1. Making public — Amateur; 2. Three signposts: Mill, Rorty, Barth — Friday as liminal; 3. Amateur as Sayer — Friday experiment
1. When I started this blog some years ago, I didn’t really know what I wanted from it. I think I wanted to feel like someone was listening to my thoughts, which is an important feeling for an intellectual to have sometimes. Perhaps not all the time, but without publication, thoughts idly ebb away without deposit. Central to the life of the intellectual is publication—making public, in quite any form, from newspaper editorial to book to diary to conversation. At least, the process of creating that external self we call “writing” has come to seem central to a form of life that I recognize in a number of people I admire (most of them dead writers). These are the people for whom the art of living is centrally in the mode Emerson spoke of as the province of the Sayer.
I came of intellectual age, I think, while pretending to a professionalism about Robert Pirsig for an amateur audience. Since beginning the course of writing that produced essays for moq.org, a time period in which I had dropped out of college and was setting my own agenda entirely, I’ve thought more and more about what it is to be an amateur philosopher. Since entering on the path toward becoming a professional literary critic, the thought has become permanent: I will never be a professional philosopher—so what is my relationship to philosophy? And more—what should my relationship be to the many kinds of amateur audience? “Amateur,” in my vocabulary, is not a term of denigration, for we are all amateurs about something—indeed, most things—and it would seem paramount that we speak intelligently about things on occasion in which we aren’t professionals. So how do we pull that off?
2. I don’t have an answer to that, nor of course is there a general one to it, so in lieu of one—or rather, because in lieu is the only route to pursue—I want to re-invigorate the use of my blog, which has fallen by the wayside as I attempt to grind my professional axe. I’m guided by the combination of three signposts. One is Mill’s notion of democracy being for the purpose of “experiments of living”—insofar as these experiments do not get in the way of each other, we should be allowed to pursue them. Another is Rorty’s slogan for Mill’s public/private distinction, that irony and self-creation are for the weekends. The last is the novelist John Barth’s reason for naming his book of criticism The Friday Book: “on Friday mornings (unless the story in progress asserts the priority reserved to it) I refresh my head with some other sort of sentence-making.”
Barth’s reservation of Friday for this kind of work helpfully punches up a problem Rorty never handled that well in his paeans to self-creative freedom—Friday as a kind of liminal space between public and private, something three-day weekends and differing placements of the Sabbath help call out. Friday—partway between the freedom of self-creation and the constraint of public objection. What happens when our experiments of living get in the way of each other? It can’t be that it is simply the point of contention that must be relinquished by both sides, is it? And certainly Mill’s injunction does nothing to help decide between the two experiments. And when you follow through Rorty’s Nietzschean notion that these experiments are in some ways wars between mobile armies of metaphors, it becomes particularly obscure as to just how, in fact, these wars are won. And knowing that would be helpful in knowing just how we should fight them.
3. Rorty, I think, was just a little too sanguine about the rule of reason and rationality, a rule he would’ve explicitly denied, but you can’t read people reasoning well without thinking that they hope others do so as well. So how should we balance between creative freedom and justificatory responsibilities? That’s another question, I take it, with no route through but in lieu—no way to circumscribe possibilities theoretically, but only to spell out concrete examples practically. The Friday experiment is halfway between professional persnicketiness and creative daring and riskiness. But unprofessional conduct faces two directions: one is that genius that Rorty apotheosized in the strong poet; but the other is that facility for public relations between professional and interested amateur. I think, however, there might be a third form hidden between those two—the amateur itself, become its own Sayer. The amateur can’t fight the professional on the professional’s ground, but if the professional is relating to the amateur at all, it can’t solely be on grounds that the professional owns professionally—it must be on some neutral territory, halfway between professional territory and territories unrelated. And there professional and amateur come into contact, and there the amateur must know how to stake their ground legitimately and not be cowed illegitimately—and likewise for the professional, for knowing when you are overreaching is not professional wisdom.
The Friday experiment: halfway between professional knowledge and lay audience; between professional sentence-making and experimental forms; between self-creation and public edification; between what I tell my colleagues or my students and what I reserve solely for myself or am silent of entirely and let ebb quietly away.
Showing posts with label bio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bio. Show all posts
Friday, May 17, 2013
Monday, January 11, 2010
How Not to Start a Philosophical Conversation
I first started leaving junk I've written around the internet almost nine years ago. From the very beginning, I pasted a note at the very top of the pieces inviting thoughts to my e-mail address. They made it clear that I hardly even cared what it was you thought, just so long as you wrote me to tell me the thought. I probably sounded pretty desperate, and even now I have a note in my rightnav bar, right near the top, trying to make it as easy as possible to talk to me:
I have left my e-mail address all over the internet because I always enjoy a fresh conversation. I even have a special mailbox called "OB Letters" (titled so long ago, that I can't quite remember what it was for, though I think it was "Outta' the Blue Letters," though lately--particularly with the below--it's more like "Oh Boy Letters"). I've received many different responses over the years (indeed, a few people wanting me to do their homework), and some people who e-mailed me cold years ago still keep in touch. Everyone has their own interests, but almost everyone is willing to put their own deep, abiding interests on partial hold long enough to intersect them in some minimal way with my own, which I am willing to do to my own in return.
Almost everyone. A conversation is about linking up two different sets of interests. If no effort is made at this, it is difficult to think of what is going on as a conversation. Conversations are optional and we all have our internal barometers on the kind of time and energy we are willing to put into one. What I am about to recount is an e-mail exchange I had recently, and I'm recounting it mainly because it is funny, though--I won't lie--partly out of revenge.
This is not how you start up a conversation:
And what followed was a 1,200 word "essay," annoyingly set in 18-point font, perhaps to make it look more profound than the previous 10-point "this shit will blow your mind" prologue. Now, when I think of "essay," I think of long trains of thought connected together in a pleasing, progressive kind of way. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think of essays as at the least made up of paragraphs, where "paragraph" is defined as "spatially off-set cavalcade of words of more than one sentence." No such luck for this "essay." Each was just one sentence.
I kind of glanced through the thing, dipped my toes as it were, to get a feel for what it was. Since [blank blank] had done me the kindness of glancing at my blog, I thought I would at least return the favor. The feel went something like this:
And yet, this is "unique, altogether."
So, this is what I replied with, being the nice kind of guy I am:
A kind of "thanks, but no thanks" reply. I didn't want to berate him, because he was no doubt well-meaning, though I did want to convey the kind of thing I am looking for should he want to engage in it. I thought "soliloquy" was a nicer way of saying "monologue," which is what an essay is. And, okay, I did want to tweak his whole "unique, altogether" fantasy. But what more could you ask for from someone you've never talked to before?
Apparently, a lot more:
But other than that, yikes!, right? I don't know--[blank blank]'s just about convinced me. If only he'd thrown in a few more "profounds" and "evers," I think I might have to go back and spend some real quality time with Adi Da. I mean, if [blank blank] knows that the brief smattering of sentences in seemingly random sequence are the "most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place," then he must have some sort of special powers of clairvoyance, no doubt gained from the reading itself, to hear all the things anyone has ever said, right? And that's not even mentioning the powers needed to read everything.
[Blank blank]'s reference to meta-all-caps-philosophy, by the way, is his way of connecting what he's saying to me. That's his extended hand, the attempt to make it look like this is a conversation. I don't know...maybe I should have given him a fairer shake...he did spend all that time clicking on the first link, "Attraction to Metaphilosophy," in the first category of my rightnav bar....
Conversation about really big, abstract topics can be really interesting. Almost all philosophical conversation, whether it's about the meaning of life over a Jägerbomb or an e-mail laced with references to Aristotle, Heidegger, and Camus, are likely to be mostly articulations of our own perspectives and opinions, the kinds of things that we've found useful in the way of thinking and doing, the kinds of things that get us through the day. The conversation is best made when convergence of opinion isn't the explicit goal (though the arrogance of philosophy makes this typically an implicit goal), but rather simply an exchange of viewpoints in the hopes that something said might help the other person.
At least, that's what I've found. What do you think? (The implicit question after every single one of my posts.)
Want to get in touch with me but are too scared to universalize and eternalize your comments for all everywhere and always to see? Just e-mail me: pirsigaffliction@hotmail.comI think it is a common problem for people like me, people who like to think about really big, unanswerable questions, to find other people to talk to about them. You can't count on your friends for everything, for friends are forged in the belly of spatialtemporal happenstance. It can be very lonely. I remember even as a philosophy major, I didn't really find very interesting the people in the department, and professors have their own thing going on. When you do find someone, you tend to latch on and keep blathering for fear that if the conversation ends, it will never start up again (alcohol helps with this kind of phenomenon). The moq.org e-mail discussion group is filled with people who basically just need ears to listen (or rather, eyes to read). There's only so much one can say about Robert Pirsig and the Metaphysics of Quality before it becomes apparent that it's just one more happenstance collection of conversation partners. There's nothing wrong with this--but such a realization about the contingent nature of discussion and the sheer unfairness of such a dearth of interested partners would help relieve some of the stresses and strains that arise when people have their own lives and concerns.
I have left my e-mail address all over the internet because I always enjoy a fresh conversation. I even have a special mailbox called "OB Letters" (titled so long ago, that I can't quite remember what it was for, though I think it was "Outta' the Blue Letters," though lately--particularly with the below--it's more like "Oh Boy Letters"). I've received many different responses over the years (indeed, a few people wanting me to do their homework), and some people who e-mailed me cold years ago still keep in touch. Everyone has their own interests, but almost everyone is willing to put their own deep, abiding interests on partial hold long enough to intersect them in some minimal way with my own, which I am willing to do to my own in return.
Almost everyone. A conversation is about linking up two different sets of interests. If no effort is made at this, it is difficult to think of what is going on as a conversation. Conversations are optional and we all have our internal barometers on the kind of time and energy we are willing to put into one. What I am about to recount is an e-mail exchange I had recently, and I'm recounting it mainly because it is funny, though--I won't lie--partly out of revenge.
This is not how you start up a conversation:
Hi Matt, My name is [blank blank] from [has really big beer]. I came across your blog while browsingOkay, first: don't ever send someone an essay, particularly if the only thing you say about it to connect it to the other person who you are contacting cold, out of the blue, and without further preface, is "I saw your blog" and "this is unique, altogether." The second odd thing to notice are the "related references." What's that about? I felt like I was in an interview, and I was the interviewer. It's like walking down the street and someone accosts you with, "Yes, I would like to apply for the job--here are some phone numbers you can call who will say nice things about me." And here I didn't even know I was offering a job.
Please find a unique Understanding of Reality altogether via this essay by Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
Plus related references.
1. http://global.adidam.org/books/radical-transcendentalism.html
2. http://global.adidam.org/books/ancient-teachings.html The Ancient Reality Teachings
3. www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html Adi Da and postmodernism--Adi Da's unique Understanding of both modernism and postmodernism
4. www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm The Rebirth of Sacred Art
5. www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch1b The Body as Light[blank blank]
And what followed was a 1,200 word "essay," annoyingly set in 18-point font, perhaps to make it look more profound than the previous 10-point "this shit will blow your mind" prologue. Now, when I think of "essay," I think of long trains of thought connected together in a pleasing, progressive kind of way. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think of essays as at the least made up of paragraphs, where "paragraph" is defined as "spatially off-set cavalcade of words of more than one sentence." No such luck for this "essay." Each was just one sentence.
I kind of glanced through the thing, dipped my toes as it were, to get a feel for what it was. Since [blank blank] had done me the kindness of glancing at my blog, I thought I would at least return the favor. The feel went something like this:
Reality Itself egolessly, Indivisibly, and Divinely Is As Is—always already Prior to attention, "point of view", and ego-"I".Yikes. It even had the weird underlining (who uses underlining anymore?), with the broken "Is As Is." Really bizarre. And then there's the content--fairly typical, New Agey, post-Buddhist pseudo-sophistication. Which, ya' know...whatever--it's just not my kind of thing. I shouldn't even call it "pseudo": it is what is, and makes perfectly good sense in a certain tradition of articulation. The kind of ideas behind the stylized aphorisms, however, I truly think are the same kinds of ideas in a lot of post-structuralist thought. I may not like the quasi-metaphysical talk of "reality itself," but when everything is said and done, what the above kind of thing does is dissolve the subject/object dichotomy, which gives sense to "Reality Itself is Nothingness," and leaves the reality we mere mortals toy around with to be the relational junk pragmatists specialize in. Hence all kinds of books and essays linking Buddhism and pragmatism and Buddhism and Derrida.
Reality Itself Is Self-Evidently Divine.
Reality Itself Is The Only Divine.
Reality Itself is not a Deity.
Reality Itself is not a relation of attention, "point of view", or ego-"I".
Reality Itself—or The Divine Itself—Is The egoless and relationless Context of all-and-All.
And yet, this is "unique, altogether."
So, this is what I replied with, being the nice kind of guy I am:
Hi [blank],
Thanks for the essay, but I'm less in the market for soliloquies than I am for conversation. I'm sure the collection of aphorisms that make up the essay, well-worn and reminiscent of a large-scale trend in thinking, work quite well for most purposes, but they are not exactly the direction I usually go.
Take it easy,
[blank--I mean] Matt
A kind of "thanks, but no thanks" reply. I didn't want to berate him, because he was no doubt well-meaning, though I did want to convey the kind of thing I am looking for should he want to engage in it. I thought "soliloquy" was a nicer way of saying "monologue," which is what an essay is. And, okay, I did want to tweak his whole "unique, altogether" fantasy. But what more could you ask for from someone you've never talked to before?
Apparently, a lot more:
Hi Matt, Thankyou for your response which is really an auto-biographical self description, rather than an intelligently considered response to Adi Da's Luminous Wisdom Teaching.Okay, let me stop it right there and say, he's got me there. As it happens, I had checked my e-mail within the first hour after he'd sent it, and I think I took about 15 minutes to read, consider, and craft my reply. And considering how long it probably took him to show up on my website, find my e-mail address, and paste in his no-doubt-ready-to-go cold-call e-mail, I thought it struck just about the right parity.
Plus you could not have thoroughly considerd Adi Da's Wisdom Teaching in the less that hour in which I sent you my email.
The essay that I sent you was not a collection of aphorisms or soliloquies. It was/is the most profound essay ever written on the limiitations of ALL of our usual forms of "knowledge", whether secular or so called religious.Okay, I'm not sure what the last "aphorisms and soliloquies?" means, but I'm guessing it means that whatever is behind the link contradicts that description, though I didn't waste any of my precious time (much better spent in mocking) to find out. However, considering my dictionary tells me that an aphorism is "a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation," I wouldn't wager too much money on it. And the only reason I'm including the links is in the off chance that somebody does a search for the links and finds this page mocking this poor, errant proselytizer (I really hope [blank blank] comes back and leaves comments).
Plus Adi Da's Luminous Wisdom Teaching is the most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place.
This appreciation for instance. 1. www.kneeoflistening.com/f1-kripal.html
Or these words written by Adi Da on His Understanding of Death--easily the most extraordinary lines ever written about death
1. www.easydeathbook.com/purpose.asp aphorisms and soliloquies?
[blank]
But other than that, yikes!, right? I don't know--[blank blank]'s just about convinced me. If only he'd thrown in a few more "profounds" and "evers," I think I might have to go back and spend some real quality time with Adi Da. I mean, if [blank blank] knows that the brief smattering of sentences in seemingly random sequence are the "most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place," then he must have some sort of special powers of clairvoyance, no doubt gained from the reading itself, to hear all the things anyone has ever said, right? And that's not even mentioning the powers needed to read everything.
[Blank blank]'s reference to meta-all-caps-philosophy, by the way, is his way of connecting what he's saying to me. That's his extended hand, the attempt to make it look like this is a conversation. I don't know...maybe I should have given him a fairer shake...he did spend all that time clicking on the first link, "Attraction to Metaphilosophy," in the first category of my rightnav bar....
Hi [blank],Okay, the "good luck with that" was definitely bitchy, but what do you want from me. (And yes, the "Ladi da" was on purpose, too.)
You are quite perceptive in noting that my response was largely autobiography--I'm a human being with his own own pressures and demands, including that of being a grad student, and as an amateur philosopher I have my own conceived tasks and projects. I enjoy conversation with those who wish it, but I don't consider it good manners to simply send someone an essay and expect them to be overjoyed with the prospect of having to read and spend time considering it--I have a blog because it gives people the option of totally ignoring it. If people want to talk to me about my bog, or really anything at all, they can start a conversation by e-mailing me, but requiring me to read an essay as a prerequisite to the conversation is more than I can commit to. All due apologies. I said "soliloquy" because I thought it would be a polite way of saying, "You sent me a monologue talking about yourself, but I'm not accepting monologues just now."
I perused the essay briefly, and it does look like a collection of aphorisms to me. I don't even know why you would take that to be a slight. Nietzsche was one of the greatest philosophers of the last 200 years, and some of his best work was in the aphoristic style.
You sound very committed to the philosophy enunciated in the essay, and I'm glad you find it to be the most profound, complete, and comprehensive ever. I'm sure such satisfaction makes life's conundrums and stresses easier to bear, but I'm not unhappy with mine just now, and without any indication that dialogue rather than conversion is your goal, I'll take your opinion about Ladi Da to be autobiographical.
Good luck with that,
Matt
Conversation about really big, abstract topics can be really interesting. Almost all philosophical conversation, whether it's about the meaning of life over a Jägerbomb or an e-mail laced with references to Aristotle, Heidegger, and Camus, are likely to be mostly articulations of our own perspectives and opinions, the kinds of things that we've found useful in the way of thinking and doing, the kinds of things that get us through the day. The conversation is best made when convergence of opinion isn't the explicit goal (though the arrogance of philosophy makes this typically an implicit goal), but rather simply an exchange of viewpoints in the hopes that something said might help the other person.
At least, that's what I've found. What do you think? (The implicit question after every single one of my posts.)
Monday, January 04, 2010
Discussion With Dave Buchanan
Dave Buchanan (or "DMB" as he often goes by in the moq.org discussion group) and I have had several long-standing disagreements for over seven years now. I think it might be fair to say that we've had the longest running dialogue between two self-perceived Pirsigians, hands down. If one had all the time in the world, you could follow the history of our conversation in the moq.org archives (which oddly enough begins right at the cut between the old '98 to Oct. '02 archive and the Nov. '02 to '05 archive--right in November 2002 we have our first spat, though the real fight doesn't begin until December). I look back and cringe at how silly and arrogant I was then--oh, youth: some things never change.
The arguments have continued off and on all these years, on and off the list. Lately we've each become more reserved, taking on an aloofness more appropriate to the professional stances each of us wishes to take. Well--at least I have, though even through the professed swagger that Dave still takes pleasure in taking (below he refers to his "rudeness," which is more a nostalgic allusion to our history together than what usually goes on nowadays), I can tell he's changed, his style becoming more, well, professional--as much as he continues to articulate an overt aversion to "professional philosophy" that Pirsig makes central to his philosophy (most succinctly in his epithet "philosophology"), Dave is becoming a professional philosopher (which would be hard to help a little bit of in a graduate program), whereas I remain, and increasingly become more overtly in style, an amateur.
These are interesting changes for us, though probably only to us (and maybe only to me). A few years ago we stopped spending so much time on the moq.org discussion lists, and our engagements became less and less, though I think that's partly because we've found less and less new to talk about. Our positions have become fairly entrenched, and I think if one were to read our pieces towards each other over the last few years, one would find each of us at a loss for new words more than anything else. We fluctuate reasonably with the tide of new information, as our studies continue, but neither one of us has moved much on what has underlied each of our understandings of philosophy since the very beginning, December 2002: Dave's dislike and distrust of Richard Rorty and my tepid interest in mysticism-proper.
We've remained in contact off and on these last few years, sometimes at moq.org, sometimes via personal correspondence, sometimes here, on my blog. A few years ago, after a note from Dave about his experience with Prof. Hildebrand, I was moved to write "Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan," a kind of double apology--in the contemporary sense of an "I'm sorry" to Dave, and others, for giving Rorty such a bad reputation when I was getting the hang of him, and in the old sense of "I'm still, though, an unrequited Rortyan." It runs over more detail of how I was back in the day, and what I think divides us, and I think it's still up-to-date as far as my thinking goes. What follows, below, is our most recent dialogue, carried out in the comments section of "Heidegger, Dewey, Pirsig."). The main reason I'm posting it separately is because the response to his reply that I wanted to leave in the comments section there was too big. But, too, I've enunciated some things that I think are worth preserving in a more up-front format, about the Emersonian, antiauthoritarian strain of pragmatism (something I hope to write about a little bit more soon). I should remark that Dave, for his part, was held to the same kinds of space restrictions (which, not being his blog, he didn't have any other recourse but to adhere to) and that it's a comment section, he didn't ever plan on putting these up for show or anything. For a more patient articulation of his view of Rorty and James (and implicitly me), see his "Clash of the Pragmatists."
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Hello Matt:
Pirsig's claim, that the MOQ is "more empirical" than traditional empiricism, is best understood by way of William James' radical empiricism. (Dewey and Pirsig both subscribe to this brand of empiricism while Rorty finds nothing of value in it whatsoever.) The radical empiricist's claim to be more empirical than his opponent is not to claim "that there are obvious, neutral features of reality that his opponents are repressing". For a radical empiricist, there is no such thing as a neutral feature of reality. In fact, SOM and the correspondence theory of truth are rejected by radical empiricists and so the claim to be more empirical has nothing to do with traditional dualism like mind and matter, appearance and reality. What makes him more empirical than his opponents is the method of radical empiricism.
Basically, this method says that experience sets the limits for philosophical debate. It says that all experience must be accounted for and that anything that can't be known in experience must be excluded. The provision that excludes "trans-experiential" entities is the provision that puts the brakes on metaphysics, by the way. This method excludes theoretical entities such as Hegel's Absolute, Kant's things-in-themselves and Aristotle's substance. On the other end, the claim to be more empirical than even traditional empiricists is made on the basis of what James calls "the continuity of experience" or the "conjunctive relations" within experience. He calls attention to these transitional types of experiences because the epistemic gap between subject and object, he says, is a fake philosophical problem created by the failure to take them into account. By taking notice of these conjunctive relations, it can be seen that thoughts and things are just the terminal ends or pivotal features of experience and they are connected to each other already within the tissue of experience. Thoughts and things more or less correspond in a practical sense, not a metaphysical sense. James makes quite a big deal out of these conjunctive relations because, he thinks, they plug up a hole through which all the metaphysical fictions of philosophy would otherwise come pouring in. So the radical empiricist is also rejecting all the various attempts to cross the gap between appearance and reality by saying that experience and reality amount to the same thing.
Also, I'd argue that this empirical stance is not at all inconsistent with the claim that our understanding of reality is an evolved web of analogies. As is the case with the discrepancy between metaphysics and reality, between concepts and reality, it is simply a matter of distinguishing between static and dynamic. This is not to say that static forms such as concepts and the other analogies are unreal or outside of experience but they are still distinguishable from dynamic quality, 'immediate experience' as Dewey calls it or 'pure experience' as James calls it.
This would certainly be another area where Rorty is very much at odds with these other pragmatists. You could say they all took the linguistic turn but Rorty took his at a different angle. I mean, where some would say it's language all the way down, the radical empiricist says it's experience all the way down and there is a pre-verbal, pre-intellectual kind of experience that can only be ignored at a philosopher's peril.
Finally, this incorporation of the non-conceptual features of experience is part of a larger effort to re-integrate the affective domain within philosophy, within science and within rationality itself. This sort of philosophical mysticism hardly constitutes any kind of easy escape. Quite the opposite. It's an effort to broaden and deepen the intellect.
For whatever it's worth...
Dave Buchanan
December 20, 2009
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That's really creepy--I just started to rewrite some stuff on the "more empirical" claim in the hot stove passage. What a weird apropos.
I don't think I understand enough James to talk about radical empiricism as a method very well. It just doesn't sound right to me as a good philosophical stance (I'll concede to you what James really thought). For instance, I'd feel better if you said, "'more empirical' was a bad way of putting this other point he was making...," and then filling in the ellipsis with the radical empiricism as method thing. Because, as you say, everything is experience for these guys--so at the level of abstraction these guys are playing at, why does making a claim about X being more empirical than Y look attractive? It's all empeiria, right? But you don't seem very bothered by the "more empirical" claim, which suggests to me there's a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" lying around somewhere that I don't understand.
But even then, radical empiricism as a method looks very unattractive to me. Once everything is experience, how can anything be cut out at that level? Do we not experience theoretical entities through our experience of books? That seems really nit-picky, but take Aristotle's substance/form distinction: wouldn't an Aristotelian argue that, though we overtly experience only forms, because of a nettle of logical problems, there is also a substance underneath the form that we experience concurrently, though we are not overtly aware of it. We detect substance by inference (like most entities in physics). To reject things like Kant's noumena and Aristotle's ousia, which we might say were created because of inferential requirements based on the rules of logic, would seem to suggest that logic can't tell us anything about reality. That doesn't seem right. Wouldn't, too, logic need to be rejected as a theoretical entity that we don't experience? Because if one rejects junk you learn about in books and through inference, wouldn't that just tear down all of science and knowledge since the invention of writing (paper being where all these syllogisms got written down and thought about)?
As I see it, any entity is no more or less theoretical than any other (the "theory-ladeness" claim that attends the Kuhnian revolution), and the ones that we call fictive are the ones that aren't very useful. I don't see the need for a method to tell us ahead of time, or to principally demarcate a holding pen for, which kinds of things are real and fake. Call this my greater appreciation of Pragmatism than the posthumously collected Essays in Radical Empiricism, but it is unclear to me why I need a method, rather than regular ole' experience of what works and what not.
I also still don't understand enough about what you mean by "direct experience." I outline in "Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig," my last apprehension of what I think Dewey meant, but that still seems at odds with the interpretation you want to give it (the main claim is that Dewey shifted from "concepts" to "habits").
On the relationship between "language all the way down" and "experience all the way down," which I still don't think are antithetical, I wrote this a little while ago, probably based out of a conversation I had with you: "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."
And hey, don't blame me for the phrase "easy escape of mysticism"--that's Pirsig. I dare say there's nothing easy about mysticism.
Good to hear from you Dave.
December 20, 2009
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Hey Matt:
It's not that you've overlooked a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" but rather a distinction between two categories of experience. The common sense meaning or ordinary definition of "experience" is contrasted with abstractions, theories, concepts and such. Logical inferences and deductions are known in experience too, of course, but this fact does not defeat the distinction. The difference is between primary and secondary experience and is does not entail the claim that abstractions are not known in experience. It simply calls attention to the difference between conceptual and pre-conceptual.
This doesn't tear down all of science and knowledge but it certainly has a way of showing both the value and limits of our intelligible world. It puts that big pile of analogies in perspective. Cutting things up this way says that the world as we understand it is drawn from or derived from a richer, thicker, more primordial experience. You know, it's like the difference between all the sand on all the beach and that little handful we call the world. It's like the difference between a fun day with friends and the black and white snapshot you have of that one moment. The photo is real and it is known in experience too, but it was derived from something much richer than any 5" by 7" piece of photographic paper could ever be. Ironically, this richer, more basic form of experience is exactly the one that overlooked by philosophers and so it's not that surprising that you're having trouble with it. This bias toward anything intelligible and against everything that's not goes all the way to Plato. This bias doesn't seem like such a crime to those who can't see the difference between ineffability and mere stupidity.
Or think of the distinction the way Jill Bolte Taylor likes to put it. (She's the Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke and experienced nirvana.) She says the difference between these two kinds of experience is on display in the divided structure of our brains, in the fact that we have two separate hemispheres that process experience in very different ways. Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be. It's almost literally true that we think with half of our brains tied behind our backs. Similarly, meditative practices center on this distinction between primary and secondary experience.
Imagine if the Rhapsode had said to Socrates, "Man will please quit with all those $25 questions and just dig it?." Imagine if that Rhapsode had convinced him that his demands for intelligibility only showed that he was an uptight asshole incapable of appreciating art as such. That's pretty much what Nietzsche says and I think he's right. Imagine if the Sophists had answered similarly. We wouldn't need James or Pirsig if Gorgias had been as rude as I am.
Happy New Year.
December 30, 2009
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Yeah, but I don't think I do have a bias against unintelligibility. I think I have a better way of describing it (e.g., as metaphor), and I don't think my way slights or puts down unintelligibility, where it's appropriate, in the least (always leaving open the possibility, of course, that things might initially be inappropriate before becoming common sense for the next generation). In fact, I follow Rorty (argued most famously in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but also at the end of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) in thinking that unintelligibility is necessary to cultural progress.
I don't think I'm your enemy. I don't think Rorty's the enemy you want him to be. Or at least, I don't think Rorty is usefully rolled up with the Positivists and Platonists as you want.
For the last, geez, probably two, three years now, our conversations have taken on a remarkable consistency. You say, "Radical empiricism something-something, pre-intellectual something, and Rorty's just one more variation of positivist." Then I say, "Well, something-something, Davidson, Sellars, Myth, scheme/content something, and radical empiricism is basically the same as psychological nominalism." Then you say, "No, I'm just talking about two categories of experience something-something, what I'm talking about are just all these somethings [delineation to follow] something, and this way explains the world so much more beautifully." And finally I say, "Well, something-something, I'm happy with my way just now something, and it's unclear to me why I should pick up these distinctions you're offering."
I mean, you're right--saying, "No, Matt, I'm just talking about two categories of experience," does avoid my admittedly simple, artless and somewhat obtuse argument about it "all being experience--so what's the deal?" But the elemental motivation behind this silly-looking, endlessly reiterable argument is the monist-insight that James was attracted to, about half the time. James didn't want to be labeled a monist because British Hegelianism was still really big, but once you make the central pragmatist argument that there is no Way the World Is, that there's no "transcript of reality" or that in this area of philosophical discourse "everything here is plastic" (to steal a couple Jamesisms from "What Pragmatism Means"), once you do that you level the field of eternal dichotomies--which is the same thing the monistic idealists were doing. And James knew this--he wanted to be called, in "The Present Dilemma," a "pluralistic monist." His avoidance strategy was to say, "yeah, there are no metaphysical dichotomies, but we can make as many pragmatic distinctions as we want." (Putnam makes this distinction between dichotomies and distinctions early in his Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, a book I've tried to promote in the brief "Putnam and Pirsig.")
I like this strategy. I would be glad to call myself a pluralistic monist. (I've suggested here and there in posts over the years that pragmatism is a metaphysical monism, an idea I've never gotten further in describing than at the end of "What Is Quality?", though it was to be an entire subsection in an elaborate piece that began as an essay-length reply to your essay on Rorty, but billowed in the planning stages to a projected lengthy-monograph, before finally collapsing under its own weight of ambition. I had to put out to pasture, and I still sigh heavily over its cremains.)
Where was I? Pluralistic monism--whenever you, or Pirsig, or James, or Dewey, (or Whitehead, or Bergson, or Emerson, or Santayana, or Hildebrand, or John McDowell, or Steve Hagen, or etc.) start talking about the kinds of distinctions we can make within the flow of experience--I don't immediately start thinking about monism. I understand that the people in my list, by and large, are pragmatic distinction-makers. By and large. It's the "away and small" I worry about, particularly when those parts are the ones being played up.
I start leaning towards the monistic-solvent when pluralistic-distinctions are being made when I don't know why those distinctions are being made, but are being proffered anyways on their own merits alone rather than by what they can do for me. Because, as I understand pragmatic, pluralistic monism, the one thing that can't be said about them is that they are correct, that "I say there are two categories of experience because there are two categories of experience." As a pragmatist, that doesn't make any sense to me when it comes from another pragmatist. That only makes sense coming from a Platonist of some kind.
So, with your line of explicative examples, your "You know, it's like the difference...," I read them and I go, "Yeah, but I never had a problem with them." I never had a problem handling the sand on the beach vs. the stuff in your hand analogy, nor the two halves of the brain. I don't think I need your distinction to handle them quite well. And what we are talking about is an attempt to get me to think your distinctions are indispensable--you're trying to sell me on the utility of these distinctions. What I'm not sold on are: 1) the difficulty of using my instruments and 2) the ease of using yours.
In a lot of instances, I have no problem with you (or James and Dewey) using "experience-instruments" and me using "language-instruments" (to create two categories I have great qualms about). Once each of us takes on a whole raft of pragmatist theses, I think either one of us gets the job done on a whole host of philosophical problems. Intramural conflict involves pointing to problems where you suspect the other person's tools will rattle and shake under the pressure of getting the job done. The reason I don't move to an experience-only-toolbox is because 1) I don't see why I have to use only them, 2) I have a vague, nagging suspicion that there are certain jobs the experience-tool will have trouble with (which will cause problems for me if that's my only tool), 3) these suspicions are exacerbated when it seems like the experience-tool is being suggested, even demanded, for jobs that I think it's inefficient at best for (and really--it's the demand that exacerbates), and 4) I don't have any persistent doubts about my capacity to use language-tools to handle pointed-out jobs.
I don't see myself in your broad canvas--when you point to Greek Intellectualism, I don't see myself there, so I merely shrug: "yeah, I agree with Nietzsche, too. I don't see our differences yet." When you talk about a "richer, thicker, more primordial experience" I raise my eyebrows and say, "No, thank you. I don't really feel the need to say anything like that in a philosophical context. The metaphor of primalness is a big reason why I stay away from 'primary' as a term of endorsement." When you say, "Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be," I just think you're wrong. I think people realize for themselves that there is more than one way to be in all kinds of ways, and apparently a lot more often than you think (one way people suffer this realization is through the reading of other people's articulation of other ways of being).
What I do think is more rare than the realization itself is the decision to become some one other particular way to be. And that's what I read your "sadly" as. Because I'm more Emersonian than prescriptionally-philosophical, I like to flaunt the negative inducements to self-realization (what Emerson called "self-reliance," Nietzsche "becoming who you are," and Socrates "dialectic"), but downplay the positive steps I've taken on my own path. My steps, I like to think as a full-fledged Emersonian individualist, are but one of many kinds of steps one might make after the deconstruction of what Dewey called the "crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness." I like to think that the "pluralistic," positive, constructive side of pragmatism is too personal a project for it ever to coalesce as the stable center of a tradition called pragmatism. It is, rather, the "monistic," negative, destructive side of pragmatism, which simply consists in parasitic arguments against the past and exhortations to remake the future, that might only ever serve as the ramshackle commonality of individual pragmatists. Pragmatists, therefore, will always be fighting amongst themselves about how free of the past their individual proposals for new tools are.
I don't mind that other pragmatists are not fans of Rorty or Davidsonian/Brandomian philosophy of language (the latter being the only thing I can figure to be meant by what I referred to as "language-tools" in contrast to "experience-tools," which is just shorthand for variations on "pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinctions"). I don't mind if they are retro-pragmatists, combating the excesses of the present professorial malaise (something every generation will find) by returning to a (somewhat reconstructed, retooled, and slightly imagined) "Golden Age" of pragmatism. I don't mind if they are practicing Buddhists, or Christians for that matter.
What I do mind is when other pragmatists do mind what, exactly, other people are. I do mind when it's suggested, if ever so subtly, that I need to be a Buddhist. I do care, and become a little annoyed and full of the Emersonian-pragmatist spirit of individualist self-creative free choice, whenever anyone makes such arguments about what others should self-realize as. I listen carefully but am reasonably skeptical of suggestions that I've run afoul of pragmatist edicts against Platonism, but I do become annoyed when I can't tell what I'm running afoul of. And I become full of righteous pragmatist anger, the kind of piety that can only occur when there's a center to be hypocritical of, when self-professed pragmatists tell other pragmatists how they should create themselves.
As I see it, you have a choice as a pragmatist: 1) you could throw Rorty out of the pragmatist pantheon (thus avoiding hypocrisy), 2) stop telling people what kinds of experience are "richer," and other kinds of laudatory epithets expressive of what you like--at the abstract level of philosophical discourse that you're letting these fly, I think you're running afoul of the "create yourself" plank in the pragmatist platform, or 3) throw out the "create yourself" plank that is common to Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, and Rorty.
I read your commentary on Rorty, and me, as implicit versions of (1)--you haven't explicitly thrown him out, but you suggest that "real pragmatism" is "X, Y, and Z" (just as I do in my own way)--centered around the classical pragmatists, radical empiricism, and the pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinction--and then criticize Rorty for having fallen outside the circle. This is fair enough as far as it goes, but I think you need to say more about the Emersonian side of pragmatism I've hightlighted above, the side of pragmatism I spend most of my time promoting (and Rorty spent his). It is one thing to see Rorty as backsliding into Platonism (which is a reasonable criticism), but it is another, I think, to make Platonic-like authoritarian claims about how things are. You technically avoid them in the Emersonian spirit by telling me how beautiful things look from your perspective and how much sense of the world your distinctions make, but you have a problem on your hands if I reply, "Meh--I'm good." Such odes to your personal experience that opine the richness and freedom of tradition-weighted problems your way of being afford you are all fine and dandy as far as they go, but they are exhortative, not argumentative. If they were argumentative, they'd likely run afoul of Platonist intellecutalism--straight-jacketing the kinds of nonsense I want to make. You move from argumentative-criticisms of Rorty (which are permitted) to exhortative-songs of your freedom in such away that make me think that you think they are arguments--arguments that if I were a reasonable philosopher I would need to rebut or submit to. But I don't know how to rebut your affection for the way of being known as Buddhism without being a Platonist, and that's the only thing I know I don't want to be.
My suspicion is that if you tried to sing the song of Emersonian self-creation alongside your song of mysticism (which I still perceive as quasi-argumentative, as authoritarian edict), you'd run into problems. I suspect you'd find that you wouldn't be able to sing the song of mysticism in just the same way as you have before to hold the harmony of self-creation while remaining in tune. I suspect that the notes that would be modulated to stay in tune would be just those same ones that were previously the ones critical of Rorty. Which is to say: I don't think the modulated song of mysticism would have anything critical to say to Rorty's way of being, or his philosophy.
That's my suspicion. And for my own part (and from my own perspective), the disagreement we've had is that you think I'm singing notes that criticize your song of mysticism, whereas I don't think I am. Or rather, the song I'm singing only criticizes just those notes in the song that I think would have to be modulated away if you sang it in harmony with a song of self-creation.
The arguments have continued off and on all these years, on and off the list. Lately we've each become more reserved, taking on an aloofness more appropriate to the professional stances each of us wishes to take. Well--at least I have, though even through the professed swagger that Dave still takes pleasure in taking (below he refers to his "rudeness," which is more a nostalgic allusion to our history together than what usually goes on nowadays), I can tell he's changed, his style becoming more, well, professional--as much as he continues to articulate an overt aversion to "professional philosophy" that Pirsig makes central to his philosophy (most succinctly in his epithet "philosophology"), Dave is becoming a professional philosopher (which would be hard to help a little bit of in a graduate program), whereas I remain, and increasingly become more overtly in style, an amateur.
These are interesting changes for us, though probably only to us (and maybe only to me). A few years ago we stopped spending so much time on the moq.org discussion lists, and our engagements became less and less, though I think that's partly because we've found less and less new to talk about. Our positions have become fairly entrenched, and I think if one were to read our pieces towards each other over the last few years, one would find each of us at a loss for new words more than anything else. We fluctuate reasonably with the tide of new information, as our studies continue, but neither one of us has moved much on what has underlied each of our understandings of philosophy since the very beginning, December 2002: Dave's dislike and distrust of Richard Rorty and my tepid interest in mysticism-proper.
We've remained in contact off and on these last few years, sometimes at moq.org, sometimes via personal correspondence, sometimes here, on my blog. A few years ago, after a note from Dave about his experience with Prof. Hildebrand, I was moved to write "Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan," a kind of double apology--in the contemporary sense of an "I'm sorry" to Dave, and others, for giving Rorty such a bad reputation when I was getting the hang of him, and in the old sense of "I'm still, though, an unrequited Rortyan." It runs over more detail of how I was back in the day, and what I think divides us, and I think it's still up-to-date as far as my thinking goes. What follows, below, is our most recent dialogue, carried out in the comments section of "Heidegger, Dewey, Pirsig."). The main reason I'm posting it separately is because the response to his reply that I wanted to leave in the comments section there was too big. But, too, I've enunciated some things that I think are worth preserving in a more up-front format, about the Emersonian, antiauthoritarian strain of pragmatism (something I hope to write about a little bit more soon). I should remark that Dave, for his part, was held to the same kinds of space restrictions (which, not being his blog, he didn't have any other recourse but to adhere to) and that it's a comment section, he didn't ever plan on putting these up for show or anything. For a more patient articulation of his view of Rorty and James (and implicitly me), see his "Clash of the Pragmatists."
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Hello Matt:
Pirsig's claim, that the MOQ is "more empirical" than traditional empiricism, is best understood by way of William James' radical empiricism. (Dewey and Pirsig both subscribe to this brand of empiricism while Rorty finds nothing of value in it whatsoever.) The radical empiricist's claim to be more empirical than his opponent is not to claim "that there are obvious, neutral features of reality that his opponents are repressing". For a radical empiricist, there is no such thing as a neutral feature of reality. In fact, SOM and the correspondence theory of truth are rejected by radical empiricists and so the claim to be more empirical has nothing to do with traditional dualism like mind and matter, appearance and reality. What makes him more empirical than his opponents is the method of radical empiricism.
Basically, this method says that experience sets the limits for philosophical debate. It says that all experience must be accounted for and that anything that can't be known in experience must be excluded. The provision that excludes "trans-experiential" entities is the provision that puts the brakes on metaphysics, by the way. This method excludes theoretical entities such as Hegel's Absolute, Kant's things-in-themselves and Aristotle's substance. On the other end, the claim to be more empirical than even traditional empiricists is made on the basis of what James calls "the continuity of experience" or the "conjunctive relations" within experience. He calls attention to these transitional types of experiences because the epistemic gap between subject and object, he says, is a fake philosophical problem created by the failure to take them into account. By taking notice of these conjunctive relations, it can be seen that thoughts and things are just the terminal ends or pivotal features of experience and they are connected to each other already within the tissue of experience. Thoughts and things more or less correspond in a practical sense, not a metaphysical sense. James makes quite a big deal out of these conjunctive relations because, he thinks, they plug up a hole through which all the metaphysical fictions of philosophy would otherwise come pouring in. So the radical empiricist is also rejecting all the various attempts to cross the gap between appearance and reality by saying that experience and reality amount to the same thing.
Also, I'd argue that this empirical stance is not at all inconsistent with the claim that our understanding of reality is an evolved web of analogies. As is the case with the discrepancy between metaphysics and reality, between concepts and reality, it is simply a matter of distinguishing between static and dynamic. This is not to say that static forms such as concepts and the other analogies are unreal or outside of experience but they are still distinguishable from dynamic quality, 'immediate experience' as Dewey calls it or 'pure experience' as James calls it.
This would certainly be another area where Rorty is very much at odds with these other pragmatists. You could say they all took the linguistic turn but Rorty took his at a different angle. I mean, where some would say it's language all the way down, the radical empiricist says it's experience all the way down and there is a pre-verbal, pre-intellectual kind of experience that can only be ignored at a philosopher's peril.
Finally, this incorporation of the non-conceptual features of experience is part of a larger effort to re-integrate the affective domain within philosophy, within science and within rationality itself. This sort of philosophical mysticism hardly constitutes any kind of easy escape. Quite the opposite. It's an effort to broaden and deepen the intellect.
For whatever it's worth...
Dave Buchanan
December 20, 2009
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That's really creepy--I just started to rewrite some stuff on the "more empirical" claim in the hot stove passage. What a weird apropos.
I don't think I understand enough James to talk about radical empiricism as a method very well. It just doesn't sound right to me as a good philosophical stance (I'll concede to you what James really thought). For instance, I'd feel better if you said, "'more empirical' was a bad way of putting this other point he was making...," and then filling in the ellipsis with the radical empiricism as method thing. Because, as you say, everything is experience for these guys--so at the level of abstraction these guys are playing at, why does making a claim about X being more empirical than Y look attractive? It's all empeiria, right? But you don't seem very bothered by the "more empirical" claim, which suggests to me there's a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" lying around somewhere that I don't understand.
But even then, radical empiricism as a method looks very unattractive to me. Once everything is experience, how can anything be cut out at that level? Do we not experience theoretical entities through our experience of books? That seems really nit-picky, but take Aristotle's substance/form distinction: wouldn't an Aristotelian argue that, though we overtly experience only forms, because of a nettle of logical problems, there is also a substance underneath the form that we experience concurrently, though we are not overtly aware of it. We detect substance by inference (like most entities in physics). To reject things like Kant's noumena and Aristotle's ousia, which we might say were created because of inferential requirements based on the rules of logic, would seem to suggest that logic can't tell us anything about reality. That doesn't seem right. Wouldn't, too, logic need to be rejected as a theoretical entity that we don't experience? Because if one rejects junk you learn about in books and through inference, wouldn't that just tear down all of science and knowledge since the invention of writing (paper being where all these syllogisms got written down and thought about)?
As I see it, any entity is no more or less theoretical than any other (the "theory-ladeness" claim that attends the Kuhnian revolution), and the ones that we call fictive are the ones that aren't very useful. I don't see the need for a method to tell us ahead of time, or to principally demarcate a holding pen for, which kinds of things are real and fake. Call this my greater appreciation of Pragmatism than the posthumously collected Essays in Radical Empiricism, but it is unclear to me why I need a method, rather than regular ole' experience of what works and what not.
I also still don't understand enough about what you mean by "direct experience." I outline in "Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig," my last apprehension of what I think Dewey meant, but that still seems at odds with the interpretation you want to give it (the main claim is that Dewey shifted from "concepts" to "habits").
On the relationship between "language all the way down" and "experience all the way down," which I still don't think are antithetical, I wrote this a little while ago, probably based out of a conversation I had with you: "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."
And hey, don't blame me for the phrase "easy escape of mysticism"--that's Pirsig. I dare say there's nothing easy about mysticism.
Good to hear from you Dave.
December 20, 2009
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Hey Matt:
It's not that you've overlooked a distinction between "experience" and "empirical" but rather a distinction between two categories of experience. The common sense meaning or ordinary definition of "experience" is contrasted with abstractions, theories, concepts and such. Logical inferences and deductions are known in experience too, of course, but this fact does not defeat the distinction. The difference is between primary and secondary experience and is does not entail the claim that abstractions are not known in experience. It simply calls attention to the difference between conceptual and pre-conceptual.
This doesn't tear down all of science and knowledge but it certainly has a way of showing both the value and limits of our intelligible world. It puts that big pile of analogies in perspective. Cutting things up this way says that the world as we understand it is drawn from or derived from a richer, thicker, more primordial experience. You know, it's like the difference between all the sand on all the beach and that little handful we call the world. It's like the difference between a fun day with friends and the black and white snapshot you have of that one moment. The photo is real and it is known in experience too, but it was derived from something much richer than any 5" by 7" piece of photographic paper could ever be. Ironically, this richer, more basic form of experience is exactly the one that overlooked by philosophers and so it's not that surprising that you're having trouble with it. This bias toward anything intelligible and against everything that's not goes all the way to Plato. This bias doesn't seem like such a crime to those who can't see the difference between ineffability and mere stupidity.
Or think of the distinction the way Jill Bolte Taylor likes to put it. (She's the Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke and experienced nirvana.) She says the difference between these two kinds of experience is on display in the divided structure of our brains, in the fact that we have two separate hemispheres that process experience in very different ways. Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be. It's almost literally true that we think with half of our brains tied behind our backs. Similarly, meditative practices center on this distinction between primary and secondary experience.
Imagine if the Rhapsode had said to Socrates, "Man will please quit with all those $25 questions and just dig it?." Imagine if that Rhapsode had convinced him that his demands for intelligibility only showed that he was an uptight asshole incapable of appreciating art as such. That's pretty much what Nietzsche says and I think he's right. Imagine if the Sophists had answered similarly. We wouldn't need James or Pirsig if Gorgias had been as rude as I am.
Happy New Year.
December 30, 2009
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Yeah, but I don't think I do have a bias against unintelligibility. I think I have a better way of describing it (e.g., as metaphor), and I don't think my way slights or puts down unintelligibility, where it's appropriate, in the least (always leaving open the possibility, of course, that things might initially be inappropriate before becoming common sense for the next generation). In fact, I follow Rorty (argued most famously in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but also at the end of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) in thinking that unintelligibility is necessary to cultural progress.
I don't think I'm your enemy. I don't think Rorty's the enemy you want him to be. Or at least, I don't think Rorty is usefully rolled up with the Positivists and Platonists as you want.
For the last, geez, probably two, three years now, our conversations have taken on a remarkable consistency. You say, "Radical empiricism something-something, pre-intellectual something, and Rorty's just one more variation of positivist." Then I say, "Well, something-something, Davidson, Sellars, Myth, scheme/content something, and radical empiricism is basically the same as psychological nominalism." Then you say, "No, I'm just talking about two categories of experience something-something, what I'm talking about are just all these somethings [delineation to follow] something, and this way explains the world so much more beautifully." And finally I say, "Well, something-something, I'm happy with my way just now something, and it's unclear to me why I should pick up these distinctions you're offering."
I mean, you're right--saying, "No, Matt, I'm just talking about two categories of experience," does avoid my admittedly simple, artless and somewhat obtuse argument about it "all being experience--so what's the deal?" But the elemental motivation behind this silly-looking, endlessly reiterable argument is the monist-insight that James was attracted to, about half the time. James didn't want to be labeled a monist because British Hegelianism was still really big, but once you make the central pragmatist argument that there is no Way the World Is, that there's no "transcript of reality" or that in this area of philosophical discourse "everything here is plastic" (to steal a couple Jamesisms from "What Pragmatism Means"), once you do that you level the field of eternal dichotomies--which is the same thing the monistic idealists were doing. And James knew this--he wanted to be called, in "The Present Dilemma," a "pluralistic monist." His avoidance strategy was to say, "yeah, there are no metaphysical dichotomies, but we can make as many pragmatic distinctions as we want." (Putnam makes this distinction between dichotomies and distinctions early in his Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, a book I've tried to promote in the brief "Putnam and Pirsig.")
I like this strategy. I would be glad to call myself a pluralistic monist. (I've suggested here and there in posts over the years that pragmatism is a metaphysical monism, an idea I've never gotten further in describing than at the end of "What Is Quality?", though it was to be an entire subsection in an elaborate piece that began as an essay-length reply to your essay on Rorty, but billowed in the planning stages to a projected lengthy-monograph, before finally collapsing under its own weight of ambition. I had to put out to pasture, and I still sigh heavily over its cremains.)
Where was I? Pluralistic monism--whenever you, or Pirsig, or James, or Dewey, (or Whitehead, or Bergson, or Emerson, or Santayana, or Hildebrand, or John McDowell, or Steve Hagen, or etc.) start talking about the kinds of distinctions we can make within the flow of experience--I don't immediately start thinking about monism. I understand that the people in my list, by and large, are pragmatic distinction-makers. By and large. It's the "away and small" I worry about, particularly when those parts are the ones being played up.
I start leaning towards the monistic-solvent when pluralistic-distinctions are being made when I don't know why those distinctions are being made, but are being proffered anyways on their own merits alone rather than by what they can do for me. Because, as I understand pragmatic, pluralistic monism, the one thing that can't be said about them is that they are correct, that "I say there are two categories of experience because there are two categories of experience." As a pragmatist, that doesn't make any sense to me when it comes from another pragmatist. That only makes sense coming from a Platonist of some kind.
So, with your line of explicative examples, your "You know, it's like the difference...," I read them and I go, "Yeah, but I never had a problem with them." I never had a problem handling the sand on the beach vs. the stuff in your hand analogy, nor the two halves of the brain. I don't think I need your distinction to handle them quite well. And what we are talking about is an attempt to get me to think your distinctions are indispensable--you're trying to sell me on the utility of these distinctions. What I'm not sold on are: 1) the difficulty of using my instruments and 2) the ease of using yours.
In a lot of instances, I have no problem with you (or James and Dewey) using "experience-instruments" and me using "language-instruments" (to create two categories I have great qualms about). Once each of us takes on a whole raft of pragmatist theses, I think either one of us gets the job done on a whole host of philosophical problems. Intramural conflict involves pointing to problems where you suspect the other person's tools will rattle and shake under the pressure of getting the job done. The reason I don't move to an experience-only-toolbox is because 1) I don't see why I have to use only them, 2) I have a vague, nagging suspicion that there are certain jobs the experience-tool will have trouble with (which will cause problems for me if that's my only tool), 3) these suspicions are exacerbated when it seems like the experience-tool is being suggested, even demanded, for jobs that I think it's inefficient at best for (and really--it's the demand that exacerbates), and 4) I don't have any persistent doubts about my capacity to use language-tools to handle pointed-out jobs.
I don't see myself in your broad canvas--when you point to Greek Intellectualism, I don't see myself there, so I merely shrug: "yeah, I agree with Nietzsche, too. I don't see our differences yet." When you talk about a "richer, thicker, more primordial experience" I raise my eyebrows and say, "No, thank you. I don't really feel the need to say anything like that in a philosophical context. The metaphor of primalness is a big reason why I stay away from 'primary' as a term of endorsement." When you say, "Sadly, people have to suffer a medical emergency, take drugs or take meditation lessons to even realize there is more than one way to be," I just think you're wrong. I think people realize for themselves that there is more than one way to be in all kinds of ways, and apparently a lot more often than you think (one way people suffer this realization is through the reading of other people's articulation of other ways of being).
What I do think is more rare than the realization itself is the decision to become some one other particular way to be. And that's what I read your "sadly" as. Because I'm more Emersonian than prescriptionally-philosophical, I like to flaunt the negative inducements to self-realization (what Emerson called "self-reliance," Nietzsche "becoming who you are," and Socrates "dialectic"), but downplay the positive steps I've taken on my own path. My steps, I like to think as a full-fledged Emersonian individualist, are but one of many kinds of steps one might make after the deconstruction of what Dewey called the "crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness." I like to think that the "pluralistic," positive, constructive side of pragmatism is too personal a project for it ever to coalesce as the stable center of a tradition called pragmatism. It is, rather, the "monistic," negative, destructive side of pragmatism, which simply consists in parasitic arguments against the past and exhortations to remake the future, that might only ever serve as the ramshackle commonality of individual pragmatists. Pragmatists, therefore, will always be fighting amongst themselves about how free of the past their individual proposals for new tools are.
I don't mind that other pragmatists are not fans of Rorty or Davidsonian/Brandomian philosophy of language (the latter being the only thing I can figure to be meant by what I referred to as "language-tools" in contrast to "experience-tools," which is just shorthand for variations on "pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinctions"). I don't mind if they are retro-pragmatists, combating the excesses of the present professorial malaise (something every generation will find) by returning to a (somewhat reconstructed, retooled, and slightly imagined) "Golden Age" of pragmatism. I don't mind if they are practicing Buddhists, or Christians for that matter.
What I do mind is when other pragmatists do mind what, exactly, other people are. I do mind when it's suggested, if ever so subtly, that I need to be a Buddhist. I do care, and become a little annoyed and full of the Emersonian-pragmatist spirit of individualist self-creative free choice, whenever anyone makes such arguments about what others should self-realize as. I listen carefully but am reasonably skeptical of suggestions that I've run afoul of pragmatist edicts against Platonism, but I do become annoyed when I can't tell what I'm running afoul of. And I become full of righteous pragmatist anger, the kind of piety that can only occur when there's a center to be hypocritical of, when self-professed pragmatists tell other pragmatists how they should create themselves.
As I see it, you have a choice as a pragmatist: 1) you could throw Rorty out of the pragmatist pantheon (thus avoiding hypocrisy), 2) stop telling people what kinds of experience are "richer," and other kinds of laudatory epithets expressive of what you like--at the abstract level of philosophical discourse that you're letting these fly, I think you're running afoul of the "create yourself" plank in the pragmatist platform, or 3) throw out the "create yourself" plank that is common to Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, and Rorty.
I read your commentary on Rorty, and me, as implicit versions of (1)--you haven't explicitly thrown him out, but you suggest that "real pragmatism" is "X, Y, and Z" (just as I do in my own way)--centered around the classical pragmatists, radical empiricism, and the pre-conceptual/conceptual experience distinction--and then criticize Rorty for having fallen outside the circle. This is fair enough as far as it goes, but I think you need to say more about the Emersonian side of pragmatism I've hightlighted above, the side of pragmatism I spend most of my time promoting (and Rorty spent his). It is one thing to see Rorty as backsliding into Platonism (which is a reasonable criticism), but it is another, I think, to make Platonic-like authoritarian claims about how things are. You technically avoid them in the Emersonian spirit by telling me how beautiful things look from your perspective and how much sense of the world your distinctions make, but you have a problem on your hands if I reply, "Meh--I'm good." Such odes to your personal experience that opine the richness and freedom of tradition-weighted problems your way of being afford you are all fine and dandy as far as they go, but they are exhortative, not argumentative. If they were argumentative, they'd likely run afoul of Platonist intellecutalism--straight-jacketing the kinds of nonsense I want to make. You move from argumentative-criticisms of Rorty (which are permitted) to exhortative-songs of your freedom in such away that make me think that you think they are arguments--arguments that if I were a reasonable philosopher I would need to rebut or submit to. But I don't know how to rebut your affection for the way of being known as Buddhism without being a Platonist, and that's the only thing I know I don't want to be.
My suspicion is that if you tried to sing the song of Emersonian self-creation alongside your song of mysticism (which I still perceive as quasi-argumentative, as authoritarian edict), you'd run into problems. I suspect you'd find that you wouldn't be able to sing the song of mysticism in just the same way as you have before to hold the harmony of self-creation while remaining in tune. I suspect that the notes that would be modulated to stay in tune would be just those same ones that were previously the ones critical of Rorty. Which is to say: I don't think the modulated song of mysticism would have anything critical to say to Rorty's way of being, or his philosophy.
That's my suspicion. And for my own part (and from my own perspective), the disagreement we've had is that you think I'm singing notes that criticize your song of mysticism, whereas I don't think I am. Or rather, the song I'm singing only criticizes just those notes in the song that I think would have to be modulated away if you sang it in harmony with a song of self-creation.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Second Thoughts on Existentialism
Over a decade ago now, I discovered Robert Pirsig. My first encounter was blasé—I read the first 60 pages of ZMM for a high school class on philosophy and religious studies and faked my way through a paper on it. My interest in Pirsig didn’t surface until the next year, as I took Phil 101 and had ZMM assigned on the syllabus. I groaned inwardly, but—in the context of a semester on Plato, Nietzsche, and Kuhn—I found him much more interesting. I became simultaneously interested in philosophical problems and the life-entanglement that ZMM represented. Here’s a guy who went to the mat for these problems. It was very interesting.
I was on my way up to my 101 discussion group one day in an elevator with my TA, when he asked me what philosophy courses I was taking the spring semester. I looked quizzically at him and kind of shook my head saying, “I’m…not taking any…?” He got a funny look on his face: “Oh—I thought you were a philosophy major.” I said no, I was still undeclared. He said I should think about it, and a month later when our professor asked me to assist her in a class that spring, I thought the least I could do was declare (though it took me till mid-spring—I’m very lazy).
I took three philosophy courses that spring, in addition to the aesthetics course I helped out in (a complete farce: what do I know about aesthe—wait, I’m a literary critic in training now…I love aesthetics! Ha!, and boy do I know a lot about beauty, and stuff!) . They were in Greek philosophy, existentialism, and a random cavalcade of 20th century people, including the existentialists. The deal with the 20th century class was that we could pick out any philosopher we wanted, even if we didn’t study them specifically, and write our final on them. I chose Pirsig, and because he wasn’t well known as a philosopher, my professor suggested I compare Pirsig with someone else. Because I was taking so much existentialism, I picked Sartre. This turned into “Phenomenological-Existentialism and the Metaphysics of Quality.” I read Lila for the first time for this paper, and became enamored with Pirsig’s arguments about needing a new metaphysics for our culture. And because I had so much Pirsig on the brain, when it came to writing my existentialism paper, I couldn’t help but refute Camus with the help of my newly learned Pirsig-foundation called the MoQ. This was “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.”
It never ceases to fascinate me that of all the junk I have lying around the internet, this particular essay sends me the most random readers who feel like writing (all of my reply letters begin “Thanks for reading and writing!”). Having written it a decade ago, though, I have mixed feelings about the arguments. (I have no mixed feelings about the writing—it’s horrid.) At the close, with the help of Pirsig’s theory of static levels, I get to state that Camus’ most pressing of philosophical problems, the question of suicide, of why I should not just off myself, has an easy answer: “It’s simply that Life has Meaning: to live.” Really? Life’s purpose is to be lived? I suggest that this “rather simple ethics” “leaves the door open” for the further development of a teleological ethics, but why on earth should we think that the firm foundation of the ultimate telos of life is “to be lived,” and this because we are cellular beings? At root, life has biological meaning, so now Camus’ full of crap. “Life’s purpose is to be lived” is at best a tautology, and how boring is that? Why on earth would somebody think that that’s an interesting answer to Camus’ problem?
In my estimation, there are two types of 19-year-old philosophy students: 1) people who thought Nietzsche was probably right when he said “God is dead” at 18 and still do and 2) people who thought Nietzsche was right at 18 but now don’t. I was the latter type. Most people who go in for philosophy these days do not make it through their teenage years undisillusioned (saying “illusioned” would be unfair to people for whom it hasn’t even occurred that life might be an illusion—and since Platonism is predicated on the appearance/reality distinction, such an awareness does seem to be intrinsic to philosophy). I, certainly, didn’t make it. However, I also didn’t really care that God was dead. Some people like Camus do. He cared very much, for only somebody that takes Nietzsche far too seriously could take seriously the question, “Why should I not commit suicide?”—let alone as the only truly pressing philosophical question. Passing through Nietzsche makes some people (call them “existentialists”) really pessimistic about humanity, even cynical. I wouldn’t say I was optimistic—I spent much of my time making fun of everything around me and I thought most other people were idiots (it’s hard not to when living in a dorm)—but cynical? It seemed like the perverse twin of the eternal optimism of people who go in for God. I just couldn’t get up the energy for that—it seemed like I’d have to spend just as much energy pissing on God’s grave as I would have had to do propping Him up, and when it comes right down to it, I’m very lazy.
So, what happens to some lazy 18-year-olds who go in for philosophy is that on their way to 19 they discover an easy way out—someone offers them a quick dialectical fix, a cheap but sturdy looking foundation that claims to give more polemical bang for your argumentative buck. (If they don’t find one of these by 20, they either cease to be lazy and declare as political science or sociology majors and try to save the world, or—if still lazy—enter an English department.) That was Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality for me. The trouble is, you still have something you need to prop up, and that’s no fun. It ends up being just as much work as a full-fledged God. Here you are, standing your philosophical ground, and you need something to cover yourself from all those existentialists pissing on you, but you choose a shack with a leaky roof, when at least the God-guy across the street has somebody to talk to for comfort. And so many, by 22, leave philosophical ground and never come back. I mean, shit, you just move a hundred yards south and you can watch all the football you want without ever worrying about the pissing match occurring right up the alley.
True enlightenment happens, though, when you realize that you can avoid the golden shower while still remaining on philosophical terrain. You don’t need a foundation, you just move up hill and let the others piss themselves all they want. Doing this means seeing the need for a house, even a shitty leaky one, as a small problem in a larger landscape. Seeing this, where there’s suddenly a dry hill out back you’d never noticed before, means seeing that not only is the tautology, “Life’s purpose is to be lived,” both true and boring—but it makes you wonder why you thought you should’ve been excited by it. Seeing the larger terrain of life starts to make you wonder about everyone’s motivation for saying and doing certain things, like praying or building houses or pissing on them.
Why did I go in for being a quasi-metaphysician for a time, to want to build some sort of foundation, but not an expensive God-like one? The presupposition in this is: I felt that Camus’ question needed to be answered. I felt that the cynics needed to be answered on their own ground. But once one looks at that dry hill, you have to wonder: why would I want muddy ground that’s been pissed on for 2500 years? I.e., why does Camus feel the need to ask his question? Is every question a good question? Maybe not—maybe we should wonder about Camus.
Once you start wondering about the foundation metaphor, about the need for a knock-down answer to stubbornly stupid questions like “Why should I not kill myself,” you start seeing philosophy as just another mode of articulating yourself. And you notice that you can articulate yourself anywhere, not just at your pissed-on house. So you think about moving up hill. You start to think of philosophy as just another piece of your clothing, that keeps you warm and comfortable, but is mobile and flexible, and if it becomes threadbare, you get something new—because it’s all about having something nice to wear while you wander through the landscape of life. (If anybody’s wondering what expensive, well-worn term of opprobrium to apply to this attitude, if you guessed “aestheticism,” give yourself a serious, stern nod of approval. Sorry, all the gold stars and hot bling are reserved for the people who care about the appearances—you only care about reality, a cold, bleak place which could give a shit if you get it right. So while you shiver in your patched-up hovel, dripping like an R. Kelly wet dream, console yourself—as you watch the carnivalesque, tiki-torch party on the side of the hill—with the thought that all those people are going to hell…or whatever equivalent you’ve dreamed up for them.)
The argument I made in the essay was valid, I think, but it was also—much like my last parenthetical—just silly. Why would one make it? I made it because I thought life needed a big Telos, even if it was a silly one. And, come to think of it, mine was perfect: if Camus is going to ask a stupid question, then I’m going to give a stupid answer. If you demand that the space where the Grand Telos used to be is filled, then in a disillusioned age the only way to fill it is with the inverse of God’s grandeur—tautological insipidness. Some people think that the space does need to be filled. Those who think, for instance, that free will is impossible because Darwin and Newton have proven determinism true, and therefore moral action is in trouble—these people think the hole left by God needs to be filled. They want a Grand Telos.
But why? Why not just have a little telos, or a bunch of little teloses? Why even continue using the Greek? Just say “purpose,” think of all the little things you do and why you do them, and if you like fulfilling these little goals, then keep doing them. If not, then don’t. If you break things into small enough pieces, then odds are that you’ll never answer “no” to all of them and have to start contemplating suicide. Camus’ mistake was to take all the little things as emblems for one big thing, to take riding the subway or going to work as symbols that don’t signify various little purposes, but all signify One Big Purpose. And the only thing he could figure out to fit was Nothing, and hence the absurdity. But if we thought it was a good idea to stop contemplating the big guy named God, maybe the trouble wasn’t God, but the continual contemplation of something big, parenthetical or otherwise.
My attempt to resurrect “teleological arguments” was a short-lived effort to save my leaky roof. In “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life,” I answered for ethics by taking on Kantian deontology. I still think that’s right. Deontology rests on the assumption that the World, or Reason, or Something—Something Big—gives us obligations to be performed. I don’t think that’s true. I think the only reason we have any obligations is because somebody gives them to us, meaning we give them to ourselves, and we can start breaking these obligations off into small pieces and deal with them in terms of the purposes they fulfill—which is to transform “obligation,” and deontology, into a utilitarian ethics of some kind. Not the old teleology, but a pragmatist notion of only being obligated to each other, a notion of solidarity rather than the old, cosmological obligation Kant tried to keep alive (for more on this train of thought, see “Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction”). In a later paper, “Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science,” I tried to give sense to “teleological argument” for science. That failed miserably, as one helpful commentator pointed out ruthlessly, and was the beginning of my suspicions that I should just can the telos talk.
So while I still think Nietzschean anti-Kantianism is right, the whole idea of pressing philosophical ethical questions doesn’t, and that’s because the notion of “philosophy” is typically the “big view.” As my metaphor earlier suggests, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a big view—the problem just seems not knowing when to give it a rest. The big view is necessarily, because of its bigness, abstract—the “high country of the mind,” as Pirsig put it. But some problems are down in the woods, under the canopy, and being up high obscures them. My engagement with Sartre and Husserl brings out somewhat the part of existentialisme français I still think is true. Whatever Husserl’s scientism and Sartre’s decisionism (let alone Camus’ woeisme), the easy slogan we might distill from existentialism is “existence precedes essence.”
The slogan signifies two movements: 1) the movement away from essentialism, the notion that there are set, defined centers to each particular thing that can be discovered rather than fluid, evolving centers created by the thing (any “essence” is created by the way in which we exist) and 2) the movement away from Platonic other-worldliness, away from the Realm of the Forms and back down to the ground-level of life. If there is any utility left in the “Absurdity” paper, it is the slapping around of deontology; if any in the “Phenomenological-Existentialism” paper, it is my playing up of lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” that Husserl wanted us to get back to. (Oh, and Demonstration Stick Man, who finally made an uncredited comeback in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.” What a mysterious person—is he a man who is a demonstration-stick or a stickman used for demonstrations?) The notion of lifeworld is useful in reminding philosophers, people who occasionally think too big for their own britches, that their reflections are rooted in a world that is not itself the world of reflection. This sounds other-worldly again, but perhaps a comparison with fiction may help—the words of a novel serve to create a world in which we can live through the reading of the words. Philosophy does that, too—the only difference is that if the words of philosophy do not connect up usefully enough with the things we do when not reading philosophy, then we might begin to doubt that it is philosophy we’re reading, but perhaps rather fiction (which is what well-read pragmatists think of large swaths of Plato’s dialogues and what most of my dorm-mates thought of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, as much as I tried to persuade them to the contrary).
I was on my way up to my 101 discussion group one day in an elevator with my TA, when he asked me what philosophy courses I was taking the spring semester. I looked quizzically at him and kind of shook my head saying, “I’m…not taking any…?” He got a funny look on his face: “Oh—I thought you were a philosophy major.” I said no, I was still undeclared. He said I should think about it, and a month later when our professor asked me to assist her in a class that spring, I thought the least I could do was declare (though it took me till mid-spring—I’m very lazy).
I took three philosophy courses that spring, in addition to the aesthetics course I helped out in (a complete farce: what do I know about aesthe—wait, I’m a literary critic in training now…I love aesthetics! Ha!, and boy do I know a lot about beauty, and stuff!) . They were in Greek philosophy, existentialism, and a random cavalcade of 20th century people, including the existentialists. The deal with the 20th century class was that we could pick out any philosopher we wanted, even if we didn’t study them specifically, and write our final on them. I chose Pirsig, and because he wasn’t well known as a philosopher, my professor suggested I compare Pirsig with someone else. Because I was taking so much existentialism, I picked Sartre. This turned into “Phenomenological-Existentialism and the Metaphysics of Quality.” I read Lila for the first time for this paper, and became enamored with Pirsig’s arguments about needing a new metaphysics for our culture. And because I had so much Pirsig on the brain, when it came to writing my existentialism paper, I couldn’t help but refute Camus with the help of my newly learned Pirsig-foundation called the MoQ. This was “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.”
It never ceases to fascinate me that of all the junk I have lying around the internet, this particular essay sends me the most random readers who feel like writing (all of my reply letters begin “Thanks for reading and writing!”). Having written it a decade ago, though, I have mixed feelings about the arguments. (I have no mixed feelings about the writing—it’s horrid.) At the close, with the help of Pirsig’s theory of static levels, I get to state that Camus’ most pressing of philosophical problems, the question of suicide, of why I should not just off myself, has an easy answer: “It’s simply that Life has Meaning: to live.” Really? Life’s purpose is to be lived? I suggest that this “rather simple ethics” “leaves the door open” for the further development of a teleological ethics, but why on earth should we think that the firm foundation of the ultimate telos of life is “to be lived,” and this because we are cellular beings? At root, life has biological meaning, so now Camus’ full of crap. “Life’s purpose is to be lived” is at best a tautology, and how boring is that? Why on earth would somebody think that that’s an interesting answer to Camus’ problem?
In my estimation, there are two types of 19-year-old philosophy students: 1) people who thought Nietzsche was probably right when he said “God is dead” at 18 and still do and 2) people who thought Nietzsche was right at 18 but now don’t. I was the latter type. Most people who go in for philosophy these days do not make it through their teenage years undisillusioned (saying “illusioned” would be unfair to people for whom it hasn’t even occurred that life might be an illusion—and since Platonism is predicated on the appearance/reality distinction, such an awareness does seem to be intrinsic to philosophy). I, certainly, didn’t make it. However, I also didn’t really care that God was dead. Some people like Camus do. He cared very much, for only somebody that takes Nietzsche far too seriously could take seriously the question, “Why should I not commit suicide?”—let alone as the only truly pressing philosophical question. Passing through Nietzsche makes some people (call them “existentialists”) really pessimistic about humanity, even cynical. I wouldn’t say I was optimistic—I spent much of my time making fun of everything around me and I thought most other people were idiots (it’s hard not to when living in a dorm)—but cynical? It seemed like the perverse twin of the eternal optimism of people who go in for God. I just couldn’t get up the energy for that—it seemed like I’d have to spend just as much energy pissing on God’s grave as I would have had to do propping Him up, and when it comes right down to it, I’m very lazy.
So, what happens to some lazy 18-year-olds who go in for philosophy is that on their way to 19 they discover an easy way out—someone offers them a quick dialectical fix, a cheap but sturdy looking foundation that claims to give more polemical bang for your argumentative buck. (If they don’t find one of these by 20, they either cease to be lazy and declare as political science or sociology majors and try to save the world, or—if still lazy—enter an English department.) That was Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality for me. The trouble is, you still have something you need to prop up, and that’s no fun. It ends up being just as much work as a full-fledged God. Here you are, standing your philosophical ground, and you need something to cover yourself from all those existentialists pissing on you, but you choose a shack with a leaky roof, when at least the God-guy across the street has somebody to talk to for comfort. And so many, by 22, leave philosophical ground and never come back. I mean, shit, you just move a hundred yards south and you can watch all the football you want without ever worrying about the pissing match occurring right up the alley.
True enlightenment happens, though, when you realize that you can avoid the golden shower while still remaining on philosophical terrain. You don’t need a foundation, you just move up hill and let the others piss themselves all they want. Doing this means seeing the need for a house, even a shitty leaky one, as a small problem in a larger landscape. Seeing this, where there’s suddenly a dry hill out back you’d never noticed before, means seeing that not only is the tautology, “Life’s purpose is to be lived,” both true and boring—but it makes you wonder why you thought you should’ve been excited by it. Seeing the larger terrain of life starts to make you wonder about everyone’s motivation for saying and doing certain things, like praying or building houses or pissing on them.
Why did I go in for being a quasi-metaphysician for a time, to want to build some sort of foundation, but not an expensive God-like one? The presupposition in this is: I felt that Camus’ question needed to be answered. I felt that the cynics needed to be answered on their own ground. But once one looks at that dry hill, you have to wonder: why would I want muddy ground that’s been pissed on for 2500 years? I.e., why does Camus feel the need to ask his question? Is every question a good question? Maybe not—maybe we should wonder about Camus.
Once you start wondering about the foundation metaphor, about the need for a knock-down answer to stubbornly stupid questions like “Why should I not kill myself,” you start seeing philosophy as just another mode of articulating yourself. And you notice that you can articulate yourself anywhere, not just at your pissed-on house. So you think about moving up hill. You start to think of philosophy as just another piece of your clothing, that keeps you warm and comfortable, but is mobile and flexible, and if it becomes threadbare, you get something new—because it’s all about having something nice to wear while you wander through the landscape of life. (If anybody’s wondering what expensive, well-worn term of opprobrium to apply to this attitude, if you guessed “aestheticism,” give yourself a serious, stern nod of approval. Sorry, all the gold stars and hot bling are reserved for the people who care about the appearances—you only care about reality, a cold, bleak place which could give a shit if you get it right. So while you shiver in your patched-up hovel, dripping like an R. Kelly wet dream, console yourself—as you watch the carnivalesque, tiki-torch party on the side of the hill—with the thought that all those people are going to hell…or whatever equivalent you’ve dreamed up for them.)
The argument I made in the essay was valid, I think, but it was also—much like my last parenthetical—just silly. Why would one make it? I made it because I thought life needed a big Telos, even if it was a silly one. And, come to think of it, mine was perfect: if Camus is going to ask a stupid question, then I’m going to give a stupid answer. If you demand that the space where the Grand Telos used to be is filled, then in a disillusioned age the only way to fill it is with the inverse of God’s grandeur—tautological insipidness. Some people think that the space does need to be filled. Those who think, for instance, that free will is impossible because Darwin and Newton have proven determinism true, and therefore moral action is in trouble—these people think the hole left by God needs to be filled. They want a Grand Telos.
But why? Why not just have a little telos, or a bunch of little teloses? Why even continue using the Greek? Just say “purpose,” think of all the little things you do and why you do them, and if you like fulfilling these little goals, then keep doing them. If not, then don’t. If you break things into small enough pieces, then odds are that you’ll never answer “no” to all of them and have to start contemplating suicide. Camus’ mistake was to take all the little things as emblems for one big thing, to take riding the subway or going to work as symbols that don’t signify various little purposes, but all signify One Big Purpose. And the only thing he could figure out to fit was Nothing, and hence the absurdity. But if we thought it was a good idea to stop contemplating the big guy named God, maybe the trouble wasn’t God, but the continual contemplation of something big, parenthetical or otherwise.
My attempt to resurrect “teleological arguments” was a short-lived effort to save my leaky roof. In “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life,” I answered for ethics by taking on Kantian deontology. I still think that’s right. Deontology rests on the assumption that the World, or Reason, or Something—Something Big—gives us obligations to be performed. I don’t think that’s true. I think the only reason we have any obligations is because somebody gives them to us, meaning we give them to ourselves, and we can start breaking these obligations off into small pieces and deal with them in terms of the purposes they fulfill—which is to transform “obligation,” and deontology, into a utilitarian ethics of some kind. Not the old teleology, but a pragmatist notion of only being obligated to each other, a notion of solidarity rather than the old, cosmological obligation Kant tried to keep alive (for more on this train of thought, see “Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction”). In a later paper, “Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science,” I tried to give sense to “teleological argument” for science. That failed miserably, as one helpful commentator pointed out ruthlessly, and was the beginning of my suspicions that I should just can the telos talk.
So while I still think Nietzschean anti-Kantianism is right, the whole idea of pressing philosophical ethical questions doesn’t, and that’s because the notion of “philosophy” is typically the “big view.” As my metaphor earlier suggests, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a big view—the problem just seems not knowing when to give it a rest. The big view is necessarily, because of its bigness, abstract—the “high country of the mind,” as Pirsig put it. But some problems are down in the woods, under the canopy, and being up high obscures them. My engagement with Sartre and Husserl brings out somewhat the part of existentialisme français I still think is true. Whatever Husserl’s scientism and Sartre’s decisionism (let alone Camus’ woeisme), the easy slogan we might distill from existentialism is “existence precedes essence.”
The slogan signifies two movements: 1) the movement away from essentialism, the notion that there are set, defined centers to each particular thing that can be discovered rather than fluid, evolving centers created by the thing (any “essence” is created by the way in which we exist) and 2) the movement away from Platonic other-worldliness, away from the Realm of the Forms and back down to the ground-level of life. If there is any utility left in the “Absurdity” paper, it is the slapping around of deontology; if any in the “Phenomenological-Existentialism” paper, it is my playing up of lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” that Husserl wanted us to get back to. (Oh, and Demonstration Stick Man, who finally made an uncredited comeback in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.” What a mysterious person—is he a man who is a demonstration-stick or a stickman used for demonstrations?) The notion of lifeworld is useful in reminding philosophers, people who occasionally think too big for their own britches, that their reflections are rooted in a world that is not itself the world of reflection. This sounds other-worldly again, but perhaps a comparison with fiction may help—the words of a novel serve to create a world in which we can live through the reading of the words. Philosophy does that, too—the only difference is that if the words of philosophy do not connect up usefully enough with the things we do when not reading philosophy, then we might begin to doubt that it is philosophy we’re reading, but perhaps rather fiction (which is what well-read pragmatists think of large swaths of Plato’s dialogues and what most of my dorm-mates thought of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, as much as I tried to persuade them to the contrary).
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
A Theory of Rhetorical Overindulgence
I have for years ignored the advice of others. In regards to my writing, I have always listened politely before promptly doing whatever the hell I want. My freshman year of college I took English 100, a universal American college course, something the best and brightest passed out of, those less so designed to take, and those uncaring to put any work into anything forced kicking and screaming into. Slackerdom had been my haven for many years and my retribution was, when told that "You can call me Dr. Taedium. Or Bob," to say, "How about Dr. Bob?" He didn't like that. However, given those-less-so, the name stuck amongst many. I hate it when professors want to be called "Doctor."
Ignoring everything Dr. Bob told me (which wasn't much anyways), I went on my merry way doing what I wanted. Over the years, I have entreated upon others for constructive criticism, either on subject material or style. I have, without a doubt, almost entirely and well-nigh universally disregarded nearly all forthcoming advice, adverbial or otherwise. I want feedback, but my poor fragile ego apparently cannot handle it, and so constructs apologia upon rationalization in a delusory attempt at convincing me that me rhetorical instincts are impeccable, and that I am otherwise perfect in every conceivable way. "Yeah, but I wanted to sound like that because...." "No, you see, I want to just start from there, I don't want to have to justify starting from there...." "I know, I know, but I like doing it that way...."
For all those who have given their time and energy, I would tell you that you've not struggled in vain. Some part of me hears, and I am not so small as to forget help even if I slapped you away at the time.
The main thing I've been told for some years now has been that I should mind my audience more. "Who are you writing for? Should they know about Descartes? Rorty? Pirsig? Should they know what representationalism is? Why should they care? Should you make them care?" Who, indeed, am I writing for and why, indeed, should they care?
I have, on the whole, opted for an audience of one: me. It is the easiest way to always be satisfied by your writing. There are many reasons why I should have been satisfied with this stance, beyond the self-stoking fire of being satisfied by being satisfied. For one, who can I count on to be reading? This is a blog, one that, aside from the few internet-gained, intellectual associates, mainly lives off of random google searches. How in the hell do you satisfy a random audience? Do I assume laypersons or, though surely not members of the professional caste, do I assume, shall we say, deacons?
In lieu of such rhetorical choices, I've chosen self-indulgence. The insularity has at the least allowed me to develop my own voice as a writer. But it has certainly led to a proclivity, when confronted with a troubling line, of saying, "Well, why the hell not? Who cares?" For some reason I have yet to understand, I feel like I'm losing part of myself if I should omit a line I like. It must find a place somewhere--if I just delete it, it will be lost forever.
This self-indulgence has led to me knowing fairly well in advance, when writing for classes, what lines will be circled with attendant question marks or more specific queries--"How do you defend this?" "What are you saying here?" "Hungh?" I see most of them coming down the pike as I write, but it becomes part of a cost-benefit analysis: "If I put this in, they might downgrade me. But if I don't, I'll feel like I'm caving into to what they want. Have I already completed the assignment at a high enough level that I could stand a few points knocked off?" And so most of them stay and I get the added satisfaction of, not only keeping a part of myself from spinning off into oblivion, but like the apocryphal Babe Ruth, calling my shot. I overindulge because I can get away with it. I've already gotten my A, why not enjoy myself at the same time? It's kinda' like givin' the finger to the Man. "Here, I did your stupid assignment. And I did it my way. That's right, Sinatra-style. Eat it. Sit and spin. I dare you to give me a bad grade. Nanner, nanner--BLeh."
Contrary to popular belief (as if there are popular beliefs about me), my favored assignments for classes have always been the short reflections that teachers often employ to get students to write more before longer essays. These kinds of reflections are often ungraded with the only restriction of being short. So, despite my reputation for writing overlong about everything (a just, and actual, reputation gained from years of service at the moq.org discussion group), I most enjoy the short, ungraded assignments because I'm given free reign over saying whatever the hell I want. I'm afforded the opportunity to flex my skill at compactness without the additional pressure of argumentative justification. This comes out as trying to pack together as many scintillating one-liners as possible. True, I like imagining myself as, if not the only interesting person, or even not the most interesting, at the least the producer of the most interesting things. Whether true or not, I do enjoy piling on as much as possible.
This all comes around to the question of why I feel compelled to write these lines that overreach, why I insist on sinning against argument, against saying what you've rhetorically earned.
I've come to think that the sense of indulgence, the introduction of something you haven't earned the right to say, conferred by a critical audience following the evidence and argument you've deployed, is what continues the conversation. Saying things that are provocative, and there are many ways in which to provoke, cause in others the welling up of argumentative energy, which spill out in response, indeed responses. And even more, they produce the opportunity, by furthering the conversation, to fill in that right, to justify your saying it in the first place. One can't say everything at once, and most of the time we aren't even sure what we want to say all at once, so overindulgence is actually an opening for you to say something more.
Overindulgent sayings are experiments in discourse, assertions and the like that have yet to be fully tested by the critical audience that is the on-going conversation of humankind, which eventually weed out bad experiments and produce the experience proven, intuitive common sense of a culture. Rhetorical overindulgence is what expands our discourse, it leapfrogs and thereby produces the space with which to have the conversation.
At least, that's what I tell myself to help me get to sleep.
Ignoring everything Dr. Bob told me (which wasn't much anyways), I went on my merry way doing what I wanted. Over the years, I have entreated upon others for constructive criticism, either on subject material or style. I have, without a doubt, almost entirely and well-nigh universally disregarded nearly all forthcoming advice, adverbial or otherwise. I want feedback, but my poor fragile ego apparently cannot handle it, and so constructs apologia upon rationalization in a delusory attempt at convincing me that me rhetorical instincts are impeccable, and that I am otherwise perfect in every conceivable way. "Yeah, but I wanted to sound like that because...." "No, you see, I want to just start from there, I don't want to have to justify starting from there...." "I know, I know, but I like doing it that way...."
For all those who have given their time and energy, I would tell you that you've not struggled in vain. Some part of me hears, and I am not so small as to forget help even if I slapped you away at the time.
The main thing I've been told for some years now has been that I should mind my audience more. "Who are you writing for? Should they know about Descartes? Rorty? Pirsig? Should they know what representationalism is? Why should they care? Should you make them care?" Who, indeed, am I writing for and why, indeed, should they care?
I have, on the whole, opted for an audience of one: me. It is the easiest way to always be satisfied by your writing. There are many reasons why I should have been satisfied with this stance, beyond the self-stoking fire of being satisfied by being satisfied. For one, who can I count on to be reading? This is a blog, one that, aside from the few internet-gained, intellectual associates, mainly lives off of random google searches. How in the hell do you satisfy a random audience? Do I assume laypersons or, though surely not members of the professional caste, do I assume, shall we say, deacons?
In lieu of such rhetorical choices, I've chosen self-indulgence. The insularity has at the least allowed me to develop my own voice as a writer. But it has certainly led to a proclivity, when confronted with a troubling line, of saying, "Well, why the hell not? Who cares?" For some reason I have yet to understand, I feel like I'm losing part of myself if I should omit a line I like. It must find a place somewhere--if I just delete it, it will be lost forever.
This self-indulgence has led to me knowing fairly well in advance, when writing for classes, what lines will be circled with attendant question marks or more specific queries--"How do you defend this?" "What are you saying here?" "Hungh?" I see most of them coming down the pike as I write, but it becomes part of a cost-benefit analysis: "If I put this in, they might downgrade me. But if I don't, I'll feel like I'm caving into to what they want. Have I already completed the assignment at a high enough level that I could stand a few points knocked off?" And so most of them stay and I get the added satisfaction of, not only keeping a part of myself from spinning off into oblivion, but like the apocryphal Babe Ruth, calling my shot. I overindulge because I can get away with it. I've already gotten my A, why not enjoy myself at the same time? It's kinda' like givin' the finger to the Man. "Here, I did your stupid assignment. And I did it my way. That's right, Sinatra-style. Eat it. Sit and spin. I dare you to give me a bad grade. Nanner, nanner--BLeh."
Contrary to popular belief (as if there are popular beliefs about me), my favored assignments for classes have always been the short reflections that teachers often employ to get students to write more before longer essays. These kinds of reflections are often ungraded with the only restriction of being short. So, despite my reputation for writing overlong about everything (a just, and actual, reputation gained from years of service at the moq.org discussion group), I most enjoy the short, ungraded assignments because I'm given free reign over saying whatever the hell I want. I'm afforded the opportunity to flex my skill at compactness without the additional pressure of argumentative justification. This comes out as trying to pack together as many scintillating one-liners as possible. True, I like imagining myself as, if not the only interesting person, or even not the most interesting, at the least the producer of the most interesting things. Whether true or not, I do enjoy piling on as much as possible.
This all comes around to the question of why I feel compelled to write these lines that overreach, why I insist on sinning against argument, against saying what you've rhetorically earned.
I've come to think that the sense of indulgence, the introduction of something you haven't earned the right to say, conferred by a critical audience following the evidence and argument you've deployed, is what continues the conversation. Saying things that are provocative, and there are many ways in which to provoke, cause in others the welling up of argumentative energy, which spill out in response, indeed responses. And even more, they produce the opportunity, by furthering the conversation, to fill in that right, to justify your saying it in the first place. One can't say everything at once, and most of the time we aren't even sure what we want to say all at once, so overindulgence is actually an opening for you to say something more.
Overindulgent sayings are experiments in discourse, assertions and the like that have yet to be fully tested by the critical audience that is the on-going conversation of humankind, which eventually weed out bad experiments and produce the experience proven, intuitive common sense of a culture. Rhetorical overindulgence is what expands our discourse, it leapfrogs and thereby produces the space with which to have the conversation.
At least, that's what I tell myself to help me get to sleep.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
No More, Please: A Parody for Parity
A word: I wrote this (and there will be many more to come) for a class I'm currently taking on Elizabethan literature. I'm lazy, so I'm just posting them. My professor, who took an amazing amount of time attempting to justify his insistence on so much writing (a 2-page max reflection for each class, i.e., twice a week--to which my response, in true fashion, is: "2 pages? I piss two pages before brushing my teeth every morning"), has also given directing questions and what-not for these reflections.
In fact, for this first one, he asked us to pretend that we were a counselor to King Henry VIII, advising him on Thomas More's Utopia, giving one thing we liked and one thing we disliked. At first, I was miffed at being treated like an 8th grader (do we really need to pretend to be somebody else to help us write something?), but in the end I succumbed to the opportunity. I also employed my now classic trick of writing two single-spaced pages on the first assignment because the professor had neglected to say explicitly anywhere that it was to be double-spaced--why would he? Every college kid knows that you write double-spaced to leave room for comments. And that's why it's a trick. "Oh, did you mean double-spaced? I'm sorry, I didn't know." So this is twice as long as the rest will be (and yes, this was exactly two pages with footnotes--one more line would've kicked it up to three).
--------------------
His Highest, Most Excellency, King Henry VIII,
This new book, Utopia, by Thomas More, a man of substantial eloquence and poise, of intelligence and courage; whose prodigious memory serves an immense capacity for subtle praise and critique; by whose manner we can discern the breadth and limits of your own substantial contributions to our own not entirely precarious polity; whose immense wit wizens with its wherewithal; a man with the carriage and control over his presentation and prolifically long and illustrious sentences to point to profound problems; and whose writings show the ability to dissemble a message to not completely uncourteous auditors through a not altogether veiled series of veils by partial means of a not exclusively uncluttered profusion of classical learning and rhetorical command of figures and tropes (including that of litotes)—this book comes to us, as advisors, with the task of advising you on what to think of it, though More’s tact is not at all unlike that taken by many who refer recommendations to royalty.
In this most serious of tasks, I will parse More’s language as tersely as possible so as to eliminate the ambiguity that instills its most significant passages. The trouble with More’s text in this regard is that he has cobbled together a fantastic collection of self-undermining insights that can roughly be separated into a colligation of an outrageous public intervention with an honestly brokered inner turmoil. It is safe to say that any so-called positive “position” of endorsement one can pull from Utopia can easily be distanced from the intentional compliments of the author, thus making it nearly impossible to pin anything on More himself.
But for you, Magnificent Monarch, I shall struggle ahead with some sort of analysis, if only as a guide for your own sovereign scrutiny. I shall concentrate my attention on portions of Book I because, in my estimation, Book II represents the dullest drech I have ever read. In an effort at creating verisimilitude for his fictional island of Utopia, More has employed a number of techniques (master rhetorician that he is) to that effect: in the first of the bookending letters to Peter Giles (itself part of the effort), More asks for Giles to “raise with Hythloday the points I mentioned,”[1] either “in person or letter.”[2] Raphael Hythloday, the traveler who has lived in the fictional Utopia, is himself an obvious fiction intended as a distancing maneuver between More and the text. But one of the points Giles is to bring up to have resolved, should More’s memory have failed him, is whether a certain bridge in Utopia is five or three hundred yards across, a fact so trivial that only a person wanting to get his facts straight would want to know it—thus contributing realism to the, again, fictional island of Utopia. And Book II as a whole is dull for this exact purpose: More, after wowing us with rhetorical gymnastics in Book I, adopts a plain style to create the illusion of a clear window opening upon the island so that all may see the splendor of Utopia for themselves, even beginning with what you’d literally see: the geography of the island. In this More follows his sometimes master Plato, who deplored the rhetoric of the Sophists, and in effect out-Platoes Plato by creating something more boring than The Republic (taking his own advice in Book I[3] and finally giving Glaucon a non-speaking part—an interlocutor already reduced to yea-saying—creating the monologue The Republic really is).
But it is duller than ditchwater (though its purpose is no less significant for it), so I shall confine the rest of my remarks to Book I, which includes us in on a discussion that surrounds the purpose of even describing Utopia in the first place. I agree with Hythloday’s endorsement of Ciceronian liberty, roughly seeking happiness and doing as one pleases[4] (which I predict will become emblematic of English political philosophy, so much that I foresee a cynical German someday remarking that, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does that”[5]), so much so that I regard his suggestion that we eliminate private property to be extraordinarily foolish, as he predicts most will.
The abolition of private property is the suggested change to our society that underwrites all of Hythloday’s criticisms, it is the crux upon which he would heal all problems. Seeing our incredulity from far off, More writes a dialogue between his Utopia-self and Hythloday that throws us up into the abstractions of philosophy. The textual More urges Hythloday to work with the establishment in order to change it, a reformist attitude in which one doesn’t move too far afield from what the mass can countenance.[6] Hythloday responds sharply that, “I would be doing no more than trying to remedy the madness of others by succumbing to their madness myself.”[7] Hythloday’s argument creates a specious contrast in which his opinion, the opinion of one who would heal society of its problems, “would either be different,” and therefore incomprehensible for it would be so radical as to be considered madness and laughed off the stage, “or it would be the same,” and therefore aid and abet the madness of the status quo and thus not heal a thing.[8] But this argument bespeaks a debilitating pessimism that requires one to hold the theoretical position that no substantial change, for better or worse, has ever occurred because, unless one is prone to leaping blindly into darkness with no rational breadcrumbs to follow home, every change is part of an endless parade of variations on the first establishment. (I foresee in the future, possibly in France during the 20th century, a philosopher coming onto the stage and saying, “I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system,”[9] a forecast as dark and bleak as it is incoherent, but a natural extension of Hythloday’s argument, which itself sits across common assumptions that Plato uses in the Phaedrus.)
My own suspicion is that the abolition of private property would lead to tyranny on a scale unknown in England and all other lands that bow to the rule of law (something I predict a man—I’m seeing the name “Karl Popper”—will someday trace to Plato’s doorstep). Rather than continue this rebuttal, in the reformist, experimental spirit of the Archbishop[10] I should like to praise one of Hythloday’s thoughts as an insight. Indeed, I think Hythloday is depressingly right when he suggests that thieves do not necessarily steal because they want to, but rather because they have no other recourse. One structural problem Hythloday recognizes are returning veterans of war: “They have sacrificed their limbs for the commonwealth or the king; their disability does not allow them to practice their former trades and they are too old to learn a new one.”[11] Though Hythloday overlooks these to get at the structural problems of private property, I think we can see clearly an opportunity to improve the lives of both those who have fought for your Majesty and the lives of those who would have sacrificed their possessions when these once patriotic veterans become vermin. I implore you to consider measures that might relieve both pressures, some sort of light stipend perhaps, all for your Merciful Glory.
In fact, for this first one, he asked us to pretend that we were a counselor to King Henry VIII, advising him on Thomas More's Utopia, giving one thing we liked and one thing we disliked. At first, I was miffed at being treated like an 8th grader (do we really need to pretend to be somebody else to help us write something?), but in the end I succumbed to the opportunity. I also employed my now classic trick of writing two single-spaced pages on the first assignment because the professor had neglected to say explicitly anywhere that it was to be double-spaced--why would he? Every college kid knows that you write double-spaced to leave room for comments. And that's why it's a trick. "Oh, did you mean double-spaced? I'm sorry, I didn't know." So this is twice as long as the rest will be (and yes, this was exactly two pages with footnotes--one more line would've kicked it up to three).
--------------------
His Highest, Most Excellency, King Henry VIII,
This new book, Utopia, by Thomas More, a man of substantial eloquence and poise, of intelligence and courage; whose prodigious memory serves an immense capacity for subtle praise and critique; by whose manner we can discern the breadth and limits of your own substantial contributions to our own not entirely precarious polity; whose immense wit wizens with its wherewithal; a man with the carriage and control over his presentation and prolifically long and illustrious sentences to point to profound problems; and whose writings show the ability to dissemble a message to not completely uncourteous auditors through a not altogether veiled series of veils by partial means of a not exclusively uncluttered profusion of classical learning and rhetorical command of figures and tropes (including that of litotes)—this book comes to us, as advisors, with the task of advising you on what to think of it, though More’s tact is not at all unlike that taken by many who refer recommendations to royalty.
In this most serious of tasks, I will parse More’s language as tersely as possible so as to eliminate the ambiguity that instills its most significant passages. The trouble with More’s text in this regard is that he has cobbled together a fantastic collection of self-undermining insights that can roughly be separated into a colligation of an outrageous public intervention with an honestly brokered inner turmoil. It is safe to say that any so-called positive “position” of endorsement one can pull from Utopia can easily be distanced from the intentional compliments of the author, thus making it nearly impossible to pin anything on More himself.
But for you, Magnificent Monarch, I shall struggle ahead with some sort of analysis, if only as a guide for your own sovereign scrutiny. I shall concentrate my attention on portions of Book I because, in my estimation, Book II represents the dullest drech I have ever read. In an effort at creating verisimilitude for his fictional island of Utopia, More has employed a number of techniques (master rhetorician that he is) to that effect: in the first of the bookending letters to Peter Giles (itself part of the effort), More asks for Giles to “raise with Hythloday the points I mentioned,”[1] either “in person or letter.”[2] Raphael Hythloday, the traveler who has lived in the fictional Utopia, is himself an obvious fiction intended as a distancing maneuver between More and the text. But one of the points Giles is to bring up to have resolved, should More’s memory have failed him, is whether a certain bridge in Utopia is five or three hundred yards across, a fact so trivial that only a person wanting to get his facts straight would want to know it—thus contributing realism to the, again, fictional island of Utopia. And Book II as a whole is dull for this exact purpose: More, after wowing us with rhetorical gymnastics in Book I, adopts a plain style to create the illusion of a clear window opening upon the island so that all may see the splendor of Utopia for themselves, even beginning with what you’d literally see: the geography of the island. In this More follows his sometimes master Plato, who deplored the rhetoric of the Sophists, and in effect out-Platoes Plato by creating something more boring than The Republic (taking his own advice in Book I[3] and finally giving Glaucon a non-speaking part—an interlocutor already reduced to yea-saying—creating the monologue The Republic really is).
But it is duller than ditchwater (though its purpose is no less significant for it), so I shall confine the rest of my remarks to Book I, which includes us in on a discussion that surrounds the purpose of even describing Utopia in the first place. I agree with Hythloday’s endorsement of Ciceronian liberty, roughly seeking happiness and doing as one pleases[4] (which I predict will become emblematic of English political philosophy, so much that I foresee a cynical German someday remarking that, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does that”[5]), so much so that I regard his suggestion that we eliminate private property to be extraordinarily foolish, as he predicts most will.
The abolition of private property is the suggested change to our society that underwrites all of Hythloday’s criticisms, it is the crux upon which he would heal all problems. Seeing our incredulity from far off, More writes a dialogue between his Utopia-self and Hythloday that throws us up into the abstractions of philosophy. The textual More urges Hythloday to work with the establishment in order to change it, a reformist attitude in which one doesn’t move too far afield from what the mass can countenance.[6] Hythloday responds sharply that, “I would be doing no more than trying to remedy the madness of others by succumbing to their madness myself.”[7] Hythloday’s argument creates a specious contrast in which his opinion, the opinion of one who would heal society of its problems, “would either be different,” and therefore incomprehensible for it would be so radical as to be considered madness and laughed off the stage, “or it would be the same,” and therefore aid and abet the madness of the status quo and thus not heal a thing.[8] But this argument bespeaks a debilitating pessimism that requires one to hold the theoretical position that no substantial change, for better or worse, has ever occurred because, unless one is prone to leaping blindly into darkness with no rational breadcrumbs to follow home, every change is part of an endless parade of variations on the first establishment. (I foresee in the future, possibly in France during the 20th century, a philosopher coming onto the stage and saying, “I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system,”[9] a forecast as dark and bleak as it is incoherent, but a natural extension of Hythloday’s argument, which itself sits across common assumptions that Plato uses in the Phaedrus.)
My own suspicion is that the abolition of private property would lead to tyranny on a scale unknown in England and all other lands that bow to the rule of law (something I predict a man—I’m seeing the name “Karl Popper”—will someday trace to Plato’s doorstep). Rather than continue this rebuttal, in the reformist, experimental spirit of the Archbishop[10] I should like to praise one of Hythloday’s thoughts as an insight. Indeed, I think Hythloday is depressingly right when he suggests that thieves do not necessarily steal because they want to, but rather because they have no other recourse. One structural problem Hythloday recognizes are returning veterans of war: “They have sacrificed their limbs for the commonwealth or the king; their disability does not allow them to practice their former trades and they are too old to learn a new one.”[11] Though Hythloday overlooks these to get at the structural problems of private property, I think we can see clearly an opportunity to improve the lives of both those who have fought for your Majesty and the lives of those who would have sacrificed their possessions when these once patriotic veterans become vermin. I implore you to consider measures that might relieve both pressures, some sort of light stipend perhaps, all for your Merciful Glory.
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