“I’ve Never Been Modern? Why, that Changes Everything…”

1. We have never been modern — What we thought was modernity wasn’t; 2. Social Darwinism, primitivism, pyrrhonism — Fear vs. lack of imagination; 3. I've always never been modern — The metaphysics of modernity; 4. Does doing require thinking? — Entangled lives; 5. Application: I've always never been human — Conceptual reform; 6. Intellectuals and technical vocabularies — Theoretical decongestants for stuffed up practices

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1.      Latour finds himself in a very awkward position in We Have Never Been Modern: while emphasizing, at the close of his second chapter, the point of his title, he nevertheless wants to historically chart the birth of the modern. The two claims strike me as perfectly commensurable if one sorts out what one is doing and claiming properly (in order to avoid your own paradoxes in your own philosophical Constitution). “Constitution” is, of course, Latour’s idiom for developing his account of modernity. This is the gist:

The hypothesis of this essay is the word “modern” designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of being, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification,” creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance. The first, for example, would link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists; the second would establish a partition between a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society. (11)

Latour’s selection, in 1991, of climate change as a network to be studied is a good indication of why people have found Latour’s work in the philosophy of science increasingly useful. Latour’s formulations, however, strike me as still too paradoxical by half, as in this early formulation (admittedly rhetorical for his dramatic narrative): “And what if we had never been modern? Comparative anthropology would then be possible. The networks would have a place of their own” (10). If modernity is what disallowed a space for networks, and we’ve never been modern, then networks have always had a place of their own. That’s the central paradox Latour awkwardly confronts. He wants to say (rightly, I think) that modernity never existed and to say (also rightly) that realizing this will enable us to do something new, thus ushering in a new moment in our history. But at the close of Latour’s second chapter, he goes to some lengths to say that he is not claiming “that we are entering a new era” (47). Latour’s probably right: “era” would be too strong. Latour, however, is trying to usher something new in, but because of the state of philosophy and politics at the time, he finds it difficult to say so out loud. Latour’s formulation should be: “what we thought was modernity was never actually the case, and realizing this will enable us to do better things we’ve already been doing, and perhaps for some of us something new.”

2.      In order to isolate the context Latour finds himself awkwardly in, we might look at the four-part schematic in its opening pages. After contextually defining the two modern desires as ending humanity’s exploitation of itself and increasing humanity’s control over nature, Latour lists the two different “antimodern” reactions: “We must no longer try to put an end to man’s domination of man, say some; we must no longer try to dominate nature, say others” (9). These are still two recognizable responses, and we might accord them the status of being the radical right and radical left, respectively. However, I think Latour is smart in not so doing. These responses should not be reduced to political orientation (like conservative/liberal, right/left) because political orientations are linked too directly to choices in political action—a “political orientation” can only manifest itself within some local politico-power grid (like the Beltway, or the Democratic Party, or the Arizona 2_nd District, or the Printer Icon Department at Microsoft). So what we need are labels that express a guiding motive, or orienting principle, that can then be transformed into a political orientation (and thence action) given a planting in some local institutional context. [1] The two antimodern reactions might be described fairly easily as, respectively, “social Darwinism” and “primitivism.” [2]

The first two then quite easily slide into a right/left manifestation in most current “Western” political landscapes. But Latour’s second two responses are harder to place, both in their attitude and their potential political manifestation. The third possibility Latour calls “postmodernism” and says it is an “incomplete scepticism” that causes people to “remain suspended between belief and doubt, waiting for the end of the millennium” (9). We might call this “pyrrhonism,” after the ancient form of skepticism about the possibility of making knowledge claims (and thus the problem of basing action on them). But while some (certainly not all) postmodernist theorists behave like millennialists (there were probably more during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the context Latour was confronting), it’s certainly no requirement for a pyrrhonism to so compose itself. This makes Latour’s theoretical art less useful, for its utility is based on the sense of his having placed his finger on the pulse of the times—and so better able to manifest a good alternative. This becomes worse, it seems to me, in his last option: those who double down on modernity and “carry on as if nothing had changed” (9). Latour shapes this option as those who put their head in the sand, willfully plugging their ears to their better angels. But this seems terribly ill-suited as a description for any responsible intellectual. And this also seems to be the only option available for those who, while hearing the angels, don’t have any better ideas than striving for political emancipation and better technological control in order to improve man’s estate (in the Baconian phrase). But sticking your head in the sand seems a very different quality from being out of ideas. The first manifests fear; the other lack of imagination. What I think Latour’s schematic in the last instance hinges on is his implicit definition of modernity as unmitigated, Chicago-style anarchic-market economic expansionism—the “clever trick” (9) the West hopes to export. But this must be considered a narrow definition of the modern, for what do you do if you do think there is some interesting difference between “the West and the Rest” that you yet have an imperfect faith in?

3.      The difficulty here seems to be in denying a plausible position for those who are already behaving as if we’ve never been modern, but just didn’t realize it. Because we should ask ourselves of Latour’s schematic—who is he talking about? Theorists? Intellectuals? Politicians? Educated people? Car mechanics who don’t read newspapers? This is the conundrum for the intellectual—how do I attribute motivations to people who wouldn’t understand what I’m attributing to them? What I’m pointing at, I think, is just a matter of Latour’s rhetoric getting in the way of his real point—he’s staging himself as a revolutionary in a field (which he is) while at the same time saying that everyone is hooked up to this field where he is a revolutionary. But they are and are not—everyone’s hooked into networks, but not everyone is in Latour’s disciplinary field (studying networks). It seems like we must make a distinction between intellectual and plebeian, for this seems a corollary of denying we’ve ever been modern, which was after all an intellectual’s fiction—say, of Boyle and Hobbes (his primary emblem). [4] The “modern Constitution” Latour draws up fills a role in inferential patterns that not everyone might ever stumble down. We have to say this to deny the Platonism of principles ruling practices, rather than practices being summarized by principles: the former idea helps to produce the tripartite structure of separation in Latour’s Constitution (principles rule practices, meaning realms are separate and playing by their own rules, hence all you need to do is isolate a practice and formulate its rules, rather than studying the jumble of practices), and the latter helps to show how discourse, the social, and the real (one of Latour’s several formulations) are wrapped up into each other.

Latour’s graphical representation helps see what the paradox amounts to:

The trick to seeing the paradox is asking what is being translated in the hybrid networks. In the Modern Constitution, it is Nature and Culture. But that means the Work of Translation requires the dichotomy of Nature and Culture. That’s why Latour marks it as “the first” (though if you look at his summarizing paragraph above he calls “purification” “the second”), but where does the dichotomy come from? The Work of Purification—that means all those hybrid networks conceptually require the work we’ve become suspicious of. So what, in the end, does it in fact mean to reject the Modern Constitution?

4.      The way through, I think, is to distinguish the metaphysics of modernity from the practices we are surrounded by. We might think of metaphysics as a kind of conceptual explanation of our practices and how they work. What Latour is saying is that the Metaphysics of Modernity is incoherent, and in fact needs to be to get on with the work the Metaphysics in part is designed to explain. But we shouldn’t go that far—what we shouldn’t do is think that the work requires the metaphysics. It is an explanation and perhaps a justification, but nuclear bombs do not require any particular metaphysics to work. They only require that you do a certain thing, not think a certain thing.

The reason it appears that nuclear power also requires us to think a certain thing is that it seems absurd to think that hunters and gatherers could perform the requisite tasks to create a nuclear weapon without having, for example, learned that e=mc₂. Our ability to do certain things does require us to be able to think or say certain things—we shouldn’t deny that. But what certain things? That is the open question. Latour and many others wish to argue that there is something irrevocably paradoxical about modern life (and sometimes, just human life in general—like Camus). However, this claim requires that the only way to get on with some practice (say, the Work of Translation) is via this other particular practice that actually contradicts the first. But this claim will only ever be justified based on experiment—trying out other ways of getting the good practice to work. In other words, I see no reason to think that the bad metaphysical dualism between Nature and Culture is required to get the Work of Translation done. Much good philosophical work that goes under the banner of “pragmatism” has been trying to work out alternative idioms for understanding the entangled lives we find ourselves thrown into without trying to erase the entanglement. For what pragmatists have learned over the course of philosophical history—a history marked by attempts to purify our categories of understanding—is that some categories are entangled in each other, but that isn’t itself a paradox. Entanglement is okay. It’s only the ghost of Plato that would tell us otherwise.

5.      One way of applying the lesson above is to debates about humanism and posthumanism, especially as Latour has been picked up by many who consider themselves as working out posthumanistic idioms. From a Latourian point of view, I would think the theoretical lesson is that we’ve never been human(istic)—“humanism” never existed in the way it thought itself to. The trouble here, however, seems to be that some posthumanism composes itself as, from this vantage, distinctly anti-humanistic—it doesn’t just wish for the erroneous self-conceptions of humanism to disappear, but for vast tracts of practices that “gave rise to humanism.”

My scare quotes denote the problem of identification that is at issue. For if practices proceed conceptions of practices, then what we are talking about when we want to get rid of humanism is an expulsion of practices—but which are the practices that are at issue? The trouble of cultural evolution is that we are complex to a degree we sometimes forget in analysis. Our conceptions, built out of practices, are only a problem if they double back into bad practices. The problem of institutional reform, as Latour points out, is that if you uproot a practice without uprooting the real cause of the practice—which is another practice—then you will create a “return of the repressed” situation (see 8). [5] So the problem of conceptual reform is the same: identifying correctly a conceptual practice that really does enable a particular bad practice. The trouble of conceptual reform is that a lot of different premises can lead you to the same bad action. Conceptual reform is about disabling the premises in our practical syllogisms that lead us to perform some unwanted action. On this model, there’s a certain slipperiness in conceptual reform. Not only do we sometimes misidentify the culprit, but people have a tendency to replace other premises in their syllogisms if they don’t agree that the object-action is unwanted (the problem we’ve been facing in reforming out of existence racism).

6.      This means the real question for intellectuals is—how much time should we really be spending on haggling over conceptual reform? The stance of both Latour and Shapin is that practices come first, then concepts. [6] So how much dog should we have in the fight over concepts? Who, in fact, are we fighting? Intellectuals have a habit of attributing beliefs and concepts to people who have no idea what they are talking about. This is effectively the same maneuver that physicists perform—do rocks understand the laws of gravity? (If you want to say yes, then you’re simply using a slightly different notion of “understanding”—and how much should we really haggle over this definitional asymmetry?) The real problem is not exactly, it seems to me, bridging back and forth between science, politics, and discourse (which is something like how Latour pictures the problem). The problem is bridging back and forth between experts and non-experts. This isn’t simply a problem of non-experts not understanding technical vocabularies, it is more especially the problem of convincing non-experts that the technical vocabulary should be given authority over our conceptualization of problems (and the experts trusted to be working through the correct inferential consequences—after all, how could a non-expert provide a peer review, or as we used to say in math class, “check your work”?). Latour’s battle is with other experts in his field (which we might label as, in this particular book, philosophers). So how much time should Latour spend in convincing laypersons—scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, politicians, car mechanics—that if they take his perspective, the world will become a little better (i.e., we’ll be able to handle better some of our pressing problems, like climate change)? Because just so long as there are experts resisting Latour, these on-looking laypersons will feel uneasy about giving their trust (this being the very obvious strategy in the debate about climate change). And if there are more direct paths of arguing about these pressing problems, more direct than arguing in a technical field before arguing about the bridge between that field and the public, then this makes Latour look like a detour to action.

So what is the point of all this for debates like those about posthumanism? In turns out not much, because if it is really true that all these systems and practices and networks (or whatever other name one wants to give to the layered and shifting sediment of nature-culture) have always been there, then it doesn’t exactly devalue what the technicians are doing in their respective spheres (even if it is from one vantage seamless). After all, as a layperson, I do tend to think Latour is right in nearly every way as a philosopher of science. If the above is right, then a Latourian revolution in conception just might make the world a little better. Likewise, whatever one thinks of as a “posthuman revolution” just might. But the farther one gets from actuating premises in practical syllogisms—the premise that then kicks out the requisite action—the more nebulous the possible effects changing those farther back premises will have on the object-action one’s eye is really on. All that this suggests is that as scholar-intellectuals, we make a short-term/long-term distinction between the different practices we might take our time up with: practices that will have an immediate effect on the world (voting, teaching), practices a little more distant (writing for newspapers, rabble-rousing), and practices that may only have an effect on the world in the distant future (having babies, writing treatises about conceptual change). As a plea, it is simply about orientation, or about what to remind oneself occasionally while obsessing over one’s area of interest. But it may affect our work as well, for it is possible that a practical orientation like an engulfing messianic fervor might be an actuating principle behind some of our worst practical syllogisms—that our ism-work often looks like silver-bulletism, turning our theoretical work into a practical problem. We have to remain aware of when our theory stuffs up our practical syllogisms, which then requires a theoretical decongestant like Latour.

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Endnotes

[1] These labels are at a remove from this “local” context, but no less contextual for that. I think our theoretical discourse has still not yet come to terms with how to formulate the abstract/concrete distinction across the global/local distinction—for we still too often feel moved to call abstraction a “decontextualization,” when we should rather think of it as moving from one context to another. To think of abstraction as a process of decontextualization is to be modern—and we’ve never been modern.

[2] For a brevity I will already fail at, I won’t elaborate why these two labels. But suffice it to say that at other moments in history, these attitudes might have transformed into different orientations. For example, our great modern primitivist is Rousseau, and he mobilized his in order to emancipate humanity, not to not dominate nature. Rousseau’s screeds against modern luxury and the like had as their priority his project of political emancipation, not the ecological project of nature emancipation.

[3] The “unmitigated” plays an important role here, for the American non-Marxist, Reformist Left’s hope is that European “social democracies” provide a model for how to have market economies whose tendencies for imperialistic expansion are curbed.

[4] Latour uses Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s groundbreaking 1985 book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, to discuss the theoretical implications of the historical digging done in that book: that Boyle, to create the material-scientific “object,” had to deny the framework of thought that allowed Hobbes to create the moral-political “subject,” and vice versa for Hobbes. I do something similar to Shapin’s later The Scientific Revolution in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

[5] What’s a “real cause,” especially in this complex game of interlocking practices? The same thing it is in the physical sciences—the condition that produces the effect. The great problem of cultural reform is that there are a multitude of conditions—in fact, given the problem of redescription in object-conceptualization (e.g., are you talking about the same object if you describe it differently?), there are an infinite number of conditions potentially. This makes our practices of description (i.e., “theory”) terribly important for picking out practices to be reformed, but it also means that a deep theoretical skepticism necessarily abides in all of our attempts at cultural reform—even if we successfully extirpate an unwanted effect (say poor people or greed) by reforming or removing an isolated and defined practice, we will not ever know whether or not that removed practice was really the cause of the bad effect—unless, and only unless, the bad effect returns. Only when we are wrong do we attain certain knowledge (the Hegelian via negativa crossed with Popperian falsifiability—an amusing cross-fertilization). This form of (Cartesian) epistemological skepticism is only debilitating if one hasn’t previously put one’s faith in the “experimental method”—the defining quality of which is the belief that it is only by trial-and-error that we shall apprehend causes, i.e. a real cause can never be found by theoretical fiat (though it will only appear under a theoretical edifice). The trick for making sure this faith in experiment doesn’t turn back into the Platonism that dogmatically, and by fiat, declares it really has found the real cause, and we can therefore cease inquiry, is to combine Baconian experimentalism with fallibilism—the idea that inquiry will never end because we’d never know it if we’d reached it. The trouble, here again, for this sort of orientation toward cultural reform, rather than physics reform, is that when you reform physics, the only losers are physics professors (until a physical discovery blips our universe out of existence—a real fear attaching to the activities at CERN for some). But for cultural reform, more lives are at stake, and hence “inquiry” into real causes of cultural problems has effects we might not always wish to risk. This, and only this, is what provides the intellectual justification for political conservatism, the attitude that a given change will put at risk things we wish to keep.

[6] Following Robert Brandom, I call this Shapin’s “fundamental pragmatism” in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig

My confrontation with Pirsig can be said to center around two terms, “philosophy” and “experience.” In particular, it is when you put the two together that, as in a “philosophy of experience” (or, in Pirsig’s terminology, a “Metaphysics of Quality”), that I think you can get problems of a kind that Pirsig is elsewhere at pains to distance himself from and criticize (all depending on how you define the terms, of course). My development of this angle of confrontation and this picture of Pirsig has been in part due to the pressures from my interlocuters, expositors of Pirsig who think that there’s nothing wrong with such a formulation, and vice versa with them. Our pictures of Pirsig, developed in partial dialectic with each other, have over time overflowed into the general pictures of philosophy we may hold and other particular philosophers we may attend to. This has led to surprise, on both sides, when we look in more detail at what the other is describing and drawing in our continuing efforts to expand our own horizons.

This phenomenon shouldn’t itself be surprising. It happens all the time and might most generally be called “education.” The peculiar thing about developing a picture of Pirsig is that there isn’t all that much material of Pirsig’s to keep in mind, not a lot of detail to dig around for or have to remember (though, as always happens to diggers, we may become so focused on the mineshaft we are currently in that we sometimes start to forget about the others). This isn’t so, though, for the job of developing a picture of Pirsig’s place in philosophy (or anything else), for developing a picture of how Pirsig resonates with or reverberates into the rest of what people are saying and doing. There are a lot of mineshafts out there to look through and the phenomenon of surprise is the effect of having a shaft described to you for so long as one thing, and then going into it and finding something else.

This effect, I think, isn’t due to willful mis-description or even partial understanding. All of us move through the world with partial understandings that are further increased, though never made less partial. Some people understand more about one thing than another and should be taken as authorities on X, over this other person over here. Who should be taken as an authority, as having a good understanding, is something developed over time, over conversation and debate and the dialectic. Our finitude is what produces the demand that we never rest totally certain on a platform, but always be looking for or producing a better one.

This is all to say that I’ve had my own little moment of surprise, which turned rapidly, as dawning understanding swept over my face, into joy. The ball got rolling, oddly enough, by me, but not in the usual way. In this case, my girlfriend and I were having a conversation about racism and moral progress and I started to try and impress upon her my slightly counterintuitive viewpoint. She’s studying psychology and has a bit of the scientist in her and I’m, of course, an irrepressible Rortyan and so scientistic rhetoric doesn’t take too well with me. As we were talking, I called upon Dewey to help me out. I pulled out his “means-ends continuum” to try and help me describe my hocked vision of moral progress. Turns out, she was quite taken with it and over the next few days kept asking me for where it was and more information on it.

Here’s my partial: I don’t know where in Dewey it’s from and I don’t have my Dewey books with me anymore. She wants to incorporate it in an art project she’s doing (which, she’s told me, she’d rather have me call an “art experiential” because “art project,” in her words, makes it sound like she’s in eighth grade; I told her she looks like she’s in eighth grade—she has a young face—at which point she called me a “butthead”) and maybe a paper she’s writing, so I read to her sections of Rorty that continues to gloss the notion. She also goes onto the web and grabs some papers about Dewey, art, and the means-ends continuum. They’re lying around the apartment and so I read a few of them. Most of them are lame articles about Dewey and art (not because they are about his vision of art, but because they are just lame), but one article is solely about the means-ends continuum that she picked up from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, a reputable philosophical journal. The scales fell from eyes.

In his paper, “The Means-Ends Continuum and the Reconciliation of Science and Art in the Later Works of John Dewey,” (Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 595-611) Leonard J. Waks seeks to focus on something that has never, apparently, received much isolated focus: Dewey’s analysis of the means-ends continuum. The first part of the paper is an admirable summation of the background that Dewey was reacting to. Nothing out of the ordinary here; just the usual stuff about dehumanizing, technical action, theory and practice, teleology, etc. But then the second part, “Dewey’s Analysis of Means-Ends,” which should be the meat of what I’d like to learn about, begins, “Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls”—and at this point I can hear the choir of antithetical, experience-jargon toting Pirsigians chime in triumphantly—“primary and secondary.” (598)

I rolled my eyes and got ready my thresher, ready to neatly cut out all of that kind of talk as merely the ways of the time, a vocabulary handed down to us from Locke to Kant to Northrop, the kind of thing I had hoped that James and Dewey had gotten away from in the main, or at least not used those damn exact words, words that have haunted me ever since my interlocuters had started reading more Northrop into Pirsig than they should’ve, hammering down every time Pirsig writes that Quality or DQ is the “primary experience.” I got a little ticked because here I am wanting to read about moral progress and the means-ends continuum and I have to go through a negligible discursus on experience. But then I read the next paragraph, which if I hadn’t completely forgotten by the reading of it that I had just started my thresher, I should have thought was a complete non sequitor (all in-text citations of Dewey have been removed, though all italics, before and after when quoting, are Waks’s):

“Let us turn to the deconstructive argument. Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls primary and secondary. This distinction emerges from his ‘doubt-belief’ theory of inquiry.

“According to that theory, the live organism acts to sustain the conditions needed for its continuing life. Every experience is thus situated in a causal continuum of life-sustaining activity. Every feature of experience is conditioned by the life-directing goals of the organism; it is perceived in relation to a reaching, a trying to bring into or sustain in existence the conditions required for life. Every situation is qualitatively felt as enjoyable or unsettling, depending on whether the conditions for life sustaining activity are, or are not, maintained in existence by present activity. The features are potentially cognitively meaningful, because they are all elements in the web of causal connections; they are related to their own antecedent conditions, and they are pregnant with possible consequences bearing on the life goals and life-sustaining ativities of the organism. Doubt is felt as uneasiness or imbalance, as obstacles are encountered that frustrate activity. Frustrations emerge as entrenched habits prove inadequate to the life-sustaining task and must be reconstructed. This reconstructive process, which terminates in new belief as more adequate habits are formed and doubt gives way to renewed action, Dewey, following Peirce, calls inquiry.”

When I finished that paragraph, I nodded my head in agreement. I had read about Peirce and Dewey’s redescription of inquiry and absorbed it from Rorty’s redescription (primarily from “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” ORT). The paragraph was all fairly abstract, but when you navigate your way through the jargon it says something very simple and commonsensical: you putter your way through life as you’ve been puttering until you hit something that you can’t just putter through, which causes doubt in the way you’ve been puttering, which causes you to think about whether you should perhaps find some new way of puttering. In nodding my head serenely, of course, I had completely forgotten that that paragraph was supposed to be explicating primary and secondary experience. I didn’t see anything plainly relevant and forgot all about it.

But then Waks hits me with this simple, straightforward gloss on the previous paragraph: “For Dewey, life activities undergirded by adequate habit and intelligence-in-action constitute primary experience.” (ibid.) Like a ton of bricks, it hit me all at once. First, I went, “Oh yeah, he was supposed to be talking about that.” But then: “Oh…my…God….” The constellation of what primary and secondary experience shifted completely out of kilter from my normal understanding of how neo-Kantians and Pirsigians use it by five simple words: “adequate habit … constitute primary experience.” It was almost as if the word “primary” had been italicized just for me, for the quakes of what those five words mean for a confluence of Dewey and Pirsig are tremendous.

The background is simple: for Pirsigians, Dynamic Quality is the primary experience and static patterns of Quality are secondary, following in a wake behind the cutting edge of pre-intellectual experience. Simply stating it allows one to see it: static patterns are adequate habits, which means that Pirsig is the exact reverse of Dewey.

According to Waks, for Dewey, we make our way about the world following a pattern of accumulated habits. “In this dimension tacit goals adequately direct behavior and condition a relatively fluid field of experience apprehended as a qualitative whole.” (ibid.) We just live when we are in this dimension, we don’t think about what we are doing, we just act. This is often how a Pirsigian will want to describe Dynamic Quality. For Dewey, however, accumulated habits, or static patterns, are the primary experience and the secondary is, though oddly just as in Pirsig, the reflective experience. Dewey, like Pirsig, annoyingly uses the language of “reflective delay,” but the point here is that both agree that reflection causes us to analyze into parts, as opposed to the qualitative whole of primary experience.

Dewey’s description is very convincing and intuitive: we navigate the world by a set of habits, obstacles cause doubt, doubt causes a rethinking of our habits, and the rethinking causes us to change our habits. If one finds this very convincing, however, it puts Pirsig in an awkward position—his description of DQ as the primary experience, as the qualitative whole, has to be rejected. I think one could make a run at trying to creatively put Dewey and Pirsig back together. I’m not going to attempt that here. What I will do is first try and explain why Pirsig would suggest something backwards to Dewey and then try and explain why I prefer and find quite congenial Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction I hadn’t been able to countenance before.

I think Pirsig reverses Dewey (after Dewey had reversed Kant) because he still shows signs of what Heidegger called “nostalgia for immediacy” (and what I have previously called the “pathos of distance”). This comes out in several places, but I think it’s easiest to see when we link together the baby passages in Lila to the hierarchy passages in ZMM. When Pirsig calls DQ the cutting edge of experience, he is obviously making use of a sense of immediacy, our sense that the present is a knife’s edge of conjoined beginning and ending, ever moving onward. Before Pirsig conceives of DQ in Lila, however, he already has one of its functions in mind: “You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. … The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.” (ZMM, 250, italics his)

I’m not going to slap Pirsig on the wrists for saying that the past is unreal because one of the things that I make it a point of trying to do is realign people to ZMM, that the book is not a doctrinal exposition but a dialectical journey. However, even if we don’t take this passage as doctrine, something like it is still in Lila (which much more closely resembles a doctrinal exposition). Even after the refuse of these statements in ZMM is cleared away, there is still left the sense of importance that Pirsig places on them, how emphatic Pirsig is remains.

One might wonder how or why we would want to call this a “nostalgia.” After all, isn’t Pirsig suggesting that immediacy is our only reality? How can one be nostalgic for all that there is? The nostalgia comes in when Pirsig links DQ with the experience of a baby. “One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention.” (Lila, 137, italics his) By this linking, Pirsig makes a very real shift in the meaning of DQ. No longer is DQ simply the only state we are in, how we experience reality. DQ is something that we can lose, something we can be more or less in touch with. The nostalgia for immediacy is the lost, purely new experience of a baby, or that first time we heard that one song that one time.

This creates no small amount of tension, but it is the kind of tension that is required to produce the grand effects that Pirsig claims for DQ on metaphysical thinking. However, it does tend to put a strain on its logical coherence. Further strain comes from Pirsig’s suggestion that we are static patterns, that our ego, our I, is static patterns and does not, as the Cartesian tradition has suggested, have static patterns, are separate from them. It is this suggestion of Pirsig’s that most fully aligns him with Dewey.

If Pirsig had focused more attention on the repercussions of this reversal of the tradition, I think Pirsig may have shifted his emphases in DQ. For the time being, I shall content myself with pointing out why I prefer Dewey’s description (with the idea that it doesn’t take much to see Pirsig’s conception of “static patterns” the same way). The two problems I’ve always had with the formulation of the primary and secondary distinction between experiences are the senses that 1) primary experience is more important (as in the fact that DQ is a trumping good over static patterns) and 2) that the primary experience comes before our concepts (as in DQ as pre-intellectual experience). In Dewey’s formulation, both problems disappear.

Taking the latter sense first, we can see that the supposed “time lag” in Dewey becomes totally innocuous. Waks says that for Dewey, “when habits fail and obstacles frustrate action in a situation, the unease of doubt prompts a transition to a secondary dimension, characterized by reflective delay.” (Waks, 598) This delay in Dewey, however, is not the same delay as in Pirsig. For Pirsig, the time lag is a razor thin delay between experience sans concepts and conceptualized experience. For Dewey, there is no experience that is not conceptualized. Dewey affects this shift from Kantianism by moving from concepts to habits. By dispensing with talk about concepts, and when we have them, where we get them, can we get rid of them, etc., Dewey moves us to talk about our habits of behavior. Instead of talking about how a baby forms concepts, as Pirsig does, Dewey would talk about how a baby forms habits—and the idea of concepts drops right out. This leaves us as being a set of habits, just as Pirsig says we are static patterns, accumulated patterns of behavior.

Reflective delay, then, becomes the same thing you get between the time of placing the nail and hitting the nail. When doubt enters our domain of habit, we cease the habit so that we may think about the habit and how we may reform it. There’s no mysterious time lag here, just the normal lag between hitting your thumb with a crowbar and thinking that maybe you shouldn’t use the crowbar to pound the nail, that perhaps a hammer would work better.

The nostalgia for immediacy also drops out once one recognizes that “primary” and “secondary” are simply two separate modes of being, two dimensions of experience, two different activities. Pirsig and Dewey’s highly philosophical way of putting the point can obscure the effect, but the only reason one is primary to the other is that you can’t have doubt until you have a habit to be doubtful of. Reflection on our habits is secondary because we have to have habits to reflect on. However, reflection is just as much a habitual activity as anything else that goes on in our primary experience.

This is how the first problem, the problem of beatifying primary experience, is muted. The primary and secondary designations are simply ways of distinguishing how we usually make our way about the world and a special case of making our way about the world. What is also interesting in Dewey’s model is the importance placed on secondary experience, which is often lost in Pirsig’s DQ/static set up. For Pirsig, the only reason we have static patterns is so that we won’t fall apart into chaos. Otherwise, Dynamic Quality plays all the good roles in our lives: newness, betterness, wholeness. For Dewey, the very idea of falling apart into chaos doesn’t arise. In Dewey’s arrangement, secondary experience, or inquiry, plays an important role in giving us better habits, static patterns. “Inquiry leads to a re-cognition—a new, explicit view of the situation, a new causal map enabling the formation of new plans that liberate us from doubt and re-engage us, armed with new habits, in cognitively enriched primary experience.” (ibid.) Wholeness cut into parts holds at bay the Otherness of Chaos, the fear of degeneracy, in Pirsig, but for Dewey cutting things into parts enables us to construct a better wholeness.

So much for my notes on experience, Dewey, and Pirsig. Dewey’s vision, and Waks’ article, continues into his conception of the “means-ends continuum,” which I won’t go on to discuss here. I’ll simply note that was interesting about how the distinction between primary and secondary experience links up with the means-ends continuum is that the purposes for which we construct the means to get them (ends-in-view) are incomparable to the end results after following through on our plans. This is because ends-in-view and end results exist in two different dimensions of experience, secondary and primary respectively. This produces the famous oscillation that Rorty emphasizes when we he takes up Dewey’s mantle. This isn’t to say I’m about to start talking about primary and secondary experience. I still think it is needlessly esoteric to talk about two dimensions. But Dewey’s vision in out-of-date jargon still foresees many moves made in the game of philosophy that the best pragmatists are carrying out (most of them acknowledging their debt).

Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience

I want to cover again similar ground to which I addressed in "The Pathos of Distance." One of the troubles I've always had with Dynamic Quality as a concept is that so many ideas are shunted under its mantle (no less an ostensibly "undefined" mantle). DQ is used in many different ways. One of the ways it is used is as "pre-intellectual experience". I'd like to run through a dialectical sequence, all tied around several ways in which we describe DQ--directly knowable, inexpressible, unlensed (per the glasses/filter analogy of Ch. 8 of Lila), betterness, and finally as just plain different. My effort in running through this is to try and show some of the snags we will encounter if we persist in unpacking "pre-intellectual experience" with ocular metaphors like the glasses analogy, if we continue to throw up mediation between us and reality to create distance and the pathos that follows.

I want to start with "pre-intellectual experience" in the sense of "directly knowable." Something that is directly knowable is something that is knowable without language. You know it before language. The trouble with the directly knowable is that you can't say what it is. If you could, that raises the spectare of whether it wasn't really directly known at all, and really indirectly known. How does one "know directly"? How would you help someone? One could say that the unenlightened do know directly, they just don't recognize that they do. Well, if one gets along just fine with their descriptions of things, but they just don't describe things with the distinction of direct and indirect knowing, how does one "wake up" to see the distinction? How does one "know directly" if there's no way to tell them whether what they just "knew directly" is actual or fake "knowing directly"? If there were a way of telling them, it would be linguistic and that would make whatever it was under discussion not actually "known directly," but simply thrown into the linguistic pile.

This leads to "pre-" in the sense of inexpressible. The tough question for inexpressibility is, "How do you know 'pre-' is inexpressible?" Every time you try to enunciate why its inexpressible is a case of expressibility. And further, how do you know it is impossible to express the pre-intellectual and not simply difficult? Marking off an entire area of experience tout court as impossible to express before any attempt at expression is what you might call baptizing a problem. Instead of dealing with the practical difficulties of expression, you declare that area as an eternal feature of reality.

The first two senses exhibit a conversational problem. It either ends with the mystical dogmatist (because only dogmatists insist that something is unknowable or inexpressible and that every attempt to know or express it is ruled, a priori of any actual attempt, to have failed) shrugging his shoulders, smiling, and saying, "Well, you'll know it when you see it," at which point there's nothing else to say because the conversant is hopeless (not that conversation supplied any hope in the first place because conversation itself to the mystical dogmatist is hopeless) or with the pragmatist shaking his head and saying, "Well, maybe we should just try not to talk about that stuff, or really, in that way. Afterall, talk won't help. Maybe we should just concentrate on the linguistic pile when it comes to conversation." This has the effect of changing the subject. But why should this be a problem for a mystic? Afterall, what's the point of talking about something that is inexpressible? Whatever "knowing directly" is, it can't be shared with other people. The pragmatist reaction is just that maybe we should fix up the rules of the conversation so that we don't get stuck in those kinds of cul-de-sacs.

Next I want to turn to "pre-" in the sense of unlensed. Sometimes people describe the relation between the two kinds of experience, static and Dynamic, as intellectual static patterns filtering our experience. This is an image Pirsig uses and I want to focus on his glasses analogy from the beginning of Ch. 8. Pirsig says, "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with…. If someone see things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glass off, the natural tendency … is to regard his statements as somewhat weird…." (Lila, 112-3, italics mine) The italicized part underscores the possibility of going "unlensed," which is pre-intellectual experience, seeing things with the naked eye. The question I want to ask is simple: How do you know you've become unlensed?

Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility, how do you become convinced that what you experienced was unlensed experience? The ability to convince is the ability to justify, to others or yourself. But say you justify to someone else that the experience you just had was unlensed. Haven't you just given them a new lens to filter their experience with, so now, with your guidance, they'll be able to identify that kind of experience as unlensed experience? More importantly, though, how do you know that you weren't using that lens, which you just enunciated to another, unconsciously in your original experience, the unconscious lens you were handed from your education? And even more striking, how do you know that Pirsig hasn't just given you a new lens to filter experience by making the distinction between lensed/unlensed and showing you how to use it by examples? That the way you seem to be experiencing things seems to be this way because of the lens you're seeing with?

This is the most important problem with using the glasses/filter analogy. It relates to Pirsig's identification of DQ with the experience of babies. At the end of Ch. 9, Pirsig equates the learning a baby goes through, making "simple distinctions such as pressure and sound," with DQ. "From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention." The effort to become unlensed is the effort to be a baby again. But why do we want to be babies again? Would babies have built the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty? No, but the French, working this side of the course of Western civilization, would have. So why are we so eager to toss aside what made Shakespeare and Van Gogh and Lao-tzu possible? And more to the point, we can't actually ever be babies again. Pirsig himself says that we have to settle for something less pure, that "the only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born...." (Lila, 74) This strikes me as a passage indicating the impossibility of ever being pure, of having to simply try and figure out how to deal with impurity. And if one goes that far, I would think the first thing one would try and do is dissolve the distinction between purity and impurity. We are always lensed, and in fact becoming unlensed doesn't even make any sense. And that should suggest that the lens analogy isn't even very useful.

The next link I want to turn to is "pre-" in the sense of "betterness." I don't just mean the sense of DQ-as-innovation, I mean the sense that, all other things being equal, DQ is better in toto than SQ, pre-intellectual experience better than intellectual experience. The question is again simple, "How do you know pre-intellectual is better than intellectual?" Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility and lensing, we can simply focus on its non-linguistic nature. How would you know non-linguistic is better than linguistic? My continual answer to "how would you know?" has been, "Well, you'd need to justify it and that's linguistic," but here that question can be answered because you could justify the betterness of watching a sunset to talking about a sunset without accidentally evacuating the area where the justification is supposed to occur (unlike for inexpressibility and lensing).

But now there're two different questions. The first is "Why should non-linguistic experience, all other things being equal, always be better than linguistic?" Why should eating a hot dog always be better than reading Proust? Or watching a sunset always be better than writing a poem about a sunset? One could give justification for why they are always better for you, i.e. justify it to yourself, but how do you justify it for everyone whether they like it or not, which is the force of the intended split? The second question poses another problem: how does a non-linguistic experience innovate on linguistic experience? Now I have gone back to the other sense of DQ, as innovation, as the breaking of old static patterns, and I want to know why all innovation should be intrinsically non-linguistic? Is it really the case that the only linguistic innovation, the breaking of patterns, happens when you stub your toe, see a sunset, get eaten by a tiger, or go shrooming? Was Pirsig doing nothing Dynamic when he sat in his office or on his boat trying to work out the Metaphysics of Quality by breaking its ties to SOM?

One could argue that Pirsig was simply working out the implications of his original peyote experience, but are we really going to argue that? That Pirsig didn't use any linguistic ingenuity of his own aside from the peyote experience? What I would want to suggest is that in the case of the first question, you can't justify for everyone that sunsets are better than poems of sunsets without violating the Quality thesis, "Quality is what you like." In the case of the second question, I would suggest that DQ-as-innovation should be pulled apart from DQ as non-linguistic. DQ-as-innovation cuts across the divide between linguistic and non-linguistic. Sometimes you're caused to break some patterns by something non-linguistic, sometimes by toiling around in the linguistic patterns you're given reason to break them apart (which is why Donald Davidson argues that reasons can be causes, though causes can't be reasons).

The last sense I want to turn to is "pre-" as just different than intellectual experience. Paul Turner once took this line in dialogue with me at the MD. But if one makes knowledge internal to language, trade inexpressible for difficult-to-express, eschew lenses and filtering, and make DQ cut across non-linguistic/linguistic, then you've already gone a long ways to the sense in which I would like to use "non-intellectual." At this point, the two will look indistinguishable. The only sense of "pre-" (as opposed to "non-") that makes any sense at this point is the sense that you stub your toe before you say "Ow." But aside from that commonsensical point, there isn't any further philosophical utility as far as I can see. And at this point it becomes cogent to ask in what sense the intellectual is a barrier to the non-? That’s what this whole discussion revolves around, that Pirsig thinks that the intellectual--language--is blocking something. But what is the intellectual a barrier to at this point? To you stubbing your toe?

In the end, I would suggest three different senses of DQ. The first is DQ-as-non-intellectual-experience. This is the DQ of stubbing your toe, watching a sunset, and shrooming. In this sense, DQ causes you to shift your static patterns of belief in some way (though it doesn't offer you any reasons to do so). The second sense is DQ-as-pre-reflective. This is the DQ of offering off the cuff answers to questions like "Is that sunset beautiful?" or "Which student paper was better?" or "Does Lila have quality?" The third sense is DQ-as-innovation. This is the DQ of your static patterns being shifted to the point of breaking. This can happen when a non-intellectual experience shifts them or when you shift them yourself by reflection. All three of these senses can be seen to have links to the others, but I think all three need to be distinguished and that its when you conflate them that problems start to emerge. All three of these senses are commonsensical and there may be good, practical wisdom to be drawn from them, but I think problems will also emerge when you start to push them into philosophical service.

As a postscript, I want to say something more about the baptism of problems. Sometimes philosophers are wont to say that this or that paradox (like free will/determinism) or facet of reality (like consciousness) is simply eternal and will repel every effort to get a handle on it. Oftentimes they will call such things ineffable. Generally in philosophy, you don't get to leave acknowledged paradoxes and ineffable depths lying around without taking a hit for it. This is obviously a point of contention with some philosophers. Why can't we leave them around? Well, comes the responding question, why would you want to? The answer at some point has to be, "Because they're unresolvable." But all that means is that you've changed yourself into a dogmatist, baptizing whatever problem or paradox you're facing. You've made it into a feature of reality and as an eternal feature, you've determined ahead of time that it can never be solved or explained. But if there is no way that reality is in itself, as all post-Kantian philosophers have to agree, then all features of reality are features we've played a part in putting there. Reality can't tell us when something is unresolvable. The answer we don't get to have after Kant when asked, "Why would you leave a paradox?" is "Because its an unresolvable feature of reality that we have to deal with." After getting past Kant, we realize that the way we deal with paradoxes is by making distinctions and as many linguistic innovations until the paradoxical air is cleaned up.

If you leave a paradox, you don't get to baptize it. You don't get to say that that's just the way things are. You might say that leaving the paradox makes things more flavorful, like in poetry, but then you're not playing the game of philosophy anymore. Philosophers don't leave the playing field with unresolved paradoxes. That means they've failed in why they took to the field in the first place, to see how things hang together. (One should note that in the above I've defined philosophy in a certain way, which I've before suggested one shoudn't do. What I don't think we should do is hypostatize any definition. We should, though, define it for particular purposes, like seeing whether two people are playing two different games, talking past each other. Another way of putting my above implicit definitions is to say that paradox-mongering is okay in the game of philosophy-as-poetry, but not okay in philosophy-as-hanging-things-together-coherently.)