On Friday, June 8th, I read Stanley Cavell on Emerson and saw that America was the heart and soul of Emerson. On Saturday I read Harold Bloom on Emerson and saw that Emerson was the voice and mind of America. On Sunday, the seventh day, I rested. On Monday I summoned the most strength I had yet achieved and moved on Rorty’s appropriation of Romanticism, shattering it in a display of declared superiority by changing the name to post-Emersonian (admittedly not an earth shattering shift in philosophical policy, and sadly a mimic of Rorty’s shift from post-modernism to post-Nietzschean, and for the exact same reasons).
On Tuesday I learned that on Friday Richard Rorty had passed away due to complications with pancreatic cancer.
I’m not sure what one is supposed to feel about the death of someone you’ve never met. Certainly there is the general felt loss of life, any life, the empathy for his family and friends. But I received e-mails from friends and acquaintances, many assuming they were telling me something I already knew, a few offering condolences. I didn’t know and I didn’t know how to feel.
How does one feel when one loses a writer?
We have the writer’s books, we continue to have what we had before, the only links we readers have to our writers. What do we lose, what did I lose?
Most of the obituaries are classically wrong about Rorty in the way that outsiders aren’t quite sure how to handle the fire that incenses the insiders. But they performed their duties, their function, admirably well, proliferating snapshots of his life and work. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were his grand works, but his voice remained in the essay, a balance between cunning completion and impatience. Throughout his life Rorty struggled with two daemons, the desire to argue and the desire to be interesting. These arose, like it does in most, in the dynamic between professional and amateur. With his professional face he gained considerable street cred with tightly argued articles on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, though he spent a large amount of time on metaphilosophy, an often neglected angle of presentation in analytic philosophy. His metaphilosophical reflections are where the trouble started, at least from the professional, analytic establishment’s point of view. Metaphilosophy, or talking about how we talk about philosophy, is troublesome because there are hardly any rules for how we should talk about how we should talk.
These reflections are where Rorty’s second muse began bucking for attention. Raising its head in witty cappers on solid arguments, they captivated in their audacity. They worked against professional decorum, the professional attitude of saying no more than what is dialectically allowed. But the amateur attitude is that boredom is a bigger enemy and that the conversation needs to move forward. Rorty balanced in his writing his pure professional face and his professional amateur face, the classic philosophical gadfly. Not an amateur professional as G. E. Moore is sometimes said to have been, charming but not really knowing what everyone else is talking about, but a professional amateur, a line that begins with Socrates, continues to Montaigne and Emerson and on to Bloom and Cavell, and Rorty could not control, though he could restrain, his muse because his muse was the only sense he had that he was going in the right direction.
But how should we feel when we lose a writer? Most of Rorty’s writings had long become transparent to me, disappearing on the page as they’d already become a part of me. In a certain (though pregnant) sense, I know Rorty’s mind better than my own. A few lines here and there, and the best of his essays, are still opaque, still breathing, robust and unflagging in their hidden energy, the hidden source of their power, like few philosophers have had the courage to summon and sustain. For better or for worse, Rorty was a hedgehog, and if he remains a bit foxy to me, the attraction is no doubt incumbent upon the vitality of that one big idea, not exactly his, but endlessly resuscitated, repeated, and reformulated. It is a bit unclear what that big idea is, but I suspect that is mainly because it is unfinished and I suspect it sometimes goes by the name of “America.”
One of Rorty’s most often attacked lines aims directly at this idea: “truth is whatever your peers let you get away with”. The line is quoted so often because it seems on its face so frivolous and cynical, representative of everything that is wrong with Rorty and quoted lovingly by every detractor, just as it is, a gift from Rorty showing his true colors, mocking everything holy. Every time I see detractors jump all over the line, I think, “No, no, he’s not saying something horrible. He’s adding a little speed to the notion that peers aren’t going to let you get away with just anything. It needs to be good!” The line has everything in common with more tempered ones like “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers,” “All that can be done to explicate ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘morality’, ‘virtue’ is to refer us back to the concrete details of the culture in which these terms grew up and developed,” and “…‘method’ and ‘rationality’ are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one’s fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation.” Glossing the line with the others, it’s hard to see what’s so wrong with it. It is neither frivolous nor cynical, though on the other hand it is a tad mocking of the holy, at least that which most analytic philosophers still consider holy.
I will miss Rorty’s jocular teasing, his poking and prodding at the midriffs of philosophers, and I will miss, when they became testy and angry and cried out that they think this is serious, how he would calmly, and with a sad smile, shake his head and reply, “I know, I know my child. But so am I.” I will miss Rorty’s wit and verve, but there is nothing left from him that I wish to know, and that is only because, as he well knew, what we know isn’t what is exciting, isn’t what is worth knowing. I look forward to the posthumous material, I hope he was able to finish his replies to his forthcoming volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, but what I look for, and what I’m saddened we will no longer have the opportunity to wait for, are what Pater called those hardened bits of gemlike flame, the things that give us sustenance, the ideas that we mine seemingly forever.
The most important lesson that Rorty taught me was that writing, and in particular philosophy, is vampirism. The old cliché must be amended in a Bloomian way: good writers borrow, great writers steal, but the genius makes us think that she is the authentic originator, having been so effective at stealing her predecessors’ life blood. I have no questions for Rorty, nothing I wish to know. I have no questions for anybody because they are only tools for me—I don’t care about getting you right, preserving the aura you’ve created, I only care about stealing your strength, creating something new and better. Emerson’s heirs don’t care to mummified, embalmed for future generations to stare glazed eyed at. They don’t want schools or disciples. They only wish for what they did to be returned to them—ritually sacrificed at the height of their powers, diabolized in a frenzy by the young so that they may live on in the young, not stuffed and propped up behind exhibit windows to be looked at by the young.
When a writer dies, when your writer dies, you weep for the person, you weep for their family and loved ones, but more than any of that, you weep for the power they might have unleashed upon the Earth, potentially changing it irrevocably, a power you could have usurped for your own.
The young vamps are gathering now and the fight begins in earnest.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig
My confrontation with Pirsig can be said to center around two terms, “philosophy” and “experience.” In particular, it is when you put the two together that, as in a “philosophy of experience” (or, in Pirsig’s terminology, a “Metaphysics of Quality”), that I think you can get problems of a kind that Pirsig is elsewhere at pains to distance himself from and criticize (all depending on how you define the terms, of course). My development of this angle of confrontation and this picture of Pirsig has been in part due to the pressures from my interlocuters, expositors of Pirsig who think that there’s nothing wrong with such a formulation, and vice versa with them. Our pictures of Pirsig, developed in partial dialectic with each other, have over time overflowed into the general pictures of philosophy we may hold and other particular philosophers we may attend to. This has led to surprise, on both sides, when we look in more detail at what the other is describing and drawing in our continuing efforts to expand our own horizons.
This phenomenon shouldn’t itself be surprising. It happens all the time and might most generally be called “education.” The peculiar thing about developing a picture of Pirsig is that there isn’t all that much material of Pirsig’s to keep in mind, not a lot of detail to dig around for or have to remember (though, as always happens to diggers, we may become so focused on the mineshaft we are currently in that we sometimes start to forget about the others). This isn’t so, though, for the job of developing a picture of Pirsig’s place in philosophy (or anything else), for developing a picture of how Pirsig resonates with or reverberates into the rest of what people are saying and doing. There are a lot of mineshafts out there to look through and the phenomenon of surprise is the effect of having a shaft described to you for so long as one thing, and then going into it and finding something else.
This effect, I think, isn’t due to willful mis-description or even partial understanding. All of us move through the world with partial understandings that are further increased, though never made less partial. Some people understand more about one thing than another and should be taken as authorities on X, over this other person over here. Who should be taken as an authority, as having a good understanding, is something developed over time, over conversation and debate and the dialectic. Our finitude is what produces the demand that we never rest totally certain on a platform, but always be looking for or producing a better one.
This is all to say that I’ve had my own little moment of surprise, which turned rapidly, as dawning understanding swept over my face, into joy. The ball got rolling, oddly enough, by me, but not in the usual way. In this case, my girlfriend and I were having a conversation about racism and moral progress and I started to try and impress upon her my slightly counterintuitive viewpoint. She’s studying psychology and has a bit of the scientist in her and I’m, of course, an irrepressible Rortyan and so scientistic rhetoric doesn’t take too well with me. As we were talking, I called upon Dewey to help me out. I pulled out his “means-ends continuum” to try and help me describe my hocked vision of moral progress. Turns out, she was quite taken with it and over the next few days kept asking me for where it was and more information on it.
Here’s my partial: I don’t know where in Dewey it’s from and I don’t have my Dewey books with me anymore. She wants to incorporate it in an art project she’s doing (which, she’s told me, she’d rather have me call an “art experiential” because “art project,” in her words, makes it sound like she’s in eighth grade; I told her she looks like she’s in eighth grade—she has a young face—at which point she called me a “butthead”) and maybe a paper she’s writing, so I read to her sections of Rorty that continues to gloss the notion. She also goes onto the web and grabs some papers about Dewey, art, and the means-ends continuum. They’re lying around the apartment and so I read a few of them. Most of them are lame articles about Dewey and art (not because they are about his vision of art, but because they are just lame), but one article is solely about the means-ends continuum that she picked up from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, a reputable philosophical journal. The scales fell from eyes.
In his paper, “The Means-Ends Continuum and the Reconciliation of Science and Art in the Later Works of John Dewey,” (Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 595-611) Leonard J. Waks seeks to focus on something that has never, apparently, received much isolated focus: Dewey’s analysis of the means-ends continuum. The first part of the paper is an admirable summation of the background that Dewey was reacting to. Nothing out of the ordinary here; just the usual stuff about dehumanizing, technical action, theory and practice, teleology, etc. But then the second part, “Dewey’s Analysis of Means-Ends,” which should be the meat of what I’d like to learn about, begins, “Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls”—and at this point I can hear the choir of antithetical, experience-jargon toting Pirsigians chime in triumphantly—“primary and secondary.” (598)
I rolled my eyes and got ready my thresher, ready to neatly cut out all of that kind of talk as merely the ways of the time, a vocabulary handed down to us from Locke to Kant to Northrop, the kind of thing I had hoped that James and Dewey had gotten away from in the main, or at least not used those damn exact words, words that have haunted me ever since my interlocuters had started reading more Northrop into Pirsig than they should’ve, hammering down every time Pirsig writes that Quality or DQ is the “primary experience.” I got a little ticked because here I am wanting to read about moral progress and the means-ends continuum and I have to go through a negligible discursus on experience. But then I read the next paragraph, which if I hadn’t completely forgotten by the reading of it that I had just started my thresher, I should have thought was a complete non sequitor (all in-text citations of Dewey have been removed, though all italics, before and after when quoting, are Waks’s):
But then Waks hits me with this simple, straightforward gloss on the previous paragraph: “For Dewey, life activities undergirded by adequate habit and intelligence-in-action constitute primary experience.” (ibid.) Like a ton of bricks, it hit me all at once. First, I went, “Oh yeah, he was supposed to be talking about that.” But then: “Oh…my…God….” The constellation of what primary and secondary experience shifted completely out of kilter from my normal understanding of how neo-Kantians and Pirsigians use it by five simple words: “adequate habit … constitute primary experience.” It was almost as if the word “primary” had been italicized just for me, for the quakes of what those five words mean for a confluence of Dewey and Pirsig are tremendous.
The background is simple: for Pirsigians, Dynamic Quality is the primary experience and static patterns of Quality are secondary, following in a wake behind the cutting edge of pre-intellectual experience. Simply stating it allows one to see it: static patterns are adequate habits, which means that Pirsig is the exact reverse of Dewey.
According to Waks, for Dewey, we make our way about the world following a pattern of accumulated habits. “In this dimension tacit goals adequately direct behavior and condition a relatively fluid field of experience apprehended as a qualitative whole.” (ibid.) We just live when we are in this dimension, we don’t think about what we are doing, we just act. This is often how a Pirsigian will want to describe Dynamic Quality. For Dewey, however, accumulated habits, or static patterns, are the primary experience and the secondary is, though oddly just as in Pirsig, the reflective experience. Dewey, like Pirsig, annoyingly uses the language of “reflective delay,” but the point here is that both agree that reflection causes us to analyze into parts, as opposed to the qualitative whole of primary experience.
Dewey’s description is very convincing and intuitive: we navigate the world by a set of habits, obstacles cause doubt, doubt causes a rethinking of our habits, and the rethinking causes us to change our habits. If one finds this very convincing, however, it puts Pirsig in an awkward position—his description of DQ as the primary experience, as the qualitative whole, has to be rejected. I think one could make a run at trying to creatively put Dewey and Pirsig back together. I’m not going to attempt that here. What I will do is first try and explain why Pirsig would suggest something backwards to Dewey and then try and explain why I prefer and find quite congenial Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction I hadn’t been able to countenance before.
I think Pirsig reverses Dewey (after Dewey had reversed Kant) because he still shows signs of what Heidegger called “nostalgia for immediacy” (and what I have previously called the “pathos of distance”). This comes out in several places, but I think it’s easiest to see when we link together the baby passages in Lila to the hierarchy passages in ZMM. When Pirsig calls DQ the cutting edge of experience, he is obviously making use of a sense of immediacy, our sense that the present is a knife’s edge of conjoined beginning and ending, ever moving onward. Before Pirsig conceives of DQ in Lila, however, he already has one of its functions in mind: “You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. … The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.” (ZMM, 250, italics his)
I’m not going to slap Pirsig on the wrists for saying that the past is unreal because one of the things that I make it a point of trying to do is realign people to ZMM, that the book is not a doctrinal exposition but a dialectical journey. However, even if we don’t take this passage as doctrine, something like it is still in Lila (which much more closely resembles a doctrinal exposition). Even after the refuse of these statements in ZMM is cleared away, there is still left the sense of importance that Pirsig places on them, how emphatic Pirsig is remains.
One might wonder how or why we would want to call this a “nostalgia.” After all, isn’t Pirsig suggesting that immediacy is our only reality? How can one be nostalgic for all that there is? The nostalgia comes in when Pirsig links DQ with the experience of a baby. “One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention.” (Lila, 137, italics his) By this linking, Pirsig makes a very real shift in the meaning of DQ. No longer is DQ simply the only state we are in, how we experience reality. DQ is something that we can lose, something we can be more or less in touch with. The nostalgia for immediacy is the lost, purely new experience of a baby, or that first time we heard that one song that one time.
This creates no small amount of tension, but it is the kind of tension that is required to produce the grand effects that Pirsig claims for DQ on metaphysical thinking. However, it does tend to put a strain on its logical coherence. Further strain comes from Pirsig’s suggestion that we are static patterns, that our ego, our I, is static patterns and does not, as the Cartesian tradition has suggested, have static patterns, are separate from them. It is this suggestion of Pirsig’s that most fully aligns him with Dewey.
If Pirsig had focused more attention on the repercussions of this reversal of the tradition, I think Pirsig may have shifted his emphases in DQ. For the time being, I shall content myself with pointing out why I prefer Dewey’s description (with the idea that it doesn’t take much to see Pirsig’s conception of “static patterns” the same way). The two problems I’ve always had with the formulation of the primary and secondary distinction between experiences are the senses that 1) primary experience is more important (as in the fact that DQ is a trumping good over static patterns) and 2) that the primary experience comes before our concepts (as in DQ as pre-intellectual experience). In Dewey’s formulation, both problems disappear.
Taking the latter sense first, we can see that the supposed “time lag” in Dewey becomes totally innocuous. Waks says that for Dewey, “when habits fail and obstacles frustrate action in a situation, the unease of doubt prompts a transition to a secondary dimension, characterized by reflective delay.” (Waks, 598) This delay in Dewey, however, is not the same delay as in Pirsig. For Pirsig, the time lag is a razor thin delay between experience sans concepts and conceptualized experience. For Dewey, there is no experience that is not conceptualized. Dewey affects this shift from Kantianism by moving from concepts to habits. By dispensing with talk about concepts, and when we have them, where we get them, can we get rid of them, etc., Dewey moves us to talk about our habits of behavior. Instead of talking about how a baby forms concepts, as Pirsig does, Dewey would talk about how a baby forms habits—and the idea of concepts drops right out. This leaves us as being a set of habits, just as Pirsig says we are static patterns, accumulated patterns of behavior.
Reflective delay, then, becomes the same thing you get between the time of placing the nail and hitting the nail. When doubt enters our domain of habit, we cease the habit so that we may think about the habit and how we may reform it. There’s no mysterious time lag here, just the normal lag between hitting your thumb with a crowbar and thinking that maybe you shouldn’t use the crowbar to pound the nail, that perhaps a hammer would work better.
The nostalgia for immediacy also drops out once one recognizes that “primary” and “secondary” are simply two separate modes of being, two dimensions of experience, two different activities. Pirsig and Dewey’s highly philosophical way of putting the point can obscure the effect, but the only reason one is primary to the other is that you can’t have doubt until you have a habit to be doubtful of. Reflection on our habits is secondary because we have to have habits to reflect on. However, reflection is just as much a habitual activity as anything else that goes on in our primary experience.
This is how the first problem, the problem of beatifying primary experience, is muted. The primary and secondary designations are simply ways of distinguishing how we usually make our way about the world and a special case of making our way about the world. What is also interesting in Dewey’s model is the importance placed on secondary experience, which is often lost in Pirsig’s DQ/static set up. For Pirsig, the only reason we have static patterns is so that we won’t fall apart into chaos. Otherwise, Dynamic Quality plays all the good roles in our lives: newness, betterness, wholeness. For Dewey, the very idea of falling apart into chaos doesn’t arise. In Dewey’s arrangement, secondary experience, or inquiry, plays an important role in giving us better habits, static patterns. “Inquiry leads to a re-cognition—a new, explicit view of the situation, a new causal map enabling the formation of new plans that liberate us from doubt and re-engage us, armed with new habits, in cognitively enriched primary experience.” (ibid.) Wholeness cut into parts holds at bay the Otherness of Chaos, the fear of degeneracy, in Pirsig, but for Dewey cutting things into parts enables us to construct a better wholeness.
So much for my notes on experience, Dewey, and Pirsig. Dewey’s vision, and Waks’ article, continues into his conception of the “means-ends continuum,” which I won’t go on to discuss here. I’ll simply note that was interesting about how the distinction between primary and secondary experience links up with the means-ends continuum is that the purposes for which we construct the means to get them (ends-in-view) are incomparable to the end results after following through on our plans. This is because ends-in-view and end results exist in two different dimensions of experience, secondary and primary respectively. This produces the famous oscillation that Rorty emphasizes when we he takes up Dewey’s mantle. This isn’t to say I’m about to start talking about primary and secondary experience. I still think it is needlessly esoteric to talk about two dimensions. But Dewey’s vision in out-of-date jargon still foresees many moves made in the game of philosophy that the best pragmatists are carrying out (most of them acknowledging their debt).
This phenomenon shouldn’t itself be surprising. It happens all the time and might most generally be called “education.” The peculiar thing about developing a picture of Pirsig is that there isn’t all that much material of Pirsig’s to keep in mind, not a lot of detail to dig around for or have to remember (though, as always happens to diggers, we may become so focused on the mineshaft we are currently in that we sometimes start to forget about the others). This isn’t so, though, for the job of developing a picture of Pirsig’s place in philosophy (or anything else), for developing a picture of how Pirsig resonates with or reverberates into the rest of what people are saying and doing. There are a lot of mineshafts out there to look through and the phenomenon of surprise is the effect of having a shaft described to you for so long as one thing, and then going into it and finding something else.
This effect, I think, isn’t due to willful mis-description or even partial understanding. All of us move through the world with partial understandings that are further increased, though never made less partial. Some people understand more about one thing than another and should be taken as authorities on X, over this other person over here. Who should be taken as an authority, as having a good understanding, is something developed over time, over conversation and debate and the dialectic. Our finitude is what produces the demand that we never rest totally certain on a platform, but always be looking for or producing a better one.
This is all to say that I’ve had my own little moment of surprise, which turned rapidly, as dawning understanding swept over my face, into joy. The ball got rolling, oddly enough, by me, but not in the usual way. In this case, my girlfriend and I were having a conversation about racism and moral progress and I started to try and impress upon her my slightly counterintuitive viewpoint. She’s studying psychology and has a bit of the scientist in her and I’m, of course, an irrepressible Rortyan and so scientistic rhetoric doesn’t take too well with me. As we were talking, I called upon Dewey to help me out. I pulled out his “means-ends continuum” to try and help me describe my hocked vision of moral progress. Turns out, she was quite taken with it and over the next few days kept asking me for where it was and more information on it.
Here’s my partial: I don’t know where in Dewey it’s from and I don’t have my Dewey books with me anymore. She wants to incorporate it in an art project she’s doing (which, she’s told me, she’d rather have me call an “art experiential” because “art project,” in her words, makes it sound like she’s in eighth grade; I told her she looks like she’s in eighth grade—she has a young face—at which point she called me a “butthead”) and maybe a paper she’s writing, so I read to her sections of Rorty that continues to gloss the notion. She also goes onto the web and grabs some papers about Dewey, art, and the means-ends continuum. They’re lying around the apartment and so I read a few of them. Most of them are lame articles about Dewey and art (not because they are about his vision of art, but because they are just lame), but one article is solely about the means-ends continuum that she picked up from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, a reputable philosophical journal. The scales fell from eyes.
In his paper, “The Means-Ends Continuum and the Reconciliation of Science and Art in the Later Works of John Dewey,” (Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 595-611) Leonard J. Waks seeks to focus on something that has never, apparently, received much isolated focus: Dewey’s analysis of the means-ends continuum. The first part of the paper is an admirable summation of the background that Dewey was reacting to. Nothing out of the ordinary here; just the usual stuff about dehumanizing, technical action, theory and practice, teleology, etc. But then the second part, “Dewey’s Analysis of Means-Ends,” which should be the meat of what I’d like to learn about, begins, “Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls”—and at this point I can hear the choir of antithetical, experience-jargon toting Pirsigians chime in triumphantly—“primary and secondary.” (598)
I rolled my eyes and got ready my thresher, ready to neatly cut out all of that kind of talk as merely the ways of the time, a vocabulary handed down to us from Locke to Kant to Northrop, the kind of thing I had hoped that James and Dewey had gotten away from in the main, or at least not used those damn exact words, words that have haunted me ever since my interlocuters had started reading more Northrop into Pirsig than they should’ve, hammering down every time Pirsig writes that Quality or DQ is the “primary experience.” I got a little ticked because here I am wanting to read about moral progress and the means-ends continuum and I have to go through a negligible discursus on experience. But then I read the next paragraph, which if I hadn’t completely forgotten by the reading of it that I had just started my thresher, I should have thought was a complete non sequitor (all in-text citations of Dewey have been removed, though all italics, before and after when quoting, are Waks’s):
“Let us turn to the deconstructive argument. Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls primary and secondary. This distinction emerges from his ‘doubt-belief’ theory of inquiry.When I finished that paragraph, I nodded my head in agreement. I had read about Peirce and Dewey’s redescription of inquiry and absorbed it from Rorty’s redescription (primarily from “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” ORT). The paragraph was all fairly abstract, but when you navigate your way through the jargon it says something very simple and commonsensical: you putter your way through life as you’ve been puttering until you hit something that you can’t just putter through, which causes doubt in the way you’ve been puttering, which causes you to think about whether you should perhaps find some new way of puttering. In nodding my head serenely, of course, I had completely forgotten that that paragraph was supposed to be explicating primary and secondary experience. I didn’t see anything plainly relevant and forgot all about it.
“According to that theory, the live organism acts to sustain the conditions needed for its continuing life. Every experience is thus situated in a causal continuum of life-sustaining activity. Every feature of experience is conditioned by the life-directing goals of the organism; it is perceived in relation to a reaching, a trying to bring into or sustain in existence the conditions required for life. Every situation is qualitatively felt as enjoyable or unsettling, depending on whether the conditions for life sustaining activity are, or are not, maintained in existence by present activity. The features are potentially cognitively meaningful, because they are all elements in the web of causal connections; they are related to their own antecedent conditions, and they are pregnant with possible consequences bearing on the life goals and life-sustaining ativities of the organism. Doubt is felt as uneasiness or imbalance, as obstacles are encountered that frustrate activity. Frustrations emerge as entrenched habits prove inadequate to the life-sustaining task and must be reconstructed. This reconstructive process, which terminates in new belief as more adequate habits are formed and doubt gives way to renewed action, Dewey, following Peirce, calls inquiry.”
But then Waks hits me with this simple, straightforward gloss on the previous paragraph: “For Dewey, life activities undergirded by adequate habit and intelligence-in-action constitute primary experience.” (ibid.) Like a ton of bricks, it hit me all at once. First, I went, “Oh yeah, he was supposed to be talking about that.” But then: “Oh…my…God….” The constellation of what primary and secondary experience shifted completely out of kilter from my normal understanding of how neo-Kantians and Pirsigians use it by five simple words: “adequate habit … constitute primary experience.” It was almost as if the word “primary” had been italicized just for me, for the quakes of what those five words mean for a confluence of Dewey and Pirsig are tremendous.
The background is simple: for Pirsigians, Dynamic Quality is the primary experience and static patterns of Quality are secondary, following in a wake behind the cutting edge of pre-intellectual experience. Simply stating it allows one to see it: static patterns are adequate habits, which means that Pirsig is the exact reverse of Dewey.
According to Waks, for Dewey, we make our way about the world following a pattern of accumulated habits. “In this dimension tacit goals adequately direct behavior and condition a relatively fluid field of experience apprehended as a qualitative whole.” (ibid.) We just live when we are in this dimension, we don’t think about what we are doing, we just act. This is often how a Pirsigian will want to describe Dynamic Quality. For Dewey, however, accumulated habits, or static patterns, are the primary experience and the secondary is, though oddly just as in Pirsig, the reflective experience. Dewey, like Pirsig, annoyingly uses the language of “reflective delay,” but the point here is that both agree that reflection causes us to analyze into parts, as opposed to the qualitative whole of primary experience.
Dewey’s description is very convincing and intuitive: we navigate the world by a set of habits, obstacles cause doubt, doubt causes a rethinking of our habits, and the rethinking causes us to change our habits. If one finds this very convincing, however, it puts Pirsig in an awkward position—his description of DQ as the primary experience, as the qualitative whole, has to be rejected. I think one could make a run at trying to creatively put Dewey and Pirsig back together. I’m not going to attempt that here. What I will do is first try and explain why Pirsig would suggest something backwards to Dewey and then try and explain why I prefer and find quite congenial Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction I hadn’t been able to countenance before.
I think Pirsig reverses Dewey (after Dewey had reversed Kant) because he still shows signs of what Heidegger called “nostalgia for immediacy” (and what I have previously called the “pathos of distance”). This comes out in several places, but I think it’s easiest to see when we link together the baby passages in Lila to the hierarchy passages in ZMM. When Pirsig calls DQ the cutting edge of experience, he is obviously making use of a sense of immediacy, our sense that the present is a knife’s edge of conjoined beginning and ending, ever moving onward. Before Pirsig conceives of DQ in Lila, however, he already has one of its functions in mind: “You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. … The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.” (ZMM, 250, italics his)
I’m not going to slap Pirsig on the wrists for saying that the past is unreal because one of the things that I make it a point of trying to do is realign people to ZMM, that the book is not a doctrinal exposition but a dialectical journey. However, even if we don’t take this passage as doctrine, something like it is still in Lila (which much more closely resembles a doctrinal exposition). Even after the refuse of these statements in ZMM is cleared away, there is still left the sense of importance that Pirsig places on them, how emphatic Pirsig is remains.
One might wonder how or why we would want to call this a “nostalgia.” After all, isn’t Pirsig suggesting that immediacy is our only reality? How can one be nostalgic for all that there is? The nostalgia comes in when Pirsig links DQ with the experience of a baby. “One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention.” (Lila, 137, italics his) By this linking, Pirsig makes a very real shift in the meaning of DQ. No longer is DQ simply the only state we are in, how we experience reality. DQ is something that we can lose, something we can be more or less in touch with. The nostalgia for immediacy is the lost, purely new experience of a baby, or that first time we heard that one song that one time.
This creates no small amount of tension, but it is the kind of tension that is required to produce the grand effects that Pirsig claims for DQ on metaphysical thinking. However, it does tend to put a strain on its logical coherence. Further strain comes from Pirsig’s suggestion that we are static patterns, that our ego, our I, is static patterns and does not, as the Cartesian tradition has suggested, have static patterns, are separate from them. It is this suggestion of Pirsig’s that most fully aligns him with Dewey.
If Pirsig had focused more attention on the repercussions of this reversal of the tradition, I think Pirsig may have shifted his emphases in DQ. For the time being, I shall content myself with pointing out why I prefer Dewey’s description (with the idea that it doesn’t take much to see Pirsig’s conception of “static patterns” the same way). The two problems I’ve always had with the formulation of the primary and secondary distinction between experiences are the senses that 1) primary experience is more important (as in the fact that DQ is a trumping good over static patterns) and 2) that the primary experience comes before our concepts (as in DQ as pre-intellectual experience). In Dewey’s formulation, both problems disappear.
Taking the latter sense first, we can see that the supposed “time lag” in Dewey becomes totally innocuous. Waks says that for Dewey, “when habits fail and obstacles frustrate action in a situation, the unease of doubt prompts a transition to a secondary dimension, characterized by reflective delay.” (Waks, 598) This delay in Dewey, however, is not the same delay as in Pirsig. For Pirsig, the time lag is a razor thin delay between experience sans concepts and conceptualized experience. For Dewey, there is no experience that is not conceptualized. Dewey affects this shift from Kantianism by moving from concepts to habits. By dispensing with talk about concepts, and when we have them, where we get them, can we get rid of them, etc., Dewey moves us to talk about our habits of behavior. Instead of talking about how a baby forms concepts, as Pirsig does, Dewey would talk about how a baby forms habits—and the idea of concepts drops right out. This leaves us as being a set of habits, just as Pirsig says we are static patterns, accumulated patterns of behavior.
Reflective delay, then, becomes the same thing you get between the time of placing the nail and hitting the nail. When doubt enters our domain of habit, we cease the habit so that we may think about the habit and how we may reform it. There’s no mysterious time lag here, just the normal lag between hitting your thumb with a crowbar and thinking that maybe you shouldn’t use the crowbar to pound the nail, that perhaps a hammer would work better.
The nostalgia for immediacy also drops out once one recognizes that “primary” and “secondary” are simply two separate modes of being, two dimensions of experience, two different activities. Pirsig and Dewey’s highly philosophical way of putting the point can obscure the effect, but the only reason one is primary to the other is that you can’t have doubt until you have a habit to be doubtful of. Reflection on our habits is secondary because we have to have habits to reflect on. However, reflection is just as much a habitual activity as anything else that goes on in our primary experience.
This is how the first problem, the problem of beatifying primary experience, is muted. The primary and secondary designations are simply ways of distinguishing how we usually make our way about the world and a special case of making our way about the world. What is also interesting in Dewey’s model is the importance placed on secondary experience, which is often lost in Pirsig’s DQ/static set up. For Pirsig, the only reason we have static patterns is so that we won’t fall apart into chaos. Otherwise, Dynamic Quality plays all the good roles in our lives: newness, betterness, wholeness. For Dewey, the very idea of falling apart into chaos doesn’t arise. In Dewey’s arrangement, secondary experience, or inquiry, plays an important role in giving us better habits, static patterns. “Inquiry leads to a re-cognition—a new, explicit view of the situation, a new causal map enabling the formation of new plans that liberate us from doubt and re-engage us, armed with new habits, in cognitively enriched primary experience.” (ibid.) Wholeness cut into parts holds at bay the Otherness of Chaos, the fear of degeneracy, in Pirsig, but for Dewey cutting things into parts enables us to construct a better wholeness.
So much for my notes on experience, Dewey, and Pirsig. Dewey’s vision, and Waks’ article, continues into his conception of the “means-ends continuum,” which I won’t go on to discuss here. I’ll simply note that was interesting about how the distinction between primary and secondary experience links up with the means-ends continuum is that the purposes for which we construct the means to get them (ends-in-view) are incomparable to the end results after following through on our plans. This is because ends-in-view and end results exist in two different dimensions of experience, secondary and primary respectively. This produces the famous oscillation that Rorty emphasizes when we he takes up Dewey’s mantle. This isn’t to say I’m about to start talking about primary and secondary experience. I still think it is needlessly esoteric to talk about two dimensions. But Dewey’s vision in out-of-date jargon still foresees many moves made in the game of philosophy that the best pragmatists are carrying out (most of them acknowledging their debt).
Sunday, February 11, 2007
A Map of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
An Overlong Introduction That Stretches the Limits of Even My Own Vaunted Lack of Brevity
Almost 30 years too late, I’d like to offer something of a review of Rorty’s PMN, which is to say I’d like to summarize Rorty’s epochal book by providing a road map to reading it. When PMN appeared in 1979, it had an immediate effect on its readers. By Rorty’s professional colleagues, it was taken as a betrayal, an abandonment of not only the projects to which Rorty and the professionals had dedicated themselves to, but also of the standards of rigor and merit by which good philosophy should aspire. By readers outside of philosophy departments, particularly in American English departments, it was taken as an exciting dragon slaying, the crushing of dreams that had punished and oppressed disciplines living in Philosophy’s tyrannical shadow. It wasn’t exactly either of these, but there is a kernel of truth in both. Rorty was attacking traditional philosophical projects like foundational epistemology, but the book itself did not display any lack of rigor or merit. Rorty was attacking the pretensions of philosophy’s self-image, a self-image that many philosophers held on to. Kant’s image of philosophy as the queen of the sciences held sway in many quadrants and Rorty sought to dispel that image. The effect, however, isn’t as stunning as all that and to dramatize it as Brutus murdering Caesar is to miss the care and love Rorty has for contemporary philosophy. On the other hand, by attempting to give philosophy a new self-image, people shouldn’t follow the professional philosophers’ love of drama by buying into the “Et tu, Brute?” story and rejoicing in the saving of Rome. Despite their often pretension, philosophy has never had the regal position it wished and Rorty’s aspirations are not that of Beowulf, but that of an underlaborer clearing away some brush.
One of the surprising things at the time of PMN was Rorty’s choice of heroes, his lineup of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “the three most important philosophers of our century.” (5) We might not get so excited about that announcement now (“Yeah, of course they are important and of course they have a lot of similarity. Du-uh. We know that.”), but that is only because we are living in the wake of Rorty’s written corpus, who probably did more than any other single person to ensure all three’s entwined legacy. In 1980, analytic philosophers, Rorty’s fellow professors at Princeton, could accept the choice of Wittgenstein, but Heidegger? Most believed that Carnap had successfully and satirically dispensed with him years ago, which isn’t to mention his deplorable behavior before and after World War II. Admirers of Continental philosophy, mainly located in English departments, could understand Heidegger, being Derrida’s precursor, but Wittgenstein? Sure, he was from the Continent, but his first book was perfectly boring (who writes that systematically?) and his second goes on and on obscurely about obscure topics. And Dewey? Dewey hadn’t been in vogue anywhere for at least 30 years, barely kept alive by marginalized philosophers like Sidney Hook, Morton White, and John McDermott. What was the deal?
It turns out that Rorty was performing one of the most impressive rhetorical power plays I have ever seen. For years Rorty had been accruing a very respectable and pronounced position in American philosophy, with important, influential and tightly argued papers in the philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy. He had become so respectable, in fact, that he had been elected the President of the American Philosophical Association in 1978—just in time to drop the bomb of “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in 1979 at New York in front of a whole crowd of the most important American philosophers, from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all the eastern universities, just as PMN was being released, read, and the indigestion was just beginning to be felt.
Of course, there was nothing suspicious or underhanded about it, like there were back alley orchestrations going on, it was all serendipitous (though as I understand it, Rorty caused a lot of consternation with the analytic establishment that year, not with his book or with the presidential address, but with regular ole’ stupid, peripheral academic politics: he made a ruling against the establishment in favor of the “pluralists,” who felt they were getting the short shrift, because he felt he was being bullied a little too much), and it is not the power play I was referring to. Rather, Rorty used his respectability and authority (as a “philosopher to pay attention to”) to reinvent Wittgenstein and Heidegger for their respectively uncomprehending audiences (“Wait, Wittgenstein/Heidegger is saying the same thing as Heidegger/Wittgenstein?”) and to all but single-handedly resurrect Dewey—but he did it in a book that, contrary to the appearances of the introduction, actually has only a superficial reliance on them.
Rorty is fairly upfront about all this, but it is still nevertheless very interesting to behold. The general tone and underlying message of PMN is designated by his choice of heroes, a sort of synthesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (with its therapeutic stance towards philosophical problems), Heidegger’s Being and Time (with its redescription of philosophy into existential terms, what Hook and Dewey saw as a recasting of Experience and Nature in “transcendental German”), and Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (with its tracing of the history of foundationalism). But while that may be true of its tone and inspiration, PMN’s closer point of departure is a synthesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It might be summed up best as doing for philosophy what Kuhn did for science.
The structure of the book is very important to both its readability and to its argument. The book is at its core dialectical and not, unlike philosophical systems from Descartes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, deductive. System writing in philosophy has often been taken to be the prime motivation of a philosopher, writing something that says something about everything, that creates a context in which to put everything. A philosopher gets clear about his first principles (whether “clear and distinct ideas,” a single substance of God, or the logical form of language) and then derives the rest of his system from that. This is a bottom-up approach, one that is quite fitting for the foundationalism that is commonly associated with it. Rather than seeing our reasoning as sitting vertically on top of foundations that we should secure, Rorty sees our reasoning as stretching horizontally across time. Rorty does not start with first principles with which to construct a system out of, but is rather led back to root assumptions, the uncovering of which will help us understand the structure of our reasoning. These assumptions have a history and if we understand that history we will understand why we think the way we do.
Rorty’s book, then, is laid out into eight chapters split into three parts, plus an introduction. The introduction does a fine job of laying out precisely what Rorty has in mind to do, who the heroes and villains are and a bird’s eye view of what he shall be arguing in more detail. The first part consists of a treatment of a particular problem in the philosophy of mind: the relation between mind and body. Rorty brings us along step by step, getting us clear about what possible problem there could be, what possible solutions there have been, and why this matters to philosophers and to him.
As he works at dissolving the problem of consciousness, he leads us back to why this is important for philosophers—because epistemology has created it as a problem. As long as philosophers feel motivated by epistemology, they will feel that there is a problem with consciousness. So in the second part, the largest, Rorty moves to a confrontation with epistemology—where did it come from, why is it important, what have we done, what should we do? Rorty uses this chapter to range over issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, going over all kinds of attempts to milk some sense out of the idea of a “theory of knowledge.”
And finally Rorty works us all the way back to the very idea of philosophy. What is philosophy if it has expunged epistemology? Here Rorty proffers suggestions about how philosophy has viewed itself and how it might now instead view itself. Rorty begins with the idea of the “mind” and by the end of the book shows how the notion of the “mind” has gained its philosophical strength from a number of other interlocking notions that were also in place, notions about representation, language, and systematic methodology. If you only knock one or two out, the others will still come and bring you down.
This dialectical structure is important for PMN because Rorty is working with an antagonistic crowd. Rorty is trying to convince us that we should question some of our most deeply held beliefs by taking us on a tour of how others have questioned a few of these beliefs. By dialectically going back and forth between his intended goals and his current topics, Rorty is able to meet our current objections and pull us further and further into the story, from debates about materialism, to debates about knowing generally, to debates about the enterprise of philosophy itself—showing us doubts about a particular thesis, to doubts about the general confirmation of such theses, to doubts about the very activity of forwarding such theses.
In what remains, I would like to go into more specifics about each of the chapters, what Rorty’s up to and for what purpose, then move to Richard Bernstein’s very sympathetic review of PMN where I hope to reply to some of his criticisms, and then finally offer a map of Rorty’s corpus, how we might understand his evolution as a philosopher and PMN’s place in it.
Almost 30 years too late, I’d like to offer something of a review of Rorty’s PMN, which is to say I’d like to summarize Rorty’s epochal book by providing a road map to reading it. When PMN appeared in 1979, it had an immediate effect on its readers. By Rorty’s professional colleagues, it was taken as a betrayal, an abandonment of not only the projects to which Rorty and the professionals had dedicated themselves to, but also of the standards of rigor and merit by which good philosophy should aspire. By readers outside of philosophy departments, particularly in American English departments, it was taken as an exciting dragon slaying, the crushing of dreams that had punished and oppressed disciplines living in Philosophy’s tyrannical shadow. It wasn’t exactly either of these, but there is a kernel of truth in both. Rorty was attacking traditional philosophical projects like foundational epistemology, but the book itself did not display any lack of rigor or merit. Rorty was attacking the pretensions of philosophy’s self-image, a self-image that many philosophers held on to. Kant’s image of philosophy as the queen of the sciences held sway in many quadrants and Rorty sought to dispel that image. The effect, however, isn’t as stunning as all that and to dramatize it as Brutus murdering Caesar is to miss the care and love Rorty has for contemporary philosophy. On the other hand, by attempting to give philosophy a new self-image, people shouldn’t follow the professional philosophers’ love of drama by buying into the “Et tu, Brute?” story and rejoicing in the saving of Rome. Despite their often pretension, philosophy has never had the regal position it wished and Rorty’s aspirations are not that of Beowulf, but that of an underlaborer clearing away some brush.
One of the surprising things at the time of PMN was Rorty’s choice of heroes, his lineup of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “the three most important philosophers of our century.” (5) We might not get so excited about that announcement now (“Yeah, of course they are important and of course they have a lot of similarity. Du-uh. We know that.”), but that is only because we are living in the wake of Rorty’s written corpus, who probably did more than any other single person to ensure all three’s entwined legacy. In 1980, analytic philosophers, Rorty’s fellow professors at Princeton, could accept the choice of Wittgenstein, but Heidegger? Most believed that Carnap had successfully and satirically dispensed with him years ago, which isn’t to mention his deplorable behavior before and after World War II. Admirers of Continental philosophy, mainly located in English departments, could understand Heidegger, being Derrida’s precursor, but Wittgenstein? Sure, he was from the Continent, but his first book was perfectly boring (who writes that systematically?) and his second goes on and on obscurely about obscure topics. And Dewey? Dewey hadn’t been in vogue anywhere for at least 30 years, barely kept alive by marginalized philosophers like Sidney Hook, Morton White, and John McDermott. What was the deal?
It turns out that Rorty was performing one of the most impressive rhetorical power plays I have ever seen. For years Rorty had been accruing a very respectable and pronounced position in American philosophy, with important, influential and tightly argued papers in the philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy. He had become so respectable, in fact, that he had been elected the President of the American Philosophical Association in 1978—just in time to drop the bomb of “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in 1979 at New York in front of a whole crowd of the most important American philosophers, from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all the eastern universities, just as PMN was being released, read, and the indigestion was just beginning to be felt.
Of course, there was nothing suspicious or underhanded about it, like there were back alley orchestrations going on, it was all serendipitous (though as I understand it, Rorty caused a lot of consternation with the analytic establishment that year, not with his book or with the presidential address, but with regular ole’ stupid, peripheral academic politics: he made a ruling against the establishment in favor of the “pluralists,” who felt they were getting the short shrift, because he felt he was being bullied a little too much), and it is not the power play I was referring to. Rather, Rorty used his respectability and authority (as a “philosopher to pay attention to”) to reinvent Wittgenstein and Heidegger for their respectively uncomprehending audiences (“Wait, Wittgenstein/Heidegger is saying the same thing as Heidegger/Wittgenstein?”) and to all but single-handedly resurrect Dewey—but he did it in a book that, contrary to the appearances of the introduction, actually has only a superficial reliance on them.
Rorty is fairly upfront about all this, but it is still nevertheless very interesting to behold. The general tone and underlying message of PMN is designated by his choice of heroes, a sort of synthesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (with its therapeutic stance towards philosophical problems), Heidegger’s Being and Time (with its redescription of philosophy into existential terms, what Hook and Dewey saw as a recasting of Experience and Nature in “transcendental German”), and Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (with its tracing of the history of foundationalism). But while that may be true of its tone and inspiration, PMN’s closer point of departure is a synthesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It might be summed up best as doing for philosophy what Kuhn did for science.
The structure of the book is very important to both its readability and to its argument. The book is at its core dialectical and not, unlike philosophical systems from Descartes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, deductive. System writing in philosophy has often been taken to be the prime motivation of a philosopher, writing something that says something about everything, that creates a context in which to put everything. A philosopher gets clear about his first principles (whether “clear and distinct ideas,” a single substance of God, or the logical form of language) and then derives the rest of his system from that. This is a bottom-up approach, one that is quite fitting for the foundationalism that is commonly associated with it. Rather than seeing our reasoning as sitting vertically on top of foundations that we should secure, Rorty sees our reasoning as stretching horizontally across time. Rorty does not start with first principles with which to construct a system out of, but is rather led back to root assumptions, the uncovering of which will help us understand the structure of our reasoning. These assumptions have a history and if we understand that history we will understand why we think the way we do.
Rorty’s book, then, is laid out into eight chapters split into three parts, plus an introduction. The introduction does a fine job of laying out precisely what Rorty has in mind to do, who the heroes and villains are and a bird’s eye view of what he shall be arguing in more detail. The first part consists of a treatment of a particular problem in the philosophy of mind: the relation between mind and body. Rorty brings us along step by step, getting us clear about what possible problem there could be, what possible solutions there have been, and why this matters to philosophers and to him.
As he works at dissolving the problem of consciousness, he leads us back to why this is important for philosophers—because epistemology has created it as a problem. As long as philosophers feel motivated by epistemology, they will feel that there is a problem with consciousness. So in the second part, the largest, Rorty moves to a confrontation with epistemology—where did it come from, why is it important, what have we done, what should we do? Rorty uses this chapter to range over issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, going over all kinds of attempts to milk some sense out of the idea of a “theory of knowledge.”
And finally Rorty works us all the way back to the very idea of philosophy. What is philosophy if it has expunged epistemology? Here Rorty proffers suggestions about how philosophy has viewed itself and how it might now instead view itself. Rorty begins with the idea of the “mind” and by the end of the book shows how the notion of the “mind” has gained its philosophical strength from a number of other interlocking notions that were also in place, notions about representation, language, and systematic methodology. If you only knock one or two out, the others will still come and bring you down.
This dialectical structure is important for PMN because Rorty is working with an antagonistic crowd. Rorty is trying to convince us that we should question some of our most deeply held beliefs by taking us on a tour of how others have questioned a few of these beliefs. By dialectically going back and forth between his intended goals and his current topics, Rorty is able to meet our current objections and pull us further and further into the story, from debates about materialism, to debates about knowing generally, to debates about the enterprise of philosophy itself—showing us doubts about a particular thesis, to doubts about the general confirmation of such theses, to doubts about the very activity of forwarding such theses.
In what remains, I would like to go into more specifics about each of the chapters, what Rorty’s up to and for what purpose, then move to Richard Bernstein’s very sympathetic review of PMN where I hope to reply to some of his criticisms, and then finally offer a map of Rorty’s corpus, how we might understand his evolution as a philosopher and PMN’s place in it.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Cavell at Criticism
This is a companion piece to, as opposed to a part of, “Cavell and What We Are Doing,” primarily because I got a little carried away with reading his essay “Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy.” I think there could be no better introduction to what it is that Cavell does then the second essay, “Austin at Criticism.” Seeing Cavell read Austin, one of his primary philosophical forefathers (with Wittgenstein and Emerson), is very interesting and shines a brilliant light on how Cavell views philosophy. It is filled with bits of philosophical wisdom concerning their self-image that philosophers would do well to think about. I shall try to highlight some of them.
Cavell talks a bit about “Austin’s procedures,” but as I had mentioned before, I don’t think there is anything much procedural. Instead, I think Cavell gives us a very insightful read as to where accepting Davidsonian philosophy of language leaves us (before Davidson had even finished his work besides). The first thing Cavell does is dismiss the notion that “Austin attends to ordinary or everyday language” which “is to go on saying, roughly, nothing.” (98) He also dissociates what Austin does from what a descriptive linguist would do: Austin is most assuredly not simply reporting the behavior of the majority of language-users. Cavell builds three insights out of how Austin writes as a better beginning towards a description of how ordinary language philosophy proceeds:
“(1) that one can as appropriately or truly be said to be looking at the world as looking at language; (2) that one is seeking necessary truths ‘about’ the world (or ‘about’ language) and therefore cannot be satisfied with anything I, at least, would recognize as a description of how people in fact talk—one might say one is seeking one kind of explanation of why people speak as they do; and even (3) that one is not finally interested at all in how ‘other’ people talk, but in determining where and why one wishes, or hesitates, to use a particular expression oneself.” (99)
(1) is the Davidsonian point about the erasure of the distinction between knowing a language and knowing your way around the world generally. Since this is Cavell’s starting point, his insights can be fairly seen as what we do after the destruction of the ghosts that Davidson was trying to exorcise from us, the dogmas of empiricism, namely the ones Quine identified, the dogma of the analytic/synthetic distinction and the dogma of reductionism, and Davidson’s third dogma, the dogma of the scheme/content distinction.
That being said, Cavell does seem to get off on the wrong foot when he immediately starts talking about “necessary truths.” This, I think, is negligible, both because of how little Cavell spends on it and because of how easy it is to ignore it. The invocation of “necessary” raises the spectre of the appearance/reality distinction, but it we excise it from the sentence, we still get the common sense distinction between being right and wrong—people may describe themselves a certain way and believe it, but they still might be wrong. Psycho guy might talk about his mom being alive, and sincerely believe that she is, but the fact is she isn’t. (2) is pointing out that, just because people do in fact talk a certain way, doesn’t mean that it is the most efficacious, that it is the best way to talk. What we need is an explanation of why people speak the way they do and those reasons will help us decide how to speak.
(3) seems the largest leap, but it seems perfectly reasonable and very insightful, particularly as to why philosophers could sometimes care less about counter-examples of speech. The investigation of others may help, but we finally rest on ourselves, on our own intuitive grasp of how the world is and what we want to say about it. The Davidsonian picture produces this particular kind of philosophy because in our person-community-world relationship, our “I” is produced in part by its relationship with the community and the world, but it is distinct. The sway of language use then becomes a conflict between a person and the community, as the person who wants to deviate from accepted linguistic behavior tries to convince the community to follow them. By trying to enunciate to others the reasons why you would want to withhold the label of “love” from the capricious philanderer’s feelings towards another person, you try to explain how you want to use the word love, how they should use the word love, what love in fact is.
Cavell talks about “Austin’s procedures” and “proceeding from ordinary language,” but after we learn from Davidson that we are everywhere and always in touch with the world, that no language gets the world wrong and was produced by something and for some reason, we see that Cavell’s description of philosophical procedure is obfuscated by saying “from ordinary language.” Cavell would seem to like to restrict the Davidsonian point to “ordinary language,” but it isn’t clear that Cavell or anyone else even knows what that might be—especially considering the efforts Cavell makes to ward us away from others. Davidson, however, goes the whole way and provides us a good reason as to why we should be suspicious of Cavell’s greater and greater fascination with “the Ordinary.” All languages are in touch with the world and the trick is to find out which ones are better than others, not which ones are more ordinary than others. I don’t think Wittgenstein’s spirit is best served by thinking that he espoused the elimination of linguistic innovation. It is one thing to think that philosopher’s problems are created by taking ordinary words out of ordinary contexts and transplanting them into new contexts. That is certainly true, but if people never did that, then cultural evolution would grind to a hault. The problem with the Plato-Descartes-Kant sequence is that not everything they did, not all of the new contexts, panned out. Sometimes the new contexts, the new metaphors, worked; sometimes they didn’t.
What we have between Cavell and somebody like Rorty (who I summon in my moments of need) is a struggle over the spirit of Wittgenstein, just as Rorty has struggled over the spirit of Dewey with Richard Bernstein (among others) and the spirit of Heidegger with Hebert Dreyfus (among others), and just as I have struggled with others over the spirit of Pirsig. One of the bonuses of Cavell is his cognizance of this kind of struggle. In this particular essay, Cavell is struggling over the spirit of Austin, but what he says here about Austin and his fans is cogent just about anywhere you apply it:
“To accept Austin’s explanations as full and accurate guides to his practice would be not only to confuse advice (which is about all he gave in this line) with philosophical analysis and literary-critical description (which is what is needed), but to confer upon Austin an unrivaled power of self-discernment. It is a mystery to me that what a philosopher says about his methods is so commonly taken at face value. Austin ought to be the last philosopher whose reflexive remarks are treated with this complacency, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because they suffer not merely the usual hazards of self-description but the further deflections of polemical animus.” (101)
So not only for Austin, Wittgenstein, and Pirsig, but also for Cavell himself. “Procedures” is far to methodical sounding a word to be appropriate for what Cavell enacts on the page.
Cavell locates in Austin (and Wittgenstein for that matter) a new style of philosophizing: “a change of style in philosophy is a profound change, and [is] itself a subject of philosophical investigation.” (102) What we see in Austin’s practice, in his manner of investigation, is a focus on the nuances of particular words, like the difference between a “mistake” and an “accident,” and this focus in distinguishing and comparing creates a “crosslight” in which we see that the “capacities and salience of an individual object in question are brought to attention and focus.” (103) This crosslight doesn’t just tell us what the difference between a mistake and an accident are, it tells us “what a mistake is and … what an accident is.” (104) This is the appropriate response to the panrelationalism that pragmatism unfolds in front of us. We can’t simply define a mistake in isolation, we can only define it in relation to other things, non-mistakes, because the very act of definition is a relational act. That is what Wittgenstein taught us when he said there is no ostensive definition by itself.
In this seed-crystal we find the pearly wisdom of Bloom, that life is an agon, a family romance, which it is so much more in philosophy if for no other reason than that philosophy purports to be in love with wisdom, that is life. Cavell mounts a series of explosive questions to show how Austin might sunder philosophy’s pretensions, though in the end I think he might claim too much for Austin and not enough for those following after him:
“How can we learn something (about how we—how I—use words) which we cannot have failed to know? How can asking when we would say ‘by mistake’ (or what we would call ‘doing something by mistake’) tell us what in the world a mistake is? How, given such obvious data, have philosophers (apparently) so long ignored it, forgetting that successful knowledge is a human affair, of human complexity, meeting human need and exacting human responsibility, bypassing it in theories of certainty which compare knowledge (unfavorably) with an inhuman ideal; or elaborated moral philosophies so abstracted from life as to leave, for example, no room for so homely, but altogether a central, moral activity as the entering of an excuse? What is philosophy that it can appear periodically so profound and so trivial, sometimes so close and sometimes so laughably remote, so wise and so stone stupid? What is philosophy that it causes those characteristic hatreds, yet mysterious intimacies, among its rivals? What kind of phenomenon is it whose past cannot be absorbed or escaped (as in the case of science) or parts of it freely admired and envied while other parts are despised and banished (as in art), but remains in standing competition, behind every closed argument waiting to haunt its living heirs?”
Here someone like Rorty may wish to lodge a complaint, that Cavell is housing too much power in philosophy’s past. Cavell, in the years after, will start talking about something called Skepticism that is a condition of humanity. Rorty’s problem is not that skepticism isn’t common, but rather that it doesn’t look properly philosophical, that it isn’t entirely clear why we will always have to keep talking about the Platonic canon when we talk about skepticism. This may be true, and Cavell may imply too much (in this case overpowering) power to the philosophical canon, but I think there is some truth in the idea that we still haven’t yet overcome it. Cavell’s view of spectres still captivates, but we see in these lines what exactly Rorty’s effort of therapy has been. Rorty wants us exactly to break off our agon with Plato, to view Plato as we might a piece of art rather than as a competitor to be wrestled with. And Rorty’s practice is to compare and to distinguish, to tease apart and give new contexts to old words, to show when skepticism means Skepticism and when it simply means showing a little doubt.
Cavell talks a bit about “Austin’s procedures,” but as I had mentioned before, I don’t think there is anything much procedural. Instead, I think Cavell gives us a very insightful read as to where accepting Davidsonian philosophy of language leaves us (before Davidson had even finished his work besides). The first thing Cavell does is dismiss the notion that “Austin attends to ordinary or everyday language” which “is to go on saying, roughly, nothing.” (98) He also dissociates what Austin does from what a descriptive linguist would do: Austin is most assuredly not simply reporting the behavior of the majority of language-users. Cavell builds three insights out of how Austin writes as a better beginning towards a description of how ordinary language philosophy proceeds:
“(1) that one can as appropriately or truly be said to be looking at the world as looking at language; (2) that one is seeking necessary truths ‘about’ the world (or ‘about’ language) and therefore cannot be satisfied with anything I, at least, would recognize as a description of how people in fact talk—one might say one is seeking one kind of explanation of why people speak as they do; and even (3) that one is not finally interested at all in how ‘other’ people talk, but in determining where and why one wishes, or hesitates, to use a particular expression oneself.” (99)
(1) is the Davidsonian point about the erasure of the distinction between knowing a language and knowing your way around the world generally. Since this is Cavell’s starting point, his insights can be fairly seen as what we do after the destruction of the ghosts that Davidson was trying to exorcise from us, the dogmas of empiricism, namely the ones Quine identified, the dogma of the analytic/synthetic distinction and the dogma of reductionism, and Davidson’s third dogma, the dogma of the scheme/content distinction.
That being said, Cavell does seem to get off on the wrong foot when he immediately starts talking about “necessary truths.” This, I think, is negligible, both because of how little Cavell spends on it and because of how easy it is to ignore it. The invocation of “necessary” raises the spectre of the appearance/reality distinction, but it we excise it from the sentence, we still get the common sense distinction between being right and wrong—people may describe themselves a certain way and believe it, but they still might be wrong. Psycho guy might talk about his mom being alive, and sincerely believe that she is, but the fact is she isn’t. (2) is pointing out that, just because people do in fact talk a certain way, doesn’t mean that it is the most efficacious, that it is the best way to talk. What we need is an explanation of why people speak the way they do and those reasons will help us decide how to speak.
(3) seems the largest leap, but it seems perfectly reasonable and very insightful, particularly as to why philosophers could sometimes care less about counter-examples of speech. The investigation of others may help, but we finally rest on ourselves, on our own intuitive grasp of how the world is and what we want to say about it. The Davidsonian picture produces this particular kind of philosophy because in our person-community-world relationship, our “I” is produced in part by its relationship with the community and the world, but it is distinct. The sway of language use then becomes a conflict between a person and the community, as the person who wants to deviate from accepted linguistic behavior tries to convince the community to follow them. By trying to enunciate to others the reasons why you would want to withhold the label of “love” from the capricious philanderer’s feelings towards another person, you try to explain how you want to use the word love, how they should use the word love, what love in fact is.
Cavell talks about “Austin’s procedures” and “proceeding from ordinary language,” but after we learn from Davidson that we are everywhere and always in touch with the world, that no language gets the world wrong and was produced by something and for some reason, we see that Cavell’s description of philosophical procedure is obfuscated by saying “from ordinary language.” Cavell would seem to like to restrict the Davidsonian point to “ordinary language,” but it isn’t clear that Cavell or anyone else even knows what that might be—especially considering the efforts Cavell makes to ward us away from others. Davidson, however, goes the whole way and provides us a good reason as to why we should be suspicious of Cavell’s greater and greater fascination with “the Ordinary.” All languages are in touch with the world and the trick is to find out which ones are better than others, not which ones are more ordinary than others. I don’t think Wittgenstein’s spirit is best served by thinking that he espoused the elimination of linguistic innovation. It is one thing to think that philosopher’s problems are created by taking ordinary words out of ordinary contexts and transplanting them into new contexts. That is certainly true, but if people never did that, then cultural evolution would grind to a hault. The problem with the Plato-Descartes-Kant sequence is that not everything they did, not all of the new contexts, panned out. Sometimes the new contexts, the new metaphors, worked; sometimes they didn’t.
What we have between Cavell and somebody like Rorty (who I summon in my moments of need) is a struggle over the spirit of Wittgenstein, just as Rorty has struggled over the spirit of Dewey with Richard Bernstein (among others) and the spirit of Heidegger with Hebert Dreyfus (among others), and just as I have struggled with others over the spirit of Pirsig. One of the bonuses of Cavell is his cognizance of this kind of struggle. In this particular essay, Cavell is struggling over the spirit of Austin, but what he says here about Austin and his fans is cogent just about anywhere you apply it:
“To accept Austin’s explanations as full and accurate guides to his practice would be not only to confuse advice (which is about all he gave in this line) with philosophical analysis and literary-critical description (which is what is needed), but to confer upon Austin an unrivaled power of self-discernment. It is a mystery to me that what a philosopher says about his methods is so commonly taken at face value. Austin ought to be the last philosopher whose reflexive remarks are treated with this complacency, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because they suffer not merely the usual hazards of self-description but the further deflections of polemical animus.” (101)
So not only for Austin, Wittgenstein, and Pirsig, but also for Cavell himself. “Procedures” is far to methodical sounding a word to be appropriate for what Cavell enacts on the page.
Cavell locates in Austin (and Wittgenstein for that matter) a new style of philosophizing: “a change of style in philosophy is a profound change, and [is] itself a subject of philosophical investigation.” (102) What we see in Austin’s practice, in his manner of investigation, is a focus on the nuances of particular words, like the difference between a “mistake” and an “accident,” and this focus in distinguishing and comparing creates a “crosslight” in which we see that the “capacities and salience of an individual object in question are brought to attention and focus.” (103) This crosslight doesn’t just tell us what the difference between a mistake and an accident are, it tells us “what a mistake is and … what an accident is.” (104) This is the appropriate response to the panrelationalism that pragmatism unfolds in front of us. We can’t simply define a mistake in isolation, we can only define it in relation to other things, non-mistakes, because the very act of definition is a relational act. That is what Wittgenstein taught us when he said there is no ostensive definition by itself.
In this seed-crystal we find the pearly wisdom of Bloom, that life is an agon, a family romance, which it is so much more in philosophy if for no other reason than that philosophy purports to be in love with wisdom, that is life. Cavell mounts a series of explosive questions to show how Austin might sunder philosophy’s pretensions, though in the end I think he might claim too much for Austin and not enough for those following after him:
“How can we learn something (about how we—how I—use words) which we cannot have failed to know? How can asking when we would say ‘by mistake’ (or what we would call ‘doing something by mistake’) tell us what in the world a mistake is? How, given such obvious data, have philosophers (apparently) so long ignored it, forgetting that successful knowledge is a human affair, of human complexity, meeting human need and exacting human responsibility, bypassing it in theories of certainty which compare knowledge (unfavorably) with an inhuman ideal; or elaborated moral philosophies so abstracted from life as to leave, for example, no room for so homely, but altogether a central, moral activity as the entering of an excuse? What is philosophy that it can appear periodically so profound and so trivial, sometimes so close and sometimes so laughably remote, so wise and so stone stupid? What is philosophy that it causes those characteristic hatreds, yet mysterious intimacies, among its rivals? What kind of phenomenon is it whose past cannot be absorbed or escaped (as in the case of science) or parts of it freely admired and envied while other parts are despised and banished (as in art), but remains in standing competition, behind every closed argument waiting to haunt its living heirs?”
Here someone like Rorty may wish to lodge a complaint, that Cavell is housing too much power in philosophy’s past. Cavell, in the years after, will start talking about something called Skepticism that is a condition of humanity. Rorty’s problem is not that skepticism isn’t common, but rather that it doesn’t look properly philosophical, that it isn’t entirely clear why we will always have to keep talking about the Platonic canon when we talk about skepticism. This may be true, and Cavell may imply too much (in this case overpowering) power to the philosophical canon, but I think there is some truth in the idea that we still haven’t yet overcome it. Cavell’s view of spectres still captivates, but we see in these lines what exactly Rorty’s effort of therapy has been. Rorty wants us exactly to break off our agon with Plato, to view Plato as we might a piece of art rather than as a competitor to be wrestled with. And Rorty’s practice is to compare and to distinguish, to tease apart and give new contexts to old words, to show when skepticism means Skepticism and when it simply means showing a little doubt.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
What is Quality?
In my endless pursuit for Pirsig material, I once stumbled upon a book that contained a number of small reflections by authors on what books affected them the most. Pirsig was there and his answer, as befitting a man choked by the anxiety of influence, was fairly vague. The really interesting find in the book was when I went to the index and checked to see if anyone had chosen ZMM as their book. And lo’ and behold, there was someone. I don’t remember his name (I’m currently bereft of my materials), but he wrote that he was deeply affected after reading ZMM, but he couldn’t remember how. He just remembered that after reading it he felt as if a veil had been lifted.
I think a lot of people have had that same experience with Pirsig. In my own experience, most Baby Boomers, if they haven’t read ZMM, have at least heard of it, though most of them don’t remember much of what the book was about. Even many kids in my generation (yes, I still retain the right to call myself a kid) have read or heard of ZMM. But why, if the book is so revolutionary, or at least seems to deeply affect its readers, do most not remember how it was that they were deeply affected?
I’m not proposing to answer that question. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that most people can’t remember what a book was about or how it affected them five years after the fact. Some people just don’t consider the reading of books a central part of their lives. But what about the philosophy? Pirsig proposes a new kind of philosophy of life in ZMM, and people seem attracted to it, but they neither remember what it was nor seem to alter their lives accordingly. And why did philosophers not pick up on it?
I’m not going to answer that question either, but again, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that “professional” philosophers didn’t find it useful for their own pursuits. In my earlier phase as a Pirsig enthusiast I once wrote Rorty about Pirsig. Nice guy that he is, he wrote me back and said essentially that he remembered reading it, but recalls not being that impressed with the philosophy and not understanding what everybody was so excited about. Which is interesting considering that few these days, apparently, can remember what they were so excited about either.
What I would like to suggest about the effect that ZMM has on people is that, while it doesn’t instill a positive message about how to live one’s life (it isn’t a self-help book), it does instill curiosity in some. I think the reason some don’t remember the message of ZMM is that there isn’t much of one, more or less “live life excellently.” Pirsig’s philosophy revolves around this magical word “Quality,” but people don’t remember what the philosophy is, principally because Pirsig doesn’t flesh it out. That was the purpose of Lila. But ZMM does instill curiosity in us because we see how lack of curiosity almost killed Pirsig, we see how the “establishment” can try and suppress curiosity.
What ZMM makes us curious about is philosophy, and specifically in the question “What is Quality?” If people have been affected by ZMM in a strong way, and in a way that has a lasting effect, it is typically in the fashion of making them interested to read more philosophy. They try and read Plato and Aristotle, and anybody else. That’s what happened to me, at least. What I’ve come to see, however, are two things: one, that “What is Quality?” on Pirsig’s analysis gives way to a second question and two, that this second question is not strictly philosophical in the sense that we’ve been instilled with by Pirsig.
Pirsig’s question, “What is Quality?”, gives way on his reflection to “Who are you?” While the first question is overtly meditated on in the book, the second question is only implicitly given attention to by the functioning of the book itself. Pirsig is drawn to the first question because he has an analytical mind, or as he says, a Platonic streak. He has to answer that question at the prompting of the Bozeman English Department and this is what leads him to the University of Chicago. It is there that the book ends supposedly. But, upon further reflection, the trail of the book continues and wraps all the way around to the beginning. The trail is foreshadowed by the very beginning of the book, the no-doubt-forgotten-about-by-the-time-you've-reached-the-end-of-the-book inscription prefacing the entire novel—“And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good—/Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
The only person we need to ask about Quality is ourselves. But how should we answer that question? As Pirsig shows in Bozeman, most kids are puzzled by the question, and yet they seem to know intuitively that some things have higher Quality than others. Why is that? Pirsig’s later answer is that “we,” each person’s “person,” is built out of our history, cultural and biographical, those “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.” And thus we see that Pirsig’s first, Platonic question, “What is Quality?”, gives way to the second, non-Platonic question, “Who are you?” And, as I’ve already alluded to, this second question gives way to a third, almost anti-Platonic question, “Where have you been?” And thus the trail of the book continues on after the University of Chicago. Pirsig leads us through his past, showing us how he came to be who he is, and that trail continues on all the way up to the very writing of the book, his effort to confront fully the consequences of his own analysis of his question “What is Quality?”
Of course, I’m not at all sure that this is Pirsig’s intended effect. First, while I’m sure that the first question gives way to the second, and that Pirsig would be okay with this, I’m fairly positive that his explicit philosophical stance is antagonistic to the functioning of his book to reach the third question. The second question, after all, can still be given a Platonic spin to it, but the third certainly cannot. Using Pirsig’s own categories, Phaedrus is the Platonist and the narrator is the Aristotelian, and the narrator is the one who is vanquished in the end, the narrator is the one to be found to be holding the hero, Phaedrus, the real Pirsig, down. Plato created philosophy. Plato followed his teacher, Socrates’, lead in asking, for every instance of justice, piety, and the good, “What is it? What is it outside of these instances?” This flung us into the arid climate of generalities. It is Aristotle, on the other hand, who wanted to keep us in the details. And the third question is all about the details and history, something that a Platonist has no use for.
If we settle on for the moment that “What is Quality?” is Platonic, and therefore philosophical (because Plato is philosophy), and that “Who are you?” is not Platonic, and therefore not philosophical (because we are usually drawn by such a question to detailed autobiography), then the tension in Pirsig can be drawn not only by the questions or by Pirsig’s Plato/Aristotle categories, but by drawing a contrast between philosophy and literary criticism. We know that Pirsig hates literary criticism, thinking it a parasitic enterprise best left to second-rate minds, and that most of all of what professional philosophers do is no better than literary criticism. I want to suggest that the second question belongs to literary criticism.
The reason can be seen in the very look of what we typically canonize “philosophical” texts versus “literary” texts. Philosophy is abstract, it deals with concepts by themselves. Plato’s dialogues are explained as simply the method of conveyance for his philosophy, Descartes’ meditations as simply a heuristic, the first grand modern thought-experiment. Kant is taken to be paradigmatic, Spinoza is taken to be the most pure, and Montaigne and Voltaire aren’t even taught in philosophy departments because they wrote too topically, too much about themselves. As for literary texts, we can take the novel as the obvious example: a novel charts the course of a character’s life. It is all about the details. It may give you ideas, but it gives you a whole lot more than that.
Philosophy’s roots are in the search for wisdom, but since Descartes invented modern philosophy, philosophy has largely abdicated that role in favor of the abstract manipulation of symbols, of the search for foundations or transcendental outlines. Wisdom has been left for novelists and poets to convey and explore. Dealing in the abstract can indeed help us, but, as Pirsig tells us, only if it can cash out into real life, only if it can be applied. But most philosophers in the modern period have thought of “applied philosophy” as a secondary effort, as opposed to their pure pursuits. Pirsig oscillates between the two, which is just as well, but by explicitly focusing on “What is Quality?” as opposed to “Who are you?” he gives new lease on life to the Platonic impulse, the impulse to ignore life. This is what ZMM can tend to instill in the reader. The way to read Pirsig is not as a philosopher, but as a literary critic. If we read as a philosopher we will be led to Platonism. But reading as literary critics, we can see the rootedness of his philosophy in life.
Another way of seeing the tension in Pirsig’s philosophy, and not just in ZMM, however, is by seeing what his philosophy does to literary criticism. One of the things that I’ve found suggested by Rorty’s philosophy is that there are two ways to read texts, two purposes that we can find them attuned to. One is the search for moral wisdom and the other is the search for aesthetic power. Harold Bloom has spent most of his life charting the intricacies of the search for aesthetic power, centered in what he calls the anxiety of influence and charted by criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 96) Aesthetic power in its pure form is originality, centered around the question “What is new?” Bloom has often been accused of being too narrowly focused, but Bloom would be the first to acknowledge his narrowness, and he would simply claim to be reacting to the literary critical establishment of his time that has lost its way in performing one of its duties. But indeed, Bloom has not ignored moral wisdom, and in one of his latest books, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (dedicated coincidentally enough to Rorty), he reflects at length on the great writers in our Western wisdom traditions. Moral wisdom is centered around the question “What is best?” For true pragmatists like Rorty and Bloom, it is experiencing the actualities of life and reading the possibilities of books that gives us the wisdom to navigate our way through life and find what is best.
The reason I should put together such possibly odd pairings of words, “moral wisdom” and “aesthetic power,” as literary categories is because of my readings of Pirsig, Rorty, and Bloom. Pirsig has particularly taught us that all wisdom is a moral effort, that there is no distinction between morality and ethics and other categories of choice, such as prudence and taste. And Bloom has taught me, not only that to find what is new you must struggle with the vastness of time past, but that originality is a powerful force that changes us, the more original, the more we are changed.
What I should like to meditate on is how I’m making a distinction between the two and how Pirsig would not. This is crystallized in Pirsig’s concept of Dynamic Quality. DQ is both what is best and what is most new. DQ for Pirsig is a punch to the face that we cannot ignore, that changes us whether we like it or not. But for Bloom, originality does not mean wisdom. We can appreciate the power of new metaphors without being enticed into picking them up. Metaphors, for Rorty, are meaningless, and so, linguistically speaking, something like punches to the face. The trap that Pirsig falls into is twofold: first, he falls into the Heideggerian trap of searching for elemental words, words that can never be banalized by use and thus given meanings (hence DQ/Quality’s undefinition) and second, the Platonic trap of thinking that power and the good are the same thing.
On one of Rorty’s readings, Heidegger (as he says in Being and Time) is in search for elemental words and that we can trace his movement from early to late by the changes in those words he takes as elemental. In Heidegger, these words move from German candidates like Dasein to Greek candidates like noein. What Heidegger wants are words that slough off meaning, words that simply have force. By moving back to Greek words, to words that Plato first imbued with philosophical senses, Heidegger wants to reclaim these originary words by shedding the history of philosophy from them, thereby making them metaphors again. Heidegger thus, on Rorty’s reading, evinces Bloom’s sense of poetic anxiety.
I think it is instructive to read Pirsig as searching for, not just indestructible metaphors, but elemental words for two reasons. For one, Pirsig goes back to the Greeks and the roots of language much like Heidegger, such as his recapturing of arete in ZMM and rta in Lila. For two, and more importantly, Pirsig’s DQ/Quality is originary in a cosmic sense, whereby Pirsig traces them to being reality itself, and thus the causes of reality. DQ is both originary and permanently new, always a force and never banal. Pirsig hopes not only to find a metaphor that is always a metaphor, but a metaphor that has created all the others in its wake. The Heideggerian trap is one that is set for all those who feel the strain of their predecessors. Because Pirsig’s poetic metaphors are set for philosophical purposes, however, his production of DQ/Quality causes us to lose sight of history. By focusing on the question “What is Quality?”, Pirsig’s answer in the form of an elemental word produces the Platonic tendency of metaphysical speculation rather than autobiographical introspection.
The Platonic trap is one that is produced by Plato’s attempt to, in Yeats’ phrase, “hold reality and justice in a single vision.” Rorty spins the history of philosophy out of this phrase and it is epitomized in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue, Plato attempts to philosophically explain why his fellow Athenians were wrong to convict his hero and mentor, Socrates, by showing that the Form of Good is reality behind the appearances. Heidegger, like Rorty following him later, traces the modern fixation on Reason to Plato (seen in the dialectic), which produces the modern ethical manifestation of Platonism in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. Pirsig, too, traces modern philosophy to Greek roots, but he still insists on equating the Good with Reality.
Pirsig obviously does not want us to repeat the failures of Plato. The Pirsig of ZMM has certainly located the roots of SOM in Plato, particularly in his dialectic, and there is no doubt he attacks him for it. Nevertheless, however, Pirsig does find that the Greeks were up to something good and that what this is is something like abstract thinking, which is why Pirsig suggests that he be seen as a Platonist as opposed to an Aristotelian in temperament. If Platonism and Aristotelianism are taken to be impulses towards abstraction and details respectively, then certainly these temperaments exist and are helpful and not to be denied. And yet Pirsig does seem to fall into the trap. The trap comes out clearly in what we might call the indeterminacy of Dynamic Quality thesis, when, after identifying reality with the good and with the new, Pirsig cogently says that one cannot ever tell whether one is being Dynamic or degenerate in the moment—only history can tell us that. If DQ is something that punches us in the face, how is it that we could be wrong about being punched? How does DQ help us then?
The reason Pirsig falls into the trap, I think, is not because he’s a crypto-Platonist, but because he places too much stock in abstraction. Pirsig wisely hitches his boat with pragmatism at the end of Lila, but after Rorty, having a “pragmatist metaphysics” looks like an oxymoron—and Pirsig even sees it coming when, attempting to split the difference between positivists and mystics, he says that a Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Pirsig takes that as a good sign for building bridges, but I should like to think that that would be a good time to look around for new terms.
From a metaphysical point of view—the view from which we make hard, deep cuts into Reality, splitting it into the correct pieces, the pieces Reality wants to be in—pragmatism is a monism because it denies that deep cuts can be made. Pirsig senses this and this makes pragmatism of a piece with the Buddhist strain in Pirsig. But while from a metaphysical point of view reality is monistic, from a pragmatic point of view reality is in as many pieces as you need it to be. There is an important sense in which Pirsig captures this in his distinction between DQ and static patterns. But I think there was a casualty in the process and that is the distinction between moral wisdom and aesthetic power, between what’s best and what’s new. After abstractly chopping everything down, I think Pirsig misplayed his hand in putting things back together.
So while Pirsig’s philosophy blurs the difference between moral wisdom and aesthetic power because a pragmatist metaphysics is a monism, there certainly is a pragmatic difference between the two that is lost in Pirsig because he takes “What is Quality?” to be the more serious question than “Who are you?” Pirsig takes metaphysics too seriously and so loses sight of life, lost in the mountains without a clear way home. Pirsig says that metaphysics ain’t worth a damn if it doesn’t help out in life and I can’t think of a clearer case of forgetting what we already intuitively and commonsensically know—the new may just be a passing fad.
This reflection has taken quite a few turns. I’d like to close by reiterating the difference between “What is Quality?” and “Who are you?” If we take the first question seriously, we will become lost in a sea of concepts, terms that can be pushed around in almost any direction, in an infinite number of constellations. If we take the second question seriously, however, concepts or terms we use become grounded in our lives, which is where they have their meaning. Literary criticism becomes the preferred discipline to exemplify because our lives are narratives that we reflect on. In the end, if we focus on the second question and literary criticism, the difference between the first and second question, and philosophy and literary criticism, disappears as we draw back to the roots of philosophy—the search for wisdom. Abstraction and details only gain their meaning when in harmony with each other, rooted in a narrative, the story we tell ourselves about history, our culture, our nation, our lives.
I think a lot of people have had that same experience with Pirsig. In my own experience, most Baby Boomers, if they haven’t read ZMM, have at least heard of it, though most of them don’t remember much of what the book was about. Even many kids in my generation (yes, I still retain the right to call myself a kid) have read or heard of ZMM. But why, if the book is so revolutionary, or at least seems to deeply affect its readers, do most not remember how it was that they were deeply affected?
I’m not proposing to answer that question. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that most people can’t remember what a book was about or how it affected them five years after the fact. Some people just don’t consider the reading of books a central part of their lives. But what about the philosophy? Pirsig proposes a new kind of philosophy of life in ZMM, and people seem attracted to it, but they neither remember what it was nor seem to alter their lives accordingly. And why did philosophers not pick up on it?
I’m not going to answer that question either, but again, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that “professional” philosophers didn’t find it useful for their own pursuits. In my earlier phase as a Pirsig enthusiast I once wrote Rorty about Pirsig. Nice guy that he is, he wrote me back and said essentially that he remembered reading it, but recalls not being that impressed with the philosophy and not understanding what everybody was so excited about. Which is interesting considering that few these days, apparently, can remember what they were so excited about either.
What I would like to suggest about the effect that ZMM has on people is that, while it doesn’t instill a positive message about how to live one’s life (it isn’t a self-help book), it does instill curiosity in some. I think the reason some don’t remember the message of ZMM is that there isn’t much of one, more or less “live life excellently.” Pirsig’s philosophy revolves around this magical word “Quality,” but people don’t remember what the philosophy is, principally because Pirsig doesn’t flesh it out. That was the purpose of Lila. But ZMM does instill curiosity in us because we see how lack of curiosity almost killed Pirsig, we see how the “establishment” can try and suppress curiosity.
What ZMM makes us curious about is philosophy, and specifically in the question “What is Quality?” If people have been affected by ZMM in a strong way, and in a way that has a lasting effect, it is typically in the fashion of making them interested to read more philosophy. They try and read Plato and Aristotle, and anybody else. That’s what happened to me, at least. What I’ve come to see, however, are two things: one, that “What is Quality?” on Pirsig’s analysis gives way to a second question and two, that this second question is not strictly philosophical in the sense that we’ve been instilled with by Pirsig.
Pirsig’s question, “What is Quality?”, gives way on his reflection to “Who are you?” While the first question is overtly meditated on in the book, the second question is only implicitly given attention to by the functioning of the book itself. Pirsig is drawn to the first question because he has an analytical mind, or as he says, a Platonic streak. He has to answer that question at the prompting of the Bozeman English Department and this is what leads him to the University of Chicago. It is there that the book ends supposedly. But, upon further reflection, the trail of the book continues and wraps all the way around to the beginning. The trail is foreshadowed by the very beginning of the book, the no-doubt-forgotten-about-by-the-time-you've-reached-the-end-of-the-book inscription prefacing the entire novel—“And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good—/Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
The only person we need to ask about Quality is ourselves. But how should we answer that question? As Pirsig shows in Bozeman, most kids are puzzled by the question, and yet they seem to know intuitively that some things have higher Quality than others. Why is that? Pirsig’s later answer is that “we,” each person’s “person,” is built out of our history, cultural and biographical, those “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.” And thus we see that Pirsig’s first, Platonic question, “What is Quality?”, gives way to the second, non-Platonic question, “Who are you?” And, as I’ve already alluded to, this second question gives way to a third, almost anti-Platonic question, “Where have you been?” And thus the trail of the book continues on after the University of Chicago. Pirsig leads us through his past, showing us how he came to be who he is, and that trail continues on all the way up to the very writing of the book, his effort to confront fully the consequences of his own analysis of his question “What is Quality?”
Of course, I’m not at all sure that this is Pirsig’s intended effect. First, while I’m sure that the first question gives way to the second, and that Pirsig would be okay with this, I’m fairly positive that his explicit philosophical stance is antagonistic to the functioning of his book to reach the third question. The second question, after all, can still be given a Platonic spin to it, but the third certainly cannot. Using Pirsig’s own categories, Phaedrus is the Platonist and the narrator is the Aristotelian, and the narrator is the one who is vanquished in the end, the narrator is the one to be found to be holding the hero, Phaedrus, the real Pirsig, down. Plato created philosophy. Plato followed his teacher, Socrates’, lead in asking, for every instance of justice, piety, and the good, “What is it? What is it outside of these instances?” This flung us into the arid climate of generalities. It is Aristotle, on the other hand, who wanted to keep us in the details. And the third question is all about the details and history, something that a Platonist has no use for.
If we settle on for the moment that “What is Quality?” is Platonic, and therefore philosophical (because Plato is philosophy), and that “Who are you?” is not Platonic, and therefore not philosophical (because we are usually drawn by such a question to detailed autobiography), then the tension in Pirsig can be drawn not only by the questions or by Pirsig’s Plato/Aristotle categories, but by drawing a contrast between philosophy and literary criticism. We know that Pirsig hates literary criticism, thinking it a parasitic enterprise best left to second-rate minds, and that most of all of what professional philosophers do is no better than literary criticism. I want to suggest that the second question belongs to literary criticism.
The reason can be seen in the very look of what we typically canonize “philosophical” texts versus “literary” texts. Philosophy is abstract, it deals with concepts by themselves. Plato’s dialogues are explained as simply the method of conveyance for his philosophy, Descartes’ meditations as simply a heuristic, the first grand modern thought-experiment. Kant is taken to be paradigmatic, Spinoza is taken to be the most pure, and Montaigne and Voltaire aren’t even taught in philosophy departments because they wrote too topically, too much about themselves. As for literary texts, we can take the novel as the obvious example: a novel charts the course of a character’s life. It is all about the details. It may give you ideas, but it gives you a whole lot more than that.
Philosophy’s roots are in the search for wisdom, but since Descartes invented modern philosophy, philosophy has largely abdicated that role in favor of the abstract manipulation of symbols, of the search for foundations or transcendental outlines. Wisdom has been left for novelists and poets to convey and explore. Dealing in the abstract can indeed help us, but, as Pirsig tells us, only if it can cash out into real life, only if it can be applied. But most philosophers in the modern period have thought of “applied philosophy” as a secondary effort, as opposed to their pure pursuits. Pirsig oscillates between the two, which is just as well, but by explicitly focusing on “What is Quality?” as opposed to “Who are you?” he gives new lease on life to the Platonic impulse, the impulse to ignore life. This is what ZMM can tend to instill in the reader. The way to read Pirsig is not as a philosopher, but as a literary critic. If we read as a philosopher we will be led to Platonism. But reading as literary critics, we can see the rootedness of his philosophy in life.
Another way of seeing the tension in Pirsig’s philosophy, and not just in ZMM, however, is by seeing what his philosophy does to literary criticism. One of the things that I’ve found suggested by Rorty’s philosophy is that there are two ways to read texts, two purposes that we can find them attuned to. One is the search for moral wisdom and the other is the search for aesthetic power. Harold Bloom has spent most of his life charting the intricacies of the search for aesthetic power, centered in what he calls the anxiety of influence and charted by criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 96) Aesthetic power in its pure form is originality, centered around the question “What is new?” Bloom has often been accused of being too narrowly focused, but Bloom would be the first to acknowledge his narrowness, and he would simply claim to be reacting to the literary critical establishment of his time that has lost its way in performing one of its duties. But indeed, Bloom has not ignored moral wisdom, and in one of his latest books, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (dedicated coincidentally enough to Rorty), he reflects at length on the great writers in our Western wisdom traditions. Moral wisdom is centered around the question “What is best?” For true pragmatists like Rorty and Bloom, it is experiencing the actualities of life and reading the possibilities of books that gives us the wisdom to navigate our way through life and find what is best.
The reason I should put together such possibly odd pairings of words, “moral wisdom” and “aesthetic power,” as literary categories is because of my readings of Pirsig, Rorty, and Bloom. Pirsig has particularly taught us that all wisdom is a moral effort, that there is no distinction between morality and ethics and other categories of choice, such as prudence and taste. And Bloom has taught me, not only that to find what is new you must struggle with the vastness of time past, but that originality is a powerful force that changes us, the more original, the more we are changed.
What I should like to meditate on is how I’m making a distinction between the two and how Pirsig would not. This is crystallized in Pirsig’s concept of Dynamic Quality. DQ is both what is best and what is most new. DQ for Pirsig is a punch to the face that we cannot ignore, that changes us whether we like it or not. But for Bloom, originality does not mean wisdom. We can appreciate the power of new metaphors without being enticed into picking them up. Metaphors, for Rorty, are meaningless, and so, linguistically speaking, something like punches to the face. The trap that Pirsig falls into is twofold: first, he falls into the Heideggerian trap of searching for elemental words, words that can never be banalized by use and thus given meanings (hence DQ/Quality’s undefinition) and second, the Platonic trap of thinking that power and the good are the same thing.
On one of Rorty’s readings, Heidegger (as he says in Being and Time) is in search for elemental words and that we can trace his movement from early to late by the changes in those words he takes as elemental. In Heidegger, these words move from German candidates like Dasein to Greek candidates like noein. What Heidegger wants are words that slough off meaning, words that simply have force. By moving back to Greek words, to words that Plato first imbued with philosophical senses, Heidegger wants to reclaim these originary words by shedding the history of philosophy from them, thereby making them metaphors again. Heidegger thus, on Rorty’s reading, evinces Bloom’s sense of poetic anxiety.
I think it is instructive to read Pirsig as searching for, not just indestructible metaphors, but elemental words for two reasons. For one, Pirsig goes back to the Greeks and the roots of language much like Heidegger, such as his recapturing of arete in ZMM and rta in Lila. For two, and more importantly, Pirsig’s DQ/Quality is originary in a cosmic sense, whereby Pirsig traces them to being reality itself, and thus the causes of reality. DQ is both originary and permanently new, always a force and never banal. Pirsig hopes not only to find a metaphor that is always a metaphor, but a metaphor that has created all the others in its wake. The Heideggerian trap is one that is set for all those who feel the strain of their predecessors. Because Pirsig’s poetic metaphors are set for philosophical purposes, however, his production of DQ/Quality causes us to lose sight of history. By focusing on the question “What is Quality?”, Pirsig’s answer in the form of an elemental word produces the Platonic tendency of metaphysical speculation rather than autobiographical introspection.
The Platonic trap is one that is produced by Plato’s attempt to, in Yeats’ phrase, “hold reality and justice in a single vision.” Rorty spins the history of philosophy out of this phrase and it is epitomized in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue, Plato attempts to philosophically explain why his fellow Athenians were wrong to convict his hero and mentor, Socrates, by showing that the Form of Good is reality behind the appearances. Heidegger, like Rorty following him later, traces the modern fixation on Reason to Plato (seen in the dialectic), which produces the modern ethical manifestation of Platonism in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. Pirsig, too, traces modern philosophy to Greek roots, but he still insists on equating the Good with Reality.
Pirsig obviously does not want us to repeat the failures of Plato. The Pirsig of ZMM has certainly located the roots of SOM in Plato, particularly in his dialectic, and there is no doubt he attacks him for it. Nevertheless, however, Pirsig does find that the Greeks were up to something good and that what this is is something like abstract thinking, which is why Pirsig suggests that he be seen as a Platonist as opposed to an Aristotelian in temperament. If Platonism and Aristotelianism are taken to be impulses towards abstraction and details respectively, then certainly these temperaments exist and are helpful and not to be denied. And yet Pirsig does seem to fall into the trap. The trap comes out clearly in what we might call the indeterminacy of Dynamic Quality thesis, when, after identifying reality with the good and with the new, Pirsig cogently says that one cannot ever tell whether one is being Dynamic or degenerate in the moment—only history can tell us that. If DQ is something that punches us in the face, how is it that we could be wrong about being punched? How does DQ help us then?
The reason Pirsig falls into the trap, I think, is not because he’s a crypto-Platonist, but because he places too much stock in abstraction. Pirsig wisely hitches his boat with pragmatism at the end of Lila, but after Rorty, having a “pragmatist metaphysics” looks like an oxymoron—and Pirsig even sees it coming when, attempting to split the difference between positivists and mystics, he says that a Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Pirsig takes that as a good sign for building bridges, but I should like to think that that would be a good time to look around for new terms.
From a metaphysical point of view—the view from which we make hard, deep cuts into Reality, splitting it into the correct pieces, the pieces Reality wants to be in—pragmatism is a monism because it denies that deep cuts can be made. Pirsig senses this and this makes pragmatism of a piece with the Buddhist strain in Pirsig. But while from a metaphysical point of view reality is monistic, from a pragmatic point of view reality is in as many pieces as you need it to be. There is an important sense in which Pirsig captures this in his distinction between DQ and static patterns. But I think there was a casualty in the process and that is the distinction between moral wisdom and aesthetic power, between what’s best and what’s new. After abstractly chopping everything down, I think Pirsig misplayed his hand in putting things back together.
So while Pirsig’s philosophy blurs the difference between moral wisdom and aesthetic power because a pragmatist metaphysics is a monism, there certainly is a pragmatic difference between the two that is lost in Pirsig because he takes “What is Quality?” to be the more serious question than “Who are you?” Pirsig takes metaphysics too seriously and so loses sight of life, lost in the mountains without a clear way home. Pirsig says that metaphysics ain’t worth a damn if it doesn’t help out in life and I can’t think of a clearer case of forgetting what we already intuitively and commonsensically know—the new may just be a passing fad.
This reflection has taken quite a few turns. I’d like to close by reiterating the difference between “What is Quality?” and “Who are you?” If we take the first question seriously, we will become lost in a sea of concepts, terms that can be pushed around in almost any direction, in an infinite number of constellations. If we take the second question seriously, however, concepts or terms we use become grounded in our lives, which is where they have their meaning. Literary criticism becomes the preferred discipline to exemplify because our lives are narratives that we reflect on. In the end, if we focus on the second question and literary criticism, the difference between the first and second question, and philosophy and literary criticism, disappears as we draw back to the roots of philosophy—the search for wisdom. Abstraction and details only gain their meaning when in harmony with each other, rooted in a narrative, the story we tell ourselves about history, our culture, our nation, our lives.
Monday, November 20, 2006
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:
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?
--------------------
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.
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.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.
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.
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?
--------------------
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.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
A monologue we should all memorize
I've never been subjected all that often to questions like, "So...what you gonna' do with that degree...?" It is true that my extended family doesn't understand my pursuits much at all, but my parents inherited from their respective families an awareness that different people lead different lives, even if you can't for the life of you imagine what that might be.
And my friends, well, they're all pretty much like me: overeducated, smart types that, though they don't fit the classic humanist intellectual mold like I do, are well aware that reading esoteric books might be good for somebody. Between that and my scintillating wit, blazing sarcasm, and oversized genius, I've mainly been able to squelch any possible jokes made at my effete sophistication.
But this is hilarious, sent to me by a friend of mine, an English major lost in the woods of Library Book Delivery.
And my friends, well, they're all pretty much like me: overeducated, smart types that, though they don't fit the classic humanist intellectual mold like I do, are well aware that reading esoteric books might be good for somebody. Between that and my scintillating wit, blazing sarcasm, and oversized genius, I've mainly been able to squelch any possible jokes made at my effete sophistication.
But this is hilarious, sent to me by a friend of mine, an English major lost in the woods of Library Book Delivery.
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