Rorty's Early Work

1. 1979 — What was actually radical about eliminative materialism; 2. “The Limits of Reductionism” — The rhetoric of moves — The metaphor of conversation; 3. Why republish the early work? — The technical conversation of philosophy; 4. So much missing — In this age of access — Where are the lectures?

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1.      At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20^th century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.

This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. [1] However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.

The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our practices of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we should eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is really just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was possible, going the next step and arguing we should make it actual does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that all vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.

2.      That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. [2]

What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.

This treatment of philosophizing as itself a fact in need of explanation is the metaphilosophical attitude par excellence. It is the rhetorical device which moves discussion up to the level on which the questions “Necessary for what?” and “When is a fact not really a fact?” must be raised explicitly. The acceptance of this gambit might indeed be taken as the defining characteristic of that species of discourse which we call “philosophy.” For it is precisely when the gambit is refused, and the reductionist replies that his concern is with a certain delimited subject matter which does not include his own activity of inquiry, that a given type of inquiry is liable to separate itself from philosophy and to set up shop as science. (41)

This, I think, is a tremendous insight with significant ramifications for our understanding of inquiry and its relationship to social institutions. [3] From the beginning, Rorty was concerned with metaphilosophy—thinking about why and how we do philosophy—an attitude impressed upon him most by his teacher at Chicago, Richard McKeon. This collection makes available another gem, “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (1967) This is usefully read as a follow up to “Limits,” focusing now on the specific conversational state of analytic philosophers who took the “linguistic turn” and their older colleagues who resisted the turn by continuing to speak of “essences” and “experience.” Rorty again displays his technique of ad hoc botanization, splitting philosophers into the categories of “critical,” “speculative,” and “empirical,” and though this tempest is largely missing from the teapot these days, it is still instructive to watch Rorty go through his motions. [4]

And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of conversation that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though avant la lettre. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” [5] But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.

3.      But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the Review of Metaphysics or the Journal of Philosophy easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. [6] But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?

Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20^th century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy and one essay on Whitehead. [7] But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.

Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his Consequences of Pragmatism collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” [8] But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”

4.      I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.

I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. [9] What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.

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Endnotes

[1] See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism.

[2] This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).

[3] For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a reductio ad absurdum, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.

[4] I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.)

[5] “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).

[6] *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the Review of Metaphysics in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the Review of Metaphysics, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the Review and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

Here's what it should read:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language we use. To say that "X's appear to us as F" is merely to say that "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

As you can see, it doesn't really change anything interpretationally. And besides, of the essays reproduced, "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" is the most negligible. If I could fault the editors for anything, it would be reprinting it in the first place.

[7] Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.

[8] To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)

[9] I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review “Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that analytic philosophy can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in Consequences of Pragmatism that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.

Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction

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

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Towards the end of his life, one of Rorty’s favorite passages to quote from Dewey was, “democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature….”[fn.1] The earliest, clearest expression of what Rorty took this passage to mean is his “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In that paper, Rorty sought to defend Rawlsian liberal philosophy from liberal theorists like Ronald Dworkin and communitarian liberal-critics like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor by urging that Rawls, like Dewey, is putting democracy before philosophy—democracy does not need philosophical justification (nor a fortiori has philosophical presuppositions), but it can, if people would like one, have philosophical expression. A few years after writing that paper, Rorty wrote the centerpiece of his lifework, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This book famously erected the public/private distinction that so many liberals have found troubling. Rorty, however, meant no more and no less than what Jefferson meant by the separation between church and state—keep your private life out of the government, and the government will stay out of your private life.

The formulation of “man’s metaphysic,” the philosophical expression of the democratic ethos, that Rorty favored when talking about religion was as a “utilitarian ethics of belief.” The staging point is Jefferson’s incarnation of Mill in his swerve from Locke—the point of life is happiness, and let all be free to pursue it as they choose, just so long as their pursuits don’t infringe on the pursuits of others. Because we all have a right to our own private pursuits, just so long as they do not infringe on each other or public projects, Rorty argues that James formulates a new philosophy of truth and knowledge to suit the new cultural ideal created by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A utilitarian ethics of belief suggests, first and foremost, that the only claims that should be met are the claims made by actual people. A generalized update of Peirce’s disposal of Descartes’ fake doubt, this assertion doesn’t mean we can’t use hypotheticals or the examples of literary texts in our deliberations, but simply that their occasion must be, in James’ words, “live, momentous, and forced.”

Of course, what is as up for deliberation as any decision we may face is whether a particular choice is genuine, whether it is live, momentous, and/or forced. Abstract philosophizing, such as it is above the fray of life, must be careful not to pronounce too sharply on the denizens below, though it is tempting. James found this temptation in Clifford’s demand that the religiously pious give up the charade of warranted belief in the face of science’s advance. James and Rorty push back: the scientistically pious are as bad as the religious—perhaps everyone should hand in their clerical collars.

In Rorty’s efforts to fend off scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism, however, he employs a mishandled strategy in several of his papers. The general strategy is this: by deploying the public/private distinction, we may separate out two kinds of demands respectively. Public demands are those we find when making laws, setting tax code, or when a nation struggles in the face of a neoconservative induced economic depression. For these kinds of demands, we need a thin level of discourse with which we can argue out disagreements. We may not always agree that the terms of debate are the best ones, but what is only required is that they are thin enough to not be too disagreeable to anyone. For private demands, on the other hand, disagreeability of terms of expression are grounds for considering the demand to be unforced. Unhappy with your boyfriend’s constant demand for attention? Get a new boyfriend. Don’t like the fact that women can’t be priests? Become a Methodist. Don’t like the Monopoly guy’s stupid face? Play Sorry. One doesn’t always have to set up a new shop somewhere else, one can alter their tradition from the inside (just look at poor Gary Wills), but unlike one’s government, switching private allegiance can be a bit easier.

Rorty’s strategy with religion, then, is to privatize it. On the one hand, we have the thin level of public discourse with which to debate public policy. On the other hand, we have as many modes of private discourse as we have private communities made up of like-minded, happiness pursuers. Something might seem initially wrong with this—when did science become a private path towards happiness?—but it is imperative that the pragmatist approach at this high level of abstraction construe science as such. Science is a private path because it is not political discourse. It is a job, for one thing, and then, on occasion, it is a source of intense private pleasure for some, with no end of scientists who enjoy waxing poetic about the relationship of science to the universe. Most importantly, however, science—though it may inform public discourse—is not itself the mode in which we interact with our fellow democratic citizens on issues of joint societal determination.

“Private projects versus public discourse” is not, however, the way Rorty often construes the distinction, most prominently in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” Rorty there construes “the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion of opposition between cooperative endeavours and private projects.”[fn.2] This is a mistake, and we can begin to see the road it takes us down by noting the fact that most religions (or, at least, most people involved in a religion) are still by and large traditions of group worship. Those atheists among us might not see the connection between what a scientist does with other scientists and what a pastor does with his parishioners, but we can’t make the mistake a wresting control of the religious believer’s right to self-description (not at this level, at least). A utilitarian ethics of belief is the philosophical formulation of a democratic citizen’s ethos qua citizen. It is a high-falutin’ way of putting the right to privacy. As a citizen, just so long as the other citizens’ projects of self-creation, pleasure, or redemption do not conflict with your ability to pursue your own, there should be no objection. As we put on different hats, however, or start distinguishing between the short-term and long-term effects of various options, legitimate objections might start being raised.

This might be just a slight mistake on Rorty’s part here, a kind of over-assertive preference for the Protestant turn against creed towards a personal relationship with God. And we might take Rorty’s preference for Tillich over Barth as a misguided intervention by an outsider. Rorty certainly has a right to these preferences, and to articulating them in the hopes of persuading others to reject creed, but not as part of the overall package of a utilitarian ethics of belief. Rorty leads himself this way because of his earlier identification of the issue between science and religion as “cooperative v. private,” but this leads to a formulation that is just empirically false on its face for any self-respecting Wittgensteinian. After noting that the heart of classical and contemporary pragmatism is the notion of a “holistic view of intentional content,” that “beliefs have content only by virtue of inferential relations to other beliefs,” a Sellarsian move which effectively substitutes objectivity-as-intersubjectivity for objectivity-as-correspondence, Rorty wonders rhetorically, “what becomes of intersubjectivity once we admit that there is no communal practice of justification – no shared language game – which gives religious statements their content?”[fn.3]

Rorty rightly supplies the answer in our ability to “use the attribution of such beliefs to explain what is going on,”[fn.4] but this is an outsider’s view, the external view of Davidson’s radical interpreter, the field anthropologist dropped in the middle of an alien society, trying to understand their language and culture (which one does holistically and at the same time). Certainly there might be no shared language game for enthusiasts (as Rorty is) of Whitehead’s definition of religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness,”[fn.5] but traditions of group worship, let alone theological articulation, fly in the face of “no communal practice of justification.” An internal view of the language game used by Southern Baptists or Anglicans, if we are Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian enough, would most certainly include practices of communication and understanding intelligible to its practitioners.

I don’t think this does a whole lot to Rorty’s overall point, however, in regards to pragmatism, religion, and the requirements of democracy. It simply means that when Rorty redescribes “intellectual responsibility” as “simply responsibility to people with whom one has joined a shared endeavour”[fn.6] we take that to include religious communities. Rorty, in his defense of private projects, says that the religious believer legitimately lapses intellectual responsibility with regards to her religious beliefs because all we need do is make “a distinction between what needs justification to other human beings and what does not,”[fn.7] but what we really need are more nuanced, contextual distinctions between different types of communities to whom we owe responsibility, and when and how. Rorty is entirely right to construe intellectual irresponsibility as “the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules,”[fn.8] he just needs to be more sensitive to the desire of others to spend their alone-time with others.

Endnotes

[1] From his “Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life” in The Middle Works, vol. VI.

[2] Philosophy and Social Hope, 149

[3] Ibid., 159

[4] Ibid.

[5] Whitehead, Religion in the Making, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), 16

[6] PSH, 151

[7] Ibid., 154

[8] Ibid., 151

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

Prospectus for an Idiosyncratic and Possibly Controversial Reading of Lila

Firstly, let me say up front that this was originally not my idea. Rick Budd gets sole credit and bears total responsibility (and blame) for hatching it. He wrote me with it and we exchanged a number of letters about it and the initial intention was that we would work on developing it together. In the end, however, Rick decided, probably because he was too chickenshit to attach his name to it (I'm calling you out, bitch), that I should take it and run with it. So as the thesis is worked out, I bear more and more freight and responsibility for where it goes. Rick should only be blamed for giving me the idea (though, probably for bequething it to me, too, and allowing me to run wild and unchecked).

Secondly, as the title announces, this is not what I would call a full, persuasive reading of the book. It is only a suggestion for one, an angle that could be more fully explored. In what follows, I do not stray very far from what our letters hatched. So, in that sense, Rick and I are co-authors (though I didn't ask him for permission to put it together and present it publicly, so in that sense, I bear responsibility).

What if Lila is more autobiographical than it seems? That's the question that popped into Rick's head one day and launched a number of interesting angles and insights. We are led to such a question when we stop and wonder why certain shifts occur between ZMM and Lila and within the story of Lila itself. For instance, it isn't at all questioned that when Phaedrus opens his mouth in Lila that the philosophy he spins is the philosophy of Pirsig himself. The irony of ZMM is seemingly displaced in Lila for a clear window into Pirsig's mind. So in that sense Lila is autobiographical, it tells Pirsig's philosophy as he wants it. But, we might ask ourselves, why the shift to the creation of a systematic metaphysics in Lila? And why did he drop his "pesky Indians" project in favor of it? Why does Pirsig suddenly see the need for a moral foundation, which towards the end of Lila reveals itself as a strong motivation, as seen in his reaction, for instance, to James' pragmatism and the sloppy "soup of sentiments"?

Pirsig sometimes says that Lila and Rigel are creations of his to service the story, yet on the other hand he does say that they represent himself in some way, though just as every character a novelist creates takes some part of the creator with them. But we know that not all the characters in Lila are completely fictional. Dusenberry is real, Robert Redford is real, even the boat is real. We know that Dusenberry was a real anthropologist that studied the things Pirsig says he did, we know that Redford was interested in making ZMM into a movie and that the project had moved some way towards that goal, and we know that Pirsig is a sailor with a small yacht of some kind. And what's more, from Ian Glendinning's work on the Pirsig timeline we know that the timelines of both books line up very closely to Pirsig's actual biographical timeline.

From Ian's timeline, it seems that Bob and his wife Nancy were planning to sail around the world together after he took the boat down the canal--the trip recounted in Lila. They separate almost immediately after the events of the novel end. The suggestion that turns the tide of the way we read this book is that, after reading the work Ian has done in lining up Pirsig's biographical timeline with the events of Lila, we ask ourselves: what if Lila is based on a real woman who got mixed up with Pirsig and, in some way, destroyed his marriage (as adultery tends to do)? And what if Rigel, if not based on someone real, is the voice in Pirsig that still feels guilty about what happened? Remember that Lila's character has been said to be allegorically connected to biological static patterns and Rigel to social static patterns. And now turn to Lila and reread the Rigel confrontation in the beginning of the book. With that in mind, certain passages flair up with different, ambiguous meanings.

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"It's not a public matter," Rigel said. "And I won't mention his name… or you'd recognize it." (85)
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"Are you trying to tell me his wife had no right to be angry?" (86)
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"The person we are talking about dishonored his wife and he dishonored his children and he dishonored everyone who put trust in him, as well as himself. People forgave him for his weakness, but they lost respect for him and that was what finished him for any position of responsibility." (ibid.)
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"And I don't know what the circumstances of your own personal family are my friend, but I warn you, if you're not careful she'll do it to you."
As an afterthought he added, "If she hasn't already." (87) [Is it significant that he added this as an afterthought?]
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"Well there are some of us left," he said, returning to the author, "who are still holding out against your hedonistic 'Quality' philosophy or whatever it is." (ibid.)
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"Well, we've been talking in a rather general way so far, now let me ask a rather specific question: Did the universal source of things, that is responsible for the creation of Heaven and Earth, broadcast on your radio receiver as you stumbled across my boat at two a. m. this morning that the woman you were stumbling with was an Angel of Quality?"
"What?" the author asked.
"I'll repeat," he said. "Did God tell you that Miss Lila M. Blewitt of Rochester, New York, with whom you stumbled across my deck at two this morning, has Quality?"
"What God?"
"Forget God. Do you personally think Miss Lila M. Blewitt is a Woman of Quality?"
"Yes."
Richard Rigel stopped. He hadn't expected this answer.
Could the Great Author really be so stupid? . . . Maybe he had some trick up his sleeve . . . . Richard Rigel waited but nothing came. (88-9)
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"I find quality ... is found in values I've learned in childhood and grown up with and used all my life and have found nothing wrong with. Those are values that are shared by personal friends and family ... and other companions. Because we believe in these common values we're able to act morally toward one another." (90)
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"Now you may argue, and many do, that the values of the community and the laws they produce are all wrong. That's permissible. The law of the land guarantees you the right to hold that opinion. And moreover, the laws provide you with political and judicial recourses by which to change the 'bad' laws of the community. But as long as those recourses are there and until those laws are changed neither you or Lila or anyone else can just go acting as you please in disregard of everyone else, deciding what does and what does not have 'Quality.' You do have a moral and legal obligation to obey the same rules others do." (90-1)
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"Well, do you see what happens when you get all involved in fine-sounding words that nobody can define? That's why we have laws, to define what quality is. These definitions may not be as perfect as you'd like them, but I can promise you they're a whole lot better than having everybody run around doing as he pleases. We've seen the results of that." (91-2)
[Could Pirsig have actually seen the results himself by the time he wrote this?]
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"Tell me," he said, "do you really and sincerely believe that Lila Blewitt has quality?"
The author thought for a long time. "Yes," he said.
"Well why don't you just try to explain to us how on earth you can possibly think that Lila has quality. Do you think you can do that?"
"No, I don't think I can." (92)
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Is Pirsig talking to himself through Rigel? Scolding himself for ruining his marriage? Blaming his "moral failure" on his old view of quality? Is this what sends him searching for a moral foundation with which to make moral judgments with greater clarity? Or does his guilt reignite the metaphysical madness of Phaedrus, sending him back into his old obsessions for psychological shelter? This certainly gives a whole new tone to the part where he's trying to decide whether or not he should pursue a metaphysics of Quality and says: "His mind went over this many times. A part of it said, 'Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but trouble'" (74) Was this the author-character of ZMM? "The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, ‘Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting.’ This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own." (ibid.) And was this Phaedrus?

Is this the real story of Lila? The moral failing that sent an otherwise stable Pirsig back down the road of madness? And then, with the Rigel chapter in our minds, when we turn to the conclusion of Lila, we realize that the MoQ, as a systematic philosophy, has nothing really to do at all with the resolution of the story. Rigel saves him plain and simple. Rigel explains that he came back to find Phaedrus because he was curious about why Phaedrus thought Lila had quality. He knew Lila as a child and knew she was a quality person then (she stood up for him against other kids) and thought that maybe Phaedrus had somehow seen a glimmer of that in her and came to find out what it was. Phaedrus writes this off as a "savior" complex of some kind, but from Rigel’s own words we see that it was in fact his desire to find the quality in Lila that leads to the resolution. The metaphysics was besides the point the whole time. It turns out Rigel was the one who really knew about the quality in Lila the whole time and it was Phaedrus who was grasping around the darkness of his own metaphysics to justify the comment he had made defensively, without reason....

"You're the winner, you know," the idol said. ". . . by default."
"How so?"
"You did one moral thing on this whole trip, which saved you."
"What was that?"
"You told Rigel that Lila had Quality."
"You mean in Kingston?"
"Yes, and the only reason you did that was because he caught you by surprise and you couldn't think of your usual intellectual answer, but you turned him around. He wouldn't have come here if it hadn't been for that. Before then he had no respect for her and a lot for you. After that he had no respect for you, but some for her. So you gave something to her, and that's what saved you. If it hadn't been for that one moral act you'd be headed down the coast tomorrow with a lifetime of Lila ahead of you." (462)

Pirsig sets sail down the Hudson planning to write an academic text on anthropology. Along the way, he has an affair and destroys his marriage. The guilt puts him in a moral crisis, which gets him reconsidering quite how in tune with quality he really is. Between the guilt, and the reconsideration, he descends back into his compulsion to define Quality. It consumes him to the point where the earlier project is abandoned completely and in the end he's left talking to a plastic doll that talks back to him, twirling madly, alone on a beach in glee over his metaphysics while the destruction of his marriage is only weeks down the road. Was the MoQ just a giant red-herring all along?

We find the MoQ as a red-herring because the book doesn't end with Pirsig's metaphysics, the book ends with Pirsig's doll telling him his gut reaction was moral. And what was that "gut reaction"? According to the terms of the novel, the terms of the philosophy Pirsig has laid out through it, it was Dynamic Quality, Whitehead's "dim apprehension", mystical apprehension itself. But was it? Or was it Pirsig's old insanity rising up again? Is there a difference?

One of the most important things we have to remember about Lila are the ways in which Pirsig uses points of view to write the narrative. Much of the book is from Phaedrus' point of view, but we get some from Lila and one from Rigel. We need to remember how Pirsig enjoys manipulating points of view to conceal as much as to reveal (as evident from Pirsig's letter to Robert Redford). When we read Lila as the quasi-reenactment of his moral crisis, several other things start falling into place: the dreariness of the "Cruising Blues" essay, the harshness of the "Husband without a Wife" book review (written only months before his own divorce), his sudden "right wing" turn on hippies and criminals (a metaphysical reaction to Chris's murder?).

In Pirsig's letter to Redford, he says:

Here [ZMM] ends for most readers, leaving them a little puzzled and a little haunted by it all, wanting to discuss it with someone and ask questions. A few perceptive readers and one lone British critic kept on going beyond the end of the book into a whole other interpretation which the narrator never really gives you. John and Sylvia, the bourgeois butts of the narrator's criticism, are now seen as tolerant friends. Chris, the troubled brat of the narrator's tale, now appears as almost saintly, and the benign, omniscient narrator, whose point of view the reader has had to accept as true until now is seen as Phaedrus himself, broken, his mind half-destroyed, struggling desperately to recover.

What really happened? In the end Phaedrus said he wasn't insane. But the court ruled he was, and his symptoms through the book are classic textbook symptoms of schizophrenia. What is wrong here?

I think the effect of ending the book on this question rather than an answer to it is correct. Questions can be stories too. Even though the audience is not consciously aware of another possible story, something in their subliminal minds responds to it, and that is why the story lingers with them so.... (Guidebook, 231)

Pirsig goes on to suggest in his letter that there is an "alternative, Zen explanation" of what happened in Chicago: it "was not insanity but enlightenment as it has been understood for thousands of years in China, India, and Japan..." (ibid., 231-2) Pirsig, however, says that the book couldn't say that "because to do so would sink it completely and would in fact be bad Zen to bring up. But the question of what really happened to Phaedrus is taken up again in the book I am now working on...." (ibid., italics mine) And in a buried footnote to the Redford letter, we find this from a letter to Ronald DiSanto: "I don't think all insanity is a form of enlightenment nor do I think all enlightenment a form of insanity, but I think that there is an area of overlap between the two where identical phenomena can be interpreted either way depending upon which culture one is looking out of." (ibid., fn. 3, 239)

Just as ZMM does not end with final closure, but ends with the opening up of questions the question of whether it's all been insanity or mystic apprehension is the point itself.

Almost the last thing Phaedrus says to the doll is "...you may be right and you may wrong but we're coming to the end of the road here."

To Part II

*Almost all of the above is work Rick did digging out his idea. In fact, partly because of my laziness but mostly because Rick did such an excellent job of presenting it, I mainly copied and pasted what Rick wrote to me. As much as Rick might not want it, he certainly gets writing and research credit for this project.

Prospectus, Part II

To sum up the story I was telling: Pirsig writes Lila because he has a moral crisis after his divorce from Nancy. Pirsig falls in with a woman, has an affair, gets the divorce, and now is faced with being a bad person. Pirsig, however, doesn't think he's a bad person, and so tries to rectify his moral crisis by justifying his illegitimate-in-the-eyes-of-the-court affair with "Lila". This justification takes the form of the MoQ. By the end, though, we realize that the MoQ has been besides the point. The justification that Pirsig recieves is from Rigel, that Rigel could see that Lila had quality, even back in the beginning of the book (because of his history with her), but Phaedrus could not, so how could Phaedrus justify his calling her a woman of quality? He couldn't. The only way to do it was to construct an elaborate metaphysics enshrining an indefinable grasp of Quality itself that everyone has. That way, he could argue that he really did see Quality in Lila.

Of course, by that point, he doesn't have to argue that he did, because arguing, a.k.a. metaphysics, is besides the point. It's the mystical apprehension that's important. But, the end puts into question the very idea that we could have this apprehension, or at least that he did. Even after the doll has let him off the hook and told him that the only moral thing he did was defensively saying Lila had quality (not dreaming up the MoQ), and after he has danced in celebration of his freedom on the beach, he goes right back into the "good is a noun" thing. He may be free from Lila, but is he trapped by insanity again? Is that why Lila thought he was trying to kill her? Because he was going crazy? He thinks she's lying to get Rigel's sympathy, but it's his thoughts we see, carefully controled by the author giving us only his perspective. Can his thoughts be trusted? Did he apprehend Lila's Quality, her true nature, or has Pirsig slipped back into the insanity that led him to the Chicago institutions those many years ago? Or, is there any difference?

Rigel (Pirsig's social conscience) confronts him about Lila having quality, Phaedrus insists she does, Phaedrus constructs the MoQ to justify that response, Rigel saves Phaedrus from Lila and confirms that she does have quality, but Phaedrus realizes--through the doll--that he didn't need to have his sight confirmed--he had it all along and it was the only moral breakthrough he had the whole trip. The question at the end continues to pursue us: is he a mystic or insane? Did he apprehend Quality or was he just reflexively defending his immoral act?

Reaching this position, its useful to wonder what convinces us that Phaedrus was right? Phaedrus' MoQ? No. It was Rigel. Rigel convinces us that Phaedrus apprehended Lila's Quality by confirming it. "Yes, Phaedrus, she has Quality, but not because of any mystic apprehension, it was because she did the banal things good people do, like defend me as a kid." So, at that point, we begin to question what the apprehension does for us. It didn't prove anything. What if Lila hadn't had any Quality? Things could have just as easily have gone the other way. Pirsig wrote it to confirm his apprehension, but life isn't like that. So, we may have Whitehead's "dim apprehension," but all that does is point us in a direction that we then have to travel. And the traveling is then what justifies the fruitfulness of the pointed direction--but it doesn't always prove to be fruitful. Sometimes you're wrong.

Instead of Lila being a lesser work, a lesser piece of literary masterfulness, this reading gives us every reason to believe that Lila is actually a greater, even more subtle piece of genius. Think of it this way--people who enjoyed ZMM as a book, usually for the detective like layout, the mind adventure that takes place, don't get into Lila because it just sits there--and the ending proves to be a little lame. Much of it is philosophical mosaics, pieces of essays arrayed amongst a narrative that proves to not really engage us. There's no detective story except to answer the question, "Does Lila have quality?" But who cares? She's a tramp who doesn't capture our attention. There's nothing obvious or superficial in Lila that pulls us through like in ZMM. So the only people who like Lila are amatuer philosophers who love ZMM--an already very small, select crowd. (And we pretty much know who each other are.) Professionals don't like Lila because, again, the story isn't engaging and neither is the philosophy. The philosophy is in an idiom that's been out of style for a hundred years and it doesn't make itself immediately accessible to the work others have been doing, to their problems or concerns, it simply spins itself out in relative isolation from the evolved concerns of the intervening hundred years since William James wrote. Laypeople don't like Lila because the story isn't engaging and neither is philosophy in general.

So, amatuers in love with ZMM, that's Pirsig's audience. Now comes the trick, the subtle piece of craftwork and genius--the amatuers think the same thing of the narrative as everyone else, its dung, just sits there stinking (that's a little much, but the narrative doesn't compel our attention). So, because they're amatuer philosophers in love with ZMM, they focus on the MoQ. That was Pirsig's trick. By focusing on the MoQ, readers let the metaphysics devour the narrative rather than seeing the metaphysics as a part of the narrative itself. It's not that the characters serve the philosophy, it's that the philosophy serves the characters by directing the readers mind to a place a bit more like the mind of the protagonist (and occasionally one a bit more like the mind of Lila and Rigel). When we see Lila's thoughts, she has her own ideas about quality. When we see Rigel's, he has his own ideas about quality. We see how their ideas shape their actions and the story. It was Pirsig's trick to get the only people who would like Lila to fall in love with it for the system when the moral of the story, ever so subtlely threaded into the narrative, is that love of the system, any system, is cracked and perverse. It was, in a way, a parody, a lie. Flushing out those who need the moral more than anyone else. And read this way, the ending suddenly means a lot more and ceases to be lame.

Chris died, his marriage suffered, he had his affair, he ended his marriage, he met Wendy, had a kid, and settled down to write about it. Pirsig tells us his story in his terms, Quality (well, term anyway). He dazzles us, as he did in ZMM, with elaborate metaphysical gymnastics, mysterious tales of ancient history and a whiff of something revolutionary. But in the end, ZMM was the story of a father and his relationship to his son. In the end, Lila is the story of a man who has bottomed out and is desperate to re-establish his relationship to what is good.

Lila is a parable. The moral of the story is the ditching of system, Phaedrus' "usual intellectual answer," and through this we can save mysticism. What we also have, though, is an indication that Phaedrus' metaphysics is something that he does, though not everyone else has to. It's his obsession, his way of ordering and presenting his thoughts. There's nothing inherently desirable about this presentation, though. Others reading him are suggested to take what they want and can from the book (as suggested by his preface to Marian Mountain's Zen Environment), but not to read him as systematic, despite his own systematic tendencies.

For all Pirsig's apparent straightforwardness, much of his philosophy is linked indelibly to his narratives, creating a situation in which finding his philosophy is not as easy as just quoting him. Pirsig’s philosophy is found in the experience of reading him. Part of the point of this narrative analysis is that philosophical theses are perhaps somewhat inappropriate to Pirsig's philosophy. That to get Pirsig to have philosophical theses that are consistent, you need to gloss Pirsig, but to just get Pirsig to be consistent, all you need to do is disregard philosophical theses. To take Pirsig seriously as a philosopher, one cannot take his philosophy seriously.

You can't take Pirsig seriously as a professional philosopher advancing theses. He fails in that respect. But that's only because Pirsig isn't supposed to be taken seriously as a philosopher. Pirsig creates the context in which he is to be taken seriously, and that's not in the professional model. He writes novels. That's the context. And, by giving us insight and wisdom, he is a philosopher. Just not a professional one. It is only by trying to treat him as a professional that Pirsig looks confused and convoluted. If we treat him as a wiseman, though, then he comes into his own. Part of the strain, of course, is that part of Pirsig wants to be a professional. That's his Phaedrus side. But on the other side, the Zen side, he just wants to dispense wisdom from his own life. Both ZMM and Lila are less about the philosophical problems created by metaphysical dualities as they are about the personal conflicts created by a man's conflicting intellectual instincts. The drama is in watching how the story of his life leads him to gravitate towards one instinct or another.

To Part III