Pirsig's Quest for Certainty

This was initially written from a prompt by Leela, who asked in a discussion at the MD, after suggesting that the quest for metaphysical certainty drove Pirsig to insanity, whether Pirsig achieved a comfortable equilibrium.

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From what little appearances we know of Robert Pirsig's life since the time of ZMM, he's been able to control the demons that left him in the corner of a Chicago apartment with cigarettes burning into his knuckles. I think the most important thing to understand about Pirsig's philosophy is the personal nature Pirsig most of the time perceives to be at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. This is the point at which we might bring up the James picture of a hallway with different doors, or an art gallery with a myriad of paintings. This, of course, makes Pirsig sound like he only half-meant the Metaphysics of Quality. Emphasizing the fact that Pirsig thought philosophy was like playing chess, rather than having a perfect set of chess moves, suggests to some Pirsigians that the system Pirsig created is trying to be ignored. The question is: how do we balance Chapter 26 of Lila, the philosophology chapter wherein Pirsig tells us how to read philosophy, with Chapter 12, the levels chapter wherein Pirsig solves a few philosophical problems with his Metaphysics of Quality?

Pirsig attempted to develop a new metaphysics not just for himself, but for others, too--everybody gets that. The Metaphysics of Quality wasn't just for Pirsig. However, the way to balance the self-other equation might be like this: the Metaphysics of Quality is Pirsig's, but the insights of the Metaphysics of Quality are for everyone.

The "comfortable resolution" of a quest can only be decided by the life lived, because that's ultimately where philosophy dumps out. I think one of the greatest passages Pirsig wrote is the gumption chapter in ZMM. In that chapter, Pirsig brought together philosophical abstraction with practical living--he showed us how he thinks his explorations of the "high country of the mind" dump out into the valleys of life. What he shows is how a mind can get trapped in certain thought-loops, like the monkey and the rice. That's what happened to Phaedrus. That's the problem with the Quest for Certainty, as Dewey named it. What Pirsig picked up are techniques for quelling the inferential machine known as the mind--that's what the art of meditation specifically helps with. Pirsig perceived (rightly I think) the modern mind as quickly skipping down a road that will eventually prove to be self-destructive to both individual and society. So Pirsig wanted to expand a different set of roads, to show how we don't need to run into dilemmas like "where is the value, in the subject or object?"

But there are many ways of avoiding certain bad trains of thought--Pirsig's one occasional fault is that he sometimes creates the appearance of yelling out alone at night. But there are a lot of intellectuals who perceive similar evils and propose useful techniques and roads of travel. The one major problem caused by Pirsig's occasional flirtation with superlative uniqueness, which we could forgive in a friend, is that it leads to inflexibility of thought in fellow-travelers. It leads people to perceive themselves as not fellow-travelers, but rather disciples. It leads to the thought that edifices of thought generated by thinkers must be either rejected or accepted wholecloth, and that disagreement with the master is a rejection of everything holy.

Pirsig became comfortable with his quest for certainty because he eventually learned how to tone down the personal ramifications for failure. I think he learned that it isn't a Quest for Certainty that the philosophical tradition is in search of an answer to, but rather a personal quest for the kinds of everyday certainties that we act out of. Phaedrus' quest in ZMM may have begun as Plato's, but Pirsig's quest in writing it down was the quest to resolve doubts about the everyday certainties that are leading to bad things. Phaedrus began with Doubt about the possibility of Certainty, but Pirsig finished with specific doubts about particular certainties. Pirsig eventually became comfortable with the line of thought he'd written down, and the kinds of life-instincts it had given him.

That others may not be comfortable with his resolution only matters insofar as what is being pointed to are limitations in the tools and insights he afforded. Philosophy is autobiographical--we are commending things we've found useful. What philosophy is not is a search for an Answer to an antecedantly posed Question, like from Reality, or some other entity that's big and powerful enough to be able to pose a question antecedantly to spatialtemporal people. Only with the latter understanding of philosophy does it make sense to "reject the MoQ," or any system. Only if one assumes that there are universally perspicuous questions that every philosophy or person must have an answer to would one think that the MoQ's success rests on its ability to please everyone. Only if one thinks there's a big universal Quest humanity is on, rather than a lot of little quests individual people are on, will one take seriously the rhetoric of "demonstration" and "proving."

Philosophy is autobiography for Pirsig, and it is best served by taking it seriously, but not too seriously.

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.

Cavell and What We Are Doing

Just as Santayana is my favorite name to throw out when I need an example of an early 20th century philosopher, Stanley Cavell is clearly my favorite of a late 20th century one. They aren’t quite arbitrary examples, for the reason I usually need an example, and the reason why I’m usually grasping for them, is because the topic I’m often discussing is the difference between charismatic and systematic philosophers, philosophers who are respected and brilliant while they are alive and philosophers who leave behind a problematic and a school of followers. Santayana has no school, and as far as I can tell Cavell does not either. However, like Santayana (who famously left philosophy mid-semester when it was just too beautiful in Harvard Yard to spend it in a class room), Cavell is an extraordinarily intriguing figure and I’ve been collecting his books for some time.

Cavell made his name as a brilliant interpreter of both Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. He was one of the foremost members, though most certainly the most idiosyncratic, of the now defunct school of “ordinary language philosophy,” or “Oxford philosophy.” I’ve known about Cavell for many years from my readings of Rorty, but he has remained enigmatic. After reading Danto’s essay, and having the book in question on my shelf, it became too irresistible to ignore. However, while the book isn’t unreadable, it isn’t exactly what you’d want if you were either trying to get into Cavell’s philosophy or find stuff you might find useful for yours. You’d already have to have a preexisting desire to know more about Cavell (which isn’t to say that it isn’t interesting to read).

I do have on my shelf, though, Cavell’s earliest book of essays, which shows how powerful he was early on and how little he’s changed in the subsequent fifty years. I’d read his opening preface a little while ago and had taken a few good lines from it, but I knew at the time that, if not quite inscrutable, Cavell wasn’t exactly “ordinary,” as his supposed school implies. Just as Danto says he has in his recent writings, Cavell’s been attempting to make his style reflect his theses since the very beginning, which is to say that Cavell wants “to make philosophy another kind of problem for itself.” (74) What that means is another thing altogether. But suffice it to say, I’ve found in Cavell’s writings an interesting window into a time now past. Cavell isn’t the clearest guide to Wittgenstein or Austin, but he is fascinating to watch.

I read two essays in his collection, Must We Mean What We Say?, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” and “Austin at Criticism.” It’s difficult to read books in your free time if you have no compass, if there’s no particular reason why you’re reading, if you have no purpose. Most of the time when I struggle with books it’s because I find them boring because I’m just not that interested in the problems the author is struggling with. Cavell’s no exception, and his style makes it even more difficult, but as I worked my way through them (the shortest essays in his collection) I began to get a clearer picture of how they could help me. And there are a plethora of sumptuous lines to chew on.

“Aesthetic Problems” was interesting to read because of the lack of attention usually given by philosophers considered to be in the midst of the “central problems” in the field at that time (epistemology, philosophy of language or science) to “peripheral” fields like aesthetics. It gives us a good indication as to why Cavell is seen as marching to the beat of his own drum, even from the very beginning (though even more so from his essays on Beckett and Shakespeare). It is difficult to put the essay together, as it runs in two parts: a first section on two problems in aesthetics (the paraphrasability of poems and the tonality of atonal music) and a second section on the general problem of aesthetic judgment. I’m still not quite clear on how to connect them, but I think it runs along the lines of two specific examples of the general problem, that lack of consensus on the general problem of aesthetic judgment would preclude answering the specific problems of paraphrasability and tonality. Cavell’s treatment of the two specific problems are interesting, though that depends on if you find the problems of literary criticism exciting (I certainly do) or if you could give a rat’s ass about music theory (I could not).

The problem of paraphrasability, as Cavell generates it from a quarrel between Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters, is one about what we are doing when we are reading a poem, or more specifically, what is it really that the literary critic is in the business of doing. Brooks suggests that a paraphrase of a poem, i.e. a reading of a poem, does not limn the true essence of the poem, though it does point the way—as long as it’s properly done. Cavell rightly wonders who it is that “has just flatly given it out that the essence, core, structure, and the rest, of a poem is its paraphrase,” considering we should have some trouble “in understanding what is any or all of these things, since it takes so much philosophy just to state them.” (75)

It is in this that we begin to taste the power that Cavell wields from the ordinary language tradition. Cavell, at this stage, talks a bit about the “methods” or “procedures” of ordinary language philosophy, but I should think that, just as Rorty suggests that we distinguish between “deconstruction” as whatever it is that Derrida is doing and “deconstruction” as a method of reading texts (see “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in EHO), we should distinguish “ordinary language philosophy” as whatever it is that Austin is doing and “ordinary language philosophy” as a method that his less imaginative and skilled followers employ. Cavell is certainly not one of these less skilled followers, and whatever it is that Cavell is doing I would be apt to say is the heart of the wisdom in Austin and that so-called school.

Cavell, in the above, is just getting started, and runs us through an imaginary dialectical encounter between a Brooksian critic and his defense of what he is doing. Jumping on Brooks’ concession, that a paraphrase is all right if you know what you are doing, Cavell retorts, “Which is about like saying that of course criticism is all right, in its place.” Cavell then offers a wonderful little description making fun of the lit crit’s typical habits of writing books:

“But how, in particular, are we to assess a critic’s reading the opening stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ Ode and writing: ‘… the poet begins by saying that he has lost something’ [Well Wrought Urn, 116]? We can ransack that stanza and never find the expression ‘lost something’ in it. Then the critic will be offended—rightly—and he may reply: Well, it does not actually say this, but it means it, it implies it; do you suggest that it does not mean that? And of course we do not. But then the critic has a theory about what he is doing when he says what a poem means, and so he will have to add some appendices to his readings of the poetry explaining that when he says what a poem means he does not say exactly quite just what the poem means; that is, he only points to its meaning, or rather ‘points to the area in which meaning lies.’ But even this last does not seem to him humility enough, and he may be moved to a footnote in which he says that his own analyses are ‘at best crude approximations of the poem’ [189]. By this time someone is likely to burst out with: But of course a paraphrase says what the poem says, and an approximate paraphrase is merely a bad paraphrase; with greater effort or sensibility you could have got it exactly right. To which one response would be: ‘Oh, I can tell you exactly what the Ode means,’ and then read the Ode aloud.” (75-6)

Cavell is thus able to quite quickly thrust himself into the middle of a dispute about the self-image of literary critics: what is it that they are doing? Not, what do they think they are doing, but what are they doing? I find the above passage hilarious, if for no other reason than I’ve had such dialectical encounters before, and ended them with something like, “Well, if you’re being such an ass about it, I can just read you the section from Pirsig.” Those are definite endpoints because being pushed there, with no other outlet of response, effectively evacuates the area in which both you and your difficult counter-interpreter were existing—the position of a writer. And we even find in a literary critic like Stanley Fish, from a book from that era, Self-Consuming Artifacts, just those kinds of appendices.

Of course, the need that Fish was forced into fulfilling was entirely antithetical to the need being fulfilled by the New Critics. As Fish would later make more clear in books like Is There a Text in This Class?, he was providing an anti-theoretical rebuttal to the continual theoretical repositionings that literary critics felt they were forced to include ever since Eliot and Frye and their lot became hegemonic. And this is the splash of cold water that Cavell is involved in giving us. The part that should make us laugh is the idea that we need a theory to justify what we are doing. “If you put such phrases as ‘giving the meaning,’ ‘giving a paraphrase,’ ‘saying exactly what something means (or what somebody said),’ and so on, into the ordinary contexts … in which they are used, you will not find that you are worried that you have not really done these things. We could say: That is what doing them really is. Only that serenity will last just so long as someone does not start philosophizing about it.” (77)

Cavell’s Wittgensteinian project is then to try and diagnose why we think we need a theory. Why are commonsensical descriptions not enough? Why must we get into a debate about what metaphors are and what the literal/metaphorical distinction is that allows a theory, and a condemnation of paraphrase on the part of Brooks, to be possible? Cavell would like to get us on the couch and apply the right kind of therapy so that we may stop philosophizing when we want to. The hope is that we may then be able to face up to the self-image problem in literary, and artistic criticism generally (which can just as easily be applied to philosophy): “namely what it is we are doing when we describe or explain a work of art; what function criticism serves; whether different arts, or forms of art, require different forms of criticism; what we may expect to learn from criticism, both about a particular piece of art and about the nature of art generally.” (82)

The next, thankfully brief, part of his essay is about music theory, and specifically tonality. As you may have guessed from my earlier comment, I found it boring and would like to jump right over it. On reflection, however, my gut reaction might highlight something about the problem Cavell is dealing with. I’ve never understood what music or art theory thinks it is doing. It has always seemed to me to be quite stupid. The catch is that, while I’ve always found theory about music or paintings to be stupid, I’ve not always felt the same about philosophy. Why is that? I have a feeling that my gut reaction to music theory is the gut reaction that Wittgenstein and Cavell would like to instill in us in general (not exactly true for either of them, but I’ve read too much Rorty and Fish to care). Why on earth do we need theory?

My general feeling is that aesthetics, and music and art theory, never took off as, or at least are still not today, philosophical hot topics is because they seem on their face to be silly (which isn’t to say that you wouldn’t have to take a theory class if you were in a Music or Art, or even Dance, department). The difference between theories of music or art and theories of knowledge or texts is that, on their face, the former are non-discursive, while the latter discursive. This made it easier for reflections on the latter to be more easily confused with their objects (Cavell’s problem of paraphrasability), whereas nobody confuses a painting with its critical review. As Cavell suggests, for all his talk of approximation, the critic himself “furthers the suggestion that paraphrase and poem operate, as it were, at the same level, are the same kind of thing. … And then he has to do everything at his philosophical disposal to keep paraphrase and poem from coinciding….” (76) But nobody confuses a poem for an essay about the poem. (Pace Bloom, who says delightfully that “All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology—in which the poem is and means itself—and reduction—in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a poem not itself.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 70) But discussion of Bloom’s engrossing attempts to make poetry a kind of criticism, and criticism a kind of poetry, a grand pragmatic attempt I must say, are for another time. Until then, see my “Bloom and Criticism.”) It is this position from common sense, where nobody confuses Iggy Pop with Lester Bangs or Michelangelo with Freud or Shakespeare with Samuel Johnson or reality with dreams, apples with sensations, or people with robots, that Cavell and Wittgenstein would like to return us to. For as long as we make the distinction between theory and practice that traditional philosophy since Plato has taught us to make, theory will itself seem pointless, superfluous, and generally unhelpful.

(I might at this point say something about Wittgenstein, silence, and the fact that I’ve just made the differentiation of discursive modalities as easy as that between the discursive and non-discursive, but I don’t know enough about Wittgenstein to do so. However, for all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that differentiation between discursive modalities is necessarily easy. It can be hard, just as science fiction tells us that the differentiation between people and robots might someday be hard. For instance, is it easy to tell the difference between what Derrida does and Christopher Norris or Jonathon Culler does? Probably. But what about Foucault and Ian Hacking? Or worse, Heidegger and Gadamer? It’s a practical problem, not a theoretical problem. At his worst, Pirsig seems to think that its easy to tell the difference between what Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus and Heidegger did in his lectures on Nietzsche (reflective system-building versus parasitic criticism), but Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology has nothing to do with the continuum I just drew. For more on criticism and philosophy, with special attention to Pirsig, see the first part of my “Philosophologology”.)

Moving on to Cavell’s second section on a general problem of aesthetics, Cavell suggests that “the aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs.” (86) This is a good suggestion because one of the problems Platonic philosophy set itself is the rationality of its own claims. As time wore on, fields like mathematics, science, and logic all showed themselves to be able to gain consensus, whereas philosophy more and more looked like a field like aesthetics, where the slogan “in the eye of the beholder” rose to prominence. Plato wanted philosophy to look like geometry and contemporary philosophers want philosophy to look like science for this very reason—the ability to gain consensus seems to mark its rationality. Cavell, however, comes to much the same conclusion that Rorty has, that philosophy is something different. Cavell even uses the same Hegelianism, aufhebung, to refer to what (as Rorty calls them) strong poets do to philosophical issues, “a criticism in which it is pointless for one side to refute the other, because its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way.” (85) If this gloss on a familiar Rortyan point remains obscure, it is only by working through what Cavell is saying (and saying Wittgenstein is saying) that some of his more opaque lines (usually left to sparkle by Cavell) gain resonance.

Cavell provides an interesting discussion of the genesis of the aesthetic problematic in Hume and Kant before facing us off between the positivist and post-positivist: “the positivist grits his teeth when he hears an analysis given out as a logical one which is so painfully remote from formality, so obviously a question of how you happen to feel at the moment, so psychological; the philosopher who proceeds from everyday language stares back helplessly, asking, ‘Don’t you feel the difference: Listen: you must see it.’” (90) In a fascinating reversal, Cavell aligns the anti-pragmatist efforts of Frege, Husserl, and Kant with the efforts of Wittgenstein to help suggest a way out of this standoff:

“We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the ‘psychologizing’ of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.” (91)

In an excellent footnote, Cavell adds:

“Consider, for example, the question: ‘Could someone have a feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second—no matter what preceded or followed this second?’ [Philosophical Investigations, §583]. We shall not wish to say that this is logically impossible, or that it can in no way be imagined. But we might say: given our world this cannot happen; it is not, in our language, what ‘love’ or ‘hope’ mean; necessary in our world that this is not what love and hope are. I take it that our most common philosophical understanding of such notions as necessity, contingency, synthetic and analytic statements, will not know what to make of our saying such things.”

I think this is a tremendous description of Wittgenstein’s achievement and it links quite well with the hopes of Iris Murdoch, who, in The Sovereignty of Good, reacts to the underpinnings of analytic and existentialist moral philosophy, with their conception of the individual as a monad who chooses freely, by suggesting a phenomenology of choices that seems to make more sense with the way in which we proceed in our lives: we don’t simply choose, willy-nilly, between two alternatives, our attempts to choose by weighing pros and cons and the like force our hand into making the choices we make. By the time we make a choice (at least in the things that matter), the route we choose doesn’t even appear to us as a choice, but rather as the only good option available. This is the kind of real life necessity that Cavell is talking about that analytic philosophy can hardly acknowledge.

I’m going to leave to the side for now Cavell’s perceptive treatment of the “procedures of ordinary language philosophy” at the end of his paper, one in which we find an illuminating cross light for Rorty’s legendary “we’s” (I will continue on in a second reflection on Cavell), and instead end with a comment about where Cavell leaves us with this description of Wittgenstein’s achievement, with the hopes of illuminating Cavell’s earlier opaque claim that the cause and topic of philosophical criticism is “the self getting in its own way.” With where he leaves us, Cavell says that is difficult to name it, that “Wittgenstein called it ‘grammar’; others might call it ‘phenomenology.’” (93) Murdoch herself doesn’t, I believe, use “phenomenology” to describe what I noted above, but these seem like fitting descriptions, and as Cavell notes in “Austin at Criticism,” Austin’s nigh only title for what he did, thrown out sheepishly once, was “linguistic phenomenology.” (99) The title captures something important, that what Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, and Murdoch were all doing is making themselves at home in the language games we find ourselves inhabiting. They wish to shove aside some recent philosophy as pathetic, failed attempts to flee these language games, these forms of life.

But can we flee our language games? I believe we can, but my grasp of Cavell leads me to believe that he isn’t so sure we should want to, that all fleeing endeavors are perverse. As I understand it, in recent years Cavell has been apt to talk about something called the “Ordinary” that is supposed to be the object philosophers strive after. This, to me, seems to be a maneuver that kills the imaginative genius of our poets, those intellectuals that try and conceive a new form of life. No doubt, Plato created a new form of life, but not all new creations are necessarily good ones. Talk about the “Ordinary” as some kind of control on what we should be able to think about or conceive seems to me to be just one more Platonic twist on ending philosophy, ending the progress of intellectual life, as if once everything were “ordinary” it’d all be hunky-dory and we philosophers would be out of a job.

There are two other ways of putting this point. One is by reference to the wisdom Rorty pulls out of the two competing schools of linguistic philosophy circa 1960. In Rorty’s brilliant, expansive and informative introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, Rorty pits “ordinary language philosophy” (with alums like Austin, Strawson, Cavell, and Urmson) against “ideal language philosophy” (with alums like Carnap, Quine, Goodman, and Bergmann) to see what their differences might be. His concluding wisdom runs along the lines of, “Any stick will do to beat the devil, and it would seem that offering an alternative to ordinary English might be effective in some cases, whereas demonstrating a misuse of English would be effective in others.” (LT, 15) What lies at the bottom of Rorty’s difference with Cavell is that Cavell would like to read Wittgenstein as simply returning us to common sense, whereas Rorty would like to read Wittgenstein as envisioning a new form of life, that for the Philosophical Investigations to “return” us to common sense, we must also extirpate the Platonisms and Cartesianisms that are our common sense, thus changing it and not leaving it as it always was, us where we always were.

The other way of putting this point is to say that Cavell’s description of Wittgenstein as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, which itself ironically psychologizes philosophy, parallels precisely Rorty’s description of Davidson’s achievement: “Davidson, in other words, seems to me to have found a transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments—one which tears down the scaffolding upon which the standard paradigms of ‘realistic’ transcendental arguments were mounted.” (“Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism,” 78*) The idea Rorty is suggesting about Davidson, and that I think Cavell is suggesting about Wittgenstein (though unwittingly counter-productively), is that they worked through the dialectical structure of the language game of Platonic-Cartesian philosophy to its very end and showed how it defeated itself, and was therefore a pointless, superfluous, and self-defeating enterprise (“its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way”).

And we see in Cavell things that sound reminiscent of Davidson’s working out of this “transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments” first proposed in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” The one that should leap out is when he says, “the philosophy of ordinary language is not about language, anyway not in any sense in which it is not also about the world.” (95) That counterintuitive statement about what Austin is doing should remind us of Davidson saying, “we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally,” which leads to his shocking formulation: “I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.” (“A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 107**) The erasure occurs, according to Davidson, once we drop the notion of conventions as ruling linguistic behavior and adopt a holistic picture of functioning, Davidson’s picture of triangulation between world, community, and person.

Cavell, I believe, is gesturing towards what Davidson worked out systematically, which isn’t too surprising given Cavell’s love of Wittgenstein and Rorty’s love of both Wittgenstein and Davidson. Unlike Davidson, however, Cavell is a more romantic thinker who is not content to plug away at posed problems, but is also concerned with self-creation, with the giving of wisdom for us, not just the wisdom Davidson dispenses primarily to other philosophers of language. The primary bit of wisdom is this: just as Cavell says that “Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about,” we should see that what we do in life is about whatever it is that we do—there is nothing deeper, or secret, underlying our actions. We may not always understand what we are doing, and should always seek better descriptions of them, but there is no key to unlock what’s truly happening, certainly not any philosophy can provide.



*Found in Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds. Peter Bieri, Rolf-P. Horstmann, Lorenz Krüger Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.
**Collected in Davidson’s Truth, Language, and History.

Bloom and Criticism

Pirsig's use of "philosophology" is a pet peeve of mine, probably the major place at which I have to break ranks with Pirsig and leave him to his own devices. I mentioned the other day that Bloom has been deepening my notion of the "critic" and her travails, which is only natural considering how Rorty was influenced by Bloom. I'm currently reading Bloom's The Breaking of the Vessels and I'd like to bring out some passages that I think reflect and deepen the stance I've taken earlier when claiming that all explicit criticism of philosophy is philosophy and that all philosophy is implicitly criticism of other philosophy.

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Criticism is not a science, not even a "human science," and it is not a branch of philosophy. The theory of poetry need not meet the tests by which science and philosophy rate theory, or by which they decide what is or is not theory. The theory of poetry, like all criticism, is an art, a teachable and useful art, and its true criteria are poetic: it must be memorable, pragmatic where it is most visionary, and it must give pleasure, even if only to an elite. I would sum up its necessary attributes in one formula: it must be strong, with the strength of usurpation, of persistence, of eloquence. By these criteria, most current theory can be given back to the empirical scientists, to the social scientists, and to the dialectical philosophers. Facts and arguments alike have little to do with poetry, or with poetic criticism. In homage to Emerson, who changed my mind about nearly everything when I was in the middle of the journey, back around 1965, I call upon him here as my incessant authority:

A man of genius or a work of love and beauty will not come to order, cant be compounded by the best rules, but is always new and incalculable result, like health. Dont rattle your rules in our ears; we must behave as we can. Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poet, but looks at the order of his thoughts and the essential quality of his mind. Then the critic is poet. 'Tis a question not of talents but of tone; and not particular merits, but the mood of mind into which one and another bring us.

...

Rhetoric, in Emerson's definition, is the "sovereignty of thought to make facts and men obey our present humor or belief." What Emerson calls metonymy is technically the metonymy of a metonymy, or metalepsis, and was Emerson's favorite trope, as it was Nietzsche's. No critical speculator, not even Nietzsche, was more aware than Emerson of the rhetorical drive that the poetic will directs against anteriority, against prior tropes. And no critic, not even Oscar Wilde, matches Emerson in his valorization of criticism over literature. This maxim, which gives such offense today, is stated by Emerson in one fierce transumptive formula:

Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral, and easily entertain the supposition of its entire disapperance. In our ordinary states of mind, we deem not only letters in general, but most famous books parts of a pre-established harmony, fatal, unalterable, and do not go behind Dante and Shakespeare, much less behind Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John. But man is critic of all these also, and should treat the entire extant product of the human intellect as only one age, revisable, corrigible, reversible by him.

Emerson is calling upon the reader to revise, correct and reverse all of literature, until the reader has become more transcendental and extraordinary than all the wealth of texts. I do not think that Emerson idealizes or is ironic here. Our own rejected thoughts, returning to us with an alienated luster, are what account for the uncanniness of the strong reading experience. Emerson praised Milton for the adage that the poet "ought himself to be a true poem," and then transcended Milton by urging the reader to become an even truer poem than the poet. But how can such a program be pragmatic, and thus proper to criticism? How can the critic as strong reader so revise, correct, and reverse Paradise Lost, as to become a poem truer than that magnificence? I have discovered that what many moldy fig academics and most literary journalists authentically share is a capacity for boundless indignation when I advocate a contemporary version of the Emersonian program. With what zeal they come forward, proclaiming the sanctity of the text of Milton and of Shelley, of Whitman and of Stevens, which the responsible reader is not to revise, correct and reverse, but rather to repeat, congeal, and revere. Their name is legion, and they are what our father Emerson meant when he spoke of "the sterile & stingy Nature." (25-8)

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Where do we find Pirsig in these lines? When Bloom says that criticism is not philosophy, he means not anglophone, let's-analyze-the-nature-of-logic philosophy. In its widest sense, I do not see a difference between criticism and philosophy, criticism and the love and search for wisdom. Without criticism, what could value possibly mean? Which is why I've always found Pirsig's knee-jerk response to the academy in Lila's 26th chapter to more indicative of Pirsig's mood then very good criticism. Of course, as Emerson reminds us, the mood is very important. I think Pirsig's place is as standing beside Bloom and Emerson. Bloom says that Emerson knew that "reading strong poems costs us a great deal, or, as he said, nothing is got for nothing." (28) I find Pirsig more Bloomian in criticism and Bloom more Pirsigian in philosophy when Bloom says, "All criticism that matters is experiential criticism, and experience here means literature in life and life in literature. When has loving another person, or even loving oneself, cost nothing?" (29) I see Pirsig above all when Bloom says, "Poetry, like criticism, is conflict and crisis, is projected jealousy and the death drive, is the horror and the allure of incest," that "the true paradigms both for poetry and for interpretation include the family romance." (ibid.)

I see Pirsig in Bloom's lines, but I often see Pirsig acting out his childish demand to be unique. And in those places I see his children regressing even further back, until we get his moldy fig successors demanding that we repeat, congeal, and revere. It's not Pirsig's demand that is childish, for that demand is repeated by all strong poets. It is what tells us more than anything that Pirsig demands to be seen in his family romance with Plato, Carnap, and the Buddha. What's childish is the petulance with which he delivers his demands, like a child demanding a cookie before dinner, rather than an authority demanding obeisance. Pirsig has some authority, which is what makes the petulance all the stranger.

I cheer most readily, and I can hear Pirsig behind me, when I read these lines:

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When Paul de Man tells me that an epistemological stance in regard to a literary text is necessarily more privileged than any aesthetic or moral stance, all I can do is grin cheerfully and rejoin that such a stance is no more or less literary, no more or less a trope, than the most self-abasing belly-prone reverence of professor Moldy Fig or the self-aggrandizing Bloomian wildness. What can a trope provoke except a trope, would be the Yeatsian question, to which I would reply: only the troping of a prior trope, or of the concept of trope itself.

...

[From Emerson] The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other...

I want to convert this to a Low Transcendentalism, which is to say, to a Pragmatism. It is like Emerson that he carries his dark doctrine of reading to the point of scandal, by rejecting even Shakespeare, when the rejection is done from the Gnostic perspective of absolute freedom, from the stance of the Oversoul, which the ancient Gnostics called the pneuma or spark. My own quarrel is not with deconstructions of the psyche; as a belated or Emersonian Gnostic I am more than prepared to see that reduced to the trace of a trace. But what I have called the poet in a poet, or the poet qua poet, I would call now by the ancient name of the Orphic or Gnostic or Kabbalistic spark, the pneuma of the poet and of the knowing reader. "The soul knows only the soul," Emerson said, which I translate as: the strong reader and the strong poet know only the strong reading, a reading which is a relational event, a concept of happening and not a concept of being. (30-2)

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I read a lot out of this for my pursuits with Pirsig, and someday I will try and make its relation to static and Dynamic more apparent. But part of my project is to relocate the Dynamic as not outside the static, but as something in between the static. And in criticism, this is my forerunner:

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I have quoted extensively [from Emerson], yet the best commentary I can provide is one antithetical apothegm: even the strongest poem, particularly the strongest poem, costs us too much, but without that cost the poem is only so many words, and not human action. Emerson, precursor of Pragmatism as he was, knows that only a difference that makes a difference matters. Poems matter only if we matter, and so there is no true criticism that is not experiential criticism, and poems must rely upon such criticism. But experiential criticism itself relies upon consciousness, and consciousness is of the Oversoul. Call the Oversoul the Orphic or Dionysiac commonal, democratic and yet elitist, and center it where it must be centered, in the antithetical reader. There are no texts, so that it makes little difference to affirm that there is nothing outside the text. Rather, there are configurations, richly perverse interlockings of a multiplicity of strong texts and a few scattered handfuls of strong readers. Poetry happens within those configurations, within those ratios of revision that adjust the intricate balances of psychic warfare between and within texts and readers. (34)

Quality as Archimedean Point

This is something I wrote while writing "Philosophologology" (at www.moq.org). It eventually got cut because it didn't fit in very well with the direction of the paper, but it is useful for picking out another section of Pirsig (and going over the glasses analogy section again) that is ambiguous over how good a pragmatist Pirsig is. It also makes some connections with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
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At the outset I suggested that Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology is at best muddy and misdirected and at the worst untenable. The degree to which the distinction is untenable is the degree to which you are a pragmatist. It's difficult to get a good bead on Pirsig on this matter because Pirsig consistently talks both like a pragmatist and a traditional philosopher. I have so far spent most of my time on how Pirsig talks like a traditionalist in the passages on philosophology and I have elsewhere suggested how Pirsig talks like a pragmatist in general.[1] There is one place in particular that is pertinent to this discussion where Pirsig is particularly ambiguous. In ZMM, Pirsig talks about the mythos-over-logos argument. Pirsig says, “the term logos … refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world” and that the “mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos.”[2] “The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.”[3] Pirsig’s “continuing, ongoing mythos” as our “huge body of common knowledge” recalls Nietzsche’s claim that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” “a sum of human relations.”[4] Pirsig’s claim that “Everything is an analogy” and that “Dialectic … came itself from rhetoric” are of a piece with Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonic philosophy.[5] That the mythos can be transformed is the pragmatist point about changing our intuitions. Pirsig wants to change our intuitions about truth and reason, like that we should “do what is ‘reasonable’ even when it isn't any good,” and replace it with a “new spiritual rationality.”[6]

This so far is all good pragmatist stuff. Like Nietzsche, pragmatists want to get rid of God and his doubles, they want to remove the capitalization from all of the traditional playmates of traditional philosophers: Truth, Reason, Nature, Science, History, etc., etc. This, of course, is what makes the pragmatist immediately careful about Pirsig. Pirsig seems to be Nietzschean enough, but his insistence on calling Quality the “pre-intellectual reality” makes the pragmatist a little nervous, let alone his insistence on capitalizing his moniker for the pre-intellectual reality. In the present context, this nervousness is spelled out when Pirsig says that “Quality is the generator of the mythos.”[7] Quality is completely ineffable, undefined, and our definitions of Quality are not actually definitions of Quality, they are definitions of our responses to Quality. Pirsig says that we respond to Quality and that is how we create the mythos, “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.”[8] Outside the mythos lay insanity, “the terra incognita surrounding the mythos.”[9] Pirsig then, gathering all his rhetorical strength, says that our Western mythos is insane: “the mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of the world is unreal, that is insane!”[10]

It is not clear that pragmatists can say this, however. It would require a pivot that doesn’t move, that philosophical holy grail known as the Archimedean point. For pragmatists who think that “everything is an analogy” and that everything from the “laws of nature” to the “laws of logic, of mathematics” are human inventions, that, in fact, “the whole blessed thing is a human invention,”[11] as Pirsig says in his discourse on Western ghosts, Archimedean points are hard to come by. If Pirsig wants to claim that the Western mythos is insane, he must be standing in another mythos. But it is not clear why the Western mythos could not respond as he does: that he is insane. This is how the Western mythos responds, which makes one wonder why we should even start exchanging the epithets. I think Pirsig fingers the Greeks as “the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality”[12] because he thinks he has found such an Archimedean point. He doesn’t think he’s created a better mythos, a better invention, he thinks he’s found the correct mythos, the mythos that actually follows Quality, “the track that directs the train.”[13] To call our mythos insane must mean that our mythos, “the whole train of collective consciousness of all communicating mankind,”[14] has been derailed.

Pirsig’s Archimedean point is Quality, his own capitalized, philosophical playmate, his own God-surrogate. If “everything is an analogy,” that would mean everything, not just everything up until the point at which it reaches Quality. When Pirsig says that “Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live,”[15] Nietzsche would respond, “A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor….”[16] All of our knowledge is built on metaphors, up to and including Quality. Pirsig seems to get to the second metaphor and stop. When Pirsig declares that our present mythos is insane, after saying that insanity exists outside the mythos, he sounds like the early Wittgenstein when he said the traditional problems of philosophy arise because “the logic of our language is misunderstood.”[17] Pirsig is essentially trying to say that we misunderstand Quality.

Wittgenstein then notoriously goes on to make fun of himself, as he evolves from the early Wittgenstein into the later one. In Section 114 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein begins by quoting the Tractatus: “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.”[18] He then says, “That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.”[19] Wittgenstein is here making fun of the idea that we can get at the nature of anything, that there is a correct mythos. Even this, however, is slightly misleading because you might begin to think that there is a nature, it just happens to be the fact that we can’t get to it. When Wittgenstein says famously that, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably,”[20] Wittgenstein is creating an analogy exactly like Pirsig’s analogy of the glasses in Lila.[21] Like Pirsig’s analogy, you can’t press it too hard, for if you do, you might be tempted to say that if we could discard language entirely, we could reach the nature of the thing. You would be tempted to suggest, as Pirsig does, that you could get rid of the glasses through which you see the world. For pragmatists, it's pictures and glasses all the way down. Wittgenstein’s later question to his earlier self is, if we misunderstand language, how are we to phrase our realization if the only thing we have is language? Analogously, what we should ask Pirsig is how we are supposed to misunderstand Quality if we are all everywhere and always in touch with Quality?

The reason I’ve spent so long on this particular passage from ZMM is that the muddiness in interpreting this passage is directly related to the muddiness in interpreting Pirsig’s use of philosophology. They revolve around his use of Quality. The generator of the mythos, our knowledge, is Quality. In Pirsig’s Lila analogy between the horse of philosophy and its cart, the mythos is the cart that follows behind the horse: Quality. Quality is the hinge on which hangs the distinction between philosophy and philosophology, Quality is what we can all reflect on and expect to generate beliefs. Pirsig seems to oscillate between making a “new spiritual rationality” and finding an Archimedean point on which we can pivot with some assurance. If Pirsig sticks to handing in his discovery metaphors for creation ones, then he can say that philosophy is individualistic and that we can create a better one, but he can no longer be assured that everyone will be talking about the same thing nor that we aren’t the ones seen as insane.

[1] see my “Confessions of a Fallen Priest” at www.moq.org
[2] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 358
[3] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 359
[4] Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46-7. When Pirsig says later that “Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion,” (ZMM, p. 360) he recalls Nietzsche’s successor, Heidegger, when he says that “language speaks man.” (see Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought)
[5] See Christopher Norris’ discussion of Pirsig and Nietzsche in his Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, p. 61-4.
[6] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 368
[7] ibid., p. 360
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid., p. 361
[11] ibid., p. 36
[12] ibid., p. 361
[13] ibid., p. 360
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid., p. 255
[16] Nietzsche, “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” p. 46
[17] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 3
[18] ibid., 4.5
[19] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, sec. 114
[20] ibid., sec. 115
[21] Pirsig, Lila, p. 112-3

Philosophy and Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pirsig, Baggini, and the First Rule of Philosophy

The first rule of philosophy is to keep the conversation going.

Socrates was told by the oracle that he was the wisest in Athens. Socrates had no idea why the oracle would say such a thing because he knew nothing. So he spent his days wandering Greece to prove the oracle wrong by engaging others who thought they were wise. Socrates marked the beginning of philosophy and we live in his image and by his example. Without the conversation, there is only the dogmatism of those who think themselves wise.

It would appear that in Julian Baggini's interview with Pirsig that the conversation did indeed break down and founder. I'm not entirely sure why it did. But the thing that struck me the most about the interview was Pirsig's certainty about his own wisdom. For instance, his specious contrast between "one who only tries to explain a few things and succeeds or one who tries to explain everything and succeeds." Of course more is better than less, but success is exactly what is at issue. If it is indeed wisdom is exactly what is attempting to be determined. And the only way to make strides is to keep the conversation going, to keep searching, to always be questioning.

The central problem that Pirsig raises in Lila is how we are to tell Dynamic Quality from degeneracy. He never answers the question, nor should he because there is no general way to tell. You just experiment and find out. I would think that the only way we could tell is if static latching occured, that is, looking back at our past from where we are now. One of the ways in which we use "DQ" is as a compliment. Calling something "Dynamic" is either an empty compliment about something currently being experimented with (empty because there's still no way to tell whether the experiment will be degenerate or Dynamic, though the only reason you're experimenting is because you indeed think it will succeed, but of course everyone knows that you think so already, for why else would people experiment?) or a full compliment paid to something in the past, something that was Dynamic, but is now the static patterns it left behind. Static latching is what gives you a defensible sense of success, else you'd just have a baseless opinion which might be either superiority or degeneracy. This means that Pirsig's already some ways into the conversation, or else Pirsig (and we) would have very bad opinions indeed.

Kant said that you can't learn philosophy, you can only learn how to philosophize. Philosophy is an activity. Pirsig brings that out well when he says in the introduction to Lila's Child that philosophy is like chess and "real chess is the game you play with your neighbor." Some of those neighbors we play against, of course, are those who are no longer alive, those great masters of the tradition. We cut our teeth on their books, we engage them to learn how to philosophize, we engage them to steal their wisdom. Baggini's interview brings out strongly Pirsig's desire to not engage with those of the past, but it also shows him not really engaging with those of the present, like Baggini. Pirsig's sometimes refusal to enter the "Western conversation" isn't really to be explained by some specious contrast between Pirsig's Dynamism and the Western tradition's staticness, between philosophy and philosophology. I think its to be explained by Pirsig's incarnation of rugged, American hyperindividualism, which toes along the fear of being influenced.

Pirsig's desire to ignore other philosophers, other chess partners, is tied into the anxiety of influence, Pirsig's unwillingness to see himself in anybody else's eyes. But unlike strong poets like Socrates, Nietzsche, and Hegel, Pirsig's tactic sometimes seems more like closing his eyes then staring down his predecessors and saying with Nietzsche, "Thus I willed it." Pirsig does indeed want to be original and, like Nietzsche, not owe it to anybody, but without engaging in the conversation, how are we to know if it is indeed wisdom? Wisdom arises through the conversation, not outside of it.

What I think we see in the interview is the playing out of static and Dynamic as they are instantiated in intellectual virtues: focus and curiosity. When we focus on one thing we are following through as far as possible on a single idea or subject. We are focusing our attention, like Phaedrus' laser beam cutting through the darkness. But curiosity is what keeps us on our toes. Curiosity is the virtue of the fallible conversant, always engaging others in the hopes of finding something better than they already have. Curiosity is what led Pirsig from chemistry to philosophy and then to Benares. Focus is what led Pirsig from Montana to the University of Chicago, where he chides himself on not learning more than he could of because of his obsession with his own Quality thesis. As Pirsig says in the interview, both static and Dynamic are absolutely essential. A balance is needed between focus and curiosity.

In philosophy, you always need to keep the conversation going. Without the conversation, we'll all just sit around with our own little ideas of what is good and right. Philosophy is indeed an individual's activity as Pirsig says. Every individual is a collection of beliefs and attitudes and it is the activity of philosophy that causes them to clash to see which ones are best. But because of philosophy's high level of abstraction, it is fairly easy (given time and ingenuity) to build a fairly impregnable fortress. Philosophy is the game of changing the rules, of questioning everything. When you do philosophy, potentially everything is up for grabs. The question then becomes, is the fortress you've built useful? Does it constitute wisdom?

That is why the conversation must always be kept going. If Pirsig's right in saying that "the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe," then we really are solipsistic monads if not for the conversation with other philosophers. The game of philosophy demands that we keep building bridges between each of our fortresses, all the fortresses that have been built throughout history. Good philosophy is performed when we both focus on ourselves and are curious about others.