Excavating SOM

What is SOM?

What seems a simple question, I think, is actually quite difficult. "SOM" is Pirsig's mantle for the Great Enemy, for the kind of philosophy he wants to dissociate himself from. Because there is a lot of philosophy out there, it would help to figure out where exactly the tradition of Subject-Object Metaphysics begins, what it is, how to identify instances of it, and how what other philosophers are saying hook up to it.

I've always identified the SOM with the appearance/reality distinction. When Pirsig developed the S/O Dilemma and suggested that to be subjective is to be unreal, I took that as a dominant marker of what was going on. I see the subject/object distinction as coming out of the appearance/reality one. The subject/object distinction is a specifically modern version of this older distinction, which trails back to the Greeks. The difficulty in figuring out what Pirsig thinks the great enemy is is that sometimes it seems like his enemy is materialism and sometimes it seems like something else. What's more, many followers of Pirsig interpret him as primarily fighting materialism. I'd like to pursue this difficulty by answering two questions: is SOM the same as the mind/matter dualism? and Does the mind/matter dualism really start with Socrates? If either is true, then materialism as a philosophical thesis matters a lot more to Pirsig's project. If they aren't, then there's bigger fish to fry than any thesis about what reality exactly is.

There are two primary areas where Pirsig describes what he’s up against: the S/O Dilemma (Ch 19) and pretty much all of Part IV. The SOD is set up as a mind/matter dilemma: does Quality "exist in the things we observe?" or "is it subjective, existing only in the observer?" (231) Pirsig butts his head against each of the horns. He says in acknowledging the truth of the objective horn, "Quality … was not a physical property and was not measurable," (234) thus taking the dualism seriously, as true. When he goes up against the subjective horn he takes on "scientific materialism," "what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable by the instruments of science is real." (236) Pirsig makes pretty good work of scientific materialism, but, he says, that lands him in the camp of idealists, which he wasn't so sure about. And then he says, "Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality was unfair," (239) before concluding: "Phaedrus … went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter." (240)

Here we have Pirsig linking subject and object directly with the mind/matter dualism. What else could he be talking about? The clues are littered about in this section, but they aren't completely obvious. The first is his treatment of the objective horn. To grab that horn would be to "refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability." (232) He abandons that route, because of the seeming obviousness of physical properties, but not before indicating that he was "thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality." (234) I don’t think it was the ambiguity in quality, I think it’s the ambiguity in "object" and "subject" that does him in. In preparing his brief assault on the objective horn he says, "In today's world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don't get off the ground." (234) Hey, but where are these ideas? They’re in the mind, right? Hunh. So, ideas about objects, like scientific knowledge, get to be objective? And, really, "objectivity" itself simply stands for "ideas in the mind that relate to matter," as opposed to "subjectivity" which means "ideas in the mind that relate to something else, e.g. ______ ." This ambiguity in the terms he's using bursts right out of the text a page later when he slices and dices scientific materialism: "scientific concepts … could not possibly exist independently of subjective considerations." (237) The reason is because anything in the mind is subjective, in the subject. That’s the bind and the ambiguity.

I think the sentence that tells us the most about Pirsig's concerns is this one: "The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality." (236) Because when we get to the finale of ZMM, there is a stunning lack of talk about subjects and objects. Instead, it's about rhetoric, dialectic, logic, reason, mythos, logos, truth, the good. I think it is important to take into account that ZMM is a journey, not a dissertation. It is attempting to bring us to a state that resembles Pirsig's, when he first went through it, and to do that it goes through the same stages he went through. But that doesn't mean theses are positive, like a ladder we keep going up. Its more like pulling a sled through the snow, picking up and dropping things as we need—except that Pirsig doesn't tell us when he's dropping things.

To see this, in Part IV and Chicago, Pirsig says "the more he studied, the more convinced he became that no one had yet told the damage to this world that had resulted from our unconscious acceptance of their [the Greeks'] thought." (358) This wets our appetite. Then he begins the build up, which starts with the "mythos over logos" section (an argument that Pirsig commandeers, but for which I don't think he fully grasps the consequences). Pirsig tells us that in Greek cultures "one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates." (359) There you have it, the subject/object, mind/matter distinction built by—wait a second. What? "In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy." Subjects and predicates don’t sound like mind and matter to me. What could be the (obviously vastly underdeveloped) connection? But, more importantly, is that connection important? Why would Pirsig leave something like that so horrendously underdeveloped, just kinda' throw it out there and move on? I think its exactly because he is moving on. I think that paragraph marks a shifting of topics. Suddenly, and quite inexplicably, Pirsig has shifted to language use, rather than talk about mind and matter.

I think the topic shift is cemented in the very next two sentences: "One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture, in which the Old Testament 'Word' had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,' and expect the truth to be told." (359) If we look at this as a shift in topics, we will be less surprised when we reach Pirsig's revelation of our age's spiritual crisis: "Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency"--wait for it--"to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good." (368) Pirsig italicizes that whole last part, just so we don't miss it. But if, as a reader, you had subjects and objects, specifically mind and matter, on the brain, you'd be totally thrown. "Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then." (368) Reason? But I thought we were talking about subjectivity and objectivity, mind and matter?

The reason nobody is caught off guard by this is because the structure of the narrative leads us inexorably to it. The narrative is structured so that we slowly forget about that whole thing about mind and matter, and instead start focusing on the bigger culprit: "the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason." (370)

I now want to bridge to my second question: "Does the mind/matter dualism really start with Socrates?" Does that dualism start with Greek culture, specifically Greek philosophical culture? I don't think it does. The first place I'll begin to refute the idea is with Pirsig, to continue to solidify the idea that not even Pirsig thinks the mind/matter dualism central. Pirsig begins his scattered narrative about the genesis of what he later calls the intellectual level with the piece above about subject-object differentiation, which is subtly transposed to grammar, a subject-predicate distinction, thus beginning our shift. The shift is followed through when Pirsig expands his narrative later in Ch. 29 on p. 381. "Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what was imperishable in the affairs of men." The rest of paragraph says nothing about mind and matter before it ends with "This consciousness, which had never existed anywhere before in the world, spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the Greek civilization." What's important is the new "consciousness," the search for "what was imperishable in the affairs of men."

Mind and matter do come up. In Pirsig's narrative, he says that for Greek philosophers "permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal Principles…." (382) Pirsig then runs down a short, pedantic list of some examples. He mentions that the Pythagoreans were "the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial." He ends with "Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning 'mind.'" I think these are dropped to remind us of our former travels, but Pirsig himself doesn't connect the dots. All he does add, ever so subtly is, a paragraph later, "Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition." (382) Parmenides is often linked as Socrates' direct predecessor, if for no other reason than Plato wrote a dialogue by that name fictionalizing their encounter. But Anaxagoras, not so much. There are a tiny few allusions made (favorably) by Plato about Anaxagoras, but not a lot else. His placement here is entirely to remind us of the importance of "mind." Which Pirsig promptly proceeds to finger explicitly:

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, 'Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,' and you have to say, 'Where were they? Point to them!' And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what his is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there. (382)

This is a difficult passage to interpret. Leaving aside Pirsig's allusion to his "discourse on Western ghosts", (on pages 33-6) I want to focus on how whether we should interpret Pirsig as saying that the Greeks created the divisions, or whether they were created by somebody else. Readings that give high credence to SOM being identified as materialism would suggest that the Greeks created all of those divisions together, that SOM, issuing from the subject/object dichotomy, all came together in a heap. I don't think they did. I think Pirsig shunts all of them under the SOM mantle (for some very good reasons), but I don't think the Greeks created them all. To interpret this passage as suggesting that the Greeks created them, one will hammer down on "until now there was no such thing as…." One will point back to the paragraph before where Pirsig fingers Anaxagoras as one of Socrates' teachers.

To loosen the hold of this suggestion, I want to again remind people that Anaxagoras wasn't a literal teacher of Socrates. I think his placement in the previous paragraph has nothing to do with suggesting that the mind/matter dichotomy existed or was created by the Greeks, but that its there to remind us, us "modern minds," that the "mind" is important. When I read that paragraph, I will hammer down on "Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later." When Pirsig says that the modern mind balks and says that these divisions were "there for the Greeks to discover," I think we have to be careful about taking it too literally. I think the important bit is Pirsig's reference to the "modern mind." For the modern mind, we do have these distinctions. But I think we need to gloss forward Pirsig's statement that they "came later" and remember that Pirsig, a page before, says that the "first conscious search for what was imperishable" was what "spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the Greek civilization." When Pirsig goes on to talk about what Plato and Socrates did, he doesn't talk about mind or matter, subject or object, form or substance. He says that Plato and Socrates, "are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. … He damns them because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth." (383) And then: "And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this." (384)

I want to suggest that ZMM is much more of a journey then some commentators let on. Pirsig is tracing the trail of his enemy through history. His first important stop is with the Subject/Object Dilemma. That is a specifically modern dilemma. It didn't arise with the Greeks, the Greeks didn't think about it or consider to give answers to it. But Pirsig is going backwards through our philosophical history to find the root cause of our problems. So he deals with the SOD (I might add, unsuccessfully at that point), but it is only a stage in his hunt. He (we) learn something from the encounter and what we learn is that the dilemma is all wrong. So we ask: why is it here? Part IV is the finishing of Pirsig's hunt. He traces the modern dilemma back to the Greeks. So what began the chain of events? "Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated." (382) He’s right, it can’t be. Parmenides gave us the appearance/reality distinction. We must penetrate beyond appearances, beyond shifting opinion, to the imperishable, immortal reality. Pirsig doesn't say that Anaxagoras' identification of the Immortal Principle with nous, "mind," had importance that couldn't be overstated. Anaxagoras gets one line. His placement with Parmenides as Socrates' teachers is to remind us where we came from and where we are going back to with the wisdom we find in the past.

After the appearance/reality distinction was made important, the Sophists came along and contradicted them. They said that "their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative." (383) But they didn't have the tools to win. They didn't have a way of distinguishing between probable knowledge and absolute knowledge. All the Greeks had was opinio and episteme, crappy opinion and perfect knowledge. What Plato did to destroy the Sophists was create a method for going from opinio to episteme: dialectic. This was the creation of epistemology. Parmenides created metaphysics by distinguishing between appearance and reality, and that distinction demands an epistemology, a method, criteria for being able to tell opinion about appearances from knowledge of the imperishable reality. At the heart of SOM, then, is that distinction (appearance/reality) and the demand for a method. Through the vicissitudes of time, it turned into its modern progeny: "The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one’s work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality." (236)

To supplement this reading of Pirsig, I should provide a story of how metaphysics and epistemology spawned modern SOM. I clearly don't have enough room here, nor, really, the expertise. The best supplemental story for Pirsig's concerns with SOM (as I've drawn them here) is Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It was accident that I came to read Rorty religiously, him becoming my second philosophical father to Pirsig. But the more I think about it, the more I see their concerns syncing up.

I will suggest this here, though: the mind/matter problem didn't become a problem until Descartes. The subject-object idiom didn't become solidified until Kant. Don’t get me wrong though. The Greeks clearly had some sort of concept for "mind," nous as Pirsig said. But nous isn't exactly what we mean by mind. And the Greeks had some sort of concept for "matter," maybe phusis (which roughly translates to "nature"). What I’m saying is that there wasn't a mind/matter dualism, which spawned off its own particular problems that we are familiar with, until the modern period. It is, in fact, partly what marks off the beginning of the modern period of philosophy. So, for instance, the Greeks would not have understood Pirsig’s Subject/Object Dilemma.

Love Letters I

December 21, 2004

Apple Blossom,

Letters are a fairly difficult thing to write and there are many different ways to write them. One standard form is the "update." Information is the currency of this kind of latter, typically in the form of a linear narrative. Narratives can be interesting, but many times, if poorly done, they'll just devolve into a barely stylized, logistical "event chart." It'll keep people informed, but it loses all the verve and romance of real life.

The opposite end of the spectrum is the "reflection." In the old days, some of our most important literary and philosophical events occured as letters (think Schiller, Montaigne, Goethe). They carried depth and importance. They were biographical (and sometimes cultural) artifacts, not simply egoistic debris. The best kinds of letters, the ones that steer clear of the pedestrian "event chart" and the pontificating hubris that oftentimes accompanies an extended, self-indulgent monologue, are those that mark an event in your life, and in some cases are events themselves. They provide the needed commentary and framing of an event that makes an event worth relating. What you ate for breakfast might be vaguely interesting, but everybody eats breakfast everyday. Does it really need to be marked? Events that are marked should be events you find yourself reliving over and over again, late at night in the warm, soft confines of your bed, an enchanted lullaby, whispering you to sleep.

A month ago I hit a really dark spell. I'd go out on the weekends, drink it up, but why? I became disillusioned with the whole scene. A black cloud unspooled from some place ugly and really nestled in. At work, I stopped talking to people. Normally gregarious and interested, I became listless and melancholy. I stopped going out. Everyone noticed something was wrong. They'd ask what was up, but I'd just shrug and mumble something about being tired and "out of it." And really, there was nothing specific to talk about. It was just in a foul place.

That all changed, though. Now you can't shake the grin off my face. I think part of the cloud you chased away was because of the friends around me. I love my friends dearly, I do, but part of many of their personalities is a genetic negativity. My closest friends have always had a lot of negative energy, and it really gets to you after a while. But you--you're one of the kindest, sweetest people I've ever met. Never has the sun-breaking-through-clouds metaphor ever been more appropriate, with your vivacious, rose petal smile and sprightly, infectious laugh. But most of all it's in your eyes: despite a calm face or slowly batting eyelash, the obvious kinetic energy can barely be contained by your glowing, vibrant iridescent eyes.

I guess this is all just a long way of saying you've put the "happy" in my holidays. (Next time I'll just find a Hallmark card with that in it and save all of us the trouble.) You are a wonderful, happy person. You've made me a happy person again. Like a mosquito of joy, you've bitten me into a malarial delirium, from which I hope I never recover. (Remember, you're the one who told me to write you something about mosquitoes, so that horrendously strained simile is your fault.) The last couple of years have been a hard struggle for me, and at times I thought I'd never see the light of day again. But I can't think of a better way to start off a new year.

Love,

Matt

Against Northrop

A month or two ago in the MD, some people were using Northrop in expositions on Pirsig's philosophy. Understanding Northrop should be important to understand how Pirsig's philosophy grew to be what it is, and I don't deny that, but from what I understand of Northrop, I don't like him much. I first read some sections of his books when I was writing a review of one of Anthony McWatt's papers and I didn't like what I found, and recently I picked up a book called The New American Philosophers by Andrew J. Reck ("new" circa 1968) that had a number of expositions on philosophers, including Northrop. What I read there did not please me either and simply deepened my suspicion that Northrop is a neo-Kantian. Which only deepens my suspicion that Pirsig is still caught in the philosophical web he hoped to rend and replace.

The first thing that makes me leery is that Northrop apparently is of the mind to make everything "scientific." This was a problem that Dewey had, too, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything really bad, it just means they are probably using a really wide sense of "science", probably as coextensive with "inquiry". This is all confirmed in the Reck book, but the way it is confirmed is not enticing. "...Northrop defines logic broadly 'to include any form of knowing in religion and art as well as the sciences,'" which sounds a lot like what Pirsig is up to in his redefinitions, but then Reck continues "closely linking it with epistemology, which examines the relation between the knower and the subject matter as known." (200) Knower/known distinction? Not a great sign.

Northrop adopts a "methodological pluralism," each appropriate to different problems or stages of inquiry. That sounds appropriate, but one repetitive note is sounded over and over again throughout the chapter: Northrop's distinction between the aesthetic and conceptual, the immediate and the postulate. This is what some expositers have been using with Pirsig and it is exactly that distinction that makes me so wary. Here's an instance in Reck: "Although the second stage of scientific inquiry opens with pure fact under observation, it terminates with described fact or classified fact, fact no longer pure but altered by concepts. Pure fact, 'defined as that which is known by immediate apprehension alone,' is 'a continuum of ineffable aesthetic qualities, not an external material object.' The bedrock of empirical knowledge is drenched with intuited quality, evincing an essential relation between fact and the sort of values mirrored in impressionistic art." (201)

The passage holds both resonance and dissonance with Pirsig and plays to some of the "red flag words" I've been suggesting people stay away from. Words like "pure", "immediate", and "ineffable". Pirsigians will think that "drenched with intuited quality" sounds good, but how they can coutenance an "essential relation" between fact and value is beyond me. I thought Pirsig's primary move was to make everything value. It is this kind of thing that suggests to me that Pirsig still, in the moments when he describes that which is most immediate to us (DQ), is reinscribing a fact/value distinction into his philosophy. And this is bad. Not good.

To just briefly attack Northrop's distinction between intuition and postulation, Northrop says that a concept of intuition is one "which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by, something which is immediately apprehended." (ibid.) Now, first realize that Northrop's philosophy seems to hinge on the notion of "sense data". Sense impressionism is way, way out of vogue these days, and with good reason. It is based on bad Humean psychology, which may have pushed us down the track to pragmatism, but is a ladder best left behind. Northrop may want to replace much of bad Humeanism, but I don't think he did it radically enough. Second, try and think of what "meaning" is given by something not under a description. As quoted above, "pure fact" is not "described fact," which means that a pure intuition is not under any description. Where is the meaning? This is one of the reasons why the "linguistic turn" became so popular. There seemed to be something funny going on when we talk a lot about "pure experience" and such. How do we get meaning if there is no language? Northrop and many others have forwarded answers, but I think all of them fall under Quine and Sellars' swords. It's just bad, Cartesian/Kantian-engendered philosophy.

Another thing that makes me leery is Northrop's attempt at "philosophy of culture." He suggests, reasonably enough, that ideologies underlie cultural beliefs and that we should understand these ideologies. (He also says, roughly, that a culture has an implicit philosophy, but this is either repetition of the first point or saying, very badly, that all cultures have philosophical presuppositions. I think he leans towards the latter.) But his notion of "scientific inquiry" comes lurching foward and leads him to suggest, in Reck's words, that "Consequently, world peace hinges upon the ability of men to understand the differing ideologies which motivate the behavior of nations, in order to reconcile them when they are compatible and to correct them in consonance with impartial criteria when they are incompatible." (204) Impartial criteria? Where the hell are we going to get those? Wouldn't any "impartial" criteria you come up with, when it goes against a given ideology's beliefs, be rejected as being partial, as begging the question over it? Isn't the point of Pirsig's attack on Subject-Object Metaphysics to disimbue us of the notion of an objective, impartial viewpoint? That we are all partial, valuistic?

All of this comes to a head in Reck's exposition of Northrop's legal philosophy.

If legal science is to contain objective norms for the criticism of living laws, it must include natural law ethics and natural law jurisprudence. To clarify and justify this claim Northrop distinguishes bewteen "first-order" and "second-order" facts. "First-order facts are the introspected or sensed raw data antecedent to all theory and all cultures, given in anyone's experience in any culture. Second-order facts are cultural artifacts; that is, they are the result in part at least of human theory of first-order facts. Nature and natural law are the names for all first-order facts and their relations. Culture and living law are the names for all second-order facts and their inner order." On the next page he continues: "Stated more precisely, therefore, natural law jurisprudence is the thesis that scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts provides the cognitive standard for measuring the goodness or badness of second-order artifacts. Thus just as sociological jurisprudence uses the scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of the living law to judge both legislation and the cases of positive law, so natural law jurisprudence uses the empirically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts to judge the goodness or badness of the living law." (214-5)

Do I even need to go over this? First, fact v. artifact. An artifact is an artificial fact, something made up, something not real. Second, we are supposed to get our second-order facts, the fake, artificial ones, looking closer like the first-order facts, the real ones. And a closely following third, first-order facts judge our second-order facts. The first-order facts provide the "cognitive standard for measuring goodness or badness." Cognitive standard? Again, doesn't Pirsig get rid of Kant's idea of a tribunal of pure practical reason sitting in judgement over us? Of an "is" imposing itself over our "oughts"?

I think Pirsig, in his better moments, does get rid of all those things. But I think Northrop works out fairly consistently what is required of an intuition/postulation distinction. Northrop is quite obviously trying to find that God's-eye point of view so we can find impartial criteria on which to judge other people and cultures. Pirsig says we can judge other cultures, but I hope to God there isn't any kind of notion of impartiality built in there. But I think that is exactly what is built into the intuition/postulation distinction. Things we gain by "intuition" are those things that everybody would gain in perfect symmetry, without variation.

Rocks may be such a thing, but are morals such a thing? This prima facie sense that we can get agreement on rocks and not on morals is what led to scientism. Northrop still has the sense of scientism in thinking that we can ultimately get morals to kow-tow the line. But pragmatists want to go the other direction and say that rocks aren't kow-towing any line and neither are morals. Its just the case that we can get agreement on rocks better than morals most of the time. That doesn't say anything about reality, that just means we're going to have to work hard to get people to start paying decent living wages and stop persecuting women. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time of Galileo and Newton to do to ethics and morals what they did to planets and rocks, but all that the attempts to do so have seemed to have shown us is that it wasn't, in fact, a good idea.

First-Person, Third-Person

I've been thinking lately about the various uses of "Dynamic" and "static" in Pirsig's philosophy, or rather Pirsigian philosophy, and one of those uses is to differentiate two "stances" towards experience. The static stance towards experience gives us things, whereas the Dynamic stance gives us fluid. Being in the static stance gives one demarcations between "this" and "that", but in the Dynamic stance you have a pond of undifferentiated singleness.

In fighting Dennett and Rorty's battle against the Cartesian Model of the Mind, one of the things they give us is a sense in which to have a "mind" is to speak in a particular way. This way is basically the first-person stance: "I think", "I see", "I seem to have", etc. The move Dennett and Rorty want to make, after realizing that "mind" and "consciousness" is created by a language game, is to say that we can have the stance, we just don't need the hypostatization, we don't need to think of the mind as a seperate essence from the body or the physical.

One of the responses to Dennettian/Rortyan philosophy of mind is that they are getting rid of a fundamental feature of reality, a fundamental feature of us, namely that of lived experience. We aren't just speaking in a certain way, we are enunciating what it is like to be us. These critics don't think Dennett is explaining what the mind is, they think he's explaining it away.

So it goes. One of the things that has got me thinking is Rorty's long-time puzzlement over Donald Davidson's sharp distinction between the mental and the physical. It wasn't until Bjorn Ramberg (a wonderful expositer of both Rorty and Davidson) wrote a paper for Rorty and His Critics that Rorty began to see what was going on and what the utility of it was. The gist of what I understand it to be is that Davidson is restating in his way the fundamental entwinement of the mental with the physical, the normative with the descriptive, the triangulated nature of person-community-world.

This is related in its way to the fact that there is a fundamental entwinement of what we can call the first-person and the third-person stance to phenomena. The accusation towards Dennettian philosophy of mind is roughly that his is getting rid of the first-person point of view, what it is like to be me, in favor of a thoroughly third-person stance. This is supposed because of his rendering of qualia, those irreducible elements of sensation that make up the bottom of the mind. Dennett, rather than explaining what qualia are, explains why we think we have qualia and then offers an alternative picture of what we have.

Against Dennett's sometimes scientism (whereby Dennett sometimes likes to think that he's getting at what we really do have instead of qulia), we have Rorty's sense of conversational efficacy. It doesn't pay to speak of qualia because the notion is the latest of a long line of Cartesian metaphors that simply reconstitute the Cartesian problematic of two essences: mind and matter. Instead, we should substitute different metaphors, like Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model. Rorty doesn't think Dennett's way of speaking gets at reality or our mind better, but he does think it may pay to speak that way when talking about what we have that other things, like rocks, do not.

The substitution of metaphors are for the first-person point of view, the way we look out into the world. I think there is another way of looking at this which suggests the same thing and goes on to suggest that the first-person and third-person point of view are entwined. The first-person point of view is typified by James' notion of the stream of consciousness. With Pirsig, it is roughly the Dynamic point of view, the undifferentiated soup of experience. The third-person point of view is typified by objects, things, differentiations of all kinds. In ZMM, the divorce of subject (first-person) from object (third-person) is given well by Pirsig's diagnostic of the parts of a motorcycle. He says one of the things to notice is that "the observer is missing." (ZMM, 75) And so comes Pirsig's distinction between romantic (first-person) and classic (third-person) to remedy the situation.

What I want to suggest is that the Cartesian problematic is due to a kind of confusion of modes. I don't often want to speak of "confusion," but I take this line of thinking to be a heuristic for thinking about it. So, we have the first-person stance, our stream of consciousness, lived experience, our subjectivity. And we also have the third-person stance, the objects of consciousness, a detached differentiation of things. Both stances are important and we can kinda' differentiate between them. We can think of the Cartesian problematic as arising because of a second tier of distinctions occuring under each half of the first first-person/third-person distinction. This second tier of distinctions is exactly the same as the first: first-person/third-person. This creates, then, four stances: first-person-first, first-person-third, third-person-first, and third-person-third.

Why would I create such a bewildering display? Because one of the things that is often parroted by philosophers of mind when they discuss what their subject is about is that humans are unique in having something that can be turned back on itself: having a mind allows us to reflect and we can turn it back on itself and reflect on our mind, be conscious of consciousness. This is the mistake (I think I have even read Dennett saying something to that effect). The entire point of the first-person stance is that it gives you undifferentiatedness. By turning that stance back on itself, you're reifying and differentiating the undifferentiated experience of consciousness. You are producing an essence of mind, as differentiated from the differentiated "things," i.e. (in Descartes' time) matter. In its latter day form, this is what gives us the problem of qualia. The first-person-first stance is just the undifferentiated soup of experience, but the first-person-third treats the undifferentiated soup as a thing. The mistake is in then denying that you are taking the third-person point of view.

This is what creates the problems. The paramount fact of the (pure) third-person stance is that of differentiation. As Pirsig tells us to notice about the motorcycle diagnostic, "there is a knife moving here. ... You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves." (75-6) This is Pirsig's renunciation of essentialism, of the view that there are any essences, including a Cartesian one named "mind." What realists of the mind (those who take the first-person-third stance, those who defend qualia against Dennett) want to suggest is that there is something fundamental about the mind that cannot be cut away by slicing the knife differently. Qualia will always be there for us to explain, you cannot explain it away. It is a fundamental fact of existence. But once you've admitted Pirsig is right about the intellectual knife, you don't get "fundamental facts of existence." All facts are contingent of the movement of the knife, and so by different moves we can get different facts. This is the point of Dennettian/Rortyan philosophy of mind: they are suggesting different knife movements.

The first-person-third tries to differentiate the undifferentiatedness, thus creating the problem of consciousness (Descartes' cogito, our contemporaries' qualia). The other conjoined quarter, the third-person-first, I weakly suggest, can be thought of as that other great Cartesian problem: the Problem of Other Minds. (The heuristic starts to look a little silly now, but the first point is the main one.) Instead of accidently differentiating the undifferentiated like the first-person-third, the third-person-first stance starts in differentiation mode and then tries to explain the existence of undifferentiatedness. It's roughly the attempt to deny neo-verificationism (of the kind Dennett and Rorty espouse, not the kind Carnap and Ayer devoted themselves to). So, roughly goes the heuristic, we know we have a consciousness (because I can look back at myself, take the first-person-third stance), but how do we know others have a consciousness? How do we know they can take a first-person stance? They are an object of my consciousness (third-person stance indicative), but how can their consciousness by an object of my consciousness (third-person-first)?

Alright, that's the end of that. It's just a (somewhat unwieldy) heuristic. The point of all this is that we shouldn't be trying to differentiate the undifferentiatedness of the first-person stance. If you want the first-person stance, take the God damn first-person stance and stop muddying it up with differentiations. Another way of putting this is reflecting on the Buddhist idea of Nothingness. I don't claim to understand it much, but I take it to be something of a statement of antiessentialism. There are no essences. Sartre went in this direction (and made the fundamental first-person-third mistake by being a something of a Cartesian/Husserlian) by saying that the arrow of consciousness that points out of our "self", our ego, is not, in fact, buoyed by a dot demarcating a self, an ego. It's just an arrow pointing in some direction. That's how Sartre differentiated himself from Descartes (by denying the essence of mind), but that's how he was still, somewhat, caught in the picture (by roughly taking this whole heuristic I developed too seriously).

Another way to put all this is to go back to the idea of the mind turning back on itself as the key mistake of realist philosophers of mind. Identifying that as a mistake turns up an unusual chorus of similar statements about other similar subjects. For instance, what about language turning back on itself, or reason, or (in Derridean flavor) the text? The chorus of the pragmatists, that the Buddhists join in, is captured by Donald Davidson: "There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers, at least, have supposed." ("A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs") Davidson said this in similar circumstances as Dennett is uttering "there is no such thing as a mind, not if a mind is anything like what Cartesian philosophers, at least, have supposed," and both similar to when Bloom roughly utters "there is no such thing as a text, not if a text is anything like what traditional lit-crits, or Derrideans, for that matter, have supposed" (see the earlier "Bloom and Criticism") and all them in similar circumstances as when the Buddha roughly says, "there is no such thing as a 'thing,' not if a thing is anything like what unenlightened people, at least, have supposed." I take them all to be ringing antiessentiatlistic notes, for their allotted subjects of interest.

I want to end by briefly taking up the idea of the entwinement of the first- and third-person stances. What I mean by that is that, much like Putnam's entwinement of fact and value and Davidson's entwinement of person-community-world, both stances are entwined because both are inescapable. We do have points of view, an experience of life that is from our point of view, and not some shared point of view (which is kinda' what objectivity aspires to). We don't share what's going on in our head. But the advent of Wittgenstein suggests that we do, in a fashion, share what's going on in our head, that we do have a shared point of view--that's the shared nature of language. This is far too much to go into in detail, but I think the essential notion I'd like to drive at is the entwinement of Dynamic and static.

There are many, many ways to put this (just because there are many, many ways to describe and use Dynamic/static), but one of them is as this formula: without Dynamic there is no static, but without static there is no Dynamic. I think that second half has been missing far too long in Pirsigian philosophy and it is hindering some of its exposition. It's paradoxical, but without differentiation, there is no undifferentiation (no first-person stance without a distinction between first- and third-person), and without undifferentiation, there is no differentiation (there's nothing to differentiate without experience, life). We should not coutenance any notion of something being Given to us in experience, either with cuts premade (ala realism) or without any cuts at all (ala Kantian-bred antirealism). Part of what it is to experience, as Pirsig teaches us with Quality, is to experience differentiations, but these differentiations of value are partly constituted by the differentiations that make us up, our ego, our self as a set of static patterns of value. Reality neither has joints, nor do we apply a cookie-cutter to the formless dough. We are all in this together.

The Absurdity of Getting High and Having a Mystical Experience

In Lila, Pirsig quotes approvingly a section of text that says that, when you get high, “The intellect is drawn to the analysis of complex realities or transcendental questions.” (39)

This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, probably written while the person was high. People aren’t naturally drawn to “analyze” “complex realities” or “transcendental questions.” What happens when you get stoned or trip balls is that you have a focus problem. It is often said that you focus much more intensely on a subject when you’re high. Again, that’s what stoners think. When you’re high, you don’t focus better, you have trouble unfocusing. The difference is that an intense focus implies you are thinking and analyzing a subject intently, well, and deeply. The problem when you’re high is that you can’t unfocus on a subject once you get latched onto it. This doesn’t mean you’re analyzing with great skill and acuity, it just means all you can think about are bananas. Add to this the fact that your memory has about 10 seconds on it, and you can think about bananas until the sun comes up. But just because you did doesn’t mean you discovered anything significant about bananas, or that your mind was opened up to new possibilities about bananas, or that you analyzed the hell out of bananas. It just means you were hungry.

Unfocusing may sometimes infuse you with good ideas about where to re-focus. It can provide insight. But I think its pretty far off from thinking that going shrooming is the beginning of enlightenment. Is shrooming fun? Sure. Can it provide new insight? Sure. But saying that shrooming gives you a whole new experience of things is pretty trivial when you consider that doing anything new gives you a whole new experience, one that may or may not yield insight and wisdom. There's nothing special about peyote experiences, it is just one way to expand your experience base. Sometimes its good to unfocus. Sometimes it just gives you some pretty terrible ideas (like you've transcended space and time and entered another realm of being).

Bloom and Criticism

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

Marjorie Grene

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200503/?read=interview_grene

I don't know a lot about Marjorie Grene. I have her historical portraits of Descartes, Aristotle, and the existentialists on my shelves and they've always showed some fascination for me. I'm not sure why, possibly because, for whatever reason, I identify her as a maverick philosopher. Nobody's a Grenean, but she is very well respected. Well, I found the above interview and it is absolutely hilarious. I die for academic gossip, and this just exudes the kind of thing I crave. Her personality is absolutely scintillating. The funniest part of the interview (other than her calling E. O. Wilson "that awful E. O. Wilson"), and why I found it, is this:

BLVR: That reminds me, I forgot to ask about Richard Rorty. You’re friends with him, though you don’t agree with his philosophy?

MG: We are friends, but you can’t agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He’s a wit! He should’ve lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don’t mean anything. The thing about Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is based on a total misinterpretation of Kant. It’s totally wrong about Kant, and I’m sort of a Kant person.

I love it. And I'm not entirely sure Rorty would disagree. My favorite clever remark of Rorty's was apparently at a Hegel conference some years back, discussing the Phenomenology of Spirit and Hegel's later thought and Rorty said something like, "Well, after writing the Phenomenology of Spirit, what could Hegel possibly do for an encore?"

Are You Irrational or an Asshole?

A little anecdote: I have this beat up copy of Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I get most of my books used and, living in a university town, most of them were formerly in the possession of students, students who like to mark the hell out of them. Most people have no idea what they’re marking, and many of the marks are a bunch of underlining and circling in ballpoint pen which makes it hard to read the book. Annoying to be sure, but for a quarter of the price, it ends up being worth it (so I keep telling myself). The second chapter of Williams’ book is entitled “The Archimedean Point.” In this chapter, Williams asks what kind of rock hard, root bottom, this-has-to-be-the-way-it-is could be used against ethical skeptics and amoralists. In the beginning of the chapter Williams poses his quandary: “Unless the ethical life, or (more narrowly) morality, can be justified by philosophy, we shall be open to relativism, amoralism, and disorder. As they often put it: when an amoralist calls ethical considerations in doubt, and suggests that there is no reason to follow the requirements of morality, what can we say to him?”[1] Williams quite rightly sees he’s in a tough spot because this amoralist, like Callicles in dialogue with Plato, “has a glistening contempt for philosophy itself, and it is only by condescension or to amuse himself that he stays to listen to its arguments at all.”[2] The likely response to such a contempt is, “the question is not whether he will be convinced, but whether he ought to be convinced.”[3]

“But is it?”[4] Williams sees that to say that the amoralist ought to be convinced is saying that “the justification of the ethical life could be a force.”[5] The question, then, is “Why are they supposed to be listening? What will the professor’s justification do, when they break down the door, smash his spectacles, take him away?”[6] That is a good question. So, Williams asks what is meant by “ought.”

Is it meant only that it would be a good thing if he were convinced? It would no doubt be a good thing for us, but that is hardly the point. Is it meant to be a good thing for him? Is he being imprudent, for instance, acting against his own best interests? Or is he being irrational in a more abstract sense, contradicting himself or going against the rules of logic? And if he is, why must he worry about that?[7]

As it happens, Williams doesn’t have the last bit, “why must he worry about that,” italicized. But it’s something I would want to italicize, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks it important because the previous owner had underlined that bit of the sentence. Why must he worry about that? Why must the amoralist worry about contradicting himself or going against the rules of logic, why must he worry about being irrational, in this abstract sense? The punch line to this anecdote is that Williams goes on to quote from Robert Nozick’s book, Philosophical Explanations, a bit about how the “immoral man” might respond to his being told that he’s inconsistent: “To tell you the truth, if I had to make the choice, I would give up being consistent.”[8] At the end of this block quote, ending in this choice, my previous owner has written “—because he’s an asshole”. Why would someone give up being consistent? Because he’s an asshole.

No doubt a flip remark, but what if we took it seriously? Going back to Williams’ question, “Why must he worry about that?,” you can say you’d only worry about that if you didn’t want to be an asshole. But who are these assholes? Is being an asshole different from being irrational? My previous owner, that silent, invisible interlocuter, didn’t write down that Nozick’s immoral man was being irrational, but that he was being an asshole. What’s the difference then? To capture the unintended force of my playful, I’m-imagining-exasperated student, someone who’s a little tired of all the abstract contrariness that seems to exude from the very pores of philosophy, I think the difference is that being “irrational” means being contrary to the rules of logic, while being an “asshole” means being contrary to the rules of conversation.

This difference captures the difference between a Rortyan, pragmatist reading of ethics and morality and an objectivist, foundationalist reading. When Williams says that “a limited benevolent or altruistic sentiment may move almost anyone to think that he should act in a certain way on a given occasion, but that fact does not present him with the ethical”[9] (another line underlined by my former owner), that “the ethical involves more, a whole network of considerations, and the ethical skeptic could have a life that ignored such considerations altogether,”[10] the pragmatist is wont to reply that this “limited benevolent or altruistic sentiment” would probably keep a person from kicking down your door and breaking your glasses, and that this, then, is all we need. When the objectivist opposes the ethical to sentiment, morality to prudence, the pragmatist tries to blur these differences and say that they are not a difference in kind, but only in degree.[11]

For the pragmatist, being called irrational is an abstract scare tactic that has as much force as the Golden Rule: people would like to live by it, but they consistently ignore it everyday of their lives. However, being called an asshole is a less abstract scare tactic, one that has more force because it is more specific and particular than the Golden Rule. When confronted with a contradiction in our thinking, oftentimes we are liable to shrug it off, the thought being that we could untangle it if we had more time. That is, in fact, what Rorty suggests can be cone with most contradictions, given time and ingenuity. But when you're called an asshole, you're presented with something much more presently forceful, something that must be attended to now. Rather than being presented with the emptied out rational, you are presented with the embodied ethical. Some people don't care if they are assholes, and so would remain unaffected, just as Williams suggests, that the only people that feel the force of the ethical are those that already embody it. But in the actual, workaday conversations we have with people, who wants to talk to an asshole? Should we feel bad if nobody then talks to them?

[1] Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 22, italics his
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid., p. 23
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] Nozick, quoted from ibid.
[9] ibid., p. 25
[10] ibid.
[11] Williams’ account in this chapter does give way towards something like this view. Williams says that the moral philosopher looking for justification typically takes ethical skepticism as the natural state and so overestimates “the need for a justification just as he had overestimated its effect,” i.e. that it would force the skeptic into ethicalness. (p. 26) Williams then says that “When the philosopher raised the question of what we shall have to say to the skeptic or amoralist, he should rather have asked what we shall have to say about him.” (ibid.) This seems to me a much better question and the kind of question I answered above. Williams says that Plato recognized that “the power of the ethical was the power of reason, and that it had to be made into a force. He saw it as a problem of politics, and so it is.” (p. 27, italics his) Williams insight is that those who hear the force of being called an asshole are those who are already within the bounds of ethical discourse and that moral philosophy’s aim is “not to control the enemies of the community or its shirkers but, by giving reason to people already disposed to hear it, to help in continually creating a community held together by that same disposition.” (ibid.) Thus moral philosophy becomes a subject about what kind of moral education we should receive. Williams' moral philosophy, then, is remarkably in sync with pragmatist moral philosophies, like those of Annette Baier and Jeffery Stout. I am absolutely fascinated by Williams' writing because he somehow combines a Cartesian reading of epistemology (which breeds realist tendencies in his philosophy of science) with a Nietzschean reading of moral philosophy. He is either the most confused brilliant 20th century philosopher or brings to stunning clarity the consequences of Cartesianism. I'm not sure if he can bring it off or not, but he is absolutely fascinating to watch and a wonderfully better read than the sterile moral philosophy that usually comes down the analytic pipe.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is a strange piece of baggage. A lot of times what gets called self-esteem is the obvious sense in which it is how highly you esteem yourself. But self-esteem as it works in life is a bit more complicated than that. It importantly revolves around other people. Which is odd, because it's called self-esteem, not other-esteem. But esteem only enters the picture of the self when there is something to compare it against. If there were no one but you, you would have no self-esteem because there would be no one to esteem you, nobody else with similar abilities to be placed higher or lower than yours. That wouldn’t bad, though, because you wouldn’t need any, not having anybody else to put up with.

But just as self-esteem is not all about how you esteem yourself, it isn't all about other people either--you do get involved in the act, at its most critical level. Self-esteem marks an area in which you and the other are bound together. It is based entirely on the perception you have of other people’s perceptions of you. You can either give a shit what they think, or not. But usually, saying that you could give three shits what somebody else thinks is simply a cover. You really do care, you do think about it, you are affected, it just isn’t as overt and pandering as other people.

The funny thing about self-esteem is the circle of interactions that brings it into being. If we focus on erotic attachments, this is certainly clear. Sandy likes Bob. Bob doesn't know that. Bob thinks Sandy is great, but doesn't like Sandy in the same way. Bob tells Sandy that he likes his ladies thin in the hips. Sandy is not thin in the hips. She thinks that this is why Bob doesn’t like her and so gets down on her own wide, child-bearing hips. Sandy thinks the comment is somehow directed at her, when really, Bob would never say anything to hurt Sandy and is certainly not thinking of Sandy when he says it. But that’s just it: it doesn’t really matter how people perceive you. It only matters how you perceive people as seeing you.

Real life is much more complicated then the Bob and Sandy story. Real life people have layers of these circles, all going around each other, all connected, all stirring up trouble.

The trick of self-esteem is that other people's perceptions aren't always wrong. They don't always matter, but sometimes they do point out something about you that is true. Sometimes you are rightly esteemed as having low value in some area. It’s a hard thing to be awakened to a widespread perception of you that you have willfully ignored or always been oblivious to. It just so happens that I should finally come to terms with the fact that I’m going bald, I have bad acne, I have a big nose, I have thin and flat hair, I have hair all over (even my back), I’m not that funny, I'm a huge poser, I drive too fast, I drive too slow, I’m too quiet and standoffish, I’m too loud and obnoxious, I’m too drunk, I’m too stoned, I’m too stupid, too elitist, too straight, too effeminate, I’m pretentious, I’m boring, I'm silly, I'm cowardly, I'm ignorant, peevish, defensive, unfun, depressed egotistical cranky simple--

but who needs that shit?

The Tree

This was an allegory I wrote some time ago, right after I got turned on to Pirsig. It again begins with the same tired story of my early years, the one I've told countless times about my Methodism. But it branches out, so to speak. I have no idea what gave me the idea for this. But one thing it'll do is strike some heavy disharmony with the way I think about Pirsig now. It is a record of how I first thought about Pirsig (and a record of how important narrative has always been to me), of a time when my thinking was more in sync with Pirsig of Lila.

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When I was a child my parents took me to church every Sunday. I diligently went to Sunday School and learned all the stories and when I was 13 I was baptized and confirmed a Methodist. At that point in my life I had never really thought about what it meant to be a Christian, or believe in God for that matter. The next year I started High School and the Methodist Youth Group. My teacher there opened up my eyes to entire other realms of thinking. I started to see that maybe Christianity isn’t the only way.

At this point I looked around and found myself in a pasture with a lot of trees and other Christians. Except now I didn’t know what I was doing there. I looked to the gigantic tree that they said Christ planted. I didn’t know what to think. I felt strange and out of place. I asked the others what we were doing here and they said, "We have faith in God." Where before I would’ve understood what they meant, now I couldn’t comprehend what they meant by faith. It didn’t make sense anymore. What does faith mean? And every time they answered, it never seemed to make any more sense.

So I decided to leave. The only thing that seemed to be keeping these people here was that word … faith. And all I knew is that, apparently, I didn’t have it. So I left. I walked to the edge of the field and climbed over the stone fence onto a path that was in between two fences. It was here I realized something: I had never seen this fence here before! I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before, but now it was obvious that there was one. Even stranger was that I saw people walk to the fence, close their eyes, and walk straight through the fence! They then walked across the path I was on, through the next fence, and then opened their eyes after they reached the next field. I then realized that I always remembered this other field as being apart of the field I had been in. There were all sorts of other trees in this other field and I noticed my chemistry and physics teacher and other people in white lab coats walking around.

I peered into this field and saw a lot of the old trees I liked to play on. But it didn’t look as inviting as it used to. It was missing something. It seemed cold and unfriendly. The people didn’t talk to each other very often. So I left both fields. I just started walking down the path.

I walked for a long time. I saw a lot of other fields over their stone fences. Some of the fences were bigger than other ones. Some were much smaller. I didn’t see many people in between the paths either. Once in a while I would see someone and we would talk about the different paths we had been down and the different fields we had seen. But we usually parted before too long. As I continued down the path I noticed that it was beginning to get overgrown. It started looking less like a path and more like just a corridor in between the fences. I began to see some people actually building fences around this part of the path. They would find a particularly open stretch of the “path” and just start building. Some of them walled themselves in. But all of them started growing trees in their little walled in field.

I walked and walked. Then I saw something I had never seen before. A tree growing in the “path” that didn’t seem to be claimed by any fence. It didn’t seem so big from a distance but the closer I got the bigger it got. When I got to the base, the tree seemed to stretch indefinitely into the sky; I couldn’t see where it ended. I also saw a man sitting in the shade. He was reading Farewell to Arms.

He looked up once and then went back to reading. I walked around the tree. The man continued to ignore me. So finally I tried talking to him.

"Hi. My name’s Matt. Matt Kundert."

"Hello."

"Uh, what’s your name."

"Bob. Bob Pirsig."

"So … this your tree?"

"Oh-no."

"Oh. Who’s tree is it?"

"Nobody’s."

"Really? I’ve found that most trees are claimed by someone. Like Aristotle’s tree and Kant’s tree. And Christ’s tree."

"Yeah. I know. And then they build walls around themselves to block out people who don’t like their tree. Or to keep people in. Well, I take that back. Not everybody builds walls around their tree. Sometimes other people build the walls. Like Christ. He planted the tree, true. But he didn’t build the walls. Paul did that."

"So … what’s with this tree? Why isn’t it walled in?"

"Actually, it is walled in. You can’t really see it from here, but this tree is actually at the very center of it all. And all these walls aren’t just free standing. All of these walls and all of their trees are actually walled in by a much bigger wall."

I looked around. "Where? I don’t see it?"

"Well, did you see the walls before you left them?"

"No, not until right before I left."

"Right. And you won’t see this one until you’re ready to see."

"Well, I do want to see. Can you show me?"

"Sure, but this isn’t just for fun. I’ve showed too many people who just look and smile and say, 'Wow, that’s fascinating' and then go back to their old walled-in existence. If you want to go, then you're gonna' have to want to go."

He then put down his book, got up, and started climbing the tree. I shrugged and started climbing after him. I had climbed trees before. It was how you truly got to understand what the tree was there for. But whenever I got to the top I always found the view less than impressive. Some of the trees showed me things I had never seen before. But after a while I would become bored of the view because a lot of times, while I would get to see new things, a lot of the old things I liked became obstructed. I had supposed it was because you were never meant to see everything at once.

I kept climbing and climbing. We seemed to be climbing for all of eternity.

But then I saw it.

The ground was above me.

I didn’t understand. I looked back down and there was the ground, way, way down below me. I looked up and there was the ground! But then I noticed something about the ground above me: there weren’t any walls. Only trees stretching down to me.

We finally reached the "top." Pirsig then jumped off the tree, flipped, and landed up on the ground! I just looked at him.

"Come on. You can do it."

Still clinging to the tree, I reached out a hand to the ground above me.

"Just … let go."

So I did.

And promptly fell on my head.

"What … is this?"

"This

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And that's where it ends. I never wrote any more. Seeing it and being reminded of having started it, I remember being really excited about writing it. And I remember finding it again when transfering files from my old computer to my new one several years ago. I don't remember what I thought then, other than perhaps a hint of nostalgia and the possibility of finishing it.

But now, I feel very nostalgic. As I read it, it felt like I was being put in touch with a kindred spirit--which is to say, somebody that ain't me. Because the truth is certainly that I'm not him anymore, at least not philosophically. As I read it, I recognized and remembered my old thoughts about the relation of religion and science and other things. That Pirsig's reading Farewell to Arms because the teacher that first put ZMM in my hands told us that Pirsig had a style like Hemingway's (and that I didn't like Hemingway or Pirsig when I first read them).

The part that really punches me in the face, though, the part that really intrigued me, was when Pirsig says, "And you won't see this one until you're ready to see." I never realized that I was canny enough in my youth to recognize the importance of that response by Pirsig. That is the appropriate response for Pirsig, about opening up his philosophical doors, because of the importance of mysticism. What was lost to me for a long time was how heavily that response rests on that visual metaphor. And what has also lain dormant, but is now obvious through and in this picture of somebody who once recapitulated Pirsig with more heart than I do now, is how Pirsig's cranky, obtuse, curmudgeonly stance that is well displayed by his Baggini interview is a direct outcome of that visual metaphor. People just don't see. It's so simple to see it, and yet they just don't. They stare right through it, in fact. The trouble with seeing is that you can never talk about "it", you can only show it to people.

I understood that somehow in my youth. I'll never know why "The Tree" ends where it does, why I didn't write more. But I suspect it was because I never saw. I understood that it all hinged on me seeing, but when I got to the part where Pirsig would now describe what I and he see--I couldn't do it because I didn't see. I probably didn't know it then, but it was probably by writing this little allegory, and getting to that point at which I couldn't write anymore, that forced me down the road I've travelled down. It's as if I kept trying to finish "The Tree" with everything that I wrote up until the point at which I stopped and started to wonder if it ever could be finished. The way I read it now, to finish that story is to fulfill the dreams of Plato, of metaphysics, to encapsulate Quality with a ceiling instead of the Dynamic, open sky.

That's, ultimately, what's so wrong with the mystic's ocular metaphor. If they actually saw, they would be fulfilling Plato, not refuting him.