Are There Bad Questions?

Richard Rorty spent the last ten years of his life redacting some of his more controversial rhetorical strategies, which included endlessly apologizing for hyperbole. One of his favorite strategies was to say that there were bad questions: to pursue a certain line of thought was to put yourself on the path to a conversational cul-de-sac, ending in aporia, a seeming inability to get anybody to agree to an answer. This inability to find criteria that you could get people to agree on to explain what a good answer would look like was the tell-tale sign of a bad question. The “bad question” approach to philosophical disagreement is hiding in his earliest writing, but began to truly flower when Rorty first formulated the groundplan for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1970 with “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” became solidified in that book, and most famously codified in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. In that intro, the bad-question approach becomes entwined with another strategy Rorty came to embrace: the I-don’t-have-a-theory approach. “[The pragmatist theory of truth] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about” (CP xiii).

The ironic self-contradiction has always been plain to people, though most who have taken to pointing it out leave out the irony and what it means: the pragmatist theory of truth is one about why we won’t have an interesting theory about truth. That’s important, though I’m not sure Rorty always understood quite how important. For a page later he says, famously:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the Truth or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. (CP xiv)

This “I have no theory” approach gets broadened into “and neither arguments nor theses,” as when he said in the late-70s, “Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses” (CP 93). This eventually turns into his claim that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity contains no arguments (evidence to the contrary). The interrelationship between what Rorty means by “theory,” “argument,” and “thesis” at any given moment can be parsed, and I think it would show that it depends on which direction he’s facing—whether towards Platonists, who think we must have a theory, or towards pragmatists, who think they are optional. This can be a complicated needle to thread (principally because it involves the fact that people have, e.g., selves though having a theory or thesis about that fact is optional), but to make the first pass in knitting the row, I would point out that Rorty doesn’t mention who finds the essence of Force or definition of “number” interesting. Because I certainly don’t. There are two different audiences for “number” and then “truth.” In the former case, the audience is likely mathematicians. In the latter case, Rorty’s audience is professional philosophers. And it is those who disagree with how interesting results about truth have been. So what does Rorty mean be “interesting”?

Rorty usually means by “interesting” in these contexts “discernable effect on people’s lives.” In the case of numbers, though non-mathematicians could care less, the fact that mathematics professors do and keep producing results that pan out into the warp of society means that the woof of what they do has interest. This is not the case with “truth” and “good” as of yet, for Rorty’s claim is that inquiry into Truth has not helped people produce more true statements. And by and large (emphasis on the “large”) this is true. The trouble is that Rorty has to admit that for philosophers, inquiry into Truth has helped them produce more true statements—for example, Davidson’s claim that “most of our beliefs are true.” This, as Rorty admits, is interesting and could not have been done without the context of logical positivism and their unacknowledged Platonic goals.

Being forced to face this equivocation in his rhetorical stances, Rorty began to finally admit that he does have theses, or theories, or pictures, of this or that philosophical-looking kind of object (“the self” or “reality” or “experience” or “language”). This means a disentangling of the bad-question approach and no-theory approach. “I have no theory” is really code for “you are going to be really disappointed when I tell you what it is…,” and this because of the Platonic expectations typically carried by people asking for one. But this means that “bad question” isn’t inherent, but rather a conversational stability produced by the instability of criteria for what counts as a good answer. Rorty can answer the question of what truth is, but because of the wildly ranging differences of opinion over what it is good for, it will seem a bad answer to somebody. The light in which Rorty’s answer, or anybody’s, can appear good is a stipulative light—“if for the moment we agree on X, Y, and Z, then this theory will satisfy it.” Rorty’s stipulation on truth has been the stipulation that truth, properly speaking (which is to say “for the occasion of my theory”), is a semantic and radically non-epistemic concept. That is not the only way we use the word “true,” but when push comes to shove, we should stop trying to incorporate those uses, e.g. the endorsing use, into our theory of truth because doing so is what leads to bad questions that we can’t seem to answer, or would have any practical consequences even if we could (like how we know when “snow is white” corresponds to the fact that snow is white). When Rorty would say, “That’s a bad question we shouldn’t ask,” he was suggesting there might be other, more profitable questions to discuss. And when Rorty gave an answer to the bad question, e.g. a disquotational theory of truth, it was intended shut down avenues of thought that have proven interminable cul-de-sacs (hence the epithet for disquotationalists of “deflationists” and, more generally on Platonic questions, “quietists”).

Rorty had begun sorting out these equivocations and changes in stances in his last ten years, but in Rorty’s reply to Jaroslav Peregrin in his installment to the Living Library of Philosophers, Rorty says most clearly what I’ve articulated above (and what produced the impetus to further articulate this point on the scope of his writing):

I should also have been careful not to invoke Wittgenstein’s contrast between “advancing theses” and “practicing therapy.” Doing the former now seems to me a perfectly legitimate, and often useful, therapeutic technique. Peregrin cites Wittgenstein’s claim that he was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another.” He says that this would be a good description of my preferred mode of philosophical activity. I am happy to accept the suggestion, but less happy about this suggestion that “neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty thinks that it is possible to give a theory answering ‘philosophical questions’.”

Consider Davidson’s thesis that most of our beliefs must be true, or Brandom’s inferentialist theory about the origin of singular terms. Such theses and theories provide answers to questions like, “Well, what will we say about the relation between language and nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar ‘realist’ account?” By providing the pragmatist with such answers, they facilitate his propagandizing efforts. Not everybody feels it necessary to pose such questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be able to gratify her. Though sometimes it works best to say, “that’s a bad question, one that we pragmatists don’t ask,” with some interlocutors it is more effective to reply, “here’s an answer to that question, since you insist on asking it.” (The Philosophy of Richard Rorty 247-8)

If I had to speculate on what most produced this change in Rorty, I would have to say it was the work of his student, Robert Brandom. Rorty grew up, philosophically speaking, on Davidson, who was at Princeton for a time in the late 60s. Rorty spent much of the 60s retooling as an analytic philosopher, which meant falling in love with Sellars and becoming acquainted with Davidson’s cast of mind. Rorty was left to his own devices after Davidson left, and the formative 70s—when Rorty was drawing out the consequences of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson—were also the years Brandom was at Princeton, ’72-’77.

Rorty’s fall from analytic-grace was initially a souring with “system,” with the hopes of pay-off attending all the work that must be done to create a system. Rorty was first and foremost a voracious reader, and he loved reading systems in the hopes there has a hidden source of power in them (he wrote his master’s thesis and dissertation on Whitehead). In the end, I think Rorty liked reading too much—sitting at a desk, pouring energy into getting the system just right, didn’t seem appealing because it took him out of the library stacks too long (or away from the forests where he loved bird-watching). And combine this with his reading of so many systems, whether Kant’s or Hegel’s or Carnap’s or Whitehead’s (or Dewey’s, for that matter), all claiming to have the hiddern power, and all of them contradicting each other, and you have a recipe for someone with a pretty good self-justification for not writing a system himself. Rorty’s disagreement with Davidson throughout his career pretty much amounts to the fact that Davidson always wanted to write a system, but never got around to it—so Rorty would always wonder about the aspiration, since the work he was doing in essays was so good itself. Brandom, however, is a brilliant systematizer, and has done in Making It Explicit what Davidson was never able to do and Rorty never thought worth doing. From the time of that book's publication in 1994, you can see a slow slide in Rorty’s responses to Brandom, beginning with a queasy reaction to his rehabilitiation of “representation” to a final “I still don’t think regular people need a system, but if you want one, get a load of this…totally worth it.”

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Addendum on Pirsig

What does Pirsig think about bad questions and systems?

I think it’s important to notice the course of events and presentation. In ZMM, Pirsig describes the S/O Dilemma as an aporia created by a previous agreement on the terms of debate. Pirsig later describes “truth traps,” on the analogy of the “old South Indian Monkey Trap”—which is similar to Chinese finger-cuffs—and interprets the Japenese word “mu” as “unask the question.”

And then ZMM ends (there’s a chance I might be forgetting something). The trick is that Pirsig offers a few half-hearted stabs at sysematizing his thoughts about Quality (don’t forget the diagram in Ch. 20), but the point of the story doesn’t appear to be a replacement system, but rather the resurrection of Phaedrus after chasing down the ghost of reason to Plato. When we move to Lila, I think we should pay close attention to how the Metaphysics of Quality is introduced. Pirsig quickly presents us with the quandry of SOM, a sort of recapitulation of the point of ZMM, and begins to describe his metaphysical answers. What happens then is that Rigel intercedes and objects (Ch. 6). Pirsig then bemoans his answers given, and the problem turns out to be a pernicious understanding of virtue—Pirsig let Rigel and the Victorians decide the terms of debate (the definition of the terms) and so lost before the fight even began.

The Metaphysics of Quality takes flight after a conversational difficulty. Pirsig writes that Phaedrus “realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change” (Lila 123, Ch. 9). Why? Because “he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality” (124), he’d already said something positive rather than sticking to the via negativa that mystics, particularly in the West, typically force themselves to stick to, a route that after Hegel (and particularly Adorno) became more and more prominent in non-theological metaphysics, too. Pirsig realizes that he has to say something, even that saying things are good. And this is where the presentation is interesting. The two paragraphs run like this:

By even using the term “Quality” he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term “Quality” set up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unaswered. Even the name, “Quality,” was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were “Quality” meants weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phaedrus had no answers.

. . . [ellipsis Pirsig’s] That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phaedrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phaedrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit. (124)

Pirsig considers metaphysics to be a good thing to do because it gives you an answer to people like Rigel, people who insist on certain questions. The analogy with Catholic practices in particular highlights what Pirsig has in mind. “Catechism” is from Greek roots that mean an “indoctrination.” This has bad connotations to our ears now, as does the other name Catholics have for it: dogma. But all Pirsig is highlighting is how what he is lacking is a systematic way to keep things straight in his line of thought, and how to answer people who press him.

Pirsig immediately goes on to analogize metaphysics with chess, and writes this:

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon. (125)

I’m not sure Pirsig ever comments further on the purpose of this paragraph. But we might notice that Pirsig’s subsumption of “reasonable” to “good” from ZMM should still be in effect, which may explain why “illogic” does not always hold sway. And further, we might imagine that Pirsig did have his Catechism of Quality at the ready when Rigel comes calling—would Rigel have been blown away? Should he have? There is no indication in these early pages, and particularly with the above paragraph, that Pirsig believes that had Phaedrus the MoQ ready to snap, it would have changed Rigel’s mind. It would have, rather, continued the conversation (until, perhaps, Rigel tired out first). Consider, too, the fact that when Rigel returns at the close, there’s no indication that any of Phaedrus’ “answers” are what lead Rigel to come back (for more on this curious aspect see my “Prospectus”).

What sometimes gets lost in metaphysical system-building is the person doing the building, and what the building is for. For Pirsig, there is a strong indication that metaphysics is for keeping yourself straight in conversation—consider Pirsig’s introduction to Lila’s Child where he picks up the chess metaphor again and says that “real chess is the game you play with your neighors. Real chess is ‘muddling through.’ Real chess is the triumph of mental organization over complex experience. And so is real philosophy” (viii). “Muddling through” is one of Dewey’s favorite images, one that Rorty loved to promote. Between Pirsig’s lament about getting broad-sided by Rigel and the Catechism of Quality, there’s Pirsig’s chapter on metaphysical platypi—the outcome of previously made cuts in the metaphysical firmament, previously made choices about which questions deserve answers. Pirsig says early in that chapter that “saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false” (Lila 115, Ch. 8). Both are used, are determined better or worse, relative to the purpose with which you are using them. The figure standing there weighing the options between the two alternatives is the philosopher, who sometimes goes missing in the attempt to limn the structure of reality.

And if someone insists on asking whether Quality is in the subject or object? Just say, “both—the object’s made out of inorganic, and maybe biological static patterns of Quality, and for the subject just tack on some intellectual and/or social static patterns of Quality.” And then you have your answer to a bad question. The questions won’t stop, but do they ever?

What Is Metaphysics?

Here are two definitions of metaphysics:

1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious and in some cases modify (this activity is also known in some circles as “philosophy”).

2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this activity is also sometimes known in some circles as “Platonism,” and in a few circles the acronymic “SOM”).

The above are designed for one purpose—to elaborate my position on “metaphysics,” which is Janus-faced because I have two philosophical parents. Mom (Pirsig) likes the word “metaphysics” and uses it freely to describe his philosophy. Dad (Rorty) doesn’t like the word “metaphysics,” generally because it causes headaches, and occasionally uses it to describe what he’s critiquing. What to do?

Well, it turns out that if you look closely, they are generally using two different definitions of what “metaphysics” is. With these two definitions we can split philosophers up into four groups:

A) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (1).
B) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (2).
C) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (1).
D) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (2).

Exemplars of each type:

A) Pirsig
B) Logical postivists
C) Rorty
D) Plato

The first side of the classifications, who likes which definition, is intended to display which definition of “metaphysics” people are wont to use when they are doing philosophy. The second, who does which, is intended to display—whether or not they understand themselves as doing so—which kind of metaphysics they were enacting. Hence: Pirsig likes and does the first definition and Rorty likes the second, but does the first. This happens because people who like the second definition fall into two categories: 1) unabashed Platonists/SOMists who fight against pragmatists/Pirsigians (D, above) and 2) pragmatists/Pirsigians who use “metaphysics” as the handle on which to grasp their enemy, Platonists/SOMists (C, above). Pirsig doesn’t use the word for that purpose, but I understand his purpose and so don’t get too upset what he uses the word neutrally and Rorty uses it pejoratively. (Also note the logical positivists, who thought they’d swept aside metaphysics, but were later shown to be enacting Plato’s involutions just as assuredly.)

At any rate, classifying stuff, slicing and dicing data, can be fun, but it must always be for some purpose—there is no neutrally motivated cut of the analytic knife (“neutral motivation” being in this context something of an oxymoron). Mine was to move Pirsig and Rorty together, but some questions arise as too how close that can be, and to how useful metaphysics(1) is in capturing the field of metaphysicians who aren’t Platonists. For, surely, metaphysics isn’t a turn inward, a personal investigation as metaphysics(1) seems to imply, but rather is about reality, as metaphysics(2) says. This objector may be quite noncommittal about Platonism, but they are interested in displaying the basic features of reality, not our minds or interpretive structure (or some other clever arrangement of words conveying the same thing). They are interested in creating a linguistic model of reality, much as physics creates a mathematical model of reality. These take seriously the etymological roots of “metaphysics,” noting that, alright, physics can do its thing, but metaphysicians still have to come in and mop up by noting, roughly, what makes physics possible—the structure of reality that escapes the mathematical models of physics.

This thought still seems to run in two different directions at once: in “mopping up,” does the metaphysician describe the basic structure of reality lurking behind the math, or do they describe the interrelation between physics and the rest of the world, or even, the interrelation between the disciplines that describe the world (which includes such “disciplines” as our regular effort at getting by day to day, i.e. “common sense”). After all, isn’t what escapes physics the stuff that chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc., do? Isn’t that why other disciplines got set up in the first place?

The fear of floating down the path laid out by metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward to the way that we, I, understand my relation to the world? Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, my relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the question of how our understanding relates to reality, and the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we understand it)?

The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises with the snide comment: “You seem to want to talk about how we talk about reality, but I want to talk about reality.” This is often punctuated by referencing, for example, the difference between tigers and talking about tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it be better to know about tigers, rather than how National Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how National Geographic and other professionals talk about tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a lot about the activities of zoologists without learning anything about what they study?

What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch with reality because we are focused on something other than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup called “Reality.” There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the other person believed about reality, then the communication would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more systematic anomalies might be taken to be different languages, with attendant “difficulties in translation” for persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between people might be labeled “insanity” and tremendous discontinuity is likely to be referred to as “noise.”

This is the conclusion that was reached by Donald Davidson in his work on philosophy of language, and its coordination with communication and truth. Davidson concluded that most of anyone’s beliefs must be true for communication to work—though that still leaves us in the dark about which ones are the true ones, let alone the problem of figuring out, with significant mismeasure, which person the crazy one. But Davidson’s conclusion does help dispel the Cartesian fear of solipsism—as long as communication works, we have as much certainty as we need that there is not only an External World, but also Other Minds.

So: we can investigate our understanding of reality and not fear subjectivism because it is our understanding we are investigating, most of our beliefs having been engendered by the community we grew up in, and we need not fear losing our grip on reality because this community’s understanding is its reality, in the sense, a very Darwinian one, that an understanding of the world that is around after all this time is one that works, and one that works must be one that largely teaches people how the world is.

A non-Platonist may still have some objection to metaphysics(1). After all, is not Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality more appropriately seen as a model of reality and not simply an understanding through which we see the world? Isn’t it a splicing of reality with Phædrus’ analytic knife, not just a splicing of our assumptions? The feeling behind this objection is that, yeah, investigating the way we individuals function in the world is good, but we also need an ontology, an investigation into how reality is apart from us. “You can show how reality, on the one side, and our experience of reality, on the other, must converge all you want, I think you can still talk about both of them separately and doing so will give us slightly different pieces of knowledge of the world.”

Ontology, study of the reality half of the experience/reality equation, is roughly the study of being, and it is often seen as the investigation into different kinds of being, or existence. Reading a random selection of writings on this topic over the course of the last 2,500 years will get you, not just different answers, but different kinds of answers. The metaphysical imagination has, however, been reigned in over the years, as some of its early speculations, say, in suggesting that water or fire was the root of all existence, were a little wild, indeed. In trying to circumvent all the speculative, metaphysical nonsense of preceding generations, Kant said that, rather than explain what kinds of existence there were (rather more poorly than other disciplines like the New Science), philosophy needed to show what was needed for existence to exist: what are the underpinnings, the structure that shapes the way this house exists?

There are a few problems with transcendental philosophy, but the broad thought—what has to exist for us to be able to do all of the things we are doing—is largely something that can, and should, be done. There is an infinite regress problem that arises, though, if you aren’t careful: unless a Pirsigian, for instance, is going to posit a non-physical kind of existence—which is a dangerous proposition—when somebody asks you what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, one of the few routes people feel comfortable anymore with is “it has the existence of a metaphysical proposition,” i.e. it’s something stated by people (which is Pirsig’s answer with “Western ghosts”). This, it is true, creates a circle that some people think is damaging—people need to exist for metaphysics to exist, which needs to exist for physics to exist, which needs to exist for people to exist—but pragmatists think that the circle becomes damaging and silly in equal measure: only by taking it too seriously. Part of what the word “universe” means is “that which would exist whether people do or not” and the only sense in which the universe is dependent on people is the sense in which “universe” is a word, and only people use words.

In the end, we are driven back to the Davidsonian outlook I described earlier: what we say about reality must converge with reality because there is no way we would keep saying these things if they weren’t useful, if they didn’t work, if they got reality drastically wrong. If what I said about the tiger got the tiger wrong, that way of speaking about tigers wouldn’t last. If I said, “tigers are cute and nice and love to play with me,” then I would likely get eaten upon meeting a tiger, and eventually everybody who believed that would get eaten, and thus nobody would be left thinking that about tigers. Forms of life, in Wittgenstein’s sense, evolve just as readily as biological life.

Some recalcitrant might still object, though, that just because a model of reality works doesn’t mean it is the right model, the correct model of reality. Shouldn’t we be searching for this model? Isn’t that what physics does? Since physics searches for the correct model of physical reality, shouldn’t metaphysics search for the correct model of reality in general?

The motivation behind “metaphysics,” under all definitions, but in particular those who want something more reality driven than my potted definition of metaphysics(1), is that there is more to the world, reality, and life than science. We need models of reality that display what this “more” is. This is all well and good, but the analogy with what science still displays the two sides of metaphysics, Platonic and non-Platonic. If metaphysics, like physics, is both a proliferation of hypotheses, of models, of how reality works and a winnowing of better ones, and we are willing to say with Davidson that these models do tell us how reality is, this doesn’t mean that our better and better models get closer to how reality is actually apart from our descriptions, how it should correctly be modeled. Not just Pirsig’s youthful fear of infinitely proliferating theories gets the Platonist here: how does the scientist, or metaphysician, know that he’s found the correct model, as opposed to the best one so far?

The origin of metaphysics, we say following Aristotle, was in trying to explain how reality was, like “water” (Thales) or “fire” (Anaximander) or “One” (Parmenides). The Greeks started to offer models of how reality worked. As some of the cosmologists got better and better at explaining how the “stuff” of the world worked, Plato said grandly that they were merely Giants, and that we should instead hope to be Gods. Plato saw clearly the rising tide of what we now call “science” and staked out quickly that there is more to the world than what it can tell us.

The trouble with Platonism—Plato worked out through history—is that it reduced to, not a set of hypotheses, but a method with which to tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. And since philosophy—the original inquiry—kept spinning out different disciplines that worked out according to their own particular methods the difference between a good and a bad hypothesis, philosophy had to look for a job that it could do. Platonism, distinguished carefully from philosophy/metaphysics(1), settled on looking for the way to tell the difference between a hypothesis that worked (which is what a non-philosophy discipline will tell you) and a hypothesis that is correct—a certification procedure that has itself nothing to do with, say, what physics, psychology, or history does.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between Platonism and metaphysics(1). Metaphysics seeks to investigate our models of reality because they don’t always work the greatest. For instance, some philosophers have thought that Plato was wrong, that all we need are Giants, science, physics (call some of them "logical positivists"). We have learned, however, through experimentation and the testing of models, that Plato was probably right that there was more in the world than what science can describe. But the heart of a pragmatist philosophy of science is, roughly, “Of course, there’s more in this world than what science can describe because we still need more descriptions than scientific ones.” As long as there’s an audience for baseball, there will be a need for more than physics.

Platonism wants more, however. They want to know why and how these models are correct, as opposed to just the best ones available. This aim at correctness is what Pirsig and Rorty both want to deny. Pirsig's journey in ZMM was from the contemporary Subject/Object dilemma to the more deeply rooted problem of dialectic, “the parvenu.” SOM is paradigmatic of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, but it has first been infected by the larger problem of the Platonic search for basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings to reality-as-such, a search that, given the production of individual disciplines of inquiry into how stuff in reality works (physics, psychology, history, etc.), will naturally give way to the production of a method—the dialectic. This is Pirsig's enemy in ZMM, and it is an enemy that is multifaceted in intellectual history.

Some Pirsigians think that materialism is the pernicious enemy that Pirsig was fighting with his philosophy. They believe that the growth of science was the growth of SOM, and both were the growth of our alienation from technology and, ultimately, our world. There are subtle connections between science, technology, SOM and alienation, but I don’t think Pirsig ever quite reduced SOM to what science does—SOM is an add-on to an otherwise wonderful tool called “science.”

In my view, one very general way to recapitulate the movement of ZMM is 1) Pirsig got caught in problems in the philosophy of science: what is a scientific theory? His solution was to say that a theory is a ghost generated by our evaluation of reality. 2) Pirsig got caught on the horns of the S/O Dilemma: if we have an evaluative relationship to reality, is the value in the subject or in the object? Pirsig's solution was to wonder how everything got split into subject and objects in the first place. 3) Pirsig trails the source to Plato: Plato thought there was a method, dialectic, that could detect Truth wherever it was. Pirsig sided with the Sophists who thought that Truth was an interplay of opinions, i.e. evaluations, between people.

It is the movement from (2) to (3)—or rather, history’s movement from Plato to Galileo’s science—that Pirsig leaves relatively obscure, and it hasn’t helped interpretations of him. With regard to the question of how the activity of science and the philosophical outlook of SOM relate, I would distinguish between two modern manifestations of what I’ve been calling “Platonism”: 1) scientific materialism and 2) Kantian realism. The first is the idea that science is a) the only route to Truth and b) everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. The second is the idea that a) Truth needs a foundation and b) both the mind and the world can only exist because of the other.

The Platonic common denominator of both scientific materialism and Kantian realism are contained in the (a) clauses. I would suggest that the (a) clauses can safely be detached from the (b) clauses, and that doing so eliminates the pernicious enemy Pirsig found in Plato and leaves us with two rather boring propositions. On the one hand, the first (b) clause: everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. Some may recoil, but I would pause and suggest that everything can be reduced to physical descriptions, but we also need more than just these physical descriptions to describe our world. (On reductionism generally, see my “Parable of the Reductionist”.) A metaphysical proposition can be reduced to the physical description of the breath leaving my lungs or the chemical properties of ink or the electrical properties of computer hardware, but doing so wouldn’t tell us anything about what the metaphysical proposition means and so we still would need metaphysical descriptions. The first (b) clause reduces to a bland physicalism which basically says, “Science is great, but we need more than physics to talk about what we want to talk about. Science isn’t the only Truth.” And the second (b) clause reduces to the tidy little transcendental circle I talked about earlier: people need to exist for language to exist, language needs to exist for physics to exist, physics needs to exist for people to exist.

I think the ultimate lesson to be drawn from this discussion is that it is difficult to answer the lead question: what is metaphysics? It is difficult because there have been many historical understandings of what the activity is and how it should be done. Any answer has to deal with a number of objections from slightly different understandings. The route with which I have dealt with the problem of what we are doing when we do philosophy/metaphysics is the route of finding a common enemy—it is a problem-oriented understanding of philosophical discourse. Every language has their own word for “tiger,” but somehow both the English and the French are able to deal with tigers—for the most part. Though I think there is an analogy between natural languages and the idiosyncratic philosophical jargons every particular philosopher develops in isolation from every other philosopher, I do not think everybody must be talking about the same exact thing. Davidson points towards this truth—most of our beliefs must be true, not all of them. This means that Cartesian skepticism is lame, but it does not mean that inquiry into better and better beliefs, better models of reality, must stop, or is pointless.

Philosophical discourse makes progress by assessing how individual jargons deal with the problems of reality. This problem-oriented understanding of philosophy and metaphysics allows us to see that, while Pirsig, Rorty, and Plato all talk differently, there are certain things that can be intertranslated well—and things that cannot. I have named a root that is untranslatable into the languages of Pirsig and Rorty—though they between them speak differently of it—Platonism. Seeing this root well, I think, is a precondition for understanding what more can and cannot be translated between the two, and this general process goes for philosophers generally.

Pirsig, the MoQ, and SOM

Note: This has been culled from moq.org Discussion Forum postings that first appeared beginning October 14th, 2002 under the same thread name. It represents an angle of criticism that has since receded in my thinking about Pirsig. I do not agree with everything here anymore, but there might still be some fruit to pick from this branch. My alteration process was to change phrasing if it was easy, but large scale things got left as is, even if no longer current.

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In the past (primarily in "Confessions of a Fallen Priest"), I've put forth a thesis that Pirsig can, and should at times, be seen as a Kantian philosopher. He can be seen following many of the same metaphysical moves that Kant made. On the surface, this is bad because Kant should be seen as one of the primary stakeholders in the Subject-Object Metaphysical Industry. This is, in that sense, a not-so-tiny indictment against Pirsig's view of the MoQ as repudiating SOM.

I must confess, in my first readings and exegeses of Pirsig, I was never very comfortable with what a subject-object metaphysics was supposed to be. It seemed to be a lot of things to a lot of people. I don't mention subject-object metaphysics very often in my early forum essays because, other than a very specific criticism of Sartre as using that splicing of reality, I'm not sure why so many things fall under the "evil of SOM." SOM for Pirsig is the heading that many of us (including Pirsig) throw the bad things we see being done. In this case, it is much like Derrida's "metaphysics of presence": they are what's been wrong with traditional philosophy as passed down to us from Plato. I prefer, to these broad signifiers, Dewey's "whole brood and nest of dualisms" which we inherited from Plato. I think that calling each dualism as we see them makes it easier to tackle them, even when they are tangled together.

I would like to sketch a short, simplistic narrative of the history of philosophy. It will be very short, but I hope it will contextualize my thoughts about Pirsig.

During the Pre-Socratic period of philosophy, many philosophers were embroiled in a debate about cosmology and other topics. These were the first philosophers and they tried to establish the immortal truth about these things. Thales wanted everything to be reduced to water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus flux, Anaxagoras nous, Pythagoras Number, etc. They argued and argued, but more and more hypotheses were being offered rather than any particular hypothesis zeroing in on truth.

Plato (who also represents Socrates) entered the scene and separated true knowledge from opinion. He established the dialectic as the method with which we could find the truth. With this sure path towards true knowledge, he divided Reality into two: the Realm of Ideas (or Forms) and the Realm of the Senses. This is the first systematic appearance of the appearance-reality distinction: the Realm of Ideas are real and are our foundation upon which we have true knowledge. Info we gain from the senses simply give us opinions about appearances, rather than penetrating to the truth. In the inflection I would like to give it, we can see the Realm of Ideas as being "out there" waiting to be discovered and the Realm of the Senses as something closer to us, something immediately sensed.

Fast-forward many years. Europe's intellectuals are embroiled in a skeptical crisis, quite reminiscent of the one that raged before Socrates and Plato. Descartes entered the scene and continued the Greek project of searching for a foundation for knowledge and truth, though he was one of the first to dispense with the Greek way of doing philosophy (i.e. following the direct footsteps of either Plato or Aristotle). The Rationalists and Empiricists of this time can be seen as trying to fill in the blanks of what this foundation is. The Rationalists said the foundation came from reason, but they had a hard time applying the "truths" they discovered to the world around us. The Empiricists said the foundation came from our senses. Locke and Berkeley, though, had God on their side and, essentially, this is what kept the world from falling apart. Hume, however, stepped up and said, no, we cannot have the certainty and foundation that the Greeks were looking for. It is not logical to infer universality from an empirical experience. Hume, in this light, is something of a proto-pragmatist.

Right after Hume finishes his attack on the possibility of a foundation, Kant famously steps in. Kant picks up the project to lay a foundation from which we can attain absolutely certain, true knowledge. For Kant, the real world is "out there." Kant makes an inner-outer distinction which is essentially the subject-object distinction. Objects are "out there" and when the subject represents the object correctly, then we have true knowledge. While Kant's arguments for absolute certainty are generally supposed to have failed, between Kant and the Empiricists, experience of a real world that is "out there" is solidified as our connection with Reality. Experience, in some sense, becomes our gateway to a foundation. This sets the stage for 20^th century realists, many of whom believe that science is the great excavator of Truth.

Parallel to this debate in professional philosophy was an increasing sense during the 18^th century that there were two tracks of life for humans: an inner, moral track and an outer, material track. The material world is "out there" and supplies us with food to eat. Morals, on the other hand, are felt in the heart, inside with our connection to God. We don't experience morals like rocks. That these two tracks were becoming increasingly divergent was also becoming more and more important and apparent. While science and economics helped us get we wanted on the material track, what would help us get what we wanted on the moral track? Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment helped solidify the new economics. The bourgeoisification of people made them more comfortable, eased their material concerns. But what would ease their moral concerns? Hume suggested that people would just gradually become more sophisticated and gradually turn their attentions to more "high-minded pleasures." Rousseau suggested that the sciences were corrupting and that we turn away from luxury and material things. Benjamin Constant emphasized the need for a moral education.

This is the ground upon which Pirsig entered. We have an outer track and an inner track and never the twain shall meet. Given this context, we can see that Pirsig’s solution was to move everything to the outer track. He made morals experiential. He saw that the outer track was where Reality was, where people placed great importance (be it in the metaphysical sense or economic sense), so he collapsed everything into Reality. Pirsig usurped the realist answer. By this token, the MoQ isn’t a kind of idealism at all—it’s a realist hybrid.

According to this reading, Pirsig believes he's repudiating subject-object metaphysics, but I find that he is still caught in it in the following way: he follows the Kantian inner-outer distinction, which leads people to interpret an appearance-reality distinction. Reality is still "out there." It’s just now, morals are "out there."

To support this reading, I would draw attention to the turning point in ZMM: Chapter 19, the subject-object dilemma. Pirsig is very correct in his diagnostic of the problem. In the Platonic tradition, there are two options: out there in the object, or in here in the subject. Pirsig goes on to give a pretty good description of what would happen to either of his answers: a demand for empirical verification or the charge of idealism. Pirsig's Gestalt switch, his Copernican revolution, is best seen as a redescription of what is being empirically verified, rather than falling into idealism.

One objection to this line is that Pirsig says, "he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn't reside in the material world. Then: he rejected the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn't reside merely in the mind. And finally: Phaedrus ... said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two." (240) This is Pirsig's definitive move away from SOM. The equivocation that I see is that when Pirsig describes our relation to Quality it is almost always, "When we experience Quality" or "Why does everybody see Quality differently?" Pirsig always uses language in which an ego (or subject) is experiencing reality (or object). There is still an inner-outer distinction in which reality is still "out there."

I don't think Pirsig sees this because he too hastily assumes that objective reality in SOM is considered to be material or matter. I don't think this is an assumption he should make. A realist doesn't assume that reality is corpuscularian, he simply assumes that it is "out there." This makes more sense, when we contrast the realist with the idealist who thinks that reality is "in here."

To add to my critique, I would draw attention to Chapter 5 and 6 of ZMM, the chapters in which Pirsig begins his description of the romantic-classic division. This division is, firstly, very Kantian. One of Kant's divisions was between intuition (romantic) and understanding (classic). When Pirsig describes "immediate surface impressions [as] essential for primary understanding," (75) Pirsig could be quoting straight out of the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, the classic mode of viewing things views itself as reality, and the romantic mode as appearance. You can hear the naïve scientist saying, "The atomic structure of the table is the real table, not your sense impressions of it." Pirsig wants to counter both the classic, square privileging of reality and the romantic privileging of appearance. In other words, Pirsig wants to counter SOM.

However, when we turn the classic-romantic lens back on the rudimentary metaphysical hierarchy that Pirsig sets up in Chapter 20 (much like Pirsig's own analysis of analysis, turning reason back on itself), what appears is an appearance-reality distinction. Reality is now Quality and the appearances of Quality are either romantic or classic. There is still a reality behind the appearances that is privileged and that we must correspond to. Quality is Reality prior to any division, but it would seem to be Reality, "out there," behind the appearances of any division. This is where Pirsig's mysticism comes in. Mystics who lean on the concept of maya utilize the appearance-reality distinction, otherwise they wouldn't think of language as obscuring anything.

The appearance-reality distinction is in play if you think, not just that there is something real behind appearances (like real motivations between apparent altruism), but that there is a systematic distance between reality and our perception of it. For instance, Plato believed that the Realm of Forms was real and the Realm of the Senses were simply appearances. Kant believed that objects had a real essence and that this essence could be falsely represented (Locke believed this, too). Christians, too, in a way, believe in this distinction insofar as they believe that Heaven is real and Earth is simply a passing stage. Mystics believe in this distinction when they say that language obscures reality. You believe in it when you think there is something else, something more real, lurking behind whatever it is now that you are sensing or experiencing.

To take up the last example, that language obscures reality, the trouble is that if Quality is simply the environment around us, reality around us, then that is suitably pragmatized. But to say that "Quality is what exists before you say anything," to say that language gets in the way of Quality, is to take an SOM stance. The pragmatist is going to say that, in addition to Quality being what exists before you say anything, Quality is also what exists during the speaking and after you say something. The reason this is is because the pragmatist line is that us speaking does not somehow distort our connection with Quality. We are always connected to Quality, but the Quality we perceive will be different depending on how we speak. This makes Quality different for different people. It’s still Quality, our environment, but it will be different depending on the static patterns we've been born with. The conception of a "static filter" is another SOM signifier. The pragmatist wants to replace wholesale the metaphor of a static filter with static patterns. We directly experience the static pattern and which static patterns we experience determines which other static patterns we experience. Dynamic Quality is the effort in changing our static patterns, so that we may experience new and better patterns.

Metaphysics, by a conventional definition, falls into an appearance-reality distinction because it assumes something is "beyond" reality (by strict definition, if reality were gleaned by physics). A conventional notion of metaphysics hopes to incorporate an "ultimate reality." "Ultimate" is superfluous unless "ultimate reality" is contrasted with "reality." This retains the appearance-reality distinction. Some routes around Pirsig’s use of “ultimate” in his descriptions of Quality have been to emphasize who it is undefined. This leaves a formless, ineffable, universal, ahistorical, foundational ultimate reality, while leaving all formulations of it as contingent. One could make the case that this is what both Plato and Pirsig were trying to do. Plato's instrument of irony is Socrates. David L. Hall attempts to make this case (as a strike against Rorty's narrative) when he says, "Socrates is made to play edifier to Plato's systematic aspirations. This involves the institutionalization of doubt." This makes Plato's writings "permanently ironized." Pirsig can be seen as doing the same thing with Phaedrus as his mouthpiece. It is, perhaps though, a juxtaposition of the roles Plato and Socrates played because Phaedrus seems to be the systematizer and Pirsig (as narrator of ZMM or simply as writer) the edifier.

This, I think, is the best way to try and do justice to the historicist elements of Pirsig while remaining an essentialist. However, my question is: "What good is an ultimate reality if you can't correspond to it?" Pirsig keeps Quality undefined, but I can’t understand trying to correspond to it and I can’t understand keeping around a terminology that creates metaphysical distance. It’s the same thing that Locke did in explaining the difference between real essences (or definitions) and nominal essences (or definitions). Locke thought that real essences existed, but he didn't think we'd ever know if we correctly corresponded with them. He thought that all we'd ever have were nominal essences, which we defined. The question to Locke and Pirsig, in the name of Ockham's Razor, is why keep the real essences or undefined ultimate reality? In Locke, at least we could correspond to the real essences, we'd just never know it. In Pirsig, we can't correspond to Quality because it’s not defined and never can be defined. The definition of Quality is "undefinable."

The use we get out of Quality as ultimate reality is as a foundation for universality and ahistoricality. The appearance-reality distinction is retained so that we can touch something universal: a replacement for God. The retainment of the appearance-reality distinction, even when we can't ever correspond to reality, is a statement for the demand for a foundation. This is a foundation that pragmatists dispense with, something we do not think is needed. So we are quick to pull out our razors.

A textual example in Pirsig from Chapter 8 of Lila is very revealing. Pirsig begins a section by saying, “This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash all subject-object thought but that’s not true.” (114) Most of that paragraph sounds like Pirsig is discarding a correspondence theory of truth. He sounds like an antiessentialist when he says, "One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along." However, two lines before, he sounds like a confused metaphysician: "But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist."

This I take to be Pirsig's hubris. He believed he could succeed where Plato failed. He believed he could encapsulate the Good. Pirsig thinks he can have an ultimate reality and not expect people to want to correspond to it. He says, one line before that, "If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things—that which corresponds to the "objective" world—and all other constructions are unreal." Well, my question is, what good is an ultimate reality if you can't correspond to it? If Quality becomes the ultimate reality then it tempts people to come along and say, "Hey, the MoQ is universal and ahistorical." But then, in the same breath, Pirsig trys to say that "No, it isn't." By retaining a fairly traditional formulation of what metaphysics is, he's retaining rhetorical facets of SOM. The point is that Pirsig doesn't have to retain metaphysics or SOM: Nietzsche and the pragmatists show him a way out. They show him a way in which he can retain the second and fourth quote without the need for the third. In fact, to be more precise, the fourth quote should read: "If we retain an ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things."

In contrast to Pirsig's solution to the problem of SOM, the metaphysics of presence, or that whole brood and nest of Greek dualisms, the pragmatist suggests a rhetorical answer that Pirsig both considers, thinks is the best stratagem, and others apparently counseled him in doing: refuse to enter the arena. (233) Following Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, and Wittgenstein, throw out the tradition of even considering these things as problems. Dissolve problems by making them disappear, rather than solve problems which gives them more credence than they deserve. But Pirsig doesn't do this. In attempting to get people to start to care about the material realm, in getting them to start to view morals as just as real and important as motorcycles, Pirsig pushes everything "out there" into reality.

If I'm right, that in setting up the MoQ Pirsig ressurects the Kantian inner-outer distinction, then this gives credence to universalist, right-rendering-of-reality readings of Pirsig. The question that this reading brings up is how dedicated you are: do you love the MoQ more than you hate SOM? If you're like me, you start to read the MoQ like a pragmatist would. If not, then be prepared to face the problems of realism, which are much like the problems that Pirsig levels against the whole scientific establishment. This is the problem of ZMM and Lila: some of what he writes can be subjected to the same criticisms that he brings up.

This is why there are so many wildly differing readings of Pirsig and the MoQ: there is ample room for wildly differing readings of the MoQ. Just like Kant, who can be read as an idealist or a realist, I think Pirsig can be read as a realist, an idealist (or anti-realist), or a pragmatist. So, the moral of this story is that, if you are looking for a foundation, a true, ahistorical MoQ to set your feet upon, you are following in the footsteps of Kant and a tradition of Platonic dualisms, three of which are the entangled appearence-reality distinction, the inner-outer distinction, and the subject-object distinction. If you repudiate the need for foundations, you are following Dewey and the pragmatists. Both can be found in Pirsig. The question is, who's side are you on?

Excavating SOM

What is SOM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begging the Question, Moral Intuition(s), and Answering the Nazi, Part I

I mentioned to Sam in a comment that I was saving for posterity some of my old posts at the MD by reposting them (with some minor revisions) here. I consider one of my state of the art posts, one of the posts that shows where my thinking currently is abut Pirsig, to be this one, "Begging the Question." What's funny is that I can never find it in the archives when I look for it because I wrote it two and a half years ago. I'm like, "There's no way it could be from 2003." But there it is.

The difficulty with this series of posts is that my opinion hasn't changed much and I think it says something important. I've tried on several occasions to prepare to write it up as an essay, which still needs to be done, but every time I can't quite figure out how to frame it, what background is necessary. I can never quite figure out which direction to go. So it sits. But now I'll repost it with minor revisions, hopefully that will help me think about what to do with it. And of course more peer review always helps.

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One of the things that is commonly misunderstood about Rorty and pragmatism is that people think that it is irrationalist. That what we find in Rorty, particularly in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is a complete disregard for argumentation and that pragmatism in general leads to fuzzy thinking. I think this is a slight misunderstanding, or at least misleading. I think it is from a keen understanding of logic that leads Rorty to some of his conclusions about the limits of logical argumentation (or as some alarmists may put it, the limits of reason). In three parts, I hope to string together the related subjects of argumentation and morals in light of Pirsig and Rorty. Pirsig argues that his "Metaphysics of Quality" gives us a firm foundation for our moral thinking, something that stems the tide of "moral paralysis" and gives us something with which to beat the heads of our moral enemies. I would like to test the parameters of this foundation to see what exactly is being used to beat our enemies, what exactly Pirsig's philosophy gives us that he thinks is lacking from, for instance, James' pragmatism. I will first begin by exploring an important, if not the most important, argumentative fallacy--the act of begging the question.

Begging the Question
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Petitio principii, begging the question, as an informal fallacy means "the procedure of taking for granted, in a statement or argument, precisely what is in dispute" (according to Anthony Flew's fine dictionary of philosophy) or "arriving at a conclusion from statements that themselves are questionable and have to be proved but are assumed true" (according to Peter Angeles' equally fine philosophical dictionary). The technical, formal meaning of "begging the question" is "assuming the conclusion or part of the conclusion in the premises of an argument". (Angeles) This leads to circular reasoning. Circular reasoning and question begging go hand in hand. You can't argue with "All bachelors are single" because the definition of bachelor is singlehood.

In Rorty's hands, begging the question takes on a new form. John Stuart Mill said that, "if logic did not contain real inferences, all deductive reasoning would be petitio principii, a begging of the question." (Oxford Companion to Philosophy) However, this contains an element of Kantianism. Mill contrasts between verbal inferences and real inferences and this matches up to the distinction Kant drew between analytic judgements and synthetic judgements. After Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", however, it has been increasingly hard for philosophers to hold this distinction. This pans out to mean that Mill was inadvertantly right, all deductive reasoning does beg the question.

To help see what I mean by this, I'm going to give a short lesson in formal logic. This is what a logical proof looks like in formal mode:

~P, Q->P, RvQ - R

Formal logic is like algebra, except with stand-ins for propositions, rather than numbers. Each capital letter stands for a proposition, and each combination of capital letters with other symbols stand for propositions. What that line of symbols means is that you assume (i.e. they are your premises) "~P" (i.e. "not P"), "Q->P" (i.e. "if Q, then P"), and "RvQ" (i.e. "R or Q"). The "-" means that stuff on the left are your assumptions and stuff on the right is what you are trying to prove, i.e. your conclusion.

Okay, here's how the proof looks:

1. ~P ------- A (meaning Assumption)
2. Q->P ---- A
3. RvQ ----- A
4. ~Q ------ MT 1,2
("Modus Tollens" on lines 1 and 2. Why? Because if you assume "if Q, then P" and you find out "not P", that means it couldn't possibly be "Q" because if it were "Q" then it would have to be "P". And you already have "not P". That would make a contradiction.)

5. R ------- vE 3,4
("'Or' elimination" on lines 3 and 4. Why? Because "R or Q" means you must have either "R" or "Q". Since you've found out "not Q", it couldn't possibly be "Q" (that would be a contradiction) so it must be "R".)

A simple five step proof.

In Rortyan terms, the capital letters ("P", "Q", and "R") and every combination of those letters in our proof ("~P", "Q->P", "RvQ", "~Q", and "R") is our vocabulary. Our final vocabulary corresponds to our assumptions. The final vocabulary of our five-step proof was lines 1-3. We didn't ask if those assumptions were true, we assumed them and then performed logical machinations to see what our assumptions would yield us (we got both lines 4 and 5).

When Rorty talks about the shifts between vocabularies as falling outside the bounds of argumentation, he's saying that there is no argumentative way to shift the truth-value of your assumptions, because to argue is to be inside of a logical proof, so to speak. If you find that you can argue about some particular assumption, that means that there is a bigger logical proof with other assumptions working in the background, that "~P" is really the conclusion of another logical proof. Rorty's point about vocabularies is the Millian point that all argumentative reasoning is circular, that if you try and argue about an assumption, you will be led back to another proof with assumptions, and if you argued about those assumptions, you will be led further back to another proof, ad infinitum. And what will more than likely occur is that, at some point, you will start to find some of the conclusions of your first few proofs as assumptions in your later proofs. That's circular.

Given a vocabulary, given a set of assumptions (e.g. lines 1-3) you will always reach your conclusions (lines 4-5), i.e. the conclusion is implied in the set of assumptions. That means that if you don't assume the same propositions, you will not get the same conclusions. If you assume "~P", ala our 5-step proof, and I assume "P", that means I will not get "R", given the rest of the assumptions. It means I'm working in a different logic proof, a different vocabulary. And because we can't argue over the truth-value of our assumptions, because it would be hopelessly circular, we are both begging the question over each other.

This explains, for instance, the title of Rorty's first book of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty isn't simply recapitulating Dewey, or James, or Quine, or Sellars, or Davidson. He's working out the logical consequences of the vocabulary that these men have suggested that we start using, rather than this other vocabulary called "Platonic metaphysics". In Rorty's suggestion that there is no way to logically move from one vocabulary to another, he is playing out the consequences of Quine's inadvertant rendering of Mill. And in working out these consequences, he has pointed out along the way when these same people fall short of endorsing these consequences. That, in a nut shell, is what I use Rorty to do with Pirsig. Given certain assumptions in Pirsig, I find that he's a pragmatist. But Pirsig also has these other conclusions that don't seem to jive with pragmatism. So I try and tease out all of his assumptions, his entire vocabulary, and see whether they mesh, or whether we don't, in the end, end up with a series of short 5-step logical proofs and find that in Proof 8 he assumes "P" and in Proof 16 he assumes "~P".

When we look at philosophy in general, I think we will find that logical argumentation of the kind I laid out rarely, if ever, occurs between philosophers. My five-step problem is a useful heuristic, but probably only that. We typically only find logical argumentation in a book written by one philosopher. What occurs between philosophers is a long series of circumventions. One philosopher constructs an argument, another philosopher criticizes it as bearing out the wrong conclusions, and the first philosopher either capitulates (because he shares the same assumptions as the second philosopher and he did make an error of some kind) or he shifts the terms of debate from the criticizing philosopher's terms back into his own and refines his terms. Take, for instance, arguments about "post-modernism". Philosopher A says, "Post-modernism is great because it eschews metanarratives." Philosopher B says, "Post-modernism sucks because it leads to nihilism." PhA says, "No, pomo doesn't lead to nihilism because, even though it eschews metanarratives, it doesn't say that narratives do not exist." PhB says, "Yeah, but without a metanarrative, how could a narrative mean anything?" PhA says, "A narrative means something the same way a metanarrative means something. If you hold your proposition to be true, why wouldn't the metanarrative be meaningless unless there was a meta-metanarrative?" PhB says, "Because a metanarrative means the buck stops here." PhA says, "Well, that's what a narrative means. The pomo point is that our narratives aren't ahistorical like a metanarrative is supposed to be." And on and on it goes.

My point is that circumvention really isn't all that rare, that it is in fact a commonplace of communication. It only becomes important to point out when two people's vocabularies differ to such a great extent that they can't agree on anything of concern. This is the point when "begging the question" becomes an important phrase. This is the point where philosophy meets metaphilosophy. When doing philosophy, the vocabulary being used is somewhat agreed upon. Engagements are more or less in argumentative form in which the back and forth between philosophers takes the form of refinement, or small circumventions. When doing metaphilosophy, the vocabulary we should be using to do philosophy is up for grabs. Engagements more or less do not look like engagements at all, and the back and forth is in the form of explication. The circumventions are so large it becomes convenient to speak of "begging the question" and the only thing to do is describe what your position is and why you think it better. In ZMM, Pirsig is doing metaphilosophy when he suggests that we drop the SOM vocabulary and instead create a Quality vocabulary. The MoQ is his attempt at setting out what that vocabulary would look like.

What should be recognized is that in ZMM, Pirsig does not argue conclusively that we should drop SOM. He argues periodically (like his brief taking on of each of the horns of the Subject/Object Dilemma), but he typically drops these arguments because he finds the terms in which he argues are unsuitable because they are their's, they are SOM's terms. What drives Pirsig is the apparent SOM conclusion that we should "do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good." (ZMM, 368) Pirsig's key attempts at persuasion are rhetorical: he recontextualizes in an attempt to make the old picture appear inadequate and he redescribes in an attempt to paint an alternative picture that looks better than the old one.

Pirsig's major attempt at recontextualization in ZMM is his sections on Greek philosophy at the end of the book. Pirsig's first move is to set a new context for Plato's Dialogues. Are they transcripts of what Socrates and his interlocuters actually said? "When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too." (380) Pirsig's second step is to reconstitute the Sophists' reputations by pointing out that they were ambassadors. This sets up his narrative where he goes through the Homeric myths, to the pre-Socratics via Thales, Anaximenes, etc. to Parmenides and Zeno, and then to the Sophists which sets up what Socrates and Plato were up to: a historical synthesis of his predecessors. Pirsig is not arguing here that Plato is wrong, he is not dialectically engaging Plato. He is showing us that Plato's achievement in philosophy was contingent on his predecessors. Pirsig is thereby suggesting that the problems of Plato's achievement are contingent, that they can be changed by changing the problematic, changing our philosophy, changing our vocabulary.

Pirsig's alternative comes in the form of redescribing things in terms of his new vocabulary and asking us to compare the old with the new. He does this when he substitutes "Quality" in place of "Dao" in the Daodejing, (256-7) when he restructures our metaphysical hierarchy (252-3), and when he performs his Copernican inversion by suggesting that Quality sits behind subjects and objects and not the other way around. (250)

His inversion is of particular interest to us here given his description of his options in the Subject/Object Dilemma. He says that he has "three classical logical refutations" and several "illogical, 'rhetorical' ones". (232) However, his third logical refutation is to "go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices." This isn't, however, "logical" given our analysis of how logical arguments work. Going between the horns is the same as saying, "Sorry, my friendly Bozeman English faculty cohorts. You are begging the question." Pirsig is saying that he doesn't accept the Subject/Object Dilemma as a dilemma. This isn't a refutation. He didn't argue with them. He refused to answer the question because he didn't accept their terms. He shifted the debate.

On this count, his answer is rhetorical and akin to the third rhetorical option he uses, "refuse to enter the arena". However, I think there is a difference between what Pirsig calls his third classical answer and his third rhetorical answer. The difference is that the classical answer, the inversion, still sufficiently plays by enough of the rules of philosophy to count as a small circumvention, a refinement. The stark refusal to enter the arena, to take the "easy escape of mysticism" (which I would argue is not the only way to refuse entrance), would count as a large circumvention, a significant begging of the question, a call for explication. The consequence of the difference I am drawing is that Pirsig is still playing by enough of Plato's rules to count as doing philosophy in Whitehead's sense of being footnotes to Plato. He has not sufficiently disputed Plato's project to count as doing metaphilosophy. This means he could be still playing with the vocabulary of the SOM.

That Pirsig doesn't completely circumvent Plato's project doesn't mean that he is playing SOM's rules. What remains to be seen is if Pirsig's refinement of Plato's project dodges sufficiently what Pirsig takes to be the dangers of SOM. To see this, I would like to show how Pirsig attempts in some way to conflate argumentation and morality, how Pirsig tries to envision moral problems as arguable, as answerable to reason, how Pirsig wants to answer the Nazi and not simply convert him.

To Part II