Discussion With Dave Buchanan

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

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

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

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

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Hello Matt:

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

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

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

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

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

For whatever it's worth...

Dave Buchanan

December 20, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good to hear from you Dave.

December 20, 2009

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Hey Matt:

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year.

December 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston

There is a long, venerable history of philosophers inspiring others in divergent ways. Beginning with Socrates, who inspired the history of philosophy in all of its factious dissonance, I doubt there has been a single great philosopher who hasn't been struggled over. Pirsig is no exception and there is a lengthening record of these differences. Caryl Johnston has recently began a site dedicated to thinking through Pirsig's philosophy and putting it to use. She has also taken an opportunity to confront some of my writings on Pirsig and I would like to return volley.

After reading her response to my criticisms of philosophology, it isn't clear to me where our major disagreements are. I think Johnston gets me just right when she says, "Kundert seems not to be talking about the Metaphysics of Quality but with the ghost that the Metaphysics of Quality came to exorcise: namely, the Metaphysics of Substance." ("Responding to M. Kundert," para. 13) It is common practice to criticize me for my avowed preoccupation with the various guises of SOM, which we might call Platonism, Cartesianism, Kantianism or essentialism, representationalism, realism, etc. I make no bones about concentrating much of my energy on these exorcist rituals and since Pirsig spends at least half of his energy doing so, I'm always surprised when people respond so poorly. Because if Pirsig's philosophy really is still needed so desperately, then SOM is still something that needs to be exposed.

Of course, what upsets other Pirsig enthusiasts is that I tend to turn the anti-SOMism back on Pirsig. Defenses of Pirsig under these circumstances puzzle me because they usually consist of what I see as further backsliding into SOMism combined with outrage at the thought of turning the soap back on Pirsig to see if he is not himself clean, which just makes me bridle even further. After all, why shouldn't we make sure that Pirsig isn't free of that which he says he is? I see most of my so-called critiques of Pirsig as aggressive investigations. I don't think every avenue I've set out to explore has panned out, but I don't regret spending time to explore it. Is not philosophy supposed to be about questioning?

What puzzles me about Johnston is her declaration that she does "not read Pirsig as 'anti-authoritarian' in any sense." (para. 15) This concerns me because the stipulated sense I had given it in "Pirsig Institutionalized" ("Antiauthoritarianism is a specifically philosophical thesis that says that people are not bound to any non-human authority, be it God, Reality, or Reason," Part I, para. 1) is one that I had thought all Pirsigians would have been able to get behind. It didn't occur to me that it would be contentious at all. Johnston goes on to read "antiauthoritarian" in a non-philosophical sense, which is a construal I don't use for that term. (Johnston ends her piece by talking about real authority, as opposed to philosophical authoritarianism, which is interesting given my discussion of real authority in Part III, indeed in Pirsigian terms in footnote 6.) So, leaving aside my further claims about an antiprofessionalist pattern of argument (which then collapses into antiestablishmentarianism), I would like to lay out in a different way why I take it as plain that Pirsig is a philosophical antiauthoritarian.

There are two sides to the Quality thesis that I would highlight as antiauthoritarian. One is the identification of Quality as undefined and the other is the identification of Quality as reality as experience. The first I take to be anti-Platonic and anti-essentialist. Plato created the Realm of the Forms by taking his teacher's style of conversational engagement, the elenchus, and turning it into the dialectic. It was hard not to notice that Socrates had the disconcerting habit of starting from definitions of terms, but Plato misconstrued Socrates as trying to get to the correct, True definitions, rather than just better definitions.

Socrates wasn't looking for the essence of piety, he was first eviscerating Euthyphro's understanding, and then supplying a different one. Plato took Socrates' style and turned it into a theoretical method of metaphysical ascension. Pirsig, by not just not defining Quality, but by defining Quality as undefined, is making Quality an anti-essence. For Plato, the Realm of the Forms was True Reality which we needed a method to reach, a reality that is a force. Pirsig's Quality, on the other hand, is undefined, which immediately makes Plato's quest look like a fool's errand. There are no essential definitions that must be respected and that force themselves on us, there are only negotiated points of reference, hence the primacy of rhetoric and Pirsig's reiteration of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things."

The identification of Quality with reality and experience follows for the same underlying reason of antiauthoritarianism, of taking Protagoras seriously and not making up things to bow down to. Modern philosophy separates itself from Greek philosophy by making a separation between experience and reality. (The roots for this are Greek, but Rorty makes a convincing case in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that this particular dichotomy only became a problem after Descartes. In this, Rorty is following Whitehead, who in Process and Reality said that what was distinctively modern was the "subjectivist bias" we inherited from Descartes.) This is the subject/object divide that so concerns Pirsig. What Pirsig finds particularly pernicious is the fact that there are facts about things like rocks, stuff "out there," but things like values are pejoratively "subjective" because they are only "in here," in our minds. Facts, from a SOMist point of view, are to be respected because of what they are, true and in reality, whereas mental states like happiness and ethics are going to be different for everybody because they are internal.

Pirsig wants to collapse the experience/reality distinction because it collapses all of these dichotomies that create an area that is clear and a force and an area that is murky and amorphous. Rather than supposing that "facts" are what they are because reality forces us to think of them that way, Pirsig wants to emphasize the role our experience of them plays. Facts are what they are because of how humankind, as a whole, experiences them, and this "humankind" is built out of individuals experiencing them. Reality is no longer an authority figure, it is an experiential partner.

So much for my rehearsal of philosophical antiauthoritarianism. I suspect Johnston would find little to object to in its outline, though perhaps in some of the details. But given agreement on the outline, I'm finding it difficult to find important disagreements, aside from a few lonely details. For instance, Johnston apparently respects my right to defend academia, noting correctly that the whole goal is for Pirsigian philosophy to take it over, but I would quibble with her sense that "philosophers have not been altogether willing to discuss" Pirsig's philosophy and that "there is a suspicion of unwillingness on the part of the philosophic community to greet this new visitor with open arms." (para. 5) I have to confess that this sounds a little naive. I think we should remind ourselves that there is no single philosopher that inspires the same opinion in other philosophers. Philosophers are notoriously individualistic. Look at Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein: rare is the philosopher that esteems all three highly, but it is hard to find someone who doesn't rate one of them highly. It is best for Pirsigians to not focus on how few their numbers are, which just leads to building resentment, and instead focus their energy on philosophy.

Another point is when I think Johnston misses the point of my argument in "Philosophologology." She agrees that you can't really separate history from the essence of philosophy, but scoffs, "what difference does it make?" (para. 6) It is no wonder she found my train of thought "torturous." The whole point behind the exercise was to try and isolate what the two terms mean, what they must mean for Pirsig to get the required force behind the derogatory epithet "philosophology." (Some people, in defense of Pirsig, have gone the route of claiming the epithet isn't derogatory.) As I say at the beginning of "Pirsig Institutionalized," if all Pirsig meant was "intellectual history" v. "philosophy," then Pirsig's epithet loses its force. But if Pirsig meant "history" v. "substance," then we have a Platonic ghost to be exorcised. The first paper goes through the motions of the exorcism and why I think I keep finding fire underneath the smoke in, probably excruciating, detail.

An example of fire: after shaking her head in bewilderment at why I would emphasize the inseparability of history from philosophy to Pirsig (sometimes I do the same thing while I'm doing it, since I wouldn't have thought I'd need to), Johnston balks at my attack on what has sometimes been called "perennial philosophy." (para. 7) Part of my argument in "Philosophology" was on the idea that, in Pirsig's analogy, the "horse" of philosophy is always open for inspection. This continued on to my claim that "…many of the things philosophy struggles with on a day-to-day basis are not things that immediately come to mind for the man on the street." What's interesting is that Johnston immediately belies her disagreement with this by following with an admission that the man on the street may not have the problems of philosophy in mind. For Johnston, however, this means nothing, because for her philosophy does have a common essence that we all struggle with, whether we know it or not.

Now, Johnston thinks it is haughtiness on the part of academics to think that they are fighting problems that the common person can't deal with, but I think it is just the reverse: it is haughty to think that you, the philosopher, know better than a regular guy what his problems are. My academic attitude is just the opposite of what Johnston attributes: it is what I consider a proper humility in not thinking that everything I find problematic is a problem for everyone. Philosophy is what I do and I'm not about to be so high-and-mighty as to think that that is what everyone should be doing.

Of course, under Johnston's implicit definition of philosophy, which in that section is roughly "articulation," it is hard to see how non-philosophers might escape philosophy's purview. And Johnston's right, only very haughty people would use such a broad definition while retaining professional jurisdiction. Philosophers used to do that around the time of Kant, but it's increasingly difficult to find old-fashioned traditionalists like that anymore. Johnston's definition was not the one you would find hiding behind what I was talking about. What I was referring to in that section were "problems of philosophy" philosophy, the professional problems of the "mind/body problem," the "problem of the external world," the battle between freedom and determinism, etc.

If Johnston would agree with me that most people don't think about these things as problems, she may yet argue that it is the job of we who do find them as problems to show them to be problems to Joe Blow. But the idea that these problems are inherent to reality, that they are inescapable, is part of the Platonic edifice that I called "philosophy as a natural kind." In this picture, these problems are hidden at our core and simply need to be pulled out to the surface. But this imagery goes against the empiricist strictures that Pirsig abides by, that we are born tabula rasa, that all ideas we have are gained through experience, i.e. we are educated into seeing these problems. What Johnston might call eliciting what was implicitly always there, I would call teaching how to play a new game. I don't think of the debate between freedom and determinism as an obstacle for humanity, I think of it like a crossword puzzle, and who would force everybody to play crossword puzzles if they didn't want to?

But, of course, "problems of philosophy" philosophy isn't the only kind of philosophy, and I suspect that Johnston could care less about the problems of Platonism and Cartesianism. Her impatience with my exoricism preoccupation is no doubt because she wants to do something else. I write these kinds of tracts, however, because the form in which other's write about Pirsig, or argue about this or that, still looks Platonic to me. The kind of rhetoric we use matters. That's lesson one from Pirsig: it's all rhetoric. People get exasperated with me, but I think if we aren't careful, we'll lose whatever ground we think Pirsig gained.

The biggest prima facie difference that I've been neglecting so far is Johnston's and my's respective esteem for pragmatism and metaphysics, or should I say, the words "pragmatism" and "metaphysics." (para. 8) I'm an avowed pragmatist and Johnston an avowed metaphysician, and one of the few things that we agree on over and against my many other Pirsigian interlocutors is that the two are like oil and water. Except that, I'm not so sure we do agree on that, just as I don't think those many others disagree. The reason is a certain ambiguity in the terms. Johnston says she doesn't like pragmatism because it is anti-metaphysical, but with the wide definition of philosophy and metaphysics she seems to consistently employ, then it would be hard indeed to be anti-metaphysical without being anti-life.

For instance, Johnston says that she sees, "Pragmatism as inherently anti-metaphysical, no matter how dressed up, softened and made serviceable for real life it may be." That is one of the funniest ways I've ever seen pragmatism construed. In my experience, it is metaphysics that has always had to go to great lengths to show everyone how "serviceable for real life" it is. Pragmatism, on the other hand, dressed itself as the practical philosophy, as the philosophy that would get rid of all the stuff the impeded real life.

But this is where the ambiguity resides. In her "In Search of Quality," Johnston says this about metaphysics:

The value of metaphysics is that it forces a confrontation with one’s basic beliefs, and therefore, with one’s strategies for deviousness. It seeks to suspend or disrupt that which is purely automatic in us. According to Ortega y Gasset, metaphysics has to do with the sphere of fundamental beliefs. (para. 4)

I think Johnston is construing metaphysics as pretty much coextensive with critical thinking. This makes pragmatism, which tells us that it is anti-metaphysical, a kind of status quo enhancing philosophy. But this wasn't the metaphysics to which the pragmatists were rebelling. Peirce, James, and Dewey were all rebelling against the same Platonic and Cartesian specters that Pirsig is. For "anti-metaphysical" to make any sense at all, as opposed to some kind of irrationalism, metaphysics has to refer to something narrower. This narrower thing is pretty much coextensive with Platonism, who--against popular belief--is not coextensive with thinking itself.

What this pans out to, on my reading, is a relative like or dislike for the writings of avowed pragmatists and for use of the word "metaphysics." If Johnston doesn't like reading James or Dewey, it would priggish of me to fault her. (I wish I could convince Pirsigians that they're being a bit unctuous in demanding everyone read Pirsig.) And, on the other hand, it would be equally persnickety to require me to use the term "metaphysics" when referring to what I do. I'm not sure I see the point in that kind of faithfulness.

Where does that leave us? I'm not entirely sure. I take it that we do have a different estimation of the relative merits of systematic philosophy versus, what we might call, ad hoc philosophy. Just in terms of Pirsig, Johnston seems to favor the systematic tenor of Lila, whereas I favor the edifying tenor of ZMM. But in the end, I'm not sure how much is divulged by that preference. I take one of the main lessons from Pirsig to be that one can never predict where wisdom may arise, a quest that all philosophers, indeed all people, are always involved in simply in virtue of living life.

Before leaving off, I would like to make one last note, and this is on Johnston's use of aletheia ("In Search of Quality," para. 4). I am only really acquainted with two uses of the term, one with Platonism and the other with Heidegger. In Platonism, aletheia was an "unveiling" that Plato linked to anamnesis, his view that the Truth was laden in us all from before we lighted upon this mortal coil and that we simply needed help to "recollect" it. This is bad Platonism as far as I'm concerned. In Heidegger, the term serves a similar purpose, but in Heidegger's attempts to out-Plato Plato, it is difficult to put the term to use at all. However, I'm intrigued by Johnston's use, which she identifies as the "truth-finding process". This seems to me a more Socratic notion, with emphasis on process, one that is palatable to pragmatists and something I hope she expands on more in her meditations on Pirsig and his relation to the Greeks.

Midwestern Megalomania

I've been tipped off to a new interview with Pirsig. Its another jounalistic style interview that narrates more than it reports, which is all fine for what it is, but when you have an autobiographical book, it doesn't do all that much for those of us who've read it recently. It's nice, but I prefer the Baggini interview because it tries to engage Pirsig's philosophical thoughts. It's also sad because it sounds like this may be his last trip into the public eye.

Not much struck me in the interview, except the new oddball details of his life and the recurring thematic of Midwestern megalomania--a reserved, polite, self-aggrandized revolutionariness that's so soft spoken as to be barely heard.

On the new details score, I have to admit that I'm having trouble fitting in this newbie: "When his wife [Nancy] came to see him [in the asylum] he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital." Excuse me, what? Nancy divorced Bob before they lived in Minnesota, before Bob took Chris on the trip out west, before he wrote ZMM? Something doesn't fit right. At any rate, if that's true, it certainly means I have to revise somewhat my wild speculations about the subterranean origins of Lila.

However, one thing does fit a lot of pieces together. When Pirsig suggests that, as the interviewer summarizes it, "he was just a man outside his time," and that, as Pirsig puts it, "It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself," I feel like I can say with renewed conviction that--maybe, just maybe--it wasn't Pirsig's ideas that got him hooked up to a mind incinerator and was perhaps, ya' know, the gun he wagged in someone's face.

Maybe it's just my experience dealing with reflected-glory hounds, but I can't say that I have a lot of patience with Pirsig's outsider persona. To the point, I can't say that I have a lot of patience with anybody's outsider persona--"Oh, look at me, I'm so outside the norm. Aren't I cool?" I've run into more than a few of these comme il faut, très chic scenesters with a warm, nuggety center of sublimated I-just-want-to-be-loved to be absolutely sick to death of the goddamn cliché--which, of course, doesn't make it any less true. And why look here:

He hoped Lila would force the 'metaphysics of quality' from the New Age shelves to the philosophy ones, but that has not happened. Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. 'Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that "quality" can not be defined,' he says.

This desire to be incorporated in a philosophy canon seems odd anyhow, since the power of Pirsig's books lie in their dynamic personal quest for value, rather than any fixed statement of it. But maybe eventually every iconoclast wants to be accepted.

It does seem a little odd, now doesn't it? But let me just lay this to rest: Pirsig is not "ignored" because of his insistence that Quality cannot be defined. Pirsig is ignored (if that's the term you want to use) because he didn't teach philosophy at any univerisities, because he never wrote books for any university presses, because he never wrote essays in any journals, because he never read papers or chaired panels at an APA Conference.

And you know what? A lot of people did do that kind of thing and they aren't read or discussed. A lot of people did that and won't be discussed much after they die. Does this mean that their ideas are ahead of their time or that there is a cultural immune system protecting itself from the heretic? Maybe, but probably not. There are many, many particular reasons for every possible outcome that has happened to a philosopher or intellectual-at-large. Does anybody take Santayana's philosophy seriously anymore? Or Royce? Or Brand Blanshard? These figures loomed during their time, but like Stanley Cavell will probably end up, they passed on into the dustbin of active philosophical opinion for one reason or another.

I do know one thing. Santayana, Royce, and Blanshard aren't taken seriously because they were out of style during their time and out of style now. That means that they never left behind a school of followers to continue on in their vein. They may yet come back into style, be rediscovered. And the same thing could happen to Pirsig. But Pirsig ain't makin' it any easier. If he wants to make it into the canon, he has to engage the canon. And Santayana and the rest are example enough that even if you do, nothing is certain.

Personally, I think he's fine right where he is (which is also why I don't cry much about Santayana or lose much sleep over Cavell's probable future). I think the interviewer is right, Pirsig's value is in the spiritual autobiography he's left us, at his attempt to create himself on the page. Why would you want a bunch of stuffed shirts preaching about you when you can have the young generation living through you?

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p.s. I now have the links to the Q&A interview. One day too late for my first paragraph. Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. And from what I've read of it in the short time I have available, it seems much more like the kind of thing I'm happy to see from Pirsig. Not that the interviewer butchered Pirsig or anything, but the conversation is much more, well, conversational and likable then the trimmed narrated version of his lines. I still think Midwestern megalomania is a fairly decent hook for some of the things that come out of Pirsig's mouth (I still don't think Pirsig has his pulse on philosophy departments enough to tell what's going on, though I must say he's right about this: "Americans tend to be always just interested in the latest thing." I'm not so sure the Brits aren't culpable in the same thing, but isn't a short term memory good for following the Dynamic nose?), but hey, I certainly ain't sayin' I'm not a Midwestern egomaniac. It shouldn't take anyone that long to figure that out.

p.p.s. I had a really weird dream last night where I dreamt that I read in the interview that Pirsig has been divorced nine times. I woke up and had to shake the sleep from my head and say, "No, no he hasn't. That was a dream." Weird.

Prospectus, Part II

To sum up the story I was telling: Pirsig writes Lila because he has a moral crisis after his divorce from Nancy. Pirsig falls in with a woman, has an affair, gets the divorce, and now is faced with being a bad person. Pirsig, however, doesn't think he's a bad person, and so tries to rectify his moral crisis by justifying his illegitimate-in-the-eyes-of-the-court affair with "Lila". This justification takes the form of the MoQ. By the end, though, we realize that the MoQ has been besides the point. The justification that Pirsig recieves is from Rigel, that Rigel could see that Lila had quality, even back in the beginning of the book (because of his history with her), but Phaedrus could not, so how could Phaedrus justify his calling her a woman of quality? He couldn't. The only way to do it was to construct an elaborate metaphysics enshrining an indefinable grasp of Quality itself that everyone has. That way, he could argue that he really did see Quality in Lila.

Of course, by that point, he doesn't have to argue that he did, because arguing, a.k.a. metaphysics, is besides the point. It's the mystical apprehension that's important. But, the end puts into question the very idea that we could have this apprehension, or at least that he did. Even after the doll has let him off the hook and told him that the only moral thing he did was defensively saying Lila had quality (not dreaming up the MoQ), and after he has danced in celebration of his freedom on the beach, he goes right back into the "good is a noun" thing. He may be free from Lila, but is he trapped by insanity again? Is that why Lila thought he was trying to kill her? Because he was going crazy? He thinks she's lying to get Rigel's sympathy, but it's his thoughts we see, carefully controled by the author giving us only his perspective. Can his thoughts be trusted? Did he apprehend Lila's Quality, her true nature, or has Pirsig slipped back into the insanity that led him to the Chicago institutions those many years ago? Or, is there any difference?

Rigel (Pirsig's social conscience) confronts him about Lila having quality, Phaedrus insists she does, Phaedrus constructs the MoQ to justify that response, Rigel saves Phaedrus from Lila and confirms that she does have quality, but Phaedrus realizes--through the doll--that he didn't need to have his sight confirmed--he had it all along and it was the only moral breakthrough he had the whole trip. The question at the end continues to pursue us: is he a mystic or insane? Did he apprehend Quality or was he just reflexively defending his immoral act?

Reaching this position, its useful to wonder what convinces us that Phaedrus was right? Phaedrus' MoQ? No. It was Rigel. Rigel convinces us that Phaedrus apprehended Lila's Quality by confirming it. "Yes, Phaedrus, she has Quality, but not because of any mystic apprehension, it was because she did the banal things good people do, like defend me as a kid." So, at that point, we begin to question what the apprehension does for us. It didn't prove anything. What if Lila hadn't had any Quality? Things could have just as easily have gone the other way. Pirsig wrote it to confirm his apprehension, but life isn't like that. So, we may have Whitehead's "dim apprehension," but all that does is point us in a direction that we then have to travel. And the traveling is then what justifies the fruitfulness of the pointed direction--but it doesn't always prove to be fruitful. Sometimes you're wrong.

Instead of Lila being a lesser work, a lesser piece of literary masterfulness, this reading gives us every reason to believe that Lila is actually a greater, even more subtle piece of genius. Think of it this way--people who enjoyed ZMM as a book, usually for the detective like layout, the mind adventure that takes place, don't get into Lila because it just sits there--and the ending proves to be a little lame. Much of it is philosophical mosaics, pieces of essays arrayed amongst a narrative that proves to not really engage us. There's no detective story except to answer the question, "Does Lila have quality?" But who cares? She's a tramp who doesn't capture our attention. There's nothing obvious or superficial in Lila that pulls us through like in ZMM. So the only people who like Lila are amatuer philosophers who love ZMM--an already very small, select crowd. (And we pretty much know who each other are.) Professionals don't like Lila because, again, the story isn't engaging and neither is the philosophy. The philosophy is in an idiom that's been out of style for a hundred years and it doesn't make itself immediately accessible to the work others have been doing, to their problems or concerns, it simply spins itself out in relative isolation from the evolved concerns of the intervening hundred years since William James wrote. Laypeople don't like Lila because the story isn't engaging and neither is philosophy in general.

So, amatuers in love with ZMM, that's Pirsig's audience. Now comes the trick, the subtle piece of craftwork and genius--the amatuers think the same thing of the narrative as everyone else, its dung, just sits there stinking (that's a little much, but the narrative doesn't compel our attention). So, because they're amatuer philosophers in love with ZMM, they focus on the MoQ. That was Pirsig's trick. By focusing on the MoQ, readers let the metaphysics devour the narrative rather than seeing the metaphysics as a part of the narrative itself. It's not that the characters serve the philosophy, it's that the philosophy serves the characters by directing the readers mind to a place a bit more like the mind of the protagonist (and occasionally one a bit more like the mind of Lila and Rigel). When we see Lila's thoughts, she has her own ideas about quality. When we see Rigel's, he has his own ideas about quality. We see how their ideas shape their actions and the story. It was Pirsig's trick to get the only people who would like Lila to fall in love with it for the system when the moral of the story, ever so subtlely threaded into the narrative, is that love of the system, any system, is cracked and perverse. It was, in a way, a parody, a lie. Flushing out those who need the moral more than anyone else. And read this way, the ending suddenly means a lot more and ceases to be lame.

Chris died, his marriage suffered, he had his affair, he ended his marriage, he met Wendy, had a kid, and settled down to write about it. Pirsig tells us his story in his terms, Quality (well, term anyway). He dazzles us, as he did in ZMM, with elaborate metaphysical gymnastics, mysterious tales of ancient history and a whiff of something revolutionary. But in the end, ZMM was the story of a father and his relationship to his son. In the end, Lila is the story of a man who has bottomed out and is desperate to re-establish his relationship to what is good.

Lila is a parable. The moral of the story is the ditching of system, Phaedrus' "usual intellectual answer," and through this we can save mysticism. What we also have, though, is an indication that Phaedrus' metaphysics is something that he does, though not everyone else has to. It's his obsession, his way of ordering and presenting his thoughts. There's nothing inherently desirable about this presentation, though. Others reading him are suggested to take what they want and can from the book (as suggested by his preface to Marian Mountain's Zen Environment), but not to read him as systematic, despite his own systematic tendencies.

For all Pirsig's apparent straightforwardness, much of his philosophy is linked indelibly to his narratives, creating a situation in which finding his philosophy is not as easy as just quoting him. Pirsig’s philosophy is found in the experience of reading him. Part of the point of this narrative analysis is that philosophical theses are perhaps somewhat inappropriate to Pirsig's philosophy. That to get Pirsig to have philosophical theses that are consistent, you need to gloss Pirsig, but to just get Pirsig to be consistent, all you need to do is disregard philosophical theses. To take Pirsig seriously as a philosopher, one cannot take his philosophy seriously.

You can't take Pirsig seriously as a professional philosopher advancing theses. He fails in that respect. But that's only because Pirsig isn't supposed to be taken seriously as a philosopher. Pirsig creates the context in which he is to be taken seriously, and that's not in the professional model. He writes novels. That's the context. And, by giving us insight and wisdom, he is a philosopher. Just not a professional one. It is only by trying to treat him as a professional that Pirsig looks confused and convoluted. If we treat him as a wiseman, though, then he comes into his own. Part of the strain, of course, is that part of Pirsig wants to be a professional. That's his Phaedrus side. But on the other side, the Zen side, he just wants to dispense wisdom from his own life. Both ZMM and Lila are less about the philosophical problems created by metaphysical dualities as they are about the personal conflicts created by a man's conflicting intellectual instincts. The drama is in watching how the story of his life leads him to gravitate towards one instinct or another.

To Part III

The Parable of the Reductionist

When I first started reading Rorty, I found essays about all sorts of philosophers and little schematic maps splitting the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy into groups. I was always attracted to learning about other philosophers and I love little schematic maps. I learned later that Rorty picked up this technique from his teacher, Richard McKeon--Pirsig's infamous Chairman. I tend to think that Pirsig misunderstood McKeon, though. David Hall (in his book on Rorty) suggested that we really shouldn't be reading McKeon as trying to find the architectonics of philosophical discourse (like some of his similar colleagues were doing), but as performing a kind of interpretive reading. Sometimes people think that "isms" hamper our ability to understand, but I think they're looking at them the wrong way. Categories, like "realist" and "pragmatist", arise only after you've tried to understand them and are part of the attempt to understand by classifying patterns of linguistic similarity and conceptual work. McKeon was misunderstood by Pirsig because of this kind of antiprofessional prejudice against "classification," the one we see all the time when the hippie/stoner says (saying it preferably as Tommy Chong would say it), "Don't put me in a box, man." Except, what else is understanding than classification? How else are we to understand unless we differentiate? The problem is taking the classifications as written in the stars, as Platonists are wont to do. But good pragmatists don't do that. We use them as a map with which to make our way around philosophy. As new bumps appear, you change the map.

But this little anti-antiprofessionalist screed wasn't why I was writing today. Rather, it was about one of the things I found out about Rorty as I read more of him (though, its not about that either). Originally, I found other philosophers and little maps. The more I read, though, the more I started seeing a general pattern in Rorty. One of the earliest things I picked up from Rorty (probably to my detriment) was the sense of when someone was "begging the question," a locution I began to use more and more. The sense I was gradually given by Rorty in his essays was how arguments at a certain point break down and there isn't anything argumentative left to do. As I read back into Rorty's corpus, into his essays in the 60s and 70s that aren't collected into books, I was given a much stronger sense of how important this was to Rorty's project. In his earlier days, I saw much more clearly how seeing patterns of argument, of reasoning, played into his becoming a fully fledged pragmatist. And I saw that this was what attracted me to Rorty: it was the attraction to metaphilosophy, of how we do philosophy. And likewise, that's what attracted me to Pirsig, his ability to display lines of thought and then move backwards to undercut them (like in the S/O Dilemma).

One of the things that's being talked about in the MD recently is "reductionism". And this is something that is in the back of people's minds a lot. One of the problems people have with reductionism is that it seems so deadening. Reducing everything to one kind of thing seems to take all the fun out of life, all the plurality of normal, everyday existence. This, by itself, isn't a philosophical defense, but it does lead to one. When scientific reductionists reduce everything to physics, one of the replies is that they can't reduce our actual experience of reality to physics. Our experience of eating an apple or seeing a sunset is irreducible to firing neurons and bouncing particles. One becomes a realist and says, "No, all this stuff I experience is real." Its the old antireductionist move to "save the appearances" that we've had ever since Aristotle reacted to Plato's divided line metaphysics. Antireductionism is probably one of the most important philosophical instincts that have pushed philosophy forward--the other being reductionism. More on that later.

To stop the endless cycle of reduction, to stop physics from gobbling everything up, my realist from above has made an antireductionist move towards phenomenology, what we phenomenally experience. That barrier is roughly what they call nowadays in anglophone philosophy "qualia". And this does have prima facie resonance with Pirsigians. What we see, though, is that to create this barrier with qualia, the realist has to make the traditional metaphysical distinction between essence and accident, text and context. The antireductionist move is saying that our qualia, our phenomenal experience, is irreducible to neurons because the qualia are the essence of the experience, that the quality of the experience is irreducible to the pattern of it arising. This kind of distinction is a mistake. By using phenomenal qualia as an antireductionist stop gap, the realist resurrects the black box of consciousness, the duality of mind and body.

There is an alternative way of saving the appearances, however. The first thing we need to do is to stop resisting the power of redescription. One of the most important things that Rorty impressed upon me is the notion that anything can be redescribed into anything else. The power of redescription is the power of analogy, metaphor, the genius of imagination. It is, in fact, one of the philosopher's classic tools. Reductionism (which I above somewhat misleadingly called one of the most important philosophical instincts) is a special case of the more general power of redescription. What reductionism adds to its redescription (in terms of Idea, Matter, Spirit, Quality, etc.) is--as everyone can probably guess--"and this is the way things really should be described."

The realist instinct--the antireductionist instinct--is to say, "No, no. That can't be described that way." The question is, why not? What is it hurting? The traditional realist tactic (which has taken many forms, from Aristotelianism to Husserlian phenomenology to defenders of qualia) has been to say that the reductionist is hurting the essence of the thing. This causes the reductionist to bridle and reply, "Well show me this essence!" When the realist can't (because to do so would be to do something no one has ever been able to do, fulfill the destiny of Platonic metaphysics), the reductionist feels smug. The realist, pissed that he failed, then turns to the reductionist and says, "Well, if you're so smart, prove to me that your reduction is the essence of the matter!" And, of course, the reductionist can't either. That's why the quarrel between reductionists and realists, Platonists and Aristotelians, has lasted 2500 years.

The pragmatist sees these two quarreling and suggests that they calm down. She tells them that the problem, so it seems to her, is that neither one can cash in on their proclamations of essence. So why not drop the proclamations? To the reductionist she says, "Go ahead and make all the redescriptions you want." To the realist she says, "And if there's a redescription you don't like, don't use it." What the pragmatist is suggesting, as I did above, is that reductionism is a special case of redescription and realism (in the sense of pluralism, the attempt to "save the appearances") is a special case of pragmatism. What both special cases hinge on is a so far fruitless and conversation stifling essentialism. After brushing aside essentialism, what is left is our ubiquitous power to create new descriptions and our particular power to choose which descriptions we use for which purposes. This means that a scientist can go on reducing color to wavelengths in the laboratory without worrying about whether red doesn't exist and that a poet can go on writing sonnets about love without worrying about whether the Freudian next door will say that its all in his id.

I think this is roughly the position that Dennett calls heterophenomenology. It roughly means that there are as many things that exist as there are ways of speaking, that our ontology is coextensive with our speech patterns. It is, in effect, a kind of insouciance towards ontology. You can proliferate as many different kinds of speech patterns as you want, but the ones that catch on are the ones that are useful and the objects of those speech patterns become, roughly, the ones that we are going to say "exist". This is how pragmatists brush aside questions about whether molecules, electrons, and quarks really exist or are just useful heuristics for science. Another instance, demons. Do demons exist at bars and pubs? Can't say that they do, but they do tend to exist in fantasy novels. Does love exist? Sure it does, because "love" is a very important word in the web of speech patterns that we use in life. Does God exist? That depends. In scientific studies God doesn't play a big role (we are all atheists in the laboratory), but at Church He does.

So if someone says that love and compassion are not reducible to chemicals in the brain, I think we should be inclined to say that they are just insofar as we are capable of correlating brain activity with "love behavior". However, the reason why we don't usually reduce love and compassion to chemicals outside of physiological studies is because when your lover asks you to talk dirty, saying "You make my C-fiber quiver" usually doesn't turn them on. (Come to think of it, that actually does sound kinda' dirty.) And if a Pirsigian reads too much Freud and starts to wonder, "Are there such things as values? Or could we just as easily talk in terms of desires?", our instinct should be to say, sure, there are values and there are desires, and for many things we could follow Freudians like Lacan and just translate values into desires, but I would think there are some forms of discourse, a few practical distinctions in the area, where we could cut a difference between values and desires that makes some sense and would be profitable to do. In those cases, we can easily slough off Freud and Lacan and say that what they say is besides the point right now.

I think the important thing to get over is our fear of redescription. When people start crying "Reductionist!", I think all that means is that they don't like the redescription for a particular reason, that what was redescribed into different terms seems to leave out a distinction they would like to see in place. However, what is often not explored by the knee-jerk reactionary is whether or not one could still make the distinction he wants in the now redescribed terms. Its still left open whether or not the redescribed distinction is suitable or not for the purposes desired, but I think people should follow through a little bit further into what a redescription means for their desired distinctions. It doesn't always mean something bad. Redescriptions are made for just as particular purposes as distinctions are made.