. Where were the attacks going to come from? They will come, and you will be found wanting, so how do you ensure your position of any success if your defenses are meager because you don't know who to defend yourself against? All the imagination in the world will only get you so far against innumerable others, past, present, and future, all with far more imagination than you (considering they get to at least start with yours). I've always had to know the terrain I was to be working on before I could unfreeze myself to get moving. Granted that people work in different ways, and my way just one more alternative, but Pirsig's suggestion that we just stake our flag and make our stand just seems pure folly. I need intel reports before moving out into the field.

Both ways work, of course. Pirsig's way of just busting onto the scene and fighting everybody that looks at you wrong does work, and it does so because you learn the tricks of the trade, you learn ground-level tactics, how to fight, albeit all from the school of hard knocks. And unless you're stubborn, you learn to give up the spot of quagmire you initially staked and head for the high ground. My way is more like getting a course in broad-scale strategy before going into the field, going to West Point first before heading to 'Nam. I guess that's where Pirsig and I differ in our marriage of East and West. Pirsig marries together Socrates and Lao-tzu, whereas I marry Socrates and Sun-tzu.

Socrates said to know thy self and Sun-tzu said to know thy enemy. You can't do one well without doing the other and you can't do one and then by proxy have the other taken care of. They are less flip sides to the same coin then two pieces to the puzzle. You won't know yourself by virtue of knowing your enemy, but neither will you know everything about yourself until you do.

Pirsig seems to denigrate all the book learning we get at West Point and instead favors going directly to Vietnam. The trouble is when you write something. It's one thing to enter dynamic conversation, attack, parry, riposte. You have your foil right there. And in this sense I think we can see Pirsig siding with Socrates against Derrida in favor of speech over the written letter. Pirsig wants the dynamic conversation that erupts from watching a squirrel on a tree, not the soulless written voice speaking for eternity. But should we really eschew writing? Hardly. Pirsig in fact follows in a long tradition of philosophers who create themselves through their writing, Nehamas' Socrates-Foucault tradition. So when we sit down to create ourselves on the page, how do we begin? How do we situate ourselves?

That's the trouble with writing a 1200 word essay solving the problem of free will when you're 18. The broader your generalizations, the greater the demand for concrete enemies becomes, otherwise you're faced with ethereal strawmen. That was the triumph of ZMM. Pirsig endeavored to create himself on the page by creating conversations with people. They were, for the most part, created out of his own mind, but the trick of the novel was getting us to believe, and be swayed by, the convictions of his interlocuters, John, Sylvie, the teachers of Bozeman, the Chairman. Pirsig had enemies, he was doing dynamic biography in terrain where we all could see some semblance of ourselves and he then performed transumptive philosophy to affect the change he desires in how we see ourselves. But if transumption is easy in conversation because your partners are right there to tell you how they feel, if it's easy to talk about squirrels when they are right there, when does the opportunity arise to create a systematic metaphysics in conversation?

It doesn't and that was the struggle of Lila. Pirsig needed to make that transition and it wobbled and felt heavy. Lila creates interlocuters, but every time Pirsig glosses systematic, he loses his audience because we don't see the point in becoming systematic. When Pirsig starts talking to himself, we lose Pirsig's conversation partner and so lose our point of view. Despite Pirsig's protestations against "philosophology," Pirsig is no idiot and he made concrete philosophical enemies to play with, he did travel through biography. Pirsig set his philosophy against logical positivists and (I would say, though Pirsig may not) against traditional mystics. But why should comfortable, bourgeois Americans care about the logical positivists? If Pirsig can't make that case, then he can't make the case for us caring about systematic philosophy, his or anybody else's. In ZMM, Pirsig offered multiple therapeutic strategies, layers of discrete medicine that could be taken. But in Lila he's offering a cureall. But why do we need it?

When Lila succeeds, it succeeds despite the systematic effort. It's success is the same as ZMM, multiple therapeutic strategies. Pirsig's distinction between Dynamic and static is very persuasive when taken as an edifying bit wisdom, but the effort to place it systematically always falls a bit short because we don't know why we should be systematic. This isn't to denigrate all system, but post-Lila I think the demand is clear: for philosophers who wish to systematize Pirsig's thought, the trail through biography must be accomplished. Galen Strawson was upset because he saw SOM as a strawman. So it is if it isn't brought down from broad generalization and properly buoyed by concrete enemies. Pirsig may love wisdom from everyday life, but he also loves sitting in his armchair and reflecting. There's room for both, but the audience for the second is much smaller, more focused, more opinionated, and much more demanding. Pirsig's trouble in Lila wasn't being caught between postivists and mystics, it was being caught between laypeople and professionals.

You got a cureall for the spirit of modern man? Yeah, you and every other philosophy PhD. Get in line.