Philosophy Books for Literature Students

It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden’s, Shelley’s, Arnold’s, and Eliot’s prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. …

Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in the universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. A literary critic in what T. J. Clarke has called the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of New York in the ’30s and ’40s was expected to have read the The Revolution Betrayed and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as The Wasteland, Man’s Hope, and An American Tragedy. In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 81-2)

Whatever the specifics of Rorty’s picture of what a literary critic is today (I say this partly because Rorty was reflecting on this at the end of the ’80s), the historical picture he sketches in the first paragraph is roughly what happened and gets at the consequences we still deal with. Because of further reactions to the “Orwellian-Bloomian culture,” the present state of becoming professionalized in an English department has become even more complicated, as the addition of what we call “New Historicism” and “cultural studies” adds even more kinds of possible books to be familiar with (such as adding “history” to Rorty’s list, which is all I think New Historicism amounts to, their protests to the contrary). This creates a frenetically anxious environment for the would-be practitioner, just coming through the door wanting to learn what’s what. By the mid-’70s, Said was already describing the situation as “less background, less formal training, less prescribed and systematic information, is assumed before one begins to read, write, or work. Thus when one begins to write today one is necessarily more of an autodidact, gathering or making up the knowledge one needs in the course of creating. The influence of the past appears less useful and, as two recent critics, W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom, have argued, more likely to produce anxiety” (Said, Beginnings, 8).

That’s only kind of what Bate and Bloom meant, and perhaps Said’s somewhat sunny slant on being the autodidact is because he was already so well-learned. The past isn’t “more likely to produce anxiety,” it just does—and particularly when you have less background, less training, and no systematically arranged information to peruse. The situation of the young literature student starting out is similar to that of the amateur philosopher—both are autodidacts, with many avenues of thought that could be pursued, which presents both the freedom and the dilemma: I can only go one way at a time, so which shall it be? Given the limits of time and energy, you don’t want to waste your time. But, too, Rorty’s pragmatic sensibility reminds you that at some point, you’re going to want to get a job doing this, which means you’re going to need to fake knowing something. Every tenured professor has a youthful story about a book that everyone else around them seems to have read but that they didn’t learn about until later. The goal of every student looking into the future is to minimize the length of that list of books.

It is in this situation that I make the following short list. The American education system does not prepare a young student very well to pursue philosophy, and it does this by slighting a historical background in the major thinkers. As a matter of cultural conversation, it doesn’t help to know that they were mainly white men who are now dead—if everyone assumes you know something about them, then you’d better know something about them. Who this unidentified “everyone” is, however, has been shrinking, at least in the United States. The fact is that after the ’60s and ’70s, if you were a budding literary critic, it’s quite probable that you read some Continental philosophy, like Derrida or Foucault or Lacan, because that was hot in those days. The trouble for us now is that it isn’t so hot: which means you are much more likely an autodidact trying to pick it up by yourself.

What makes Continental philosophy difficult is that their frame of reference is often either the history of philosophy or really weird descriptions of “common experience” (think: Being and Nothingness or Being and Time). The latter can be very useful in an ad hoc way, but it’s difficult to feel like you’re getting in the middle of a conversation because Continental philosophers often don’t talk to each other, but rather to the major figures of the past. And if you don’t know how to negotiate through those old figures, you can get lost pretty quick. The only way to get through that problem is to learn something about the past. But, as Said pointed out, there are no how-to manuals lying around. And on top of that, the philosophers who speak your language are nattering on to almost exclusively each other about problems only they (so they say) find interesting—this is why no one knows anything about Anglo-American philosophy either.

The list below is to help with getting into the Anglo-American conversation, to find an entry point into their conversation (unless you already understand Derrida, in which case go to Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). There’s no particular reason why one would need to, but the anglophone philosophical conversation does have some distinctive things it does better and there is the added bonus of knowing something no one else knows (distinguishability is a valuable intellectual-market commodity). In addition, if you want to know more about the Big Dead Guys, you can’t read just any English-speaker’s introductory version, because they often won’t tell you anything relevant to the way the Continental philosophers are talking about them. (Exemplary exception: Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750. And also, though a Frenchman, Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy is a brilliant discussion of the Continental mid-century ferment.) And that’s just what a growing intellectual needs: coin to make your way between disciplines, not burrowing into one extra discipline that might never come in handy. Said’s literary critic as quasi-autodidact is very much right insofar as the problems that a student will become immersed in and seek to solve might take them in any number of directions, and the trick is to be able to very quickly sink into a pile of research without getting lost and going the wrong direction (the problem of the red herring).

What makes the list below what it is is that 1) each philosopher was important at some point to the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, 2) the books in some way recapitulate facets of those conversations, 3) they are also about much bigger fish than those narrow conversations, 4) they are very well-schooled in the history of philosophy and the books enter into that larger sequence, and 5) they all have an eye towards an even larger intellectual conversation that, for example, includes literature. Because of those 5 things, the list below is designed to not waste a literature student’s time.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre—One of the most important books of moral philosophy in the last 50 years, this was MacIntyre’s first extended attempt to link together work in epistemology, philosophy of action, and the fate of our moral and political cultures. And while disagreement with some of its central claims is almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t think God is a necessary presupposition, it is a fascinating tour de force that takes you through the Greeks and the Enlightenment on the composition of communities. In order to get past the notion that Lyotardian postmodernism means the death of continuity and the birth of free-wheeling relativism, one needs a working notion of tradition and practices. MacIntyre offers an excellent version here, while at the same time arguing (as Marxists will love) that liberalism is still undermining their composition. One interesting facet of the book is his treatment of Jane Austen as a moral philosopher.

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor—Taylor’s book might be an even larger story with a similar perspective as MacIntyre’s, though their titles effectively give you each of their focuses. Taylor’s story is especially important given the kind of sophistication literature students are to show in handling a “character” as a locus of selfhood—for if a character has a self, it might be useful to know how our notions of what a self is have evolved (and thus plunk an author in their own historical milieu). This was a major entry into the debates about “modernity” (even if I think that word is overused), just as Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a major entry into the somehow still-ongoing debates about secularization. Taylor and MacIntyre were two major thinkers identified as “communitarians”—the position you get when you want to throw away the worst of Marx and keep the best of Hegel. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is (with good reason) hot right now, and that description of the Romantic self perfectly complements Taylor’s story, which engages heavily with literary traditions, particularly poetry.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Bernard Williams—this book is largely supposed to be about ethics and political philosophy, but it is something like a comprehensive system inasmuch as Williams situates it within a set of relationships with philosophical neighbors like the philosophy of science and of language. The chapters on their interrelations are some of the best of its kind. Williams also has a historical depth of understanding that is nearly matchless, and his unique ability is to distill the past into its heritage for us today without harming it. Transforming the past into a set of problems to be negotiated is an excellent way to make the actual reading of Plato’s Republic or Kant’s Critiques not just a haze of bare understanding of what’s going on.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty—while MacIntyre’s book distills his earlier work on the philosophy of the social sciences and of action and Williams his work on science and language, they don’t go into extraordinary detail on those conversations. Rorty’s book is, by itself, the most comprehensive recapitulation of the minute details of the “core subjects” of the first 100 years of analytic philosophy available (roughly, 1880 to 1980—Frege to Davidson). It is beautifully Hegelian in its ability to tell a progressive story about how one philosophical position was transumed by the next up to this present (late ’70s) moment. Even if disagreeable in its conclusions, its ability to lay bare the reasons for one position against another is the ideal starting point to understanding what philosophers of language and of mind are going on about. It also situates these smaller conversations into a larger story stretching back to the Greeks and makes inroads to connecting the anglophone conversation with the Continental one.

Must We Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell—if it was difficult to choose one book from the array of useful and powerful books from each of the previous authors’ storehouse (it being very difficult not to choose Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), it was particularly difficult to choose which Cavell book to single out. However, given my commitment to the utility of the book to introduce an autodidact into the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, I chose this book on the basis of each essay’s sterling compactness on an array of relevant issues. The Claim of Reason was difficult not to choose, but Cavell’s discussions of Austin, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics and his general performance in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy” (while offering penetrating insight into what the hell that is) are perfect introductions to their subjects and the occasional weirdness of his later work.

Those are my five suggestions, five being a nice round number, though now I will indulge in four more that more or less fail in the “introduction to anglophone conversation” criterion. These are just brilliant.

The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas—Nehamas is the most eminent philosophical scholar (a philosopher, not a classicist) of Socrates and Plato living today. This book is, actually, an excellent introduction into a host of scholarly problems about reading Plato, with dense endnotes. Its brilliance, however, is in its humane rendering of what the “philosophical life” is, beginning with the impact of Socrates as a figure in the mind of the philosopher. What follows are amazing discussions of silence, discussion, arête, knowledge, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and, above all, irony. If you work anywhere in the vicinity of the trope of irony, you cannot afford to pass up this book.

The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch—this book is worth getting just for its first essay. Murdoch was a novelist in addition to a philosopher, and she was also a Platonist. Every single person on my list is, in an important (and delimited) sense, an anti-Platonist. So what gives? To my mind, Murdoch offers one of the best, distilled accounts of the problem of the modern notion of the self taken for granted by early liberal theory. In my favorite phrase of hers, it is “a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” And while Brandom’s Kant, Cavell’s Wittgenstein, and Lear’s Freud should all be friends of ours, Murdoch points out a pressing problem at that stage of the conversation, and in its face presents an excellent discussion of the pressure of context in ethical decision-making. She puts it in Platonic terms of sight, of “contexts of attention,” but its ancestor, I should say, is rather E. M. Forster. For literary critics who want a good illustration of what a “literary point of view” might be as giving a distinct angle on a philosophical topic, there is nothing better than this very short book.

Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar—if much good moral philosophy these days is “virtue-centered” in its approach (in contradistinction to a Kantian-style search for principles), then Shklar offers an extraordinary meditation on its darker flipside (much as she does for liberal discussion of justice in The Faces of Injustice). Shklar moves easily back and forth between contemporary practical problems (international, domestic, personal), theoretical problems, history both social and intellectual, and sources of our moral thinking as diverse Machiavelli, Montaigne, Christianity, James Madison, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hawthorne.

Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman—if Rorty offers a narrative of what he even puts in scare quotes as the “core subjects” of anglophone philosophy, then Susan Neiman offers a tremendous narrative of the history of modern moral philosophy, which she argues was actually at the core (at least at its early stage in the 18th century). Ranging from close readings of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bayle, Voltaire, Freud, and a really interesting one on the Marquis de Sade, Neiman’s story centers on the importance, in particular, of two world-historical events that have shaped in sometimes subtle ways thinking about evil: the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 and the holocaust at Auschwitz. Her understanding of how our thinking about moral responsibility and the sources of evil have changed and might yet still change (with a short, speculative section on September 11) is penetrating and well-worth thinking about.

American Lit Notebook: Hawthorne I

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.

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Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown”

What a contrast Hawthorne is to Emerson and Thoreau, so-called Transcendentalists! Sin is a primary source of meditation for Hawthorne, it would seem, and it is nowhere in evidence in Emerson, agonistic wrester of the Christian tradition. Whereas Emerson seems more intent on setting the ideals of America, Hawthorne would take the culture as he finds it to complicate and enrich the laden tensions.

The swift, penultimate paragraph of “Young Goodman Brown” sums up the wisdom found in Hawthorne’s allegory: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream, of a witch-meeting?” (64) The point of the tale is that it doesn’t matter. Brown has been changed by the experience, and lost to the forces of sin. The shape-shifting devil says that the knowledge he would bestow those who’ve traveled is “to know their secret deeds,” (62) of all your neighbors, “to penetrate … the deep mystery of sin….” (63)

What knowledge is this? seems to be the question. At the outset of Brown’s journey, Hawthorne sets in contradistinction the lonely solitude of the traveler with the possibility of “passing through an unseen multitude.” (52) This “unseen multitude” eventually takes the shape of all his neighbors: “And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her [Faith] onward.” (58) Even if we can commonsensically distinguish between saints and sinners, Hawthorne blurs them all together in Brown’s nightmare.

The figure of Faith completes the allegory, for the significance is the setting of faith against doubt, and the triumph of doubt. Previous convictions of purity are shattered as he hears their whispers in the dark gloom of the wilderness. We should take the wilderness to be simply the living of life: we walk through life without truly knowing the hearts of our fellow-travelers, but—and this is key—only our own. “But, where is Faith?” (61) says Brown, and it is the loss that sinks us. The trick of the devil is his “reasoning as we go,” (53) “discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor….” (56) The reasoning that the devil teaches, which seems so natural in the “uncertain light,” (53) is that, if we harbor any sins in our own hearts, even living as if we did not, then could not any other, including those pure saints we esteem as being beyond sin entirely?

“Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward.” (62, italics mine)

It is because Brown treats the possibility of goodness as coextensive with the existence of pure cases of purity from sin that, having finally lost faith in this easily doubted notion, he becomes a storm of gloom, “a distrustful, if not a desperate man,” (64) treating everyone as a secret horrid sinner, lustful for the worst depravities. Forever after, Brown “shrank from the bosom of Faith….” (ibid.)

Hawthorne: “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

“My Kinsman” seems a step down from “Young Goodman Brown,” a mere fable compared to the latter’s complex allegory. “My Kinsman” seems to be not much more than a running joke capped with a good, old-fashioned piece of potted American wisdom: we rise and fall on our own merits; no hereditary hand for us. Hawthorne lets the story unfold, but we get it early on and the references to “dreaming” at the end are in no way narratively central, and are no doubt a first attempt to use a good idea, which he was able to capitalize on in “Young,” though not earlier.

Like every good poet, Hawthorne chooses his words carefully and there are three repetitions that call for attention, the first two responsible for the humor. The joke is that every time Robin opens his mouth to seek the Major, he says, “my kinsman, Major Molineux,” a phrase chosen with great calculation by Robin (with the attendant pomp), but for which backfires every time. The exact phrase, barring the title, appears nine times (11, 14, 15, 16, 18, twice on 19, 22, and 27). On 23, when we would expect the phrase, Robin says “one Major Molineux,” which allows him brief headway in finding his kinsman. And, of course, the tale ends with the converse, “your kinsman, Major Molineux,” thus capping the joke and the bit of Emersonian Americanism.

The joke is aided by a second repetition, that of “shrewd” and its cognates. This aids the joke, it being repeated over and over how intelligent, cunning, and perceptive Robin thinks he is, yet the reader already knows exactly why he keeps getting the treatment he is, totally misreading the situation he is in by, as Hawthorne puts it, a pompous “assumption of consequence.” (14) The use of “shrewd,” however, also allies itself with a major thematic of Hawthorne’s, here and in “Young.” Whereas Hawthorne hasn’t figured out yet how to use dreaming in his narrative yet, the two tales have in common what lies at its root, a preoccupation with “appearances,” the appearance of reality, or people, or streets.

Shrewdness, intelligence, doesn’t help Robin read his situation. We may question how shrewd Robin really is, and it certainly is a mistaken assumption that guides Robin’s actions, but the third repetition, of “countenance” and its cognates, pleads us to think deeper into the subject: the “long favored countenance” (11) of the first man he accosts, the “strange hostility in every countenance” (14) at the inn, the final stranger’s “altogether prepossessing countenance” (23). I’m not sure Hawthorne was able to successfully harness the thematic to open up a dialogic space, but it is raised in two coded places. The first is the vanity of “the philosopher seeking an honest man.” (15) I’m unsure whether this is an old saw or not, or whether it is a reference to some specific philosopher, but Socrates’ quest for someone who knew something, always ironically disarmed by his own profession of ignorance, certainly rings with it (because when faced with Socratic irony, the honest thing to do is admit, no, I don’t know anything) no less with the second code, “physiognomy.” (19) Socrates became a meditative source for Montaigne on just this score, with such a beautiful soul but ugly face. The question of the relationship between the appearance of something, and its reality, floats around the tale, though is never quite put centrally into place.

Towards a Narrative of SOM

One of the pressing problems in Pirsig is what SOM is and where it fits in with the history of philosophy (something I tried to cover one side of, the textual side, in "Excavating SOM"). This is something that needs to have more attention paid to it, but all I can offer is this kind of summary of what I currently think. I think SOM can pretty easily and uncontroversially be identified with philosophy done in the Cartesian tradition. Iconoclastic philosophers have always been good at coming up with idiosyncratic names for the problems they see, and in this case Pirsig's doesn't even stray very far from traditional appellations. The separation between subject and object has been explicit at least since Kant, and Kant is typically seen as working out the consequences of the problematic handed down to us from Descartes.

There's one scholastic problem, of course, with simply identifying SOM with Cartesianism and that's Pirsig's ZMM tracing of the problem to the Greeks. If you look into the historical studies on the subject, they'll usually tell you that there were some significant changes between the two time periods, typically something like the ascendancy of epistemology in Descartes. I think what can be said, though, is that there are a whole host of problems born of errant distinctions and that many of these distinctions orbit each other. If you start with any one of them in a particular orbit, you'll more than likely get weighed down with the others. It is certainly apparent to me that Pirsig shunts a whole host of distinctions under SOM's canopy and his narrative extending back to the Greeks simply helps show how Descartes and his problematic were still working in Greek shadows.

To help see this, I would suggest looking at the way Pirsig lines up Truth and dialectic on one side and the Good and rhetoric on the other. Pirsig's analysis of Plato, I think, is dead on. He says that Plato ostensibly sets the Good as the highest Form, as the highest principle in his system. But if you look closer, the highest principle is subservient to the dialectic because the dialectic is how the Good is discovered. Dialectic, or Method, attains priority over the Good. I would suggest that this analysis gives us the first suggestion that epistemology must have priority over metaphysics, though this became apparent (or at least pressing) to philosophers only after Descartes. I think the historical reasons for this, and its run up to contemporary times, are excellently given by Stephen Toulmin in his Cosmopolis. This passage from the end should have no small amount of resonance with Pirsigians:

Throughout history, the development of philosophy has displayed a sequence of pendulum swings between two rival agendas. On one agenda, the task of philosophy is to analyze all subjects in wholly general terms; on the other, it is to give as general an account as the nature of the field allows. Theoretically minded Platonists speculate freely, framing broad generalizations about human knowledge; practical-minded Aristotelians hesitate to claim universality in advance of actual experience. So read, the move from 16th-century humanism to 17th-century exact science was a swing from the practical, Aristotelian agenda, to a Platonist agenda, aimed at theorectical answers. The dream of 17th-century philosophy and science was Plato's demand for episteme, or theoretical grasp: the facts of 20th-century science and philosophy rest on Aristotle's phronesis, or practical wisdom. When Wittgenstein and Rorty argue that philosophy today is at "the end of the road", they are overdramatizing the situation. The present state of the subject marks the return from a theory-centered conception, dominated by a concern for stability and rigor, to a renewed acceptance of practice, which requires us to adapt action to the special demands of particular occasions.

One thing I wish Pirsig would have done was distinguish more sharply between the various problems that were included in his SOM. I think his neglect to do so leads him to conflate materialism (an ontological thesis) with epistemology in a less than helpful way. I think this conflation is what leads him to say, fallaciously, that any philosopher worth his salt forwarded seriously the thesis that values are not real. The materialism comes out when Pirsig identifies objects with the material realm and subjects with the apparitions in our minds. It is only combining this thesis, that the world is nothing but corpuscles bouncing in a void, with the episteomological distinction between objectivity and subjectivity that we get the absurd claim that rocks are real, but our desire for ice cream is not. I don't think any of the great Western philosophers have ever tendered such a suggestion, though vulgar, commonsensical manglings of the great philosophers may generate such a position. But we should be a bit more sophisticated than that. The two are obviously connected in important ways, but not in the way that Pirsig claims. Pirsig aims this charge at the logical positivists and I think this is why Galen Strawson, who should otherwise have at least picked up from his dad, P.F. Strawson, a thing or two about Kantian philosophy and the persuasiveness of a paradigm of thought, says that SOM is a strawman. The positivists claimed that values were cognitively meaningless, which leads to emotivism, not unreal and there is big difference.

I would maintain, then, that the road to modern philosophy (and Descartes in particular) was begun by Plato's attempt to combine Euclid's geometrical method with Socrates' conversational style, or to put it another way, as Rorty says, his attempt to combine the Greek's love of argumentation with their love of wisdom. ("Philosophy as a Kind of Writing") The earlier Greek philosophers had taken the first tentative steps by attempting to assert what was really going on behind the appearences (which Parmenides made explicit). But Plato took the decisive step by arguing that we needed something to decide between all these competing hypotheses. Plato's alteration of Socrates' dialectic (the elenchus) from a searching conversation between several people into a method by which Truth is ascertained was the push needed to solidify Method's grip over philosophy, taking us down the path towards epistemological priority. It only stalled in the bed because Aristotle's philosophy, with its emphasis on practical wisdom, took hold of the Romans' minds, before all of it tumbled into obscurity for a thousand years.

The rise of Descartes marked the rise epistemology. Richard Popkin argues that Descartes, like Plato before him, was involved in a program of cooptation. The patriarch of Renaissance philosophy was Montaigne. He exemplified the skeptical tradition of Pyrrho that had blended with Aristotle's philosophy. Descartes took this skepticism and pushed it towards his own ends. By coopting something like the skeptical devices used by these earlier philosophers, Descartes tried to say something positive. He used it as a method to reach his Archimedean foundation. The actual skeptics during this time were outraged that Descartes would call his philosophy "skeptical." Pyrrhonian skepticism doesn't say anything positive, it only provides the negative point that maybe we shouldn't be trying to say those positive things. They vigorously attacked Descartes, but to no avail. As Toulmin likes to say, "Descartes' coup d'etat" was complete and his program of philosophy captured the imaginations of European intellectuals.

Between Descartes and Locke, modern philosophy saw the rise of what Quine calls the "idea idea," the idea that we have ideas over here in the mind and the material world out there. This was the first step towards divorcing man from the world, observer from the observed, subject from object. Rorty suggests that, if we accept Descartes' representational problematic (as opposed to sticking to Berkeley's dictum "ideas can only represent other ideas"), modern philosophy can be seen as a series of attempts at trying to get the subject and object back together. This is why Pirsig can be seen to have so many prima facie similarities with 19th century philosophers (particularly Hegel), because the "subject/object" idiom was in vogue after Kant put his stamp on philosophy.

However, this idiom never really took that strong a hold in Britain. The beginning of the divorce between Anglophone philosophy and Continental, Franco-German philosophy was with the rise of linguistic philosophy. The triumph of Russell over Anglo-American philosophy was matched by Husserl's triumph over Continental. In the subsequent decades, analytic philosophers began focusing more and more on matters that were dry and remote, stuff that simply seemed "academic" to laypeople, talk about predication, modal logic, etc. It didn't have the world-historical verve and romance that Kant and Hegel gave to Continental philosophy, which continued in mutated form the subject/object idiom. But despite these superficial differences, both idioms have held to an essentially Cartesian picture of philosophy. Some philosophers like Rorty, Robert Brandom, Samuel Wheeler, and Henry Staten among others in the late 20th century, have been able to transcend the differences in idioms and show how paradigmatic philosophers like Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida are making essentially the same points.

I think by the end of this story we can begin to see why Pirsig's SOM raised so many hackles. I would contend that SOM is the product of Plato and Descartes, but it is the divergence in philosophy since Kant (either towards Hegel or towards Frege) that tells us something about the reception of Pirsig's philosophy. Pirsig is reacting to the logical positivists, a camp of Anglophone philosophers (despite the most famous ones being German), but he assigns the problem dramatic importance, which is entirely Continental in demeaner. This is why we get Galen Strawson going, "What the hell are you talking about?" Its not that SOM as a target misses its mark, or is completely incoherent, its that analytic philosophers can't imagine why Pirsig talks about it like its a world-historical conspiracy. Foucault and other Continental philosophers, however, might have been perfectly happy with the kind of spin Pirsig puts on the story.

In a qualified sense, I think SOM is just another name for Cartesianism, but I also think its just another name for Platonism and Kantianism. The reason is that I think SOM is just one more signifier for a tradition that stretches from the beginning of philosophy to our current stage. The original battle lines were drawn between rhetoric and dialectic, and though the battles have changed over the years, essentially the same war is being fought. One of the great facets about intellectual history is that at every stage in the sequence, we always find a Sophist, or Pyrrhonian skeptic, or pragmatist to counter the Platonist, Cartesian, or Kantian.

Philosophy and Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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