Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency

*NOTE* The internal page links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

I.	Madness
II.	Menus and Maps
III.	Tears
IV.	At a Loss for Words
V.	The Feeling of Reality
VI.	Madness and Directness as Contingency
VII.	Spiritual Exercises

Madness
I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality (think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those who are out of touch with reality. So who is right?

So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and thus occlude ourselves.

Menus and Maps
To do this, I will recur to two analogies used by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig’s most famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), did yeoman’s work in bridging typical Western divides between mysticism, art, science, and technology. Its success lay in combining a sophisticated genealogy of the modern scientific mind back to the Greek logos (in the vein Heidegger pioneered) with a down to earth mapping of that mind in the everyday lives of us passive technological consumers. Part of his success, in fact, lies in the fact that he is not a pioneer in any of the vast areas he rambles through, but rather in his vast powers of distillation, synthesis, and communication, using tropes that have floated through the public consciousness but now become welded together as part of a single thematic. As Emerson said, “the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.”[fn.2]

The two analogies I should like to use come from Pirsig’s second book, Lila. The first establishes for Pirsig the mystic sense of reality he seeks to do justice to, which is difficult because for mysticism “the fundamental nature of reality is outside language”—“Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food” (72). What is nice about this figure is that it illustrates how the menu can get between you and the food. It also illustrates nicely the linguistic feature of what is between us and reality, and hooks up with the anxiety Plato inaugurated between onoma (name) and eidos (form) in which the lack of a link between the two eventually led to Saussurean declarations that language is conventional and thus arbitrary (because the names are instituted by us and not by reality).

Pirsig shifts his hold on this structural motif by moving to a second analogy: the map. Pirsig’s purpose in Lila is to create an alternative metaphysical understanding of reality (a “Metaphysics of Quality,” or MoQ) to the dominant understanding, which he calls the “subject-object metaphysics” (SOM). One problem with SOM is that it can’t recognize itself as conventional, and thus cannot have an alternative. The SOM version of the history of inquiry is a gradual unfolding of the single, correct understanding of reality. Pirsig doesn’t want to avoid the notion of a “gradual unfolding,” but he does want to say that our metaphysical assumptions are due for an upgrade:

“saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but it’s every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Artic it’s the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.” (114-5)

Pirsig, following a conceptual move prepared for by Mill and James, implies rather that it is the utility of particular conventions that should weighed, instead of thinking of an omnivorous Convention that is whatever is correct. The latter leads to the unhelpful circular logic of “whatever is correct is the Convention; and the Convention is correct, so you must be wrong.” This short-circuits inquiry, for every trendsetter was wrong before they set the new right.

Tears
Pirsig’s alternative seeks to include both conventions and mystic reality (which we might define simply and antithetically as “not conventions”). It has to do so in something like this manner: “this conventional understanding of reality includes both an understanding of conventions and of not-conventions, but because understanding is conventional, it can only indicate obliquely where not-conventions are, i.e. at the breakages.”

This is where the power of the map analogy comes into its own, for the notion of a map moves to alleviate anxieties about arbitrariness by tying us to a surface. In Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality is the primordial, mystic reality from which all unfolds. After the unfolding begins, the locus of any individual object as this particular object is defined as a static pattern of Quality—a rock is an inorganic static pattern, a person an entire rainforest of patterns, at the top of which are our intellectual patterns of conventional understanding. These intellectual patterns are our map. The map qua map does not respond to its environment, the person does. And the person has a pencil, and can keep erasing and adding topographical marks to better negotiate the environment as the person sees fit given the person’s experience.

In the Kantian version of this analogy that Pirsig aims for, however, though we are reacting to the environment, our face is always planted in the map—our mind is conventional, constituted by/as intellectual patterns. So how does one account for the mystic reality, for not-conventions? Not-conventions, in Pirsig’s vocabulary, are Dynamic Quality. Following the old mystic saw about pointing at the moon, think of the mystic reality’s inclusion as the words “Dynamic Quality” written on the map with an arrow pointing at a tear in the map it is next to. This gives us a way of interpreting the diction of directness: when you “look” at Dynamic Quality, perceive the mystic reality, you are actually looking through the map at the ground below. This is one way of describing how Dynamic Quality helps one change the map to evolving circumstances: it describes how we must perceive a hole in which we can fill in new conventions. No tear, nothing new; nothing new, no evolution. On the analogy of maps, one central concern of Pirsig has been to write into our maps a notion of change, of openness, of the element that will always escape Platonic encapsulation (what I've previously called "Quality as an anti-essence").[fn.3] Pirsig wants to bring back down to earth the notion of mystic experience, and one way to do this is to begin the rapprochement at the level of what we all do everyday without thinking: occasionally modify our habits of interaction with the world according to a world that is not our habits.

If this seems to eliminate a lot of the spice of mysticism, I’d like to move back the other direction by considering two basic kinds of tear in the map: perceptual and conceptual. By “perceptual” I mean considerations of reaction based on a novel stimulus from our nonlinguistic environment. Western mysticism has filtered down to us in large part through the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, which is more or less analogous to Pirsig’s reaction to SOM. Consider the similarities between Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Pirsig’s apotheosis of nature and the landscape (Pirsig carries, in fact, on his trip in ZMM a copy of Walden). The modern notion of “aesthetic sublimity” developed by Edmund Burke and Kant came about at the same time as the rise of landscape art as a popular medium. As artisanal technological grasp increased, alongside the spread of democratic egalitarianism (which consequently led to the rise of a customary, polite society), anxieties over a mechanized, conventional life increased. In reaction, we began to conceive of “nature” as an alternative.[fn.4] Though this has had a long tradition in the West, encapsulated by Plato’s antithesis between phusis (nature) and nomos (convention) and Virgilian pastoral, our specifically modern notions are nearer in development. Nature was to be both loved and feared—the sublime, as Burke and Kant conceive it, is scary for the exact reason that it spills over our conventions. “Wild” nature can still kill you. And we can easily see what they mean. Consider the Grand Canyon: the common experience of it is as a “blowing away,” leaving a person “at a loss for words,” “stunned.” These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”[fn.5]

At a Loss for Words
We might call being “at a loss for words” the state of being unable to constitute linguistic meaning. Another kind of experience of the world aside from the perceptual, nonlinguistic variety is the conceptual or linguistic. If regular, conventional, routinized linguistic communication is based on the mutual, correct transference of “what I mean” to “I understand what you mean,” then we can understand a breakdown in communication as itself a kind of tear in the map of understanding. On the Eastern side, we might understand this as the purpose of a Zen koan, what the Greeks called an aporia (literally: “with no way out”). Socrates’ elenchus, his dialectical method of cross-examination, functioned by taking conventional meanings and driving a person using those meanings to their natural ends, where they crashed against walls of conflicting answers—and that was it. Our best accounts of Socrates are that he never moved beyond his professed ignorance, even if Plato did. Partly, no doubt, from his masterful and obsessive use of elenchus-directed-at-aporia, but partly too due to the mask of irony he always kept over him, one of the recurring descriptions of Socrates is of his strangeness: atopia, “being out of place.” Pierre Hadot says of Socrates, with adjectives every one of which link with what I’ve been talking about, “he is atopos, meaning strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, disturbing.” Hadot then quotes Theaetetus 149a: “I am utterly disturbing [atopos], and I create only perplexity [aporia].”[fn.6]

Socrates’ strangeness is distinctively in language. The tear in the fabric of the map that Socrates represents through irony is a linguistic tear—what has been described as his “silence” is a distinctive kind of linguistic silence, constituted only by the language that surrounds it.[fn.7] Alexander Nehamas heightens this tear when he emphasizes that the peculiarity of irony is that it does not simply “mean its opposite,” but rather more difficultly “not this.”[fn.8] Socrates will always remain a mystery because we will never know what he meant because he never came out from behind his mask. In fact, Nehamas argues that it is the irony—the mask that hides meaning—that produces his reality to us:

“Incomprehensible and opaque, to his author as well as to us, Plato’s early Socrates has acquired solidity and robustness few literary characters can match. That is why he appears more real than fictional. Plato’s implicit admission that he does not understand him, his amazing success in reproducing Socrates’ irony not only toward his interlocutors but also toward himself, is the mechanism that explains why generations of readers have inevitably returned to these texts, convinced that they provide a transparent window that opens directly onto the light of reality.”[fn.9]

The Feeling of Reality
How can this be? How can a conventional creation feel real? This conundrum for literary artists gives us a good window onto the general problem of conventions and mysticism. For “reality” becomes a creation. “Reality” becomes something people sense, and the pattern of that sense becomes the earmarks of a conventional understanding of reality. The gradual unfolding of a better conventional articulation of our sense of reality is partly what a metaphysics is for. As Nehamas points out, we have come to see that it is because Socrates is ultimately unclassifiable, which is to say something that will always escape classification, that we feel he is real, a “transparent window.” This gives us a sense of reality as unpredictable—Socrates lives like a real person because like them he will respond to you occasionally in ways you did not expect.

Frank Kermode charts something analogous to this in narrative fiction. Narrative fiction functions on plot, on the “transformation of mere successiveness” into a meaningful temporal unfolding. The latter is “our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future.”[fn.10] Mere chronicity, the mere succession of one damn thing after another (as the old bit about history goes), has no meaning: it is just one thing after another. What creates meaning is a tie between one thing happening and another, causal or otherwise. This creates a past, and as human life moves forward in time, we are always looking forward to another thing happening, and not just any thing (like the endless myriad of occurrences we don’t even register as happening to us everyday) but something we are tied to.

Plot, however, is something artists create: it is a convention. Human meaning, once again, becomes conventional. Kermode recognizes this pattern and calls chronicity, “mere successiveness,” our human sense of reality. As I said, the amount of things we don’t notice and tie are infinitely greater than that which we do, and those unnoticed parts are the overflow of reality over the borders of our conventions. As human culture has progressed, we’ve become more self-conscious about how we are creating the meaning, and this stage is “marked by an understanding that this play of consciousness over history, this plot making, may relieve us of time’s burden only by defying our sense of reality.”[fn.11] So our articulated conventions of meaning “will be humanly serviceable as models only if they pay adequate respect to what we think of as ‘real’ time, the chronicity of the waking moment.”[fn.12] At the same time, we cannot go too far the other way, and Kermode marks both with metaphors of madness. “Schizophrenics can lose contact with ‘real’ time, and undergo what has been called ‘a transformation of the present into eternity.’”[fn.13] This is the collapse of temporally demarcated moments into one single enduring moment, eternity. But too: “To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane.”[fn.14] To see no connections is to behave like no normal person, to function without meaning.[fn.15]

Madness and Directness as Contingency
Partly as a response to triumphalist stories of all kinds, especially of liberalism and its converse Marxism, Foucault theorized and attempted to write his intellectual histories in a way to emphasize the disjuncts, the radical ruptures, of history—to eliminate the connections other histories emphasized. In a Kuhnian vocabulary, this gave the sense of paradigms shifting from one to another for no internal reason (a misunderstanding once foisted on Kuhn that he always had difficulty rubbing away). In an Aristotelian vocabulary, it reinjected what were seemingly accidental features of the essence of a subject (like the history of psychiatry or jails) and showed how they played a live role in their constitution and evolution. In Rorty’s jargon, Foucault emphasized the contingency of events on vast vicissitudes that are only uncovered by the use of a particular vocabulary—and now, after years of recorded history, we can see quite clearly how these particular vocabularies come and go and uncover and recover (both senses) new and old things. Rorty once said that Foucault gives you “a kind of know-how, a way of looking askance and obliquely at contemporary institutions and practices.”[fn.16]

If we put together Kermode’s sense of “mere successiveness” as a kind of madness with this sense of contingency, I think we have a philosophical map for what directness is in the map analogy. What is often qualified as “brute” or “sheer” contingency is the impress of the unclassifiable—you have never encountered it before, but you must encounter it. A vocabulary, on the Kantian version of the map analogy, plots (topographically and in Kermode’s narrative sense) what you see, what you are aware of, but moments of evolution are moments when the map breaks down, when something tears itself through the map unavoidably into your sight.

All of this emphasis on the metaphor of vision will make many post-Heideggerians suspicious (a well-earned suspicion). If we shift from the mode of considering both perceptual and conceptual rifts in a vocabulary (in which it makes perfect sense to say that the sight of the Grand Canyon startles you), we can consider Rorty’s way of describing conceptual contingency: metaphor. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty famously follows Shelley in saying that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”[fn.17] Rorty expands this notion of poet (Greek for “maker”) to include any “person who uses words as they have never before been used.”[fn.18] This allows him to follow Nietzsche in seeing intellectual history as “the history of metaphor.”[fn.19] So—what is a metaphor? Rorty here follows Davidson in describing metaphor as sheer noise—complete meaninglessness.[fn.20] Pure noise is sheer contingency, a linguistically unclassifiable experience. You can talk about noises, of course, but they don’t mean anything in the sense that you can’t talk with noise. However: talking about the noises, and increasingly with them—as in using them for particular purposes—crushes the metaphor under the weight of intelligibility, thus eventually making it a “dead metaphor” (like the foot of a mountain or the mouth of a river or the purity of a soul). Metaphors, like irony, are linguistic silences, tears in the fabric of meaning, dynamic introductions into a static topography. In terms of our map analogy, the death of the metaphor is the sewing up of the tear in our map, the dynamic, new classification used to pattern our experience.

There’s a sense, then, in which we’ve now classified the mystic tear in reality, or in Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality. But what kind of classification is this? I called Quality an anti-essence before, and even in the limited Aristotelian sense in which we can still get mileage out of referring to irrelevant accidents, Quality is still an anti-essence: the sense of directness mystics are talking about is that sense in which your sense of relevance changes, in which you notice that which you had previously been blind to. Quality, in another way, is a pure metaphor: so new that it startles, but always just that—the new that startles, the new that calls for attention. If we have a handle on the reality the mystics are concerned about, it is only in the sense of knowing that it is out there, potentially just around the corner, waiting to leap out at us.

Spiritual Exercises
This leads me to the function of mystic practices, which include such sentential attitudes as Zen koans. These practices are what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” Hadot, in turn, links the notion of a spiritual exercise to the Greek Christian term askēsis, which means in that context (in Harold Bloom’s version) “self-purgation” or (in Hadot’s) “self-transformation.”[fn.21] In Bloom’s ratios of poetic anxiety-management, an askēsis is the willed curtailment of oneself. One does this, as a poet (always remembering Rorty’s widened understanding), to avoid simply being the repetition of a previous, powerful poet. This, I believe, is the same basic premise of what Eastern traditions call “beginner's mind.”[fn.22] If we are thrown into the world and socialized, then one way to understand the process of individualizing ourselves to break free of the happenstance education we received is to empty ourselves of that which we’ve learned.

If we think of a literal, perspicuous sentence—a sentence that has a “clear meaning”—as having an inferential path from this particular sentence to another (from the first sentence to its meaning, a second sentence), then we can think of poetic metaphor as a moment of dynamic self-creation, a moment in which all of your education fails you and you are allowed/forced to supply something for yourself. For the sentence “love is a battlefield” has no single clear meaning—many paths are available. And even more, “blue is a tree”—what on earth could that mean? The purpose of a mantra in meditation is to help clear your mind, to eliminate it, by saying a phrase over and over until it loses meaning, until what used to be sounds that had meaning become pure sounds, phonemes qua phonemes, not phonemes qua words. And in that moment, when it loses all public meaning, it attains total private meaning for you and you alone, a completely inarticulate meaning lost the moment you turn to articulate it. The practice of attaining inarticulate meanings is thus a purely private exercise—or rather, an exercise of achieving pure privacy. The public benefit of such inarticulate meanings are not the same as those meanings we get from such sentences as “God is Love” or “America is Freedom,” for an inarticulate meaning is nontransferable. Its only public benefit is on the life of the person as a whole. The notion of “inarticulate meaning” is about as close as we are going to get to a meaningful notion of ineffability, which when push comes to shove is the last conceptual bastion of the mystic notion of reality.

Endnotes

[1]E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 70-75—and the whole chapter, “The Blessings of Madness,” generally—is invaluable on the Greeks.

[2]Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series

[3]See "Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston," particularly para. 6-8. For "Platonic encapsulation," see ZMM, 388. For an early use in an exposition of a couple Rorty essays, where I articulate some qualms I had about Pirsig's position, see "Hediegger, Dewey, Pirsig" (I'm not sure I still have these qualms). See also my "Introduction to Pirsig" for a short exposition of what I take to be his philosophical fundamentals (in terms of theses he holds, at least).

[4]This summary discussion is indebted to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. In particular, on landscape painting see 88-90 and his discussion of Tench Coxe that builds up to his emblematic discussion of Carlyle’s disgust with mechanism 162-80.

[5]Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. This famous passage that Rorty popularized as “breaking the crust of convention” occurs at the end of his chapter, “Search for the Great Community,” in describing the place of the artist in the community.

[6]Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 30. See also his Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158. John McDowell translates this as “What they do say is that I’m very odd, and that I make people feel difficulties.” Cornford as: “the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.”

[7]Stanley Fish argues in an analogous way about freedom of speech and first amendment law in the eponymous essay in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Part of Fish’s point is that if silence (i.e., the mystic reality for our purposes) is surrounded by intelligibility, then unintelligibility/silence surrounds intelligibility: “Without restriction, without an inbuilt sense of what it would be meaningless to say or wrong to say, there could be no assertion and no reason for asserting it. The exception to unregulated expression is not a negative restriction but a positive hollowing out of value—we are for this, which means we are against that—in relation to which meaningful assertion can then occur. It is in reference to that value—constituted as all values are by an act of exclusion—that some forms of speech will be heard as (quite literally) intolerable” (103-4). Compare this flip-flop perspective on meaning and unintelligibility to my description of Dynamic Quality as a tear in the map and Pirsig’s picture of Dynamic Quality as surrounding the static patterns in his SODV,13.

[8]The first three chapters of Nehamas’s brilliant The Art of Living are about the different kinds of irony at work in the Platonic dialogues, but see especially on this particular kind 52-7.

[9]Nehamas, The Art of Living, 91. When Harold Bloom discusses the aesthetic power of particular characters he describes them in the same kind of way, as remaining hidden from their authors, which like Nehamas is what then makes them appear more real, as living, breathing personalities than other kinds of characters. The common denominator is that the creation cannot be reduced to this or that description, something always escapes, is unclassifiable. The ability to represent the unrepresentable is the ultimate task, on a Bloomian aesthetics, of every artist—once a culture has learned how to encapsulate a figure or a text it becomes a “period piece.” This is why Bloom argues, for example, that Shakespeare is our mind and that he has not found his “reader”: to be the mind is to do the reading, and to “read” in this sense would be to reduce and thus to kill what was living and irreducible.

[10]Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 46

[11]Kermode, 57

[12]Kermode, 54

[13]Kermode, 55

[14]Kermode, 57

[15]I would go further and argue that, for all practical purposes, the notion of continued "pure immediacy" is both a feeling of eternity and "mere successiveness." This is too large a subject to wade into, but see my discussion of Wyndham Lewis in "Lewis and Ulysses" about what I call "fish-blink" time. See too my discussion of Jameson in "Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia" for another metaphorical use of schizophrenia and the linked notions of intelligibility and unintelligibility.

[16]Rorty, “Reply to Jacques Bouveresse” in ed. Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, 149

[17]From the close of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.” Rorty does not explicitly refer to Shelley in this regard in CIS, but it was undoubtedly on his mind and became an explicit invocation in his writings at the end of his life.

[18]Rorty, CIS, 28

[19]Rorty, CIS, 16. The allusion to Nietzsche is of course to his famous passage about truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” (Portable Nietzsche, 46).

[20]For the Davidsonian account of metaphor, see CIS 18-9 and the longer defense in “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” in ORT.

[21]See his essay “Spiritual Exercises” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, particularly 82. See also the chapter “Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse” in his What Is Ancient Philosophy? If we were to embark on an attempt to distinguish between theoretical exercises and spiritual exercises (such that we take on Nehamas’s note that philosophy is a way of life that includes the having of theoretical theses—see The Art of Living, 1-6), we will want to take note of Hadot’s suggestion that physics, for the Greeks, was a spiritual exercise and not an attempt for greater control (even predictive) over nature. This is one issue that animates Hans Blumenberg’s attempt to demarcate the ancient Greek from the medieval, and thence the modern. See especially his discussion of Epicurus in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 145-79.

[22]See ZMM, 291-3.

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):

“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.

“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.”

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.

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).

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.

Cartesian Epistemology, or Incorrigibility as the Mark of Something

There’s an early essay by Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology” (1970), that I think marks the point at which Rorty figured out that he had to write PMN and how he would do it. The paper serves to point in the same general direction and uses the same style of partial historical, argumentative narrative and partial contemporary engagement of issues. The paper is, for the most part (like most of Rorty’s earlier papers, though probably more so), entirely replaceable by PMN . . . but essays are so much shorter. And, in my experience, Rorty has a way of saying the same thing over and over again in rarely the same way. Each experience opens you up to new angles. I’m not going to lie and say that I can reread every single piece of his writing with relish, but for being predominately a self-acknowledged one-note Nelly, he has the surprising capacity to hold your attention throughout most of his corpus of writing. I’m not sure the same can be said for many others. But then again, maybe I just have the same obsessive interests as he does and like hearing that one same thing over and over again. At any rate, I’d like to take that earlier paper and use it to help illuminate a portion of Pirsig that has always gotten my panties in a bunch.

First, I shall present Rorty’s six claims he hopes to make:

1. A necessary condition for participating in ontological discussion during what I shall call the ‘Cartesian period’ was that an answer be given to the question: Given that we have incorrigible knowledge only of the contents of our minds, how is it that we can know about anything else?

2. The paradigm of an answer to this question was the claim that the nature of the object of knowledge—reality as opposed to appearance—was different than either common sense or science conceived it.

3. The justification for the existence of ontology as a distinct discipline came to be the fact that neither science nor common sense could offer an adequate reply to the epistemological sceptic. Giving such a reply became the paradigm of what it was to do philosophy.

4. The refusal of many contemporary philosophers to take seriously the suggestion that reality is different from either common sense’s or science’s picture of it is due to the fact that they no longer accept or find it necessary to answer the epistemological sceptic.

5. The reasons why this premise is no longer accepted can be traced back to the abandonment of certain more general principles.

6. These principles are such that, once they are accepted, it is not clear why there need be a discipline called ‘ontology’ over and above empirical science. The justification of the existence of such a discipline thus requires to be rethought. (275, emphasis his)

The first thing I should note is Rorty’s use of common sense and science. These were his earlier years and I do not think that he’s suggesting that only science gives us knowledge, or some such thing. The object of his attack is the notion that there is a special discipline called “philosophy” (or ontology, in this case) that gives us a special kind of knowledge that only it can give us, something different than what we gain from physics, sociology, literary criticism, or walking down the street.

The second thing I should note is that Pirsig doesn’t seem to obviously fit in this schematic of claims. There are three reasons: 1) it isn’t obvious that Pirsig is practicing a discipline called “ontology” that is over and above anything, and this because 2) Pirsig doesn’t consider offering a reply to the epistemological sceptic to be a big deal, and this because 3) Pirsig doesn’t talk about something called the “mind” a lot. Pirsig really doesn’t have a philosophy of mind, just as it would be curious to say that he has a philosophy of language. He has latent views about mind and language, but he doesn’t spend time constructing a large view of the subject that hooks up to other views and can be used to rebut perceived criticisms. However, time and time again I find things in the philosophy of mind and language that make me think of Pirsig, but not always in a good way. In particular, it’s Pirsig’s notion of “immediate experience” that always raises my hackles. “Immediacy” is notorious for causing philosophical problems. With respect to the above, it’s Pirsig’s attendant claim that the value that is immediately experienced is known with absolute certainty. (Lila, 76) This certainty is a mark of the mental, of mind, that Rorty popularized as “incorrigibility.” But if Pirsig doesn’t obviously have an extensive notion of the mind (let alone a problematic one), what is a problematic mark of the mental doing in Pirsig’s account (Rorty has said that incorrigibility is ­the only property of the mind that can make it problematic, or at least make epistemology seem necessary)? What is it doing? Is it problematic?

I think it can be, but it all depends on how it is put to use. For instance, in Pirsig’s example the notion of us being certain about our experience is completely commonsensical. Of course we are going to be absolutely certain of whatever value-experience we have with the stove. The trouble is when Pirsig pushes this certainty into other services. Pirsig will eventually want to claim that mystics shouldn’t be ignored because they have direct experience with Quality. And, in fact, this direct experience carries with it the full weight of being absolutely certain knowledge because it was an immediate, direct experience. This is where things become problematic. For instance, if somebody says that they see water, should we believe them? What if you’re in a desert and it turns out to be a mirage? What happens to the absolute certainty? By using such an example we should notice how far the certainty extends: not very far at all. If the person who saw water was being sincere, then we can say that they were absolutely certain that they saw water, or even that they did actually experience the sight of water. It turns out, however, that they were wrong. They didn’t experience the sight of water, they experienced an optical illusion. This is what I’ve called the shibboleth problem: when do we believe the mystic? Do we believe all mystics? How do we tell the Lao-tzus from the gun-toting, compound nut-jobs (aside from the guns)? They both claim a direct relation, so how do we tell?

There are obvious, pragmatic answers to this (like the guns), but they burn a hole in the binding of “immediate experience” with “absolute certainty” that Pirsig affects, which then destroys the reason he gives for including formerly excluded mystics. I think the bridge can be built again to include mystics, but I think a different route needs to be taken.

I'm not going to explore this particular issue further, but I’d like to bridge back to the Rorty essay. The claim I’d like to make is that it would appear that when Pirsig makes claims about the exclusion of mystics, which hinge on a problematic mark of the mental, he’s tripped into doing a special discipline called ontology.

Here’s Rorty:

The mind-body problem is an offspring of the theory that knowledge consists in the having of certain representations of reality (including perceptual ones), by the subject. As [Wallace] Matson has recently pointed out [in “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?”], the Greeks had a soul-body problem but not a mind-body problem—or, at least, not the mind-body problem which has bothered philosophers from Descartes to Feigl. Before this mind-body problem can be made to seem urgent (as Matson also notes) one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of. Once one believes all this, one will have to grant the existence of a realm to contain the objects of immediate awareness. This will be the Mind, or the Subject qua Subject. Psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism. In the great systems of the Cartesian period, the primary task of ontology was to get the Subject and the Object back together. Solutions to the mind-body problem appear as simple corollaries to solutions of the Problem of Knowledge.

Thus the ontologies of almost every important non-sceptical philosophy from Spinoza to Russell consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same. The concomitance of the modes of the two known attributes of Spinoza’s God, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz’s monads, the variations on what Austin calls ‘the ontology of the sensible manifold’ (Berkeley, Kant, Russell), the perfect union of appearance and reality in Hegel’s or Royce’s Absolute, and Whitehead’s panpsychism are so many ways of showing that if you know enough about the sort of thing you are directly aware of (the contents of your mind) you will know everything there is to know about everything. In short, the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects—a redescription which would not have been thought necessary had not the original claim about direct awareness been swallowed. (278-279, emphasis his)

I want to point out the family resemblances between Pirsig and what is said here. First is the claim that “psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism.” While it isn’t immediately apparent that Pirsig carries with him a notion of representation (though I have my suspicions about that, partially articulated here) or that he practices a special discipline called ontology, it should be clear that his direct/indirect distinction is some sort of epistemology, some sort of claim about knowledge and knowing, and that the Dynamic/static distinction which houses the direct/indirect distinction seems to be more than an epistemological distinction. While Pirsig wouldn’t seem to have a psychophysical dualism, the Dynamic/static dualism does deal with “stuff,” what is real, such that we have “things” on one side and “no-thing” on the other (Paul Turner has been working on disentangling Pirsig’s epistemology from his metaphysics). These are pulled together in a muddle which can produce weird effects.

Second, when Rorty says that to engender the mind-body problem “one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of,” notice that while Pirsig doesn’t seem to be hampered by the mind-body problem, he is hampered by both of these notions: we are immediately aware of Dynamic Quality and the things we want to know about are what we are not immediately aware. All things are housed under static patterns—that which we are only indirectly aware.

And third, while Pirsig has rejected claims that Quality is similar to Hegel’s Absolute, one can see here why they were offered. In ZMM, Pirsig takes the Subject/Object divide and shows how they are not divided in Quality—thus fulfilling “the primary task of ontology” of getting the “Subject and Object back together.” There is an immediate difference in that Pirsig is in some sense saying that the divide is illusory, that Quality is primary and the divide is secondary, not the other way around which engenders the problems. This is important and, I think, right. But look at what else Rorty says about these ontologies: they all “consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same.” They are all Quality. And Rorty suggests further that “the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects”. Before Pirsig, “quality” was thought to be something that humans had or found, not something that rocks had. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think that critics of Pirsig would call his saying that Quality is Reality is anthropomorphic, a subjectivizing of reality.

These family resemblances begin to mount up. But, hey, Rorty himself obviously has many family resemblances to such despicable characters as the logical positivists. However, I think Pirsig’s family resemblances collude to produce the Myth of the Given. Pirsig’s claim that static patterns are what are deduced from the immediately apprehended Dynamic Quality seem to me to produce the idea that we are Given something completely untainted by language or distinctions or anything else we might do to it, some unblemished content, to which all of our dealings with it, linguistic and such, are the persistence of a certain scheme. Pirsig thinks that our current cultural scheme is unjustly giving mystics the short shrift and that if we got back to the content, we would be able to create a better scheme (see Pirsig’s comments about “cultural immune systems” in chapter 4 of Lila).

This cuts back to what I was saying about how far the absolute certainty of touching a stove or seeing water goes. Rorty calls his Sellarsian thesis the Principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility:

That a given sentence is used to express incorrigible knowledge is not a matter of a special relation which holds between knowers and some object referred to by this sentence, but a matter of the way in which the sentence fits into the language of a given culture, and the circumstances of its user, at a given time. (282, italics his)

Again, not immediately applicable given that Pirsig isn’t motivated by the epistemological sceptic. I think that this is good, but I think we can still see him in these lines. First, with incorrigibility—we gain our absolute certainty by our special relation to Dynamic Quality. And second, Rorty’s linguistic alternative makes knowledge internal to a language game and Pirsig would prima facie reject that because we directly know Dynamic Quality before any language. The differences between these two treatments of incorrigibility are summed up later by Rorty: “The importance of the principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility is that it undercuts the attempt to discover this nature by casting doubt on the first move which the sceptic makes—namely, to have found some case of knowledge which is a clearer case than others, and is thus a clue to the essence of what it is to be knowledge. It causes this by saying that the cases in which ‘doubt plays no role’ are cases in which we do not let doubt play a role, not cases in which we are in a different natural state.” (283, emphasis his)

Why Rorty should say “the sceptic’s first move” I’ll skip over. Pirsig isn’t interested in finding the essence of knowledge, but he is interested in being more Dynamic. Dynamic Quality is obviously the kind of “clearer case than others” when compared to static patterns. Dynamic Quality is direct, static patterns are only indirect. The direct knowledge of Dynamic Quality is better and replaces the indirect knowledge of static patterns (the resemblance to the appearance/reality distinction should be apparent). It does this because we don’t doubt it. Its high or low Quality is absolutely certain. However, what of the guy in the desert? In Rorty’s case, it makes perfectly good sense to absolutely believe the guy you see put his hand on the flaming stove when he tells you that he’s absolutely certain that his hand experienced low Quality. However, it also makes perfectly good sense to have some doubt when the guy in the desert says he sees water. Because of our circumstances of being in a desert, though the linguistic cue of “I see…” tells us that he’s absolutely certain he is seeing something, we let doubt play a role. It’s not clear how this is to pan out in Pirsig’s philosophy. It seems perfectly reasonable that Pirsig could frame incorrigibility the same way as Rorty does. All this means is that the person who’s experiencing X has changed his beliefs in a certain way (experiencing a hot stove, the sight of water, the hearing of a good Republican argument). What it doesn’t mean is that everybody else has to change their beliefs (or static patterns) just because the other person did. The absolute certainty, and particularly not the experience of high or low value, doesn’t travel that far. As I suggested before, however, this is damaging to the way Pirsig claims that mystics have been left out of the conversation of mankind. I think one should toss Pirsig’s particular argument. I think that argument tries to put commonsensical distinctions to philosophical use, which is the way philosophical problems are created. Pirsig is better when he is seen as dissolving philosophical problems and suggesting cultural criticism, not using a philosophical apparatus to tell us that we have to do something. Some of the tools Pirsig leaves lying around are good for some purposes, but bad for others.

Introduction to Pirsig

A little belatedly, but I thought I might provide an introduction to the namesake of my little blogthingy I got going on here. I'm simply going to present what I take to be Pirsig's main philosophical suggestions.

Pirsig's first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, presents his "Quality thesis". This thesis has many sides, but it comes out of a reaction to the dominant subject/object distinction in post-Cartesian modern philosophy. Pirsig sees quite rightly that if we dissolve the dichotomy between the knowing subject and the known object that we end up with a play of values. Pirsig's way of getting there is to attack the Greek idea that our primary relationship to reality is one of knowing. Pirsig asserts, rather, that our primary relationship is one of valuing, and that everything else falls from there.

What this thesis ends up meaning from "there," however, is disputed to a certain extent. Some people are content to follow Pirsig in offering a broad, general onto-cosmological view of reality centered around the undefinable "Quality." I consider such views to be occasional poems with a determinate subject matter that are potentially beautiful, but generally shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because if they are taken seriously (as Pirsig and most of those who do write and enjoy such poetry), they turn back into the Platonic philosophy of knowing that Pirsig was trying to get rid of. When it comes to philosophical theses (of the kind that get bandied about in professional circles), Pirsig should be seen as only offering negative ones against a predominate image of philosophy--Subject-Object Metaphysics.

One of the theses that Pirsig presciently sides up with in ZMM and continues in Lila is that of historicism. Pirsig suggests that we are situated in history, in a continuing conversation with "ghosts of history" that produces what we call knowledge: "the building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues". In the cosmological poem to reality that Pirsig offers us in Lila, he adds an important nuance--the distinction between static and Dynamic. Our static patterns of value are broken by Dynamic Quality, those crazy new things that we sometimes just instinctively feel are better. If these crazy new things end up being better, then they leave behind in their wake new static patterns, which eventually become the new crust of convention that Pirsig, like Dewey before him, suggested we should always be ready to break through.

The importance of the connection between Pirsig's Quality thesis and his historicism is that the move from knowing to valuing moves us from essentialism to relationalism. No longer do we have objects with an essence that we can know. Instead, we have "objects" that are constituted by the layerings of value placed upon them. And since any "subject" doing the valuing is also a collection of these layers of placed value, we invite a kind of panrelationalism in which any "object," or "subject," or more generally, any "thing" we differentiate from any other "thing" is defined by its relations to every "thing" it's being differentiated from (including what's doing the differentiating).

This is why the static/Dynamic distinction becomes very helpful in Pirsig's later philosophy. All objects are static patterns of value of some kind. A static pattern of value is a repetitive way of valuing some "object," but since all there is to this "object" are those repetitive valuings, we call the locus of those valuings the "object" and name it, e.g., a "rock" or a "molecule" or an "electron." However, the relations between things change over time. Sex changed biology. The Greeks changed politics. The Romantics changed the way we create ourselves. All of those things changed the way things were previously done and are retrospectively viewed as progressive (namely because they allowed the other things after them to occur). But more importantly, we must become historicists after renouncing essentialism because essentialism held up the ideal of being rational by correctly identifying objects with particular amounts of intrinsic value. By rejecting essentialism, we reject the idea of intrinsic value and so reconstitute the process of valuing (and the rationality of it) as an historical process of advancing betterness. A break in the old patterns of valuing is defended, sometimes only retrospectively, by the betterness accrued in the new patterns, and betterness can only assessed by other old patterns being left in place. Eventually, it is theoretically possible that we may tear down so many of these old patterns that there are none left that we could identify with, essentially making us a new form of life. But as long as we can tell a story of progressive betterness, of how we got from there to here, we can be rational and avoid the charge of nihilism often attributed to those who deny essentialism.

There are a lot more facets to Pirsig's philosophy, and even more to his writings. But I take the above to be basic to the position in philosophical space that Pirsig occupies. While I don't think a whole lot cosmologically follows from the above, I do think think that it breaks down Plato as Pirsig wished to do.

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.