Morton and Metaphysics

Timothy Morton's recent book, Ecology without Nature, is an interesting, provocative meditation on the notion of nature in writing--and since all "notions" are conceptual, articulated things, nature, when when we talk about it, is always, in an attenuated sense, "in writing." Morton's book is broken into three massive chapters. The first is required reading for anybody working with nature-writing: Pirsig, Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, whoever. The most important portion is a very astute itemizing of rhetorical techniques, what he calls an "ambient poetics," and what they are usually doing for these kinds of writers. Morton calls nature-writing "ecomimesis," which from its Greek roots would mean "imitation of the home." Just playing around with his terminology can yield interesting insights, even if you for the most part ignore everything else.

Which is what I would like to do to large swaths of his book. A lot of it, so it seems to me, is mired in fancy Derridean clothing that, while not tanking his unique perspective (as it totally would of a lesser critic), is quickly becoming out-dated. What I wrote below tries to bring out what that is.

Even as that is so, the second chapter is an attempt to link Romantic poetry, the Romantic ethos, the consumerist ethos, economics and our ethical thinking about nature. And while certain aspects are still too marxist for me to take seriously (which is to say, once you shuck the marxist vocabulary that requires a platonic method to constitute, the sentence loses its polemical point and so any utility at all), Morton has written previously on a much larger scale about only that subject, and some of the things briefly stated in this book are interesting and plausible. I can't wait for the day that our cultural-studies thinking forgets about marxism so that it can really spread its wings. The third chapter is a looser cavalcade of speculative, philosophical thinking about how we might "represent" (the modern translation of mimesis) nature. There are some interesting bits, to be sure, but reading Stanley Cavell (like this chapter from In Quest of the Ordinary) is probably a more productive use of time.

References are to:
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2007

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

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Near the center of his book, Morton makes this statement about the center of his book: “Ambience is really an externalized form of the beautiful soul. Without doubt, the discovery of the beautiful soul as the form of ecological consumerism is the most important concept in this book” (121). The difficult equivocation tucked into this statement is between “ambience as the rhetoric of talking about ‘the outside’” and “ambience as an historical construction.” Much of Chapter 1, which is given over to the discussion of ecomimesis and the poetics of ambience, reads like a manual for how to achieve the effect of there being an environment in one’s writing. However, granting that “strong ecomimesis” is “distinct and modern” (32, 33), Morton still spends most of the book talking about just how inescapable this rhetoric is while at the same time speaking of it as historically arising out of particular circumstances. But if the beautiful soul is a peculiar moment in the unfolding of the Western Geist, as Hegel thought and Morton following a Marxist brand thinks, it is unclear how ambience in general could be the externalized form of this particular historical construct, though it is clear how that being the case could make the beautiful soul look nearly inescapable.

One of the virtues of Morton’s book is his elaboration of a poetics of ambience, of the rhetoric of inside/outside. Its main vice is its assumption of the inescapability of metaphysics. Take Morton’s elaboration of the Derridean notion of the “re-mark,” which he takes to be the fundamental mark of ambience. He says, “there is nothing underneath the wave/particle distinction. The same is true of the re-mark. Either the inside/outside distinction is constituted, or not” (50). The analogy is perfect for his purposes, but on elaborating this point again at the close of the chapter, Morton immediately follows with “Not that the distinction is real; it is entirely spurious” (78). What could this mean? For a distinction to be an illusion, there would have to be a reality to the situation that you could then elaborate, but Morton expressly says that there is “nothing underneath” the distinction.

This curious equivocation is repeated in a similar way in Chapter 2, which is a recrossing of Marx back with Hegel to read the phenomenon of Romanticism. Morton suggests that Hegel's notion of the beautiful soul is an amping up of a picture of the mind that Morton calls “the ideology of consumer capitalism”—“the mind is like a supermarket and … our consciousness floats, with free choice, among various ideas that can be selected at will, like so many different bottles of shampoo or magazines” (126). This is an excellent description, as is his articulation of the beautiful soul as, in summary, one who values “transformative experiences” qua transformative experiences (111), whose “purpose is to have no purpose” (112) because the point is not what you are transformed into (the eschewal of content), but the transformation itself (the form). And though elitist Baudelaire-types (Romantic poets, bohemians, hipsters, etc.) realize self-consciously this lebensform, every mindless repetition of “supermarket consumption” reinforces the self-conscious form’s possibility of flowering by emphasizing how every act of “free choice” of this or that bottle of shampoo is but an abstract emblem for one thing: Free Choice. This drains the content leaving only the form (that which lies behind, e.g., the post-9/11 idea that if you don’t buy stuff at the mall, the terrorists will win).

So far a good bit of cultural criticism. However, “ideology” as a term can only receive its utility from a contrast with something else, if not Marxian “science,” then at the very least some other ideological form (taking “ideology” in a very neutral, descriptive sense). So on the one hand we have the ideology of consumer capitalism’s picture of the mind as an empty consciousness floating around making “free choices”—but what is the alternative? Morton nowhere comes close to suggesting that he wishes to revamp a Marxist-like notion of “science” or any other kind of epistemological method with which to pierce behind the veil of appearances to reality, yet he says—in a constant motif of avoiding anything smacking of the “new and improved”—“these ‘new and improved’ versions of identity never entirely get rid of the paradoxes of the idea of self from which they deviate” (176). Morton doesn’t think we can have a new picture of the self: “We cannot come up with a ‘new and improved’ version of identity that will do without the paradoxes and aporias associated with it” (182). And yet it is not at all clear why not. One could grab Iris Murdoch at random from a bag full of anti-Kantians (Richard Rorty, Annette Baier, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre) and it would be easy to show that not only does Murdoch identify the trouble with what we might call modernity its picture of an empty self (blaming it largely, though perhaps in the long-run unfairly, on Wittgenstein), but that she feels quite content in elaborating a picture of a non-empty self. What is unclear is not only how her picture of the substantial self catches itself up in Cartesian paradoxes and aporias, but more especially how it wouldn’t only improve Morton’s picture of an ecology without nature.[fn.1]

To help substantiate this, I would point to Morton’s approving mention of the “Western Apache’s use of narrative in the naming of places,” where “there is no difference between a place and the socially reproving and improving stories that the Apache associate with it, and thus, there is no nature” (180). Compare this to Rorty’s extrapolation of Daniel Dennett’s picture of the self as a “center of narrative gravity” to the general picture of any object as a center of “descriptive gravity.”[fn.2] In Rorty’s picture of the self, and indeed anything we differentiate as an object (which means putting into the foreground with a background), language is indelibly wrapped up into it. This has caught Rorty a lot of flack in the anglophone philosophical world, but it chimes perfectly with Morton’s appreciation of Derrida’s comments on narcissism, which are echoed when he says, “One cannot help anthropomorphism” (180).[fn.3] Indeed, Morton goes quite far in laying the groundwork for a rapprochement with American pragmatism when, following Marx’s pragmatism (encapsulated best in the “Theses on Feuerbach”), he says, “In order to be sitting by a fire, you have to satisfy certain needs” (181). This in one fell, odd semantical swoop captures the pragmatist point that differentiations come attached to purposes—it wouldn’t be this or that “place” if it weren’t satisfying certain needs, for which the distinction between an object in the foreground against a background is but the tool.

It is at this point that Morton would start making contortions. For one, he says that the possibility of the expansion of sympathy from the human to the nonhuman implied by Derrida’s work on forgiveness seems to imply “that we should treat animals and plants as ends in themselves and not as means. But the paradox is that maintaining this view denatures nature” (180) What isn’t clear is why this is bad—we are replacing one conception of nature for another, are we not? Morton’s Derridean enjoyment of paradox gets in the way of his point. After making the pragmatist point about tools and purposes I elicited earlier, he says “the debate about environment and world—between humans who are able to contemplate their needs aesthetically (with distance), and animals who make do with whatever is around them—is thus a red herring” (181). Morton, who is referring to John McDowell’s book Mind and World, is absolutely right, though I think his point is obscured by his transformation of McDowell. Morton is referring to a section in McDowell’s book where he is intent on elaborating a distinction between “mere sentience” and “second nature,” which humans have. Here’s the key line: “When we acquire conceptual powers, our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives, but exercising spontaneity, deciding what to think and do” (McDowell 115) The key disagreement between McDowell and Rorty is McDowell’s reinvention of Kant’s notion of spontaneity as different in kind from “coping.” For pragmatists, the purpose behind the deployment of differentiations is coping. McDowell wants a radical difference between what animals do and what humans do. What’s unclear in Morton’s appreciation of the problem is what he could mean by calling this question “profound”: “are animals capable of aesthetic contemplation?” (Morton 181) For McDowell and Rorty, the difference is language and so, in Rorty’s rejection of the distinction between environment and world as a red herring, he would say the question is as profound as the task of figuring out whether the animal is linguistic.[fn.4] So what could it mean to reject the distinction as a red herring and still find the question compelling and profound?

A capsule summary of the background to Morton’s book would be that it assumes that Derrida was correct when he elaborated the notion that philosophy is rhetorical yet rejects rhetoric and that philosophy is inescapable. Morton’s book has the vices of its virtues in this approach—he precisely avoids all those questions in which the Derrida-like unavoidability of paradox might become suspect. This isn’t exactly a criticism, for it would be like criticizing the creator of a new paradigm for spending too much time constructing it—at a certain point you want to stop abusing the blueprints and see what goes up. The oddity of Morton’s experiment, naturally, is in turning deconstruction into a basis for construction, but this simply embodies the paradoxes Morton continually finds rooted and unavoidable at the bottom of every deconstructive investigation. It is this issue of “unavoidable paradox” that should provide a moment of true curiosity for the deconstructive deep-sea diver—for how is the baptism of a paradox into metaphysical unavoidability any different from a Cartesian Archimedean point?[fn.5] Morton teases out paradoxes in the rhetoric of ecology and, rather than getting rid of them, makes them the basis of his constructive project, the way the world is that we must deal with. But how does this not turn deconstruction into a Cartesian method of piercing behind the veil of appearances to reality and not turn Derrida into a foundationalist? The problem is neither paradigm-deconstruction nor paradigm-construction, but rather—as in all major, interesting philosophical difference—picking the wrong assumptions to hold with conviction (in the Greek: dogma) and build off of. This doesn’t “demolish” Morton’s project, of course, which is the true virtue of his book. For as much as his rhetoric against much thinking revolves around the threat that they are seeking the “new and improved” and he is radically not (somehow), it hardly clouds the interesting ideas that pop out.

Endnotes

[1]Murdoch elaborates this view in “The Idea of Perfection” in her The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2001) (which can also be found in the very representative collection of her essays, Existentialists and Mystics). She says this picture, which she finds behind the behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian, is a “happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud” (9). Her view of the self is based on emphasizing “contexts of attention” to the process of choice, and of dissolving the notion of a “will” that undergirds Kantian moral philosophy, treating so-called “decisions” as more like “compulsions.” In her attack on the will, she mirrors Williams in his book Shame and Necessity and MacIntyre’s notion of “emotivism” in After Virtue.

[2]This is in his essay “Daniel Dennett on Intrinsicality,” particularly 105-110, of his Truth and Progress (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[3]For further remarks along this line on anthropomorphism with respect to animals (particularly my reference to Snell), see "The Representation of Animals."

[4]Rorty's most illustrious student, and McDowell's long-time colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Brandom, has also reconstituted Kant's shadow in the face of Rorty's long-standing battle with it (since "The World Well Lost"). While McDowell tries to breathe life into Kant's notion of "spontaneity" (which Rorty comments on in a 1998 article in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), Brandom breathes fascinating life into Kant's notion of the "unity of apperception" (in the first chapter of his 2009 Reason in Philosophy). The difference between McDowell and Brandom, and why Rorty would have endorsed Brandom's version of Kant, is that McDowell tries to make an ontological distinction between "mere sentience" and the "second nature" of language. Brandom, on the other hand, takes Rorty's Davidsonian point and works further from there to show just what the addition of language does entail to our difference from animals, for the move from sentience to sapience. This point is most stunningly worked out in the last chapter of that book, "How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science," where Brandom reverses Rorty's long (long) standing notion that philosophy does not make progress by showing (and convincing even me) that philosophy, indeed, does show results that other disciplines might want to bone up on.

[5]For a little more on metaphysical baptism, see closing two paragraphs of "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience."

James and Woolf

This is a short thing written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This one ends without a conclusion.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

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Objectivity and subjectivity, so we are told, didn’t exist until fairly recently. At least, this is the case with the sophisticated concepts these terms might refer to. Some of what they refer to, at least in part, might seem to be very old, and some quite indispensable to the very idea of being sentient. These would surely be large currents in the history of evolution, the history of ideas and culture, indeed, the history of history, to take hold of and pull apart. One strand of this larger web, however, is the history of our linguistic representation of our subjectivity, or—somewhat less pretentiously—how we represent the first-person point of view. How do we explain what it is like to be in our minds? And this question flows directly, for the poet or novelist, into how do we write like what it is to be in our minds?

James answers the first question by way of articulating a list of phenomena encountered while thinking and I should like to bridge to my second question, and Woolf, in talking about James. Woolf’s problem is not how we might better articulate our conception of consciousness, but how we might write to make the reader feel as though they are taking on the consciousness of another, how it might feel to have someone else’s first-person point of view. James’ list is convenient because he does quite well in listing the kinds of effects a writer needs to produce in the reader. James doesn’t get caught up in the problems of ontology, but rather wants to help us talk about what is going on whether or not we are happy with our descriptions of what the “what” is, “the fact of thinking itself.” (James, 224) James reorients us to the phenomenological standpoint and moves on with listing the phenomena, the facts of how we perceive. The first is, of course, that every thought is some person’s thought: “It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned.” (ibid., 226)

For James this might drown us in questions about how a presumably non-spatial entity might have a “location” (after all, a spatial metaphor itself), but for Woolf, this translates into a narrative perspective that always hovers around the mind of some person. Woolf writes from a perspective that occasionally rises above the action, to narrate completely in the third-person, and she occasionally dips completely within the consciousness of a character, written in first-person, but for most of Mrs. Dalloway the action is depicted in a third-person stream of consciousness, sometimes termed a “free indirect style.” The effect is a narration of events, not as God might see them, but as this one character sees them, a third-person point of view from the interior of a person’s mind.

Woolf “locates” the reader’s point of view by the use of the character’s full or proper name, for instance “Mrs. Dalloway” or “Septimus Warren Smith.” We are introduced to our first consciousness with the first line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” (Woolf, 3) And with that we are plunged into her mind. This plunge effect is created by the narration not using quotation marks when narrating an interior thought, leaving us in a state of ambiguity. Take this sequence:

“But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.” (ibid., 52)

We can conceive, and are led to believe, that Peter literally has the thought “But she’s extraordinarily attractive” cross his mind, but then a further use of the same signal, “…, X thought,…” gives us a third-person narration, given away by the pronoun, “until she became the very woman he had always had in mind.” This happens consistently throughout the novel, adding to the effect of floating, bobbing in the air near the action.

There’s an ethical dimension to all this centering on the first-person point of view, on subjectivity. Given the seeming necessity of beginning with the Cartesian standpoint, of our inability to ever quite fully scrape off the subjectivity of our statements, there has been no end of consternation over this effect on Truth. There’s no better meditation on this than watching Woolf’s characters recapitulate their own pasts as motivations for present actions. When the past is linked to our memory, tricky problems appear. One prime example is Clarissa’s relation to Peter. Early in the story we get, “So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him.” (ibid., 7) Given the techniques that Woolf is using, it is ambiguous as to whether the italicized part is an objective pronouncement on her life, or a subjective reiteration (and possibly one of self-convincing). And then we compare this line with what we receive of Clarissa’s inner state when she actually sees Peter: “Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him? she wondered, that awful summer?” (ibid., 41) It makes us wonder whether any of our statements of truth are anything more than emotive or different degrees of superlative emphasis.

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Works Cited

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1890, 1918.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925, 1953.

A Map of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

An Overlong Introduction That Stretches the Limits of Even My Own Vaunted Lack of Brevity

Almost 30 years too late, I’d like to offer something of a review of Rorty’s PMN, which is to say I’d like to summarize Rorty’s epochal book by providing a road map to reading it. When PMN appeared in 1979, it had an immediate effect on its readers. By Rorty’s professional colleagues, it was taken as a betrayal, an abandonment of not only the projects to which Rorty and the professionals had dedicated themselves to, but also of the standards of rigor and merit by which good philosophy should aspire. By readers outside of philosophy departments, particularly in American English departments, it was taken as an exciting dragon slaying, the crushing of dreams that had punished and oppressed disciplines living in Philosophy’s tyrannical shadow. It wasn’t exactly either of these, but there is a kernel of truth in both. Rorty was attacking traditional philosophical projects like foundational epistemology, but the book itself did not display any lack of rigor or merit. Rorty was attacking the pretensions of philosophy’s self-image, a self-image that many philosophers held on to. Kant’s image of philosophy as the queen of the sciences held sway in many quadrants and Rorty sought to dispel that image. The effect, however, isn’t as stunning as all that and to dramatize it as Brutus murdering Caesar is to miss the care and love Rorty has for contemporary philosophy. On the other hand, by attempting to give philosophy a new self-image, people shouldn’t follow the professional philosophers’ love of drama by buying into the “Et tu, Brute?” story and rejoicing in the saving of Rome. Despite their often pretension, philosophy has never had the regal position it wished and Rorty’s aspirations are not that of Beowulf, but that of an underlaborer clearing away some brush.

One of the surprising things at the time of PMN was Rorty’s choice of heroes, his lineup of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “the three most important philosophers of our century.” (5) We might not get so excited about that announcement now (“Yeah, of course they are important and of course they have a lot of similarity. Du-uh. We know that.”), but that is only because we are living in the wake of Rorty’s written corpus, who probably did more than any other single person to ensure all three’s entwined legacy. In 1980, analytic philosophers, Rorty’s fellow professors at Princeton, could accept the choice of Wittgenstein, but Heidegger? Most believed that Carnap had successfully and satirically dispensed with him years ago, which isn’t to mention his deplorable behavior before and after World War II. Admirers of Continental philosophy, mainly located in English departments, could understand Heidegger, being Derrida’s precursor, but Wittgenstein? Sure, he was from the Continent, but his first book was perfectly boring (who writes that systematically?) and his second goes on and on obscurely about obscure topics. And Dewey? Dewey hadn’t been in vogue anywhere for at least 30 years, barely kept alive by marginalized philosophers like Sidney Hook, Morton White, and John McDermott. What was the deal?

It turns out that Rorty was performing one of the most impressive rhetorical power plays I have ever seen. For years Rorty had been accruing a very respectable and pronounced position in American philosophy, with important, influential and tightly argued papers in the philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy. He had become so respectable, in fact, that he had been elected the President of the American Philosophical Association in 1978—just in time to drop the bomb of “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in 1979 at New York in front of a whole crowd of the most important American philosophers, from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all the eastern universities, just as PMN was being released, read, and the indigestion was just beginning to be felt.

Of course, there was nothing suspicious or underhanded about it, like there were back alley orchestrations going on, it was all serendipitous (though as I understand it, Rorty caused a lot of consternation with the analytic establishment that year, not with his book or with the presidential address, but with regular ole’ stupid, peripheral academic politics: he made a ruling against the establishment in favor of the “pluralists,” who felt they were getting the short shrift, because he felt he was being bullied a little too much), and it is not the power play I was referring to. Rather, Rorty used his respectability and authority (as a “philosopher to pay attention to”) to reinvent Wittgenstein and Heidegger for their respectively uncomprehending audiences (“Wait, Wittgenstein/Heidegger is saying the same thing as Heidegger/Wittgenstein?”) and to all but single-handedly resurrect Dewey—but he did it in a book that, contrary to the appearances of the introduction, actually has only a superficial reliance on them.

Rorty is fairly upfront about all this, but it is still nevertheless very interesting to behold. The general tone and underlying message of PMN is designated by his choice of heroes, a sort of synthesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (with its therapeutic stance towards philosophical problems), Heidegger’s Being and Time (with its redescription of philosophy into existential terms, what Hook and Dewey saw as a recasting of Experience and Nature in “transcendental German”), and Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (with its tracing of the history of foundationalism). But while that may be true of its tone and inspiration, PMN’s closer point of departure is a synthesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It might be summed up best as doing for philosophy what Kuhn did for science.

The structure of the book is very important to both its readability and to its argument. The book is at its core dialectical and not, unlike philosophical systems from Descartes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, deductive. System writing in philosophy has often been taken to be the prime motivation of a philosopher, writing something that says something about everything, that creates a context in which to put everything. A philosopher gets clear about his first principles (whether “clear and distinct ideas,” a single substance of God, or the logical form of language) and then derives the rest of his system from that. This is a bottom-up approach, one that is quite fitting for the foundationalism that is commonly associated with it. Rather than seeing our reasoning as sitting vertically on top of foundations that we should secure, Rorty sees our reasoning as stretching horizontally across time. Rorty does not start with first principles with which to construct a system out of, but is rather led back to root assumptions, the uncovering of which will help us understand the structure of our reasoning. These assumptions have a history and if we understand that history we will understand why we think the way we do.

Rorty’s book, then, is laid out into eight chapters split into three parts, plus an introduction. The introduction does a fine job of laying out precisely what Rorty has in mind to do, who the heroes and villains are and a bird’s eye view of what he shall be arguing in more detail. The first part consists of a treatment of a particular problem in the philosophy of mind: the relation between mind and body. Rorty brings us along step by step, getting us clear about what possible problem there could be, what possible solutions there have been, and why this matters to philosophers and to him.

As he works at dissolving the problem of consciousness, he leads us back to why this is important for philosophers—because epistemology has created it as a problem. As long as philosophers feel motivated by epistemology, they will feel that there is a problem with consciousness. So in the second part, the largest, Rorty moves to a confrontation with epistemology—where did it come from, why is it important, what have we done, what should we do? Rorty uses this chapter to range over issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, going over all kinds of attempts to milk some sense out of the idea of a “theory of knowledge.”

And finally Rorty works us all the way back to the very idea of philosophy. What is philosophy if it has expunged epistemology? Here Rorty proffers suggestions about how philosophy has viewed itself and how it might now instead view itself. Rorty begins with the idea of the “mind” and by the end of the book shows how the notion of the “mind” has gained its philosophical strength from a number of other interlocking notions that were also in place, notions about representation, language, and systematic methodology. If you only knock one or two out, the others will still come and bring you down.

This dialectical structure is important for PMN because Rorty is working with an antagonistic crowd. Rorty is trying to convince us that we should question some of our most deeply held beliefs by taking us on a tour of how others have questioned a few of these beliefs. By dialectically going back and forth between his intended goals and his current topics, Rorty is able to meet our current objections and pull us further and further into the story, from debates about materialism, to debates about knowing generally, to debates about the enterprise of philosophy itself—showing us doubts about a particular thesis, to doubts about the general confirmation of such theses, to doubts about the very activity of forwarding such theses.

In what remains, I would like to go into more specifics about each of the chapters, what Rorty’s up to and for what purpose, then move to Richard Bernstein’s very sympathetic review of PMN where I hope to reply to some of his criticisms, and then finally offer a map of Rorty’s corpus, how we might understand his evolution as a philosopher and PMN’s place in it.

Cartesian Epistemology, or Incorrigibility as the Mark of Something

There’s an early essay by Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology” (1970), that I think marks the point at which Rorty figured out that he had to write PMN and how he would do it. The paper serves to point in the same general direction and uses the same style of partial historical, argumentative narrative and partial contemporary engagement of issues. The paper is, for the most part (like most of Rorty’s earlier papers, though probably more so), entirely replaceable by PMN . . . but essays are so much shorter. And, in my experience, Rorty has a way of saying the same thing over and over again in rarely the same way. Each experience opens you up to new angles. I’m not going to lie and say that I can reread every single piece of his writing with relish, but for being predominately a self-acknowledged one-note Nelly, he has the surprising capacity to hold your attention throughout most of his corpus of writing. I’m not sure the same can be said for many others. But then again, maybe I just have the same obsessive interests as he does and like hearing that one same thing over and over again. At any rate, I’d like to take that earlier paper and use it to help illuminate a portion of Pirsig that has always gotten my panties in a bunch.

First, I shall present Rorty’s six claims he hopes to make:

1. A necessary condition for participating in ontological discussion during what I shall call the ‘Cartesian period’ was that an answer be given to the question: Given that we have incorrigible knowledge only of the contents of our minds, how is it that we can know about anything else?

2. The paradigm of an answer to this question was the claim that the nature of the object of knowledge—reality as opposed to appearance—was different than either common sense or science conceived it.

3. The justification for the existence of ontology as a distinct discipline came to be the fact that neither science nor common sense could offer an adequate reply to the epistemological sceptic. Giving such a reply became the paradigm of what it was to do philosophy.

4. The refusal of many contemporary philosophers to take seriously the suggestion that reality is different from either common sense’s or science’s picture of it is due to the fact that they no longer accept or find it necessary to answer the epistemological sceptic.

5. The reasons why this premise is no longer accepted can be traced back to the abandonment of certain more general principles.

6. These principles are such that, once they are accepted, it is not clear why there need be a discipline called ‘ontology’ over and above empirical science. The justification of the existence of such a discipline thus requires to be rethought. (275, emphasis his)

The first thing I should note is Rorty’s use of common sense and science. These were his earlier years and I do not think that he’s suggesting that only science gives us knowledge, or some such thing. The object of his attack is the notion that there is a special discipline called “philosophy” (or ontology, in this case) that gives us a special kind of knowledge that only it can give us, something different than what we gain from physics, sociology, literary criticism, or walking down the street.

The second thing I should note is that Pirsig doesn’t seem to obviously fit in this schematic of claims. There are three reasons: 1) it isn’t obvious that Pirsig is practicing a discipline called “ontology” that is over and above anything, and this because 2) Pirsig doesn’t consider offering a reply to the epistemological sceptic to be a big deal, and this because 3) Pirsig doesn’t talk about something called the “mind” a lot. Pirsig really doesn’t have a philosophy of mind, just as it would be curious to say that he has a philosophy of language. He has latent views about mind and language, but he doesn’t spend time constructing a large view of the subject that hooks up to other views and can be used to rebut perceived criticisms. However, time and time again I find things in the philosophy of mind and language that make me think of Pirsig, but not always in a good way. In particular, it’s Pirsig’s notion of “immediate experience” that always raises my hackles. “Immediacy” is notorious for causing philosophical problems. With respect to the above, it’s Pirsig’s attendant claim that the value that is immediately experienced is known with absolute certainty. (Lila, 76) This certainty is a mark of the mental, of mind, that Rorty popularized as “incorrigibility.” But if Pirsig doesn’t obviously have an extensive notion of the mind (let alone a problematic one), what is a problematic mark of the mental doing in Pirsig’s account (Rorty has said that incorrigibility is ­the only property of the mind that can make it problematic, or at least make epistemology seem necessary)? What is it doing? Is it problematic?

I think it can be, but it all depends on how it is put to use. For instance, in Pirsig’s example the notion of us being certain about our experience is completely commonsensical. Of course we are going to be absolutely certain of whatever value-experience we have with the stove. The trouble is when Pirsig pushes this certainty into other services. Pirsig will eventually want to claim that mystics shouldn’t be ignored because they have direct experience with Quality. And, in fact, this direct experience carries with it the full weight of being absolutely certain knowledge because it was an immediate, direct experience. This is where things become problematic. For instance, if somebody says that they see water, should we believe them? What if you’re in a desert and it turns out to be a mirage? What happens to the absolute certainty? By using such an example we should notice how far the certainty extends: not very far at all. If the person who saw water was being sincere, then we can say that they were absolutely certain that they saw water, or even that they did actually experience the sight of water. It turns out, however, that they were wrong. They didn’t experience the sight of water, they experienced an optical illusion. This is what I’ve called the shibboleth problem: when do we believe the mystic? Do we believe all mystics? How do we tell the Lao-tzus from the gun-toting, compound nut-jobs (aside from the guns)? They both claim a direct relation, so how do we tell?

There are obvious, pragmatic answers to this (like the guns), but they burn a hole in the binding of “immediate experience” with “absolute certainty” that Pirsig affects, which then destroys the reason he gives for including formerly excluded mystics. I think the bridge can be built again to include mystics, but I think a different route needs to be taken.

I'm not going to explore this particular issue further, but I’d like to bridge back to the Rorty essay. The claim I’d like to make is that it would appear that when Pirsig makes claims about the exclusion of mystics, which hinge on a problematic mark of the mental, he’s tripped into doing a special discipline called ontology.

Here’s Rorty:

The mind-body problem is an offspring of the theory that knowledge consists in the having of certain representations of reality (including perceptual ones), by the subject. As [Wallace] Matson has recently pointed out [in “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?”], the Greeks had a soul-body problem but not a mind-body problem—or, at least, not the mind-body problem which has bothered philosophers from Descartes to Feigl. Before this mind-body problem can be made to seem urgent (as Matson also notes) one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of. Once one believes all this, one will have to grant the existence of a realm to contain the objects of immediate awareness. This will be the Mind, or the Subject qua Subject. Psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism. In the great systems of the Cartesian period, the primary task of ontology was to get the Subject and the Object back together. Solutions to the mind-body problem appear as simple corollaries to solutions of the Problem of Knowledge.

Thus the ontologies of almost every important non-sceptical philosophy from Spinoza to Russell consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same. The concomitance of the modes of the two known attributes of Spinoza’s God, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz’s monads, the variations on what Austin calls ‘the ontology of the sensible manifold’ (Berkeley, Kant, Russell), the perfect union of appearance and reality in Hegel’s or Royce’s Absolute, and Whitehead’s panpsychism are so many ways of showing that if you know enough about the sort of thing you are directly aware of (the contents of your mind) you will know everything there is to know about everything. In short, the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects—a redescription which would not have been thought necessary had not the original claim about direct awareness been swallowed. (278-279, emphasis his)

I want to point out the family resemblances between Pirsig and what is said here. First is the claim that “psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism.” While it isn’t immediately apparent that Pirsig carries with him a notion of representation (though I have my suspicions about that, partially articulated here) or that he practices a special discipline called ontology, it should be clear that his direct/indirect distinction is some sort of epistemology, some sort of claim about knowledge and knowing, and that the Dynamic/static distinction which houses the direct/indirect distinction seems to be more than an epistemological distinction. While Pirsig wouldn’t seem to have a psychophysical dualism, the Dynamic/static dualism does deal with “stuff,” what is real, such that we have “things” on one side and “no-thing” on the other (Paul Turner has been working on disentangling Pirsig’s epistemology from his metaphysics). These are pulled together in a muddle which can produce weird effects.

Second, when Rorty says that to engender the mind-body problem “one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of,” notice that while Pirsig doesn’t seem to be hampered by the mind-body problem, he is hampered by both of these notions: we are immediately aware of Dynamic Quality and the things we want to know about are what we are not immediately aware. All things are housed under static patterns—that which we are only indirectly aware.

And third, while Pirsig has rejected claims that Quality is similar to Hegel’s Absolute, one can see here why they were offered. In ZMM, Pirsig takes the Subject/Object divide and shows how they are not divided in Quality—thus fulfilling “the primary task of ontology” of getting the “Subject and Object back together.” There is an immediate difference in that Pirsig is in some sense saying that the divide is illusory, that Quality is primary and the divide is secondary, not the other way around which engenders the problems. This is important and, I think, right. But look at what else Rorty says about these ontologies: they all “consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same.” They are all Quality. And Rorty suggests further that “the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects”. Before Pirsig, “quality” was thought to be something that humans had or found, not something that rocks had. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think that critics of Pirsig would call his saying that Quality is Reality is anthropomorphic, a subjectivizing of reality.

These family resemblances begin to mount up. But, hey, Rorty himself obviously has many family resemblances to such despicable characters as the logical positivists. However, I think Pirsig’s family resemblances collude to produce the Myth of the Given. Pirsig’s claim that static patterns are what are deduced from the immediately apprehended Dynamic Quality seem to me to produce the idea that we are Given something completely untainted by language or distinctions or anything else we might do to it, some unblemished content, to which all of our dealings with it, linguistic and such, are the persistence of a certain scheme. Pirsig thinks that our current cultural scheme is unjustly giving mystics the short shrift and that if we got back to the content, we would be able to create a better scheme (see Pirsig’s comments about “cultural immune systems” in chapter 4 of Lila).

This cuts back to what I was saying about how far the absolute certainty of touching a stove or seeing water goes. Rorty calls his Sellarsian thesis the Principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility:

That a given sentence is used to express incorrigible knowledge is not a matter of a special relation which holds between knowers and some object referred to by this sentence, but a matter of the way in which the sentence fits into the language of a given culture, and the circumstances of its user, at a given time. (282, italics his)

Again, not immediately applicable given that Pirsig isn’t motivated by the epistemological sceptic. I think that this is good, but I think we can still see him in these lines. First, with incorrigibility—we gain our absolute certainty by our special relation to Dynamic Quality. And second, Rorty’s linguistic alternative makes knowledge internal to a language game and Pirsig would prima facie reject that because we directly know Dynamic Quality before any language. The differences between these two treatments of incorrigibility are summed up later by Rorty: “The importance of the principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility is that it undercuts the attempt to discover this nature by casting doubt on the first move which the sceptic makes—namely, to have found some case of knowledge which is a clearer case than others, and is thus a clue to the essence of what it is to be knowledge. It causes this by saying that the cases in which ‘doubt plays no role’ are cases in which we do not let doubt play a role, not cases in which we are in a different natural state.” (283, emphasis his)

Why Rorty should say “the sceptic’s first move” I’ll skip over. Pirsig isn’t interested in finding the essence of knowledge, but he is interested in being more Dynamic. Dynamic Quality is obviously the kind of “clearer case than others” when compared to static patterns. Dynamic Quality is direct, static patterns are only indirect. The direct knowledge of Dynamic Quality is better and replaces the indirect knowledge of static patterns (the resemblance to the appearance/reality distinction should be apparent). It does this because we don’t doubt it. Its high or low Quality is absolutely certain. However, what of the guy in the desert? In Rorty’s case, it makes perfectly good sense to absolutely believe the guy you see put his hand on the flaming stove when he tells you that he’s absolutely certain that his hand experienced low Quality. However, it also makes perfectly good sense to have some doubt when the guy in the desert says he sees water. Because of our circumstances of being in a desert, though the linguistic cue of “I see…” tells us that he’s absolutely certain he is seeing something, we let doubt play a role. It’s not clear how this is to pan out in Pirsig’s philosophy. It seems perfectly reasonable that Pirsig could frame incorrigibility the same way as Rorty does. All this means is that the person who’s experiencing X has changed his beliefs in a certain way (experiencing a hot stove, the sight of water, the hearing of a good Republican argument). What it doesn’t mean is that everybody else has to change their beliefs (or static patterns) just because the other person did. The absolute certainty, and particularly not the experience of high or low value, doesn’t travel that far. As I suggested before, however, this is damaging to the way Pirsig claims that mystics have been left out of the conversation of mankind. I think one should toss Pirsig’s particular argument. I think that argument tries to put commonsensical distinctions to philosophical use, which is the way philosophical problems are created. Pirsig is better when he is seen as dissolving philosophical problems and suggesting cultural criticism, not using a philosophical apparatus to tell us that we have to do something. Some of the tools Pirsig leaves lying around are good for some purposes, but bad for others.

First-Person, Third-Person

I've been thinking lately about the various uses of "Dynamic" and "static" in Pirsig's philosophy, or rather Pirsigian philosophy, and one of those uses is to differentiate two "stances" towards experience. The static stance towards experience gives us things, whereas the Dynamic stance gives us fluid. Being in the static stance gives one demarcations between "this" and "that", but in the Dynamic stance you have a pond of undifferentiated singleness.

In fighting Dennett and Rorty's battle against the Cartesian Model of the Mind, one of the things they give us is a sense in which to have a "mind" is to speak in a particular way. This way is basically the first-person stance: "I think", "I see", "I seem to have", etc. The move Dennett and Rorty want to make, after realizing that "mind" and "consciousness" is created by a language game, is to say that we can have the stance, we just don't need the hypostatization, we don't need to think of the mind as a seperate essence from the body or the physical.

One of the responses to Dennettian/Rortyan philosophy of mind is that they are getting rid of a fundamental feature of reality, a fundamental feature of us, namely that of lived experience. We aren't just speaking in a certain way, we are enunciating what it is like to be us. These critics don't think Dennett is explaining what the mind is, they think he's explaining it away.

So it goes. One of the things that has got me thinking is Rorty's long-time puzzlement over Donald Davidson's sharp distinction between the mental and the physical. It wasn't until Bjorn Ramberg (a wonderful expositer of both Rorty and Davidson) wrote a paper for Rorty and His Critics that Rorty began to see what was going on and what the utility of it was. The gist of what I understand it to be is that Davidson is restating in his way the fundamental entwinement of the mental with the physical, the normative with the descriptive, the triangulated nature of person-community-world.

This is related in its way to the fact that there is a fundamental entwinement of what we can call the first-person and the third-person stance to phenomena. The accusation towards Dennettian philosophy of mind is roughly that his is getting rid of the first-person point of view, what it is like to be me, in favor of a thoroughly third-person stance. This is supposed because of his rendering of qualia, those irreducible elements of sensation that make up the bottom of the mind. Dennett, rather than explaining what qualia are, explains why we think we have qualia and then offers an alternative picture of what we have.

Against Dennett's sometimes scientism (whereby Dennett sometimes likes to think that he's getting at what we really do have instead of qulia), we have Rorty's sense of conversational efficacy. It doesn't pay to speak of qualia because the notion is the latest of a long line of Cartesian metaphors that simply reconstitute the Cartesian problematic of two essences: mind and matter. Instead, we should substitute different metaphors, like Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model. Rorty doesn't think Dennett's way of speaking gets at reality or our mind better, but he does think it may pay to speak that way when talking about what we have that other things, like rocks, do not.

The substitution of metaphors are for the first-person point of view, the way we look out into the world. I think there is another way of looking at this which suggests the same thing and goes on to suggest that the first-person and third-person point of view are entwined. The first-person point of view is typified by James' notion of the stream of consciousness. With Pirsig, it is roughly the Dynamic point of view, the undifferentiated soup of experience. The third-person point of view is typified by objects, things, differentiations of all kinds. In ZMM, the divorce of subject (first-person) from object (third-person) is given well by Pirsig's diagnostic of the parts of a motorcycle. He says one of the things to notice is that "the observer is missing." (ZMM, 75) And so comes Pirsig's distinction between romantic (first-person) and classic (third-person) to remedy the situation.

What I want to suggest is that the Cartesian problematic is due to a kind of confusion of modes. I don't often want to speak of "confusion," but I take this line of thinking to be a heuristic for thinking about it. So, we have the first-person stance, our stream of consciousness, lived experience, our subjectivity. And we also have the third-person stance, the objects of consciousness, a detached differentiation of things. Both stances are important and we can kinda' differentiate between them. We can think of the Cartesian problematic as arising because of a second tier of distinctions occuring under each half of the first first-person/third-person distinction. This second tier of distinctions is exactly the same as the first: first-person/third-person. This creates, then, four stances: first-person-first, first-person-third, third-person-first, and third-person-third.

Why would I create such a bewildering display? Because one of the things that is often parroted by philosophers of mind when they discuss what their subject is about is that humans are unique in having something that can be turned back on itself: having a mind allows us to reflect and we can turn it back on itself and reflect on our mind, be conscious of consciousness. This is the mistake (I think I have even read Dennett saying something to that effect). The entire point of the first-person stance is that it gives you undifferentiatedness. By turning that stance back on itself, you're reifying and differentiating the undifferentiated experience of consciousness. You are producing an essence of mind, as differentiated from the differentiated "things," i.e. (in Descartes' time) matter. In its latter day form, this is what gives us the problem of qualia. The first-person-first stance is just the undifferentiated soup of experience, but the first-person-third treats the undifferentiated soup as a thing. The mistake is in then denying that you are taking the third-person point of view.

This is what creates the problems. The paramount fact of the (pure) third-person stance is that of differentiation. As Pirsig tells us to notice about the motorcycle diagnostic, "there is a knife moving here. ... You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves." (75-6) This is Pirsig's renunciation of essentialism, of the view that there are any essences, including a Cartesian one named "mind." What realists of the mind (those who take the first-person-third stance, those who defend qualia against Dennett) want to suggest is that there is something fundamental about the mind that cannot be cut away by slicing the knife differently. Qualia will always be there for us to explain, you cannot explain it away. It is a fundamental fact of existence. But once you've admitted Pirsig is right about the intellectual knife, you don't get "fundamental facts of existence." All facts are contingent of the movement of the knife, and so by different moves we can get different facts. This is the point of Dennettian/Rortyan philosophy of mind: they are suggesting different knife movements.

The first-person-third tries to differentiate the undifferentiatedness, thus creating the problem of consciousness (Descartes' cogito, our contemporaries' qualia). The other conjoined quarter, the third-person-first, I weakly suggest, can be thought of as that other great Cartesian problem: the Problem of Other Minds. (The heuristic starts to look a little silly now, but the first point is the main one.) Instead of accidently differentiating the undifferentiated like the first-person-third, the third-person-first stance starts in differentiation mode and then tries to explain the existence of undifferentiatedness. It's roughly the attempt to deny neo-verificationism (of the kind Dennett and Rorty espouse, not the kind Carnap and Ayer devoted themselves to). So, roughly goes the heuristic, we know we have a consciousness (because I can look back at myself, take the first-person-third stance), but how do we know others have a consciousness? How do we know they can take a first-person stance? They are an object of my consciousness (third-person stance indicative), but how can their consciousness by an object of my consciousness (third-person-first)?

Alright, that's the end of that. It's just a (somewhat unwieldy) heuristic. The point of all this is that we shouldn't be trying to differentiate the undifferentiatedness of the first-person stance. If you want the first-person stance, take the God damn first-person stance and stop muddying it up with differentiations. Another way of putting this is reflecting on the Buddhist idea of Nothingness. I don't claim to understand it much, but I take it to be something of a statement of antiessentialism. There are no essences. Sartre went in this direction (and made the fundamental first-person-third mistake by being a something of a Cartesian/Husserlian) by saying that the arrow of consciousness that points out of our "self", our ego, is not, in fact, buoyed by a dot demarcating a self, an ego. It's just an arrow pointing in some direction. That's how Sartre differentiated himself from Descartes (by denying the essence of mind), but that's how he was still, somewhat, caught in the picture (by roughly taking this whole heuristic I developed too seriously).

Another way to put all this is to go back to the idea of the mind turning back on itself as the key mistake of realist philosophers of mind. Identifying that as a mistake turns up an unusual chorus of similar statements about other similar subjects. For instance, what about language turning back on itself, or reason, or (in Derridean flavor) the text? The chorus of the pragmatists, that the Buddhists join in, is captured by Donald Davidson: "There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers, at least, have supposed." ("A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs") Davidson said this in similar circumstances as Dennett is uttering "there is no such thing as a mind, not if a mind is anything like what Cartesian philosophers, at least, have supposed," and both similar to when Bloom roughly utters "there is no such thing as a text, not if a text is anything like what traditional lit-crits, or Derrideans, for that matter, have supposed" (see the earlier "Bloom and Criticism") and all them in similar circumstances as when the Buddha roughly says, "there is no such thing as a 'thing,' not if a thing is anything like what unenlightened people, at least, have supposed." I take them all to be ringing antiessentiatlistic notes, for their allotted subjects of interest.

I want to end by briefly taking up the idea of the entwinement of the first- and third-person stances. What I mean by that is that, much like Putnam's entwinement of fact and value and Davidson's entwinement of person-community-world, both stances are entwined because both are inescapable. We do have points of view, an experience of life that is from our point of view, and not some shared point of view (which is kinda' what objectivity aspires to). We don't share what's going on in our head. But the advent of Wittgenstein suggests that we do, in a fashion, share what's going on in our head, that we do have a shared point of view--that's the shared nature of language. This is far too much to go into in detail, but I think the essential notion I'd like to drive at is the entwinement of Dynamic and static.

There are many, many ways to put this (just because there are many, many ways to describe and use Dynamic/static), but one of them is as this formula: without Dynamic there is no static, but without static there is no Dynamic. I think that second half has been missing far too long in Pirsigian philosophy and it is hindering some of its exposition. It's paradoxical, but without differentiation, there is no undifferentiation (no first-person stance without a distinction between first- and third-person), and without undifferentiation, there is no differentiation (there's nothing to differentiate without experience, life). We should not coutenance any notion of something being Given to us in experience, either with cuts premade (ala realism) or without any cuts at all (ala Kantian-bred antirealism). Part of what it is to experience, as Pirsig teaches us with Quality, is to experience differentiations, but these differentiations of value are partly constituted by the differentiations that make us up, our ego, our self as a set of static patterns of value. Reality neither has joints, nor do we apply a cookie-cutter to the formless dough. We are all in this together.

Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance

One of the things that most Pirsigians agree on is the need to get rid of representationalism in philosophical thinking. Representationalism is the contemporary, professional term for the idea that language represents objects. We can easily see this as part of the Subject-Object paradigm by emphasizing how language in here, in the mind, is supposed to represent objects of cognition out there. So, the line continues, since values aren't objects out there, as far as we can tell, they must only exist as linguistic structures, which means they only exist in your mind, your head, the subject. Therefore they're subjective, your morals and values are hinged only on your perspective, and since your perspective is eternally different from anybody else's (unless you've divined a way into other people's heads), values can't be compared and are, really, whatever you like.

So representationalism is one of those structural pillars of SOM that have to go. The modern version started when Descartes said that the function of the mind was to mirror nature and that philosophy was supposed to be able to tell us how clean or dirty our mirror was. Through several twists and turns, philosophers at the turn of the century put aside the mind and asked how our language mirrors reality, or as it is sometimes put, how (and when and where) our language "hooks up to" reality.

What I would like to suggest is that Pirsig sometimes uses an outdated image of language's relation to reality. The place I would like to look at first is in the beginning of Lila when Pirsig describes mysticism and logical positivism. Roughly, Pirsig says that the logical positivists think that (some) language can capture reality perfectly well, we just have to iron out when and where (yes with rocks, no with values), and that the mystics think that language can't capture at all, "the fundamental nature of reality is outside language". (Lila, 72) Language takes you further away from reality, not closer. (ibid., 73) Pirsig tries the split the difference between the two, roughly in the same way Kant did. Kant gave the empiricists and science the phenomena and the rationalists and morals the noumena and, oh by the way, the noumena is how things are in themselves, ultimate reality. Pirsig does the same kind of thing by giving the positivists static patterns and the mystics Dynamic Quality and, oh by the way, DQ is the ultimate reality.

One of the distinctions that is used to buttress this splitting is the distinction between pure and impure experience. Pure experience is what we get from a direct connection to Quality, which is Dynamic Quality. Impure, indirect experience is what is left over for the static patterns in the wake of the "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality." Dynamic Quality gives us knowledge of the ultimate reality, direct and non-linguistic. Linguistic knowledge is the kind of thing scientists toy with in pure experience's wake. One of the goals described in Pirsigian philosophy is to break the hold of static patterns to realize Dynamic Quality, to have pure experience.

One of the difficulties of this explanation is that it leaves us completely clueless as to what a pure experience could be. The difficulty lies in the fact that any expression of what it is is going to be a linguistic expression. Pure experience, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality is ineffable. The effable side, the static patterns, is all we get to work with because the ineffable is ...? As soon as you try anything, anything to fill that ellipsis, you've destroyed it. This is something that Pirsig has picked up from the mystics.

For instance, is Pirsig's "Quality" really so undefined? Hardly. It has at least one definition: undefined. And as soon as you do that you've destroyed whatever it is you tried to preserve by leaving it undefined. What the pragmatist will try to do is redescribe why Pirsig defines Quality as undefinable so it doesn't seem like we're always, perpetually, eternally (and thoroughly predictably) losing something we thought we could have. We are defined as never being able to come close to it. Everybody has always defined us that way. Eastern mystics with their concept of maya and enlightenment, the Judeo-Christian tradition with its ideas of Fallenness and Redemption, the Platonic tradition's Divided Line, Descartes' episteme, Kant's noumena. Ever since humanity became a linguistic creature it has been searching for a way back to purity. We are fallen, we are fallible, we can't ever have what is supposedly best for us.

The undercurrent of the mainstream Western philosophical traditions, after they say we are fallen, has always been, "Yeah--so what are we gonna' do about it?" Its been the effort to try and not sound so defeated when we recognize that we could be wrong, that we can make ourselves better, that our children will probably be better than us. Part of that effort is what James and Pirsig are talking about--we are always and everywhere in touch with reality because reality is experience. But what does it mean to lose the wistful tone when we recognize that absolute certainty is a pipe dream, when we realize that--whatever it means to be fallen--it is the way we are? As Pirsig says, "The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born--and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure." (ibid., 74) I think part of what it means is ditching that very distinction between purity and impurity. All experience is pure.

This is an example of the pathos of distance. What I see in Pirsig is that, while he does make this move to get rid of this pathos, he seems to reconstitute it in the static/Dynamic distinction. In ZMM it is harder for me to detect this tone, but when we get to Lila it begins to bleed in. Static patterns are what we are--we have to deal with them. But Dynamic--that's what we want to be. We want to be Dynamic as often as we can. But we can never sustain it. When a child is born, everything is Dynamic to her. But as the Dynamic turns to static, the feeling becomes more and more infrequent. Like being cast out of Eden, we long for the Dynamicness of our past, the easy Dynamic highs of a child. But this has to be like always falling in love--falling in love is the greatest feeling in the world, but you can't sustain it. If you fall in love with falling in love, you're doomed to walk the earth moving from one relationship to the next, trying to recapture that fleeting moment.

I remember when I first started posting on moq.org, an image that was often used to characterize DQ was of the carrot pulling the donkey forward. I used that image myself for a while. But I now think that that is the wrong image, the wrong analogy we should be using. That image epitomizes the pathos of distance, us always trying to reach that damn carrot and the carrot never quite being in our reach, somehow always staying one step ahead of us. I think Pirsig's mistake in the move from ZMM to Lila was when he reconfigured the classic/romantic distinction into the static/Dynamic by draining the romantic of its everydayness and vaulting it up into the mystic's eternal Other, something rare and mysterious. No longer was the classic and romantic just two different ways of looking at things or patterns of behavior, two things we switched back and forth from constantly. Dynamic Quality became the telos we were chasing, that rare moment when we see differently, when we are connected more directly with our experience, with reality.

The first line of reply will be to protest that Pirsig's point is that DQ just is this everydayness, that mysticism isn't as esoteric as all that. I think that's the proper move, but I think that's a strike against the tone being used, as pathos slides off the end towards bathos. Going back to Pirsig's original point about Quality, that experience is reality, that we are always and everywhere in touch with reality, should be enough to make us rethink the way Pirsig talks about DQ sometimes. If we are always in touch with Quality, and DQ and mysticism happen in everyday life, then I think we should realize that there's no sense in trying to chase DQ--that when Pirsig talks about being more open to DQ, he's singing in a minor key that is an outcome of the pathos of distance, the one he sought to ditch by collapsing experience and reality into each other's arms. DQ will happen to us whether we want it to or not--we can't be more or less open to it. You don't choose to have God speak to you--God chooses, and usually quite inexplicably.

The problem with both the logical postivist's idea that language can span the gap between us and reality and the mystic's idea that it can't is that both take part in the pathos of distance. Both have as a common presupposition the idea that there is a gap between us and reality and both have suggestions about how to span that gap (through language on the one hand and direct mystical experience on the other). When Pirsig says that, since both logical positivism and mysticism eschew metaphysics, metaphysics might be the place to mend the two together, to split the difference between the two, I think Pirsig takes on as conceptual baggage that common assumption: there is a distance.

I think that causes Pirsig to take along some of SOM's conceptual machinery and that that will eventually bog him down in SOMic problems. I think the way to split the difference between logical positivism and mysticism is to eschew the common presupposition between them--the idea that language is supposed to "capture" anything, that there is a gap or distance in need of being spanned. Pirsig leads us towards that eschewment when he tells us, following James and others, that experience is reality, but I don't think he goes far enough in the erasure of the pathos of distance with his descriptions of language's function.

Language neither does nor does not capture experience. Language isn't in the capturing business. Language is not a pirate. Language is a tool that we use to deal with reality, with our experience. If we make this turn fully from language-as-a-mirror/pirate to language-as-a-tool, if we fully get rid of representationalism, I think we will want to get rid of the idea of a "pre-intellectual experience." What we will have instead are non-intellectual experiences, like kicking a rock, seeing a sunset, being eaten by a tiger, dropping some acid. Its not that our language fails in capturing our experience of smoking peyote, its that language sometimes finds it difficult to deal with it. The experience of having a tough time of putting something into words isn't a measure of language's failure or success, its simply a measure of difficulty, of the struggle to find an analogue that makes sense in the analogues upon analogues upon analogues that make up civilization's knowledge.

The effect of this way of splitting the difference between logical positivists and mystics is to say, against the positivists, that mystics do produce knowledge, but, against the mystics, that this knowledge is not from a distinct and particular direct relation to reality. Once you make experience coextensive with reality everything is a direct relation to reality. Smoking peyote will not get you closer to reality if only because there is no distant reality to get closer to--reality is always and everywhere around us. What we can say after we split the difference is that mystics do produce knowledge, just as the physicists do, but its just a different kind of knowledge, not aimed at prediction and control, but at something else, like spiritual balance. The fruits of the mystics' knowledge tree, the one where the Daodejing grows, shouldn't be judged by the standards of other trees, like science, because the purpose of growing the tree is different. We don't pull out and burn the tomato plant because it doesn't grow as tall as the pine tree. We grow both, one for delicious tomatoes and the other for climbing and sitting under for shade.

The Parable of the Reductionist

When I first started reading Rorty, I found essays about all sorts of philosophers and little schematic maps splitting the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy into groups. I was always attracted to learning about other philosophers and I love little schematic maps. I learned later that Rorty picked up this technique from his teacher, Richard McKeon--Pirsig's infamous Chairman. I tend to think that Pirsig misunderstood McKeon, though. David Hall (in his book on Rorty) suggested that we really shouldn't be reading McKeon as trying to find the architectonics of philosophical discourse (like some of his similar colleagues were doing), but as performing a kind of interpretive reading. Sometimes people think that "isms" hamper our ability to understand, but I think they're looking at them the wrong way. Categories, like "realist" and "pragmatist", arise only after you've tried to understand them and are part of the attempt to understand by classifying patterns of linguistic similarity and conceptual work. McKeon was misunderstood by Pirsig because of this kind of antiprofessional prejudice against "classification," the one we see all the time when the hippie/stoner says (saying it preferably as Tommy Chong would say it), "Don't put me in a box, man." Except, what else is understanding than classification? How else are we to understand unless we differentiate? The problem is taking the classifications as written in the stars, as Platonists are wont to do. But good pragmatists don't do that. We use them as a map with which to make our way around philosophy. As new bumps appear, you change the map.

But this little anti-antiprofessionalist screed wasn't why I was writing today. Rather, it was about one of the things I found out about Rorty as I read more of him (though, its not about that either). Originally, I found other philosophers and little maps. The more I read, though, the more I started seeing a general pattern in Rorty. One of the earliest things I picked up from Rorty (probably to my detriment) was the sense of when someone was "begging the question," a locution I began to use more and more. The sense I was gradually given by Rorty in his essays was how arguments at a certain point break down and there isn't anything argumentative left to do. As I read back into Rorty's corpus, into his essays in the 60s and 70s that aren't collected into books, I was given a much stronger sense of how important this was to Rorty's project. In his earlier days, I saw much more clearly how seeing patterns of argument, of reasoning, played into his becoming a fully fledged pragmatist. And I saw that this was what attracted me to Rorty: it was the attraction to metaphilosophy, of how we do philosophy. And likewise, that's what attracted me to Pirsig, his ability to display lines of thought and then move backwards to undercut them (like in the S/O Dilemma).

One of the things that's being talked about in the MD recently is "reductionism". And this is something that is in the back of people's minds a lot. One of the problems people have with reductionism is that it seems so deadening. Reducing everything to one kind of thing seems to take all the fun out of life, all the plurality of normal, everyday existence. This, by itself, isn't a philosophical defense, but it does lead to one. When scientific reductionists reduce everything to physics, one of the replies is that they can't reduce our actual experience of reality to physics. Our experience of eating an apple or seeing a sunset is irreducible to firing neurons and bouncing particles. One becomes a realist and says, "No, all this stuff I experience is real." Its the old antireductionist move to "save the appearances" that we've had ever since Aristotle reacted to Plato's divided line metaphysics. Antireductionism is probably one of the most important philosophical instincts that have pushed philosophy forward--the other being reductionism. More on that later.

To stop the endless cycle of reduction, to stop physics from gobbling everything up, my realist from above has made an antireductionist move towards phenomenology, what we phenomenally experience. That barrier is roughly what they call nowadays in anglophone philosophy "qualia". And this does have prima facie resonance with Pirsigians. What we see, though, is that to create this barrier with qualia, the realist has to make the traditional metaphysical distinction between essence and accident, text and context. The antireductionist move is saying that our qualia, our phenomenal experience, is irreducible to neurons because the qualia are the essence of the experience, that the quality of the experience is irreducible to the pattern of it arising. This kind of distinction is a mistake. By using phenomenal qualia as an antireductionist stop gap, the realist resurrects the black box of consciousness, the duality of mind and body.

There is an alternative way of saving the appearances, however. The first thing we need to do is to stop resisting the power of redescription. One of the most important things that Rorty impressed upon me is the notion that anything can be redescribed into anything else. The power of redescription is the power of analogy, metaphor, the genius of imagination. It is, in fact, one of the philosopher's classic tools. Reductionism (which I above somewhat misleadingly called one of the most important philosophical instincts) is a special case of the more general power of redescription. What reductionism adds to its redescription (in terms of Idea, Matter, Spirit, Quality, etc.) is--as everyone can probably guess--"and this is the way things really should be described."

The realist instinct--the antireductionist instinct--is to say, "No, no. That can't be described that way." The question is, why not? What is it hurting? The traditional realist tactic (which has taken many forms, from Aristotelianism to Husserlian phenomenology to defenders of qualia) has been to say that the reductionist is hurting the essence of the thing. This causes the reductionist to bridle and reply, "Well show me this essence!" When the realist can't (because to do so would be to do something no one has ever been able to do, fulfill the destiny of Platonic metaphysics), the reductionist feels smug. The realist, pissed that he failed, then turns to the reductionist and says, "Well, if you're so smart, prove to me that your reduction is the essence of the matter!" And, of course, the reductionist can't either. That's why the quarrel between reductionists and realists, Platonists and Aristotelians, has lasted 2500 years.

The pragmatist sees these two quarreling and suggests that they calm down. She tells them that the problem, so it seems to her, is that neither one can cash in on their proclamations of essence. So why not drop the proclamations? To the reductionist she says, "Go ahead and make all the redescriptions you want." To the realist she says, "And if there's a redescription you don't like, don't use it." What the pragmatist is suggesting, as I did above, is that reductionism is a special case of redescription and realism (in the sense of pluralism, the attempt to "save the appearances") is a special case of pragmatism. What both special cases hinge on is a so far fruitless and conversation stifling essentialism. After brushing aside essentialism, what is left is our ubiquitous power to create new descriptions and our particular power to choose which descriptions we use for which purposes. This means that a scientist can go on reducing color to wavelengths in the laboratory without worrying about whether red doesn't exist and that a poet can go on writing sonnets about love without worrying about whether the Freudian next door will say that its all in his id.

I think this is roughly the position that Dennett calls heterophenomenology. It roughly means that there are as many things that exist as there are ways of speaking, that our ontology is coextensive with our speech patterns. It is, in effect, a kind of insouciance towards ontology. You can proliferate as many different kinds of speech patterns as you want, but the ones that catch on are the ones that are useful and the objects of those speech patterns become, roughly, the ones that we are going to say "exist". This is how pragmatists brush aside questions about whether molecules, electrons, and quarks really exist or are just useful heuristics for science. Another instance, demons. Do demons exist at bars and pubs? Can't say that they do, but they do tend to exist in fantasy novels. Does love exist? Sure it does, because "love" is a very important word in the web of speech patterns that we use in life. Does God exist? That depends. In scientific studies God doesn't play a big role (we are all atheists in the laboratory), but at Church He does.

So if someone says that love and compassion are not reducible to chemicals in the brain, I think we should be inclined to say that they are just insofar as we are capable of correlating brain activity with "love behavior". However, the reason why we don't usually reduce love and compassion to chemicals outside of physiological studies is because when your lover asks you to talk dirty, saying "You make my C-fiber quiver" usually doesn't turn them on. (Come to think of it, that actually does sound kinda' dirty.) And if a Pirsigian reads too much Freud and starts to wonder, "Are there such things as values? Or could we just as easily talk in terms of desires?", our instinct should be to say, sure, there are values and there are desires, and for many things we could follow Freudians like Lacan and just translate values into desires, but I would think there are some forms of discourse, a few practical distinctions in the area, where we could cut a difference between values and desires that makes some sense and would be profitable to do. In those cases, we can easily slough off Freud and Lacan and say that what they say is besides the point right now.

I think the important thing to get over is our fear of redescription. When people start crying "Reductionist!", I think all that means is that they don't like the redescription for a particular reason, that what was redescribed into different terms seems to leave out a distinction they would like to see in place. However, what is often not explored by the knee-jerk reactionary is whether or not one could still make the distinction he wants in the now redescribed terms. Its still left open whether or not the redescribed distinction is suitable or not for the purposes desired, but I think people should follow through a little bit further into what a redescription means for their desired distinctions. It doesn't always mean something bad. Redescriptions are made for just as particular purposes as distinctions are made.