1. Neo and retro — Rorty’s branding; 2. Pragmatism, radical empiricism, and the experience of life — Rorty’s 1st argument: why are we forced to use “experience”? — Myth of the Given and being forced — No force, no argument; 3. Rorty’s 2nd (non-)argument: “experience” is so passé — The linguistic turn did some good; 4. Varieties and the metaphysics of feeling — Getting turned on by religious experience — Metaphysics and asceticism; 5. Making nonlinguistic bliss accessible — Bliss from reading — Ecumenicism and ineffability
1. I define “retropragmatism” as a recent species of pragmatism that hopes to help, in Barry Allen’s phrase, turn back the linguistic turn. [1] I think such a term is helpful to differentiate it from “classical pragmatism,” which we should reserve for the historical moment now well past. For what usually marks retropragmatists is a disciplish veneration for the classical Peirce, James, and Dewey in contradistinction to their vehement dislike for the neopragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty. “Neopragmatism” was the term Morton White coined in Toward Reunion in Philosophy to house Quine in the pragmatist pantheon, and it has since come to be used to mark the rise of pragmatist theses in philosophers working in the analytic tradition, i.e. those taking the linguistic turn. The most famous, by far, of neopragmatists is Rorty, and the retropragmatists’ ire is markedly reserved for him, I think, principally because those outside of philosophy identify Rorty with the renascence of pragmatism and enthusiasm for James and Dewey—which those on the outside often identify with Rorty’s peculiar brand of James and Dewey. This pisses off those that had been toiling in the gardens of pragmatism these many years, particularly because Rorty’s version is certainly not the original.
I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding by retropragmatists, more or less rightly resentful of Rorty’s undue influence on the branding of PragmatismTM, of both Rorty and his position with respect to James and Dewey. On the side of the man, the emotions churned up by personal allegiance are, in the end I think, a necessary component of intellectual thinking. One might have expected someone in my position to say that such attitudes are “regrettable,” and they are in this case, but pragmatists have to think a little differently about the general role of such solidarity and eros. As Rorty glosses James, “there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings” (PSH 148). I don’t think we’ve yet gotten to the bottom of what this claim entails, about only being obligated to each other, and particularly about the role of what James called “our passional nature,” but this isn’t the philosophical problem I want to address here. [2] The reason I do, however all that, think resentment of Rorty on this score is regrettable is that Rorty was too humble a person for such attitudes to find a home. Rorty was happy that he could play a role in pragmatism’s rise at the end of the 20th century, but he was always deferential about what the gross effect was of his work. I don’t think he wanted people to think his brew of pragmatism was the one marketed by James and Dewey. I think, from beginning to end, he always felt awkward about accepting accolades for having done something people admired, and particularly for being pinpointed as an originator or powerful force of some idea or in some movement. Getting this sense about the man, however, requires rutting around in his writings for quite a while, and in the end—though as I shall be saying towards the end, this is actually not the case—our response to Rorty personally matters less than the position Rorty dug out in the pragmatist trenches. [3]
2. The best way of isolating the difference between retropragmatists and neopragmatists is wondering about the relationship between, as James distinguished them, pragmatism and radical empiricism. Retropragmatists generally see an indelible link between the two, whereas neos not so much. So while neos would rather dump the radical empiricism as an unnecessary (or even pernicious) adjunct, retros think that without radical empiricism, pragmatism has its kneecaps shot. This is the common way retros express their distaste for analytic philosophy, generally—where did the experience of life go? There’s a lot of that old-timey “love of wisdom” nostalgia built into many of these appeals to experience, or rather the demand that our philosophical vocabularies give pride of place to “experience.” Some of the differences between retros and neos are hard to repair because it seems somewhat attitudinal, or perhaps methodological. For example, retros would really rather insist on saying “appeal to experience.” However, the neos don’t know how to talk philosophy without narrowing in on the actual terms we use to erect our philosophies, and so insist that, rather than deciding the issue by how much one talks about “one’s experience” (whose experience? Yours? Mine? Do we need to do surveys? How do we make sure the all-important “experience of life” is injected in our philosophy?), we talk about the kind of vocabulary we use to do philosophy. So that’s why I say attitudinal and methodological—neopragmatists insist we not conflate the experience of life with something as expensive sounding as “radical empiricism,” and so debate the merits of the ism separately from other issues surrounding our philosophical performance, but retropragmatists are suspicious of conceding the point (probably because of the vague whiff of irony surrounding my earlier handling of philosophia), while yet eager to lock horns over that ism.
Rorty’s only ever had two basic arguments to wield against radical empiricism, and so against retaining the term “experience” in one’s philosophical vocabulary (the modifier “philosophical” is important here, and often neglected in considering Rorty’s position). The first is implicit in “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (in CP), which begins with the citation of evidence that the master agreed with his rebellious disciple—Dewey’s late-stage hope, expressed in a letter to Arthur Bentley, to rewrite Experience and Nature as Nature and Culture and his regret about the earlier book: “I was dumb not have seen the need for such a shift when the old text was written. I was still hopeful that the philosophic word ‘Experience’ could be redeemed by being returned to its idiomatic usages—which was a piece of historic folly, the hope I mean.” Most of “Dewey’s Metaphysics” revolves around Rorty’s argument against method, and hence metaphysics-as-foundational. However, the piece of historic folly, I think, is created by Dewey’s hope to produce “a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into mental and physical.” [5] So the first argument runs like this: if Dewey hadn’t been looking for a set of “generic traits,” he wouldn’t have convinced himself that he had to include any particular this or that, let alone “experience.” This is not an attack on the attainment of a synoptic vision, though—Rorty’s favorite definition of philosophy, that vague activity, was Wilfrid Sellars’ “seeing how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term” and right down to the end of his career he was bemoaning its absence on the American philosophical scene. [6] What Rorty rejects is the force of “had”—as a methodological point, we are never forced to use one term or vocabulary over another by anything except other people. So what neopragmatists need is a different argument for the use of “experience” than “you just have to because it’s just there, at the bottom of everything.” As David Lewis put it, incredulous stares are not arguments.
The root of this point is the Sellarsian rejection of the Myth of the Given. “Experiences,” or any other term of art for an unconceptualized bit, cannot force you to think of them in any particular way without being plugged into a network of concepts (i.e. a vocabulary). Meaningful content being just given in an experience is a resurrection of foundationalist empiricism, which the classical pragmatists all rejected (more or less). So against the demand that we use “experience” in our philosophical vocabularies, Rorty flips one coin with two sides: 1) you can’t force me to use it without relying on a foundational epistemology and 2) why would you want a metaphysics of generic terms if you aren’t going to hook it up to a foundationalist epistemology? [7]
Why, indeed—there’s a good answer to that question, but I won’t trail around to it until the end. For now, it’s enough to see that since retropragmatists want to avoid the Myth of the Given as much as the neos, they shouldn’t be able to force the term on us by way of epistemology or metaphysics, about how we know or what we know. But we should notice here, then, that Rorty’s argument against radical empiricism isn’t that it violates pragmatism’s antifoundationalism—it’s that one needs a different kind of reason for taking it up so as to avoid that possibility. One needs an answer for (2). And at the same time, Rorty hasn’t forwarded an argument against radical empiricism at all—if anything, it’s an argument against one particular way of being against the linguistic turn.
3. The only other argument Rorty’s forwarded against radical empiricism is quite like the first—not really an argument against it at all. This is the argument in “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” (in TP). It’s roughly this—“experience” is so passé. Some argument, right? For just as stares are not arguments, neither are yawns. Rorty notes in the opening pages of the essay, in a sociological manner, that “if one looks at the end of the twentieth century rather than at its beginning, one finds something of a renaissance of pragmatism, but no similar renaissance of panpsychism. The philosophers of today who speak well of James and Dewey tend to speak ill of Bergson. They tend to talk about sentences a lot, but to say very little about ideas or experiences…” (291). This is precisely what’s changing, but we still have here neither an argument for or against taking part in or resisting the shift. The reason Rorty thinks that “experience” is passé is because he thinks that the linguistic turn, on the whole, did some good for philosophy—that the linguistic turn played an important role in helping philosophers kick the incubus of representationalism. However, and this is key, Rorty does not perceive any necessary connection between talking about language and being an antirepresentationalist. He simply notes that Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson seem to have had an easier time turning the tide against an entire host what Dewey called “the whole brood and nest of dualisms” bequeathed us by the Greeks. [8]
So what’s the deal? Where’s the juice? As we should be able to see, both of these arguments boil down to thrusting the burden of proof onto retropragmatists and urging them to answer, “what’s the difference that makes a difference?” I think the trick is to turn from Dewey to James. If one focuses on Dewey, I think it’s hard to see what all the hoopla is about. This is because a metaphysics of generic terms sounds so boring—how or why would we get fired up about that? Only if you thought you had to do it, but we’ve chucked that consideration. However, if we turn to James, we can get a better idea of what’s exciting. For Dewey, using “experience” feels like a purely intellectual measure; for James, it feels experiential.
4. This is what we get out of a book like The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his late paper, “Some Inconsistencies in James’s Varieties,” [9] Rorty spends some time contrasting the James of “The Will to Believe” and Dewey of A Common Faith to the earlier James of Varieties, and particularly in retailing James’s ambiguities in how he uses “experience.” The main thing that comes out of the discussion, I think, is that what Rorty calls the “metaphysics of feeling” is the only good reason for thinking we need to risk the Myth of the Given (94). This is, essentially, Romanticism’s fire back across the bow of Enlightenment intellectualism. Rorty poses it as the corrective “to the metaphysics of cognition common to Hegel, [T. H.] Green, and Royce,” but rejects the idea that we need a metaphysics at all, a view about “what is real ‘in the completest sense of the term.’” The last phrase is from James’s conclusion: “so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (italics James’s). This is a fairly typical formulation of a notion of direct experience that people like Rorty find it hard to understand in a non-Myth of the Given sense. But perhaps even more dangerous is the notion of “completeness” in this context: what could our leverage be for knowing when we have it? One would need a substantive epistemological criterion with an attendant method for telling the difference, and that’s what Rorty spent most of his career debunking.
Rorty concludes by saying that if James doesn’t violate his own pragmatism by wielding “experience” as a weapon in metaphysical combat—something that would, because it is more “complete,” keep the slavering wolves of Freud and other external analyses of religious experience at bay—then this is tantamount to being “left wondering why we need bother with all those virtuosi” of religious experience that James elaborates in great detail, “whether the twenty Gifford lectures add anything to the twenty pages of ‘The Will to Believe’” (96). Why would we? Answering this question, I think, would be to move towards answering (2) above—why would we want a metaphysics of generic terms? Rorty, ironically enough, implicitly answers the question when he nevertheless “happily concedes” that Varieties “will continue to be read with profit for centuries to come.” Why would we read either The Varieties of Religious Experience or Experience and Nature? Because they turn us on. Rorty has repeatedly, throughout his career, articulated this ecumenical approach to life as a function of Mill’s formulation of “experiments in life” being the purpose of democracy in On Liberty. This is essentially an aesthetic attitude. However, it is an aesthetic attitude that is an ethical attitude, the same one Rorty urges toward James, that “exceptionally magnanimous man” whose Varieties, if read, “can help us become more like James, and thus help us become better people.” Why would we bother with all those virtuosi? Because “we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.” That is from the first chapter of Varieties, which Rorty quotes approvingly as the line of thought that would not have violated James’s pragmatism (91).
Rorty can’t quite get to the point of suggesting Experience and Nature because it not only doesn’t turn him on, but he also thinks it feeds our ascetic impulses, the kind of masochism that leads to Platonism and that Nietzsche diagnosed as just another will to power. A metaphysics of generic terms would be a list you try and pare away to get as small as possible. But why? Who cares if it is small? To so care in this context would be to associate Occam’s Razor with a method to get at Reality as It Really Is. That’s why Rorty thinks of systematic metaphysics as a suspicious activity. But that’s a cultural argument about a certain type of lebensform and how much, on balance, good it has done and might continue to do. And that’s still not an argument against “experience.” [10]
5. What I find most interesting about Rorty’s conclusion is that blind eye to James’s accomplishment in Varieties, which does not rest solely on the subtlety and generosity of the man’s mind and spirit. It is, as will become clear, an integral part of the achievement, but Rorty seems to suggest it’s the only thing interesting about it. However, what James does for a peculiar, modern lebensform—what Rorty variously calls “the ironist,” “the litterateur,” or “the intellectual”—is make an alternative, older though not quite incompatible lebensform accessible to it: James makes the nonlinguistic experience of bliss (what James, following the Romantics, calls “religious experience”) accessible to those who experience bliss primarily by reading. And what James, an extraordinary writer with an intense admiration for the ineffable, did for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of mystic experience, someone in the future might do for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of the multifarious forms of effing—call it, The Varieties of Reading Experience.
Until that day, one might think we could console ourselves with reading someone like Harold Bloom, a voluminous reader who in the last half of his career turned to the “common reader” as the last bastion of secular spiritual autonomy. But this actually won’t help completely because Bloom decidedly and self-consciously is deaf to some forms of writing—if it isn’t written with one’s spiritual autonomy as a primary foci imaginarius, then Bloom doesn’t care much in talking about it. [11] A true Varieties of Reading Experience would take us on a grand tour of literary history, and all the forms of writing and the experiences of reading adjunct to them, without apotheosizing any one particular form. It would be ecumenical to Homer, Euripides, Malory, Cervantes, Milton, Pope, Richardson, Radcliffe, Byron, Cooper, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Dreiser, Hemingway, Stevens—and if the point weren’t already too fine, I’d point out that we’d need to include Plato, Aquinas, Montaigne, Newton, Burckhardt, Pater, Freud, Weber, Bloom, and Richard Posner as well.
One interesting point we can make about this fantasy, though, is that the ecumenicism demonstrated by James toward the various religious traditions he treats and that of my fantasized book are the exact inverse of each other, and possibly properly so. To be ecumenical to ineffable experience is to make all the experiences, in some sense, the same—but to be properly ecumenical to effable experience, one needs to attend to the boundless differences. This might, as well, point to a connection between attraction to the ineffable and asceticism (or reduction) and attraction to the effable and romanticism (or proliferation). And this might be the reason Rorty prefers Dewey’s slim A Common Faith to James’s fat The Varieties of Religious Experience. While Dewey merely says religion is romance, James enacts it. And Rorty doesn’t think we should tempt ourselves to the ascetic anymore by making it look so romantic and enticing. Whatever asceticism we should have should be in our relationship to talking about it—just enjoy the bliss and stop effing telling us to stop effing.
Endnotes
[1] I say “help” because I get the sense that there is a much wider-spread movement to turn back the clock on analytic philosophy than just the species found in pragmatists. Since this is a broadly speaking “empiricist” reaction to analytic formalism, I cannot help but think that running parallel to a return to empiricist (foundational) metaphysics should make a pragmatist suspicious of the move, but then, an enduring tendency for pragmatists has always been to strike a more-empiricist-than-thou pose. I should also add that Allen, though formulating a number of powerful criticisms of linguistic-turn philosophy in his Knowledge and Civilization, wants little truck with a turn back to “experience.” Allen strikes a pose so reactionary that he’d turn us all the way back to before Plato formulated the quarrel between poets and philosophers—choosing instead the artisan as metaphorical unit for knowledge-production. This is a very interesting redescription of the philosophical landscape with powerful links to Dewey.
[2] Principally because I have only inchoate ideas about what to say about it as of yet. For an earlier discussion of Rorty’s “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” from which that line is drawn, see my "Rorty, Religion, and Romance."
[3] I would point to two things, however, to give some evidence, at least, of the claims I’ve just made. First, on the side of his deferential attitude, I don’t think Rorty was just blowing smoke in his “Comments on Sleeper and Edel” (1985) when, at a conference organized by the Peirce Society, he said, “I am grateful for the opportunity…, but I should begin by confessing that I am out of my depth in addressing this audience. Not only the people here with me on the platform, but practically everyone in this room has read more James and Dewey than I have, and read them more recently.” And secondly, on the side of his shyness about originality in particular, there’s the comment he makes shortly after in “Comments”—“I can only say that my references to pragmatism were an effort to acknowledge my own lack of originality rather than an attempt to make new bottles look good by claiming that they held old wine”—and his more interesting, personal reflection in the introduction to Truth and Progress: “Back in the sixties, when I was a thrusting young analytic philosopher, I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a star-studded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic – a conference from which he had just returned and the results of which he had been asked to sum up at the final session. ‘No trick at all,’ Hampshire explained, ‘for an old syncretist hack like me.’ At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up” (TP 10n5).
[4] I should add that the relative merits of “experience” in our philosophical vocabulary is not the only general point of divergence Rorty, in particular, has with the classical pragmatists. The other basic one is about the relative merits of “method” in our philosophical vocabulary. However, since obsession over method never really went out of style in American philosophical life, it isn’t really all that retro to disagree with Rorty on that point as well. See Rorty’s “Pragmatism without Method” in ORT. (The irony of this footnote should be clear by the end of the piece.)
[5] Dewey, Later Works, Vol. 1: Experience and Nature, 308; qtd in Rorty, CP, 73
[6] Cf. “How Many Grains Make a Heap?” in the London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2005.
[7] For another, earlier take on Sellars and Quine in relationship to the pressures of the retropragmatists, see my "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."
[8] Dewey, Middle Works, Vol. 12: Reconstruction in Philosophy, 271. For this Rortyan argument, see for example his “Twenty-Five Years Later” retrospective to his 1992 edition of The Linguistic Turn.
[9] In William James and a Science of Religions, edited by Wayne Proudfoot, 2004.
[10] The attitude I have about the relationship between experience and language is essentially the same as Richard Bernstein’s, but the direction with which I’ve pursued the problem (of the relationship) is the exact opposite as his. Both of us are concerned to see this as not a problem at all, but Bernstein’s route in The Pragmatic Turn is to criticize Rorty (on behalf, you might say, of the retropragmatists) and mine has been to defend Rorty (against the retropragmatists). The basic defense amounts to saying that Bernstein overstates things when he says that “it is a slander to suggest that the pragmatic thinkers, who did so much to undermine all forms of foundationalism, were guilty of appealing to experience as some sort of foundation” (152). I don’t think Rorty ever prosecuted that case, though he did collect some evidence for it. I think Bernstein is not chary enough about the various uses the pragmatists put to that term, and that it’s only by understanding constructive philosophical efforts in the context of argumentative moves against opponents (though not only in this context) that we can see fully the relative merits of those efforts (as against other constructive efforts). (Rorty specialized in this kind of context-plumbing, almost to exclusion.) Neither one of us wants to be reductive about experience or language, and Bernstein, I think, would agree with me that the retros shouldn’t be attacking the linguistic turn as such—that language is exceptionally important in understanding our relationship to the world, and that analytic philosophers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Robert Brandom have increased that understanding because of their narrow focus.
Perhaps, though, I’m being kind in not thinking Bernstein a retropragmatist himself, because his final paragraph of “Experience after the Linguistic Turn” dreadfully repeats the two basic sillinesses of the retropragmatist position against the linguistic turn as I understand it: that there’s any risk of “sliding into linguistic idealism” and that focusing on, say, “vocabularies” as your central philosophical term of art “severely limits the range of human experience (historical, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic experience) that should be central to philosophical reflection” (152). On the first, “linguistic idealism” is just the up-dated scarecrow the classical pragmatists were constantly fighting. All you have to do to avoid it is make sure to have thought through the consequences of what Davidson called triangulation, “the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter, and the world, determines the contents of thought and speech” (Truth and Predication 75). And Bernstein doesn’t recognize the extent to which Brandom, for example, does recognize the naturalized pragmatist notion of triangulation Hegel called Erfahrung. Bernstein, in setting up Rorty as a target at the beginning of his paper, mentions as an extension in a footnote that Brandom doesn’t even have “experience” listed in the index of his massive Making It Explicit—a fact Rorty had noted with some pride when talking about his former student (see TP 122). What makes this more complex than Bernstein acknowledges is that Rorty’s pride stems from the fact that he sees Brandom as “carrying through on the ‘linguistic turn” by talking about social practices—not “language.” (Bernstein otherwise does appreciate this—see Pragmatic Turn 213.) Bernstein, in the footnote, goes on to say, “Even though Brandom closely identifies his pragmatic project with Hegel, he fails to see the philosophical importance of the concept of experience (Erfahrung), which plays such a prominent philosophical role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” (232n4). As far as I can tell, this was written/published in 2010, and by 1999 Brandom had in fact written an essay that amplifies Hegel’s notion of Erfahrung (published later as Ch. 7 of Tales of the Mighty Dead), which he refers to when discussing that notion in the classical pragmatists in his introduction to Perspectives on Pragmatism (2011). (And further, to say that Brandom didn’t recognize this in Hegel by the time he finished writing Making It Explicit might be wrong as well. He suggests in the preface to his Between Saying and Doing that he’d begun working on his “Hegel project”—the book that is to be, finally though still yet unpublished, A Spirit of Trust—by the end of the ‘80s.)
However that may be, the more important silliness is the notion that talk of “vocabularies” might “limit the range of human experience” available for philosophical reflection. I have no idea how to limit the kinds of things we reflect about philosophically, and so have no real handle on how people who say this kind of thing wield it. I hear it all the time and am somewhat baffled. I can’t quite see how Rorty was limited, nor—more importantly—how his discussions of history and politics in Achieving Our Country or religion in Philosophy and Social Hope or aesthetic bliss in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were in conflict with his “linguistic idealism.” For that’s what you have to say if you wield this argument—that if the person does talk about a particular range of experience, they aren’t entitled to be able to do so. But nobody I’ve seen does argue this—they just say the target isn’t doing it, whatever “it” is. That’s the trouble—what does it mean to limit the range of experience? What does it mean to exclude, say, “historical experience” from one’s discussion of history? Then we might be able to get a handle on what it means to include it, and what it might be to construct a philosophy that perhaps allows for a division of labor between injecting the political experience of an age into a piece of writing and perhaps not but still having interesting things to say about the politics of that age. Because my hunch is that not even retropragmatists want or solely value one kind of writing on their favorite topics. After all, once you understand reading to be an experience—as one should given the logical amplification of the Hegel-pragmatist argument—then it would seem an impoverishment to the cultural experience of humankind if we said that we now only wanted writing on religion like James’s Varieties, Laozi’s Daodejing, and perhaps Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, but not Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial A Religious History of the American People or Stephen Carter’s A Culture of Disbelief (because they are historical and socio-political, respectively).
[11] Bloom is not a popular critic in the academy right now, and I often find myself cheerfully admitting my admiration in the face of frowns, but if one wants a taste for how self-conscious Bloom is about his blinders, and for his priorities as an intellectual, take a look at his introduction to Richard Wright’s Native Son in the Chelsea House Modern Critical series (collected in his Novelists and Novels).
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Friday, June 07, 2013
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense
*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.
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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.
Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.
Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.
These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.
What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.
The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.
Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.
While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?
Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.
With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.
It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.
Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?
One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.
With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]
Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.
There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.
My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.
Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”
I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.
Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.
Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.
There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.
Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.
If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.
Endnotes
[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.
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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.
Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.
Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.
These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.
What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.
The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.
Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.
While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?
Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.
With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.
It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.
Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?
One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.
With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]
Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.
There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.
My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.
Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”
I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.
Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.
Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.
There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.
Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.
If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.
Endnotes
[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Modernism and After in The Art Lover
This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This one begins a critique of Fredric Jameson's idea of "postmodernism" that I continued in my final for the class. It also has a bit about metaphor that I hope to expand much more in the future.
You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.
*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.
----------
In Geyh’s functional introduction to postmodern theory, she fleshes out the notion of antifoundationalism partially by reference to Lyotard. Lyotard defines “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv, italics his). For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is basically a skeptical attitude toward “any philosophy or theory … which claims to provide a complete explanation of culture and society” (Geyh xx). In so doing, Lyotard eliminates the large, overarching foundations for situating ourselves in the world, leaving us adrift in uncertainty.
This instability is enunciated well by Jameson as he discusses the fate of the “self” at the hands of postmodernism. Jameson says that “the very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside” (Jameson 11) and that postmodernism has made it central to itself to be “committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside” (12). This obliteration of the self is largely predicted by Lewis’ identification of the irony of romanticism—all this focus on the individual personality ends up eviscerating the notion of individuals: “…the more your particular personality … obsess[es] you, … the less ‘individualist’ you will be in the ordinary political sense. … Your ‘individualism’ will be that mad one of the ‘one and only’ self, a sort of instinctive solipsism in practice” (Lewis 8). What we have, in some sense, is a hyper-romanticism in postmodernism, a dissolution of anything substantive to be as a self by the elimination of the traditional hard edges (of metanarratives) and the relocation of meaning-inscription within each person as they swim through the bottomless stream of time. We begin blending into each other because we are never quite sure where we end and someone else begins because we ultimately only know ourselves.
This same irony, that hyper-individualism means the end of the individual, makes itself apparent in Maso’s novel. There are seemingly an infinite number of ways of drawing this picture (an effect I cannot draw into the discussion, but a stylistic maneuver very much apart of it), so I will choose but one. Caroline, our author’s author, says very early on that “I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. … Organize. Reorganize” (Maso 12). Details are bits of the world and Caroline herself must organize these bits so that the world remains in place, stable. On pages 50 to 51, Caroline describes a game her and her father used to play: “What the Light Looked Like.” The game is played by taking in the sensation of points of light and, because of a “love of simile and metaphor” (50), then saying they look like elephants, despite the fact that they are not elephants. This is similar to the more traditional activity of looking for constellations while stargazing, an activity which provides a dominant metaphor for the book. We see individual stars, but if you organize them just right, you no longer see the individual stars, but rather Hercules or Cygnus.[fn.1]
The line to be drawn between details and metaphor and seeing constellations is the sense in which they all repose on spatial metaphors, indeed even my attempt to organize them to help one see the connection: “line to be drawn.” This effect is predicted by Jameson: “our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” (Jameson 16). Details are points of light that need to be organized into recognizable patterns, whether twin elephants or Orion’s belt. This act of organization and stability occurs in a metaphoric moment in which stars are treated—for this person’s purpose—as Hercules.
The moment of instability, however, occurs for us here in Jameson’s circle around an essential concept of postmodernism. The Maso I’ve drawn attention to has so far written along lines conducive to Jameson’s notion of the postmodern dissolution of self. The climax in my portrait occurs in a section entitled “Freud Speaks” (Maso 162-3). Caroline here dreams that she is swimming in a pool, but Freud keeps telling her, no, it really is something else.[fn.2] Freud is a prime example of both an arch-metanarrativist that Lyotard is incredulous of and a “charismatic Master” that Jameson says died with modernism.[fn.3] The figure Freud is using is metaphor: you say “pool,” but that really means “birth canal.” The troubling fact of this dream, however, is that it shows just the reverse of what Jameson has been saying about the death of the personality in postmodernism. On Freud’s account—indeed, in all metanarratives—the individual loses all substance in the face of an overarching, omnipresent gesture of transfiguration, i.e. metaphor. Freud: everything is about mom, dad, and sex. Caroline is here raging against this smoothing out of the unique detail of individuals by trying to assert her own personality in the face of Freud’s totalized, circumscribing all-knowingness.[fn.4] This doesn’t make sense, however, on Jameson’s account, because metanarratives and Masters seemed to have been what held up the self. On Lewis’s account, it makes some sense since the authoritative voice of the Master—inflicting his own navel-gazing personality on everyone else—must be what obliterates and homogenizes us: we have no voice of our own, we are just repeating the words of the Master. Except that, Lewis, and especially Eliot, were in favor of a little more authority in the face of romanticism’s love of novelty.
----------
Works Cited
Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. Postmodern American Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993, 1927.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Maso, Carole. The Art Lover. New York: New Directions Classic, 2006, 1995, 1990.
Endnotes
[1] This metaphor exudes from the pores of the book. The new edition contains constellations on the cover, the sections Spring, Summer, and Fall are closed with a snippet of “Sky Watch,” the family Caroline writes about are preoccupied with stargazing. See in particular conjunction, “‘Don’t you think these first leaves look exactly like stars?’ Candace says. ‘Yes, I do,’ I say, wishing I could see more often what Candace sees” (Maso 22).
[2] The “I” in this section is a suppressed identity, but given the ebb and flow of the book, I am going to suppose unargumentatively that it is Caroline who’s dreaming.
[3] Jameson says “the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.” (Jameson 2)
[4] The close of the section reads (Maso 162):
You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.
*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.
----------
In Geyh’s functional introduction to postmodern theory, she fleshes out the notion of antifoundationalism partially by reference to Lyotard. Lyotard defines “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv, italics his). For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is basically a skeptical attitude toward “any philosophy or theory … which claims to provide a complete explanation of culture and society” (Geyh xx). In so doing, Lyotard eliminates the large, overarching foundations for situating ourselves in the world, leaving us adrift in uncertainty.
This instability is enunciated well by Jameson as he discusses the fate of the “self” at the hands of postmodernism. Jameson says that “the very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside” (Jameson 11) and that postmodernism has made it central to itself to be “committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside” (12). This obliteration of the self is largely predicted by Lewis’ identification of the irony of romanticism—all this focus on the individual personality ends up eviscerating the notion of individuals: “…the more your particular personality … obsess[es] you, … the less ‘individualist’ you will be in the ordinary political sense. … Your ‘individualism’ will be that mad one of the ‘one and only’ self, a sort of instinctive solipsism in practice” (Lewis 8). What we have, in some sense, is a hyper-romanticism in postmodernism, a dissolution of anything substantive to be as a self by the elimination of the traditional hard edges (of metanarratives) and the relocation of meaning-inscription within each person as they swim through the bottomless stream of time. We begin blending into each other because we are never quite sure where we end and someone else begins because we ultimately only know ourselves.
This same irony, that hyper-individualism means the end of the individual, makes itself apparent in Maso’s novel. There are seemingly an infinite number of ways of drawing this picture (an effect I cannot draw into the discussion, but a stylistic maneuver very much apart of it), so I will choose but one. Caroline, our author’s author, says very early on that “I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. … Organize. Reorganize” (Maso 12). Details are bits of the world and Caroline herself must organize these bits so that the world remains in place, stable. On pages 50 to 51, Caroline describes a game her and her father used to play: “What the Light Looked Like.” The game is played by taking in the sensation of points of light and, because of a “love of simile and metaphor” (50), then saying they look like elephants, despite the fact that they are not elephants. This is similar to the more traditional activity of looking for constellations while stargazing, an activity which provides a dominant metaphor for the book. We see individual stars, but if you organize them just right, you no longer see the individual stars, but rather Hercules or Cygnus.[fn.1]
The line to be drawn between details and metaphor and seeing constellations is the sense in which they all repose on spatial metaphors, indeed even my attempt to organize them to help one see the connection: “line to be drawn.” This effect is predicted by Jameson: “our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” (Jameson 16). Details are points of light that need to be organized into recognizable patterns, whether twin elephants or Orion’s belt. This act of organization and stability occurs in a metaphoric moment in which stars are treated—for this person’s purpose—as Hercules.
The moment of instability, however, occurs for us here in Jameson’s circle around an essential concept of postmodernism. The Maso I’ve drawn attention to has so far written along lines conducive to Jameson’s notion of the postmodern dissolution of self. The climax in my portrait occurs in a section entitled “Freud Speaks” (Maso 162-3). Caroline here dreams that she is swimming in a pool, but Freud keeps telling her, no, it really is something else.[fn.2] Freud is a prime example of both an arch-metanarrativist that Lyotard is incredulous of and a “charismatic Master” that Jameson says died with modernism.[fn.3] The figure Freud is using is metaphor: you say “pool,” but that really means “birth canal.” The troubling fact of this dream, however, is that it shows just the reverse of what Jameson has been saying about the death of the personality in postmodernism. On Freud’s account—indeed, in all metanarratives—the individual loses all substance in the face of an overarching, omnipresent gesture of transfiguration, i.e. metaphor. Freud: everything is about mom, dad, and sex. Caroline is here raging against this smoothing out of the unique detail of individuals by trying to assert her own personality in the face of Freud’s totalized, circumscribing all-knowingness.[fn.4] This doesn’t make sense, however, on Jameson’s account, because metanarratives and Masters seemed to have been what held up the self. On Lewis’s account, it makes some sense since the authoritative voice of the Master—inflicting his own navel-gazing personality on everyone else—must be what obliterates and homogenizes us: we have no voice of our own, we are just repeating the words of the Master. Except that, Lewis, and especially Eliot, were in favor of a little more authority in the face of romanticism’s love of novelty.
----------
Works Cited
Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. Postmodern American Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993, 1927.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Maso, Carole. The Art Lover. New York: New Directions Classic, 2006, 1995, 1990.
Endnotes
[1] This metaphor exudes from the pores of the book. The new edition contains constellations on the cover, the sections Spring, Summer, and Fall are closed with a snippet of “Sky Watch,” the family Caroline writes about are preoccupied with stargazing. See in particular conjunction, “‘Don’t you think these first leaves look exactly like stars?’ Candace says. ‘Yes, I do,’ I say, wishing I could see more often what Candace sees” (Maso 22).
[2] The “I” in this section is a suppressed identity, but given the ebb and flow of the book, I am going to suppose unargumentatively that it is Caroline who’s dreaming.
[3] Jameson says “the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.” (Jameson 2)
[4] The close of the section reads (Maso 162):
He [Freud] smirks a little. He’s heard this all before.Significant is Freud’s knowingness, his incredulity, the repetition of “I,” and the emphatic “is,” the verb “to be,” which is the prerequisite for a metaphor, and the only way to short-circuit one. (“No, it doesn’t mean love, it is just a heart.”)
“It really is a pool. I think it means I want to go swimming.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says.
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