Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?

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By 1980, Richard Rorty had added to his argumentative script the notion that Anglo-American philosophy was splintering into closed specialties that threatened a certain kind of inconversability. Different philosophy departments promoted different paradigms of what good philosophy looked like, based largely on what kind of problems and approaches to take seriously, and this of course produced different kinds of professional training. "The best hope for an American philosopher is Andy Warhol's promise that we shall all be superstars, for approximately fifteen minutes apiece." [fn.1] Rorty's was not, however, a nostalgic lamentation. The further along his career went, and the more acquainted with the situation of other humanities departments he became (particularly English departments), the more the notion that fashionableness was a good marker of disciplinary health rose to the forefront. "Fashion" was a good epithet for Rorty's angle of vision, for by using it as a commendatory term in reference to disciplines, he could at once recognize the utility of curiosity and newness in the intellectual life, while at the same time marking their transitoriness in the face of "the long view"--the view he often took, and the view up in flames from our currently fashionable faith in particularity.

One of reasons I am writing, however, is to wonder: is my sense that this is the case, about our current fashions, even right? More and more I get the feeling that fashions are fast-disappearing ghosts, and not because they are constructed out of our imaginations and flare for only fifteen minutes apiece. Fashionable Foucauldianism aside, culture being a function of the social imaginary makes its products no less real. No, what I have been struck by the idea is that for even the notion of a "fashion" to be applicable, there must be a center to the discipline, a center that judges "what is in fashion." These "centers" and "judgings" will always be wavering, disputed territory--we've learned that much from our theoretical sophistication about the notion of disciplines and communal self-weavings. But the material, disciplinary conditions that made this territory even possible might be disappearing. What made, for example, changes in fashion in Anglo-American philosophy possible was that one could chart those changes. How? By reading what people were writing--but not all of it counts. The notion of "fashion" does include having a periphery (and being "out of fashion"), and as such one judged fashions by looking to the journals that functioned as centers of influence, as gate-keepers to high quality, and thus to fashion. If you wanted to be in the know, philosophers in the middle of the century nearly all read some combination of the Journal of Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Mind, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Rorty once commented that professionalization, when he was coming of age, consisted in being in "the pre-print loop"--seeing what established people were concentrating their energies on, and thus being able to "get in on the conversation" to thus show your own ability to people who could judge it.

This is disappearing, I think, largely because of the rise of specialization. Our awareness of this fact is not new. But I think we may finally be far enough along the process that we can begin to see what its effects may be. Specialization, the population increase within disciplines, and the "publish or perish" method of advancement have created a disciplinary world in which we may not have a center, nor need one. The one fear of this process for a long time, however, has been that nobody will talk to each other anymore. And the further along the track we have gone, the more I think this is panning out as a truth. That's my sense, at least, and I stand in general curiosity as to its truth. But is it bad, even if it's true? Is the conversational model, the lens with which to perceive disciplinary health, outmoded? What do we replace it with?

As more and more scholars born between 1890 and 1940 die, we get more and more reflections by their most immediate students about the death of the long view at the hands of specialization. Edward Said was already lamenting in the 70s the death of scholars on the model of Auerbach, Spitzer, and Curtius: people who seemed to know everything, read everything. But that kind of thing seems impossible today, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that there is simply too much to read. [fn.2] So, if scholarly specialization is, as I believe it to be, on the whole a good thing, what happens to our ability to not just talk to each other, but take that long view, to saying something general? Foucault seems to suggest this is a fading intellectual type, and that that might be a good thing, but should we be suspicious of Foucault, as he was, after all, a mighty generalist?

Walter Jackson Bate, that tremendous critic, scholar, and intellectual historian, was reflecting on something like the above problem when he wrote this in 1982:

The truth is that, with the fading of the Renaissance ideal through progressive stages of specialism, leading to intellectual emptiness, we are left with a potentially suicidal movement about "leaders of the profession," while, at the same time, the profession sprawls, without its old center, in helpless disarray.

One quickly cited example is the professional organization, the Modern Language Association.... A glance at its think program for its last meeting shows a massive increase and fragmentation into more than 500 categories! I cite a few examples: "Deconstruction as Poltics," "Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas," "The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature," or (astonishingly) "The Absent Father in Fact, Metaphor, and Metaphysics in the Middle Generation of American Poets." ... Naturally, the progressive trivialization of topics has made these meetings a laughingstock in the national press.

So, now we know Bate is additionally a snobbish prick. But is there nothing of value in the above lamentation? That passage was quoted in the book that happened to prompt me to these reflections, Barbara Johnson's A World of Difference. It was not finding the Bate, but reflecting to myself, "Why did I even buy this? Does anyone even take Johnson seriously anymore?" The trouble is that I don't even know where to turn to get a sense of how I should answer that question. The more time goes on, the more I get the feeling that the answer to such questions is both, and disturbingly, "Yes, you should care; and no, don't worry about it." I don't think the answer used to be that, back when there was a center, and this might be for the good: the sense of letting a thousand flowers bloom. But when you are job hunting, I suspect the answer is still, "Yeah, you don't wanna' take stock in the passé." But there's no center anymore to tell us what's passé and what fashionable.

But more than that question is the fading of the Renaissance view, the fate of the generalist, being able to take the long view. I'd like to think such a thing still desirable. But we can't read everything, and there's no center anymore to tell you what to read to assure yourself of a job, so splintering forces your head further into very local power structures (i.e. of your narrow specialty), and the force of "publish or perish" is such that nobody will get ahead taking the long view. Is that line of reasoning right? Is there anything to be done? Should we be worried?

I might, in the end, not say that I'm worried, but I wonder about the notion of generality being a specialty. I think it always was, but what's coming to the fore is how it might be becoming impossible to have more than one specialty. Whereas, one used to be able to cut their teeth on a specialty while keeping up on other intellectual pastimes, so that on the backside of one's career, aging in tenure, one could take the long view without worrying about professional advancement (and have enough logged reading and research to be able to take that longer, more comprehensive view), now I'm not sure we have the time to both make inroads on a specialty and keep up on anything else. Even if this is a confession of personal limitation, it has to be an increasing reality for more and more. And if it is, that means we will lack a community to be able to judge general assertions. For who will know? That's the Hegelian model of intersubjectivity at work. That is an actual possibility. And that is what strikes me as fearful: it's the inconversability fear again, but I'm wondering if put this way, it's less snobbish than fearing the death of the heroic, Renaissance übermensch. And the fact of the matter, I think, is that right now there is no professional outlet for specializing as a generalist. And that means no one will be able to do it in the future I'm imagining, and imagining as possible.

Endnotes

[1] Consequences of Pragmatism, 216

[2] Another to think about is the capabilities of our education systems. Auerbach, Spitzer, and Curtius knew absurd numbers of languages, and while we know this kind of continued diversity is possible, in Europe for example, I wonder if part of its possibility derives from the compact space that houses these different language groups. And if global homogenization continues apace, which we have no reason to doubt, then this condition will disappear as well. It isn't, in other words, just that Americans are absurdly exceptionalist, thinking everyone should just speak English. It's also a function of having other languages around, impacting your daily life. The only other route is forced entrenchment through public schooling, and not only is their no will for that, I wonder about its desirability (despite it being likely the only solution).

Wright and the Figures of Slave Narrative

From a seminar on the three largest post-Harlem Renaissance figures, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, this is a fairly pedantic, unexciting piece that just cobbles together some continuities between the slave narrative tradition and the African-American literary tradition that succeeded it. There's no real motivation for it into a thesis, however. The precursor to this, from which I think I borrow a few lines about Douglass, is "Literacy as Symbol and Material Means in Douglass." Like that piece, I was still caught in an overbearing fascination with the orality/literacy thematic, an understanding still largely conditioned at this point by Ong's Orality and Literacy and Havelock's Preface to Plato.

References:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Eds. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

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I propose to trace out the functioning of three different figures inherited by Wright from the tradition of slave narrative, taking as emblematic Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: curiosity, literacy, and leisure. I will in each case briefly discuss how they work in Douglass before showing how Wright continues, extends, or alters each figure in the changed cultural landscape some 100 years after Douglass’ escape, though I shall spend most of my time on literacy.

An important theme struck by both Douglass and Wright is the repression of curiosity. In Douglass, this occurs frequently, usually in relation to literacy. Curiosity leads you out of your current nest of experience and into a new experience, thus leading to learning. Douglass, who didn’t even realize that literacy was a forbidden object (much as Wright had to learn his lessons the hard way), was taught the basics by his mistress, Mrs. Auld, before her husband corrected her: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. … He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master” (Douglass 31). This is a “new and special revelation” (ibid.) for the young Douglass and it opens up the “pathway from slavery to freedom” (32). Likewise for Wright, in his own first pass at autobiography in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he shows curiosity to learn how to grind lenses, Morrie immediately “grew red.” “Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” (Wright 228) The notion that blacks might be “uppity” immediately changes the whites’ attitudes to them, as the first hint of it sours situations for both Douglass and Wright repeatedly.

The figure of literacy might be the most important figure in Douglass’ Narrative, functioning as both a symbol for freedom and an actual, material precondition for freedom. Literacy for Douglass is a skill that allows for the free acquisition of knowledge and the ability to negotiate the white man’s world. It is also a precious commodity carefully protected by slave masters, as illustrated before. The pathway of literacy consists in the attainment of “the more valuable bread of knowledge” (Douglass 34), which functions in two ways for Douglass: 1) knowing how to read and write aids materially in his ability to escape from captivity and 2) Douglass learns that slavery is a contingent institution and that one of its main means of enforcement is the stripping of the slave of his humanity.

The first echo we might point to is again in “Ethics.” Wright says, “it was almost impossible to get a book to read. It was assumed that after a Negro had imbibed what scanty schooling the state furnished he had no further need for books” (Wright 235). Wright here, however, doesn’t go into depth about the meaning of literacy, nor play it out much—all we see is that though African-Americans can read, they aren’t allowed access by white-run libraries. We get a much stronger look at how Wright uses the symbol of literacy in Lawd, Today! (his first significant piece of fiction, though only published posthumously). When the protagonist, Jake, goes by the Chicago Library on his way to his friend Bob’s, Jake says to himself, “That’s right. I ain’t never looked around in one of them joints” (69). What is striking is not that he hasn’t been in a library, or thinks there’s a cover charge, but that if he did go into a library, he muses, he could “tell old Bob and Al and Slim all about the big books I seen…” (ibid.). Seen—not read, or even opened.

What’s worse, upon seeing a black boy reading in the library, Jake immediately thinks, right on the heels of his reverie of setting his friends aflame with jealousy at all the books he had seen, that “too much reading’s bad” (ibid.). This is one of a series of stunning reversals of thought that happen within moments of each other, another being the rapid switch in the group’s opinion of the International Negro Uplift Association, from “Yeah, they’s smart” to nine lines later “Aw … They nuts as hell” (109). Jake says of reading that “it was all right to read the newspapers … but reading a lot of books … would drive you crazy.” “It addles your brains, and if you addle your brains you’ll sure have bookworms in the brain” (69). He then recalls, as justification and evidence for his view, that “his poor old grandmother had told him that when he was a child, and he had never forgotten it, and had never had bookworms” (ibid.).

Wright seems to be, at least in part, displaying literacy as a forgotten means of freedom. The psychology of oral vs. literate culture is such that remembered words and phrases, in an oral culture, function as thought-gatekeepers far more than in a literate culture. Words in the mind tumble over each other in sometimes quite odd associations, but the better and easier remembered (like in proverbs, rhymed aphorisms, or bits of wisdom from authoritative sources, like grandmothers), the more likely these bits will be recalled in connection with current experience. For instance, Jake assigns some prestige to books and being in the library, but then Jake sees the black boy, and thinks, “reading’s bad.” Why? Because “his mind went back to his boyhood; he remembered a schoolmate of his who had become queer from trying to memorize the Bible” (ibid.). When Jake saw the boy, he saw his queer schoolmate, and reacted to himself turning queer—his earlier thought (books good, maybe I should go into the library) was derailed by this fragment of memory. And then his mind immediately reinforced this new thought with a further stock association, the wisdom of his grandmother. His brain doesn’t quit, though, and Wright adds a further illustrative crinkle, as Jake then thinks, “But it was all right if you were studying for the pulpit” (ibid.), because God will protect you from going crazy—but then what happened to the kid memorizing the Bible? Jake’s mind has already moved on, however, and such reversals are never brought to account. A mind brought up in a literate culture, however, because of the opportunity to reinforce the ephemeral spoken word with the unchanging written word, has better opportunity to not be led down mental avenues with no hope of returning and asking, “Did anything I just think (say) make sense?” And when you write it down, you can look it over.

There are two other examples with Jake we might recur to for reinforcement. One is the scene in which he reads the newspaper, as he has said is okay to do. The joke of the chapter is that, when Jake reads the newspaper, all he does is read the headline out loud and then run off at the mouth about whatever he thinks about what he thinks the headline means. But there are several telling moments for my purposes. When Jake goes off on FDR and the Democrats, he closes by saying, “I’m going to stick with the Republicans. Old Abe Lincoln is the ship and all else is the sea . . . Now, who said that?” (29) That old chestnut for black electoral politics tells Jake who to vote for, but it is not an actual evaluation of who would be best for him.[fn.1] When Jake attempts to engage with Lil, she says “I wasn’t listening to you reading” (31)—by which she really means, listening to him spout—and Jake replies, “You could learn something if you didn’t keep that empty head of yours stuck into them Gawddamn Unity books all the time” (ibid.). The irony is, of course, that Lil is actually reading, whereas Jake does not (except for advertisements, which he spends much more time reading the entirety of as we see in the following chapter). But what’s more is what Jake says about God: “Gawd’s hooey! It’s a gyp game, that’s all!” It isn’t apparent that Jake is just saying this eristically, but that he truly believes it—at the time, for compare his relative reverence and respect for God in the Library scene discussed above. And finally, there’s the dialectical series between Jake and Lil beginning with his rant about the Communists. Lil counters him on every response, actually challenging him, recurring to the newspaper as a source of her views. Jake, possibly recalling the moment before she interceded having said, “That’s no lie, I was reading it just the other day in the Tribune…” (33), eventually finds himself backed into a corner and says, “Woman, is you a Red?” (ibid.) There are several fascinating points to this exchange: 1) he appears entirely sincere in his thought process and in thinking that Lil must be a Red for challenging him as she does; 2) it isn’t clear at all that Jake is cognizant of having just lost the debate or the jagged shifts in thought; 3) it isn’t clear why he didn’t recur to his response to Einstein, that “these old newspapers sure tries hard to fool folks” (32), when Lil challenged him, and since that is clearly a legitimately open mental avenue for Jake, it just punches up how rough and random any particular turn his mind seems to take.

Possibly the most illustrative example of the oral cast of mind in Jake, and therefore the importance of literacy to the idea of freedom, occurs when Jake is raging about the inspector at work: “You sonofabitch! It ain’t always going to be this way! His mind went abruptly blank. He could not keep on with that thought, because he did not know where that thought led. He did not know of any other way things could be, if not this way. Yet he longed for them not to be this way” (142). Literacy is the key to other worlds, the key to seeing how things might be another way. An imagination that cannot stretch beyond the things told to it by its immediates is an impaired imagination. Reading is what did it for Douglass and for Wright. Reading allows one to escape immediate surroundings and take flight, either to other actual realities (like in nonfiction, history, etc.) or to made-up realities—the effect is the same, as the circle of possibilities expands outwards, thus increasing the flex of mind that allows you to imagine more for yourself.

The last figure of leisure leads directly from here and shows Wright exerting a tremendous alteration over it. For Douglass, leisure time meant time to strategize and to think. The path to freedom lay open, but obscured, and at one point he says, amidst the “perpetual whirl of excitement” of working at the docks in Baltimore, that “I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty” (Douglass 70) The most obvious shift from slave narratives to neo-slave narratives, of course, is that people like Douglass were escaping a fairly literal slavery, while that which holds Wright and his contemporaries is the more intangible cultural slavery left from continued racism. So, in Wright the figure of leisure plays differently. The image of the “lazy” black man is created. But why? Wright tells us—as the group watches some white students get off work, Jakes thinks, “Them white boys always in a hurry to get somewhere. And soon’s they get out of school they’s going to be bigshots. But a nigger just stays a nigger” (117). “Yeah, but ain’t no use of a black man rushing.” “Naw, ‘cause we ain’t going nowhere” (118). Douglass could imagine that slavery could be ended, and that eventually people could co-exist peacefully. Wright, 100 years later, is displaying the crushing, felt defeat at the hands of whites that debilitates the common black imagination and that begins to repeat itself—like Jake’s grandmother telling him that reading is bad.

Endnotes

[1] It was, in fact, Frederick Douglass about the Republican Party. I suspect this was a veiled slap at Douglass by Wright, with regards to the changed landscape of politics and how Douglass stuck by the Republican Party even after its disastrous effort at Reconstruction and subsequent takeover by the rich, of whom Jake says, “them men owns and runs the country!” (29)

What is Quality?

In my endless pursuit for Pirsig material, I once stumbled upon a book that contained a number of small reflections by authors on what books affected them the most. Pirsig was there and his answer, as befitting a man choked by the anxiety of influence, was fairly vague. The really interesting find in the book was when I went to the index and checked to see if anyone had chosen ZMM as their book. And lo’ and behold, there was someone. I don’t remember his name (I’m currently bereft of my materials), but he wrote that he was deeply affected after reading ZMM, but he couldn’t remember how. He just remembered that after reading it he felt as if a veil had been lifted.

I think a lot of people have had that same experience with Pirsig. In my own experience, most Baby Boomers, if they haven’t read ZMM, have at least heard of it, though most of them don’t remember much of what the book was about. Even many kids in my generation (yes, I still retain the right to call myself a kid) have read or heard of ZMM. But why, if the book is so revolutionary, or at least seems to deeply affect its readers, do most not remember how it was that they were deeply affected?

I’m not proposing to answer that question. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that most people can’t remember what a book was about or how it affected them five years after the fact. Some people just don’t consider the reading of books a central part of their lives. But what about the philosophy? Pirsig proposes a new kind of philosophy of life in ZMM, and people seem attracted to it, but they neither remember what it was nor seem to alter their lives accordingly. And why did philosophers not pick up on it?

I’m not going to answer that question either, but again, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that “professional” philosophers didn’t find it useful for their own pursuits. In my earlier phase as a Pirsig enthusiast I once wrote Rorty about Pirsig. Nice guy that he is, he wrote me back and said essentially that he remembered reading it, but recalls not being that impressed with the philosophy and not understanding what everybody was so excited about. Which is interesting considering that few these days, apparently, can remember what they were so excited about either.

What I would like to suggest about the effect that ZMM has on people is that, while it doesn’t instill a positive message about how to live one’s life (it isn’t a self-help book), it does instill curiosity in some. I think the reason some don’t remember the message of ZMM is that there isn’t much of one, more or less “live life excellently.” Pirsig’s philosophy revolves around this magical word “Quality,” but people don’t remember what the philosophy is, principally because Pirsig doesn’t flesh it out. That was the purpose of Lila. But ZMM does instill curiosity in us because we see how lack of curiosity almost killed Pirsig, we see how the “establishment” can try and suppress curiosity.

What ZMM makes us curious about is philosophy, and specifically in the question “What is Quality?” If people have been affected by ZMM in a strong way, and in a way that has a lasting effect, it is typically in the fashion of making them interested to read more philosophy. They try and read Plato and Aristotle, and anybody else. That’s what happened to me, at least. What I’ve come to see, however, are two things: one, that “What is Quality?” on Pirsig’s analysis gives way to a second question and two, that this second question is not strictly philosophical in the sense that we’ve been instilled with by Pirsig.

Pirsig’s question, “What is Quality?”, gives way on his reflection to “Who are you?” While the first question is overtly meditated on in the book, the second question is only implicitly given attention to by the functioning of the book itself. Pirsig is drawn to the first question because he has an analytical mind, or as he says, a Platonic streak. He has to answer that question at the prompting of the Bozeman English Department and this is what leads him to the University of Chicago. It is there that the book ends supposedly. But, upon further reflection, the trail of the book continues and wraps all the way around to the beginning. The trail is foreshadowed by the very beginning of the book, the no-doubt-forgotten-about-by-the-time-you've-reached-the-end-of-the-book inscription prefacing the entire novel—“And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good—/Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

The only person we need to ask about Quality is ourselves. But how should we answer that question? As Pirsig shows in Bozeman, most kids are puzzled by the question, and yet they seem to know intuitively that some things have higher Quality than others. Why is that? Pirsig’s later answer is that “we,” each person’s “person,” is built out of our history, cultural and biographical, those “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.” And thus we see that Pirsig’s first, Platonic question, “What is Quality?”, gives way to the second, non-Platonic question, “Who are you?” And, as I’ve already alluded to, this second question gives way to a third, almost anti-Platonic question, “Where have you been?” And thus the trail of the book continues on after the University of Chicago. Pirsig leads us through his past, showing us how he came to be who he is, and that trail continues on all the way up to the very writing of the book, his effort to confront fully the consequences of his own analysis of his question “What is Quality?”

Of course, I’m not at all sure that this is Pirsig’s intended effect. First, while I’m sure that the first question gives way to the second, and that Pirsig would be okay with this, I’m fairly positive that his explicit philosophical stance is antagonistic to the functioning of his book to reach the third question. The second question, after all, can still be given a Platonic spin to it, but the third certainly cannot. Using Pirsig’s own categories, Phaedrus is the Platonist and the narrator is the Aristotelian, and the narrator is the one who is vanquished in the end, the narrator is the one to be found to be holding the hero, Phaedrus, the real Pirsig, down. Plato created philosophy. Plato followed his teacher, Socrates’, lead in asking, for every instance of justice, piety, and the good, “What is it? What is it outside of these instances?” This flung us into the arid climate of generalities. It is Aristotle, on the other hand, who wanted to keep us in the details. And the third question is all about the details and history, something that a Platonist has no use for.

If we settle on for the moment that “What is Quality?” is Platonic, and therefore philosophical (because Plato is philosophy), and that “Who are you?” is not Platonic, and therefore not philosophical (because we are usually drawn by such a question to detailed autobiography), then the tension in Pirsig can be drawn not only by the questions or by Pirsig’s Plato/Aristotle categories, but by drawing a contrast between philosophy and literary criticism. We know that Pirsig hates literary criticism, thinking it a parasitic enterprise best left to second-rate minds, and that most of all of what professional philosophers do is no better than literary criticism. I want to suggest that the second question belongs to literary criticism.

The reason can be seen in the very look of what we typically canonize “philosophical” texts versus “literary” texts. Philosophy is abstract, it deals with concepts by themselves. Plato’s dialogues are explained as simply the method of conveyance for his philosophy, Descartes’ meditations as simply a heuristic, the first grand modern thought-experiment. Kant is taken to be paradigmatic, Spinoza is taken to be the most pure, and Montaigne and Voltaire aren’t even taught in philosophy departments because they wrote too topically, too much about themselves. As for literary texts, we can take the novel as the obvious example: a novel charts the course of a character’s life. It is all about the details. It may give you ideas, but it gives you a whole lot more than that.

Philosophy’s roots are in the search for wisdom, but since Descartes invented modern philosophy, philosophy has largely abdicated that role in favor of the abstract manipulation of symbols, of the search for foundations or transcendental outlines. Wisdom has been left for novelists and poets to convey and explore. Dealing in the abstract can indeed help us, but, as Pirsig tells us, only if it can cash out into real life, only if it can be applied. But most philosophers in the modern period have thought of “applied philosophy” as a secondary effort, as opposed to their pure pursuits. Pirsig oscillates between the two, which is just as well, but by explicitly focusing on “What is Quality?” as opposed to “Who are you?” he gives new lease on life to the Platonic impulse, the impulse to ignore life. This is what ZMM can tend to instill in the reader. The way to read Pirsig is not as a philosopher, but as a literary critic. If we read as a philosopher we will be led to Platonism. But reading as literary critics, we can see the rootedness of his philosophy in life.

Another way of seeing the tension in Pirsig’s philosophy, and not just in ZMM, however, is by seeing what his philosophy does to literary criticism. One of the things that I’ve found suggested by Rorty’s philosophy is that there are two ways to read texts, two purposes that we can find them attuned to. One is the search for moral wisdom and the other is the search for aesthetic power. Harold Bloom has spent most of his life charting the intricacies of the search for aesthetic power, centered in what he calls the anxiety of influence and charted by criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 96) Aesthetic power in its pure form is originality, centered around the question “What is new?” Bloom has often been accused of being too narrowly focused, but Bloom would be the first to acknowledge his narrowness, and he would simply claim to be reacting to the literary critical establishment of his time that has lost its way in performing one of its duties. But indeed, Bloom has not ignored moral wisdom, and in one of his latest books, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (dedicated coincidentally enough to Rorty), he reflects at length on the great writers in our Western wisdom traditions. Moral wisdom is centered around the question “What is best?” For true pragmatists like Rorty and Bloom, it is experiencing the actualities of life and reading the possibilities of books that gives us the wisdom to navigate our way through life and find what is best.

The reason I should put together such possibly odd pairings of words, “moral wisdom” and “aesthetic power,” as literary categories is because of my readings of Pirsig, Rorty, and Bloom. Pirsig has particularly taught us that all wisdom is a moral effort, that there is no distinction between morality and ethics and other categories of choice, such as prudence and taste. And Bloom has taught me, not only that to find what is new you must struggle with the vastness of time past, but that originality is a powerful force that changes us, the more original, the more we are changed.

What I should like to meditate on is how I’m making a distinction between the two and how Pirsig would not. This is crystallized in Pirsig’s concept of Dynamic Quality. DQ is both what is best and what is most new. DQ for Pirsig is a punch to the face that we cannot ignore, that changes us whether we like it or not. But for Bloom, originality does not mean wisdom. We can appreciate the power of new metaphors without being enticed into picking them up. Metaphors, for Rorty, are meaningless, and so, linguistically speaking, something like punches to the face. The trap that Pirsig falls into is twofold: first, he falls into the Heideggerian trap of searching for elemental words, words that can never be banalized by use and thus given meanings (hence DQ/Quality’s undefinition) and second, the Platonic trap of thinking that power and the good are the same thing.

On one of Rorty’s readings, Heidegger (as he says in Being and Time) is in search for elemental words and that we can trace his movement from early to late by the changes in those words he takes as elemental. In Heidegger, these words move from German candidates like Dasein to Greek candidates like noein. What Heidegger wants are words that slough off meaning, words that simply have force. By moving back to Greek words, to words that Plato first imbued with philosophical senses, Heidegger wants to reclaim these originary words by shedding the history of philosophy from them, thereby making them metaphors again. Heidegger thus, on Rorty’s reading, evinces Bloom’s sense of poetic anxiety.

I think it is instructive to read Pirsig as searching for, not just indestructible metaphors, but elemental words for two reasons. For one, Pirsig goes back to the Greeks and the roots of language much like Heidegger, such as his recapturing of arete in ZMM and rta in Lila. For two, and more importantly, Pirsig’s DQ/Quality is originary in a cosmic sense, whereby Pirsig traces them to being reality itself, and thus the causes of reality. DQ is both originary and permanently new, always a force and never banal. Pirsig hopes not only to find a metaphor that is always a metaphor, but a metaphor that has created all the others in its wake. The Heideggerian trap is one that is set for all those who feel the strain of their predecessors. Because Pirsig’s poetic metaphors are set for philosophical purposes, however, his production of DQ/Quality causes us to lose sight of history. By focusing on the question “What is Quality?”, Pirsig’s answer in the form of an elemental word produces the Platonic tendency of metaphysical speculation rather than autobiographical introspection.

The Platonic trap is one that is produced by Plato’s attempt to, in Yeats’ phrase, “hold reality and justice in a single vision.” Rorty spins the history of philosophy out of this phrase and it is epitomized in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue, Plato attempts to philosophically explain why his fellow Athenians were wrong to convict his hero and mentor, Socrates, by showing that the Form of Good is reality behind the appearances. Heidegger, like Rorty following him later, traces the modern fixation on Reason to Plato (seen in the dialectic), which produces the modern ethical manifestation of Platonism in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. Pirsig, too, traces modern philosophy to Greek roots, but he still insists on equating the Good with Reality.

Pirsig obviously does not want us to repeat the failures of Plato. The Pirsig of ZMM has certainly located the roots of SOM in Plato, particularly in his dialectic, and there is no doubt he attacks him for it. Nevertheless, however, Pirsig does find that the Greeks were up to something good and that what this is is something like abstract thinking, which is why Pirsig suggests that he be seen as a Platonist as opposed to an Aristotelian in temperament. If Platonism and Aristotelianism are taken to be impulses towards abstraction and details respectively, then certainly these temperaments exist and are helpful and not to be denied. And yet Pirsig does seem to fall into the trap. The trap comes out clearly in what we might call the indeterminacy of Dynamic Quality thesis, when, after identifying reality with the good and with the new, Pirsig cogently says that one cannot ever tell whether one is being Dynamic or degenerate in the moment—only history can tell us that. If DQ is something that punches us in the face, how is it that we could be wrong about being punched? How does DQ help us then?

The reason Pirsig falls into the trap, I think, is not because he’s a crypto-Platonist, but because he places too much stock in abstraction. Pirsig wisely hitches his boat with pragmatism at the end of Lila, but after Rorty, having a “pragmatist metaphysics” looks like an oxymoron—and Pirsig even sees it coming when, attempting to split the difference between positivists and mystics, he says that a Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Pirsig takes that as a good sign for building bridges, but I should like to think that that would be a good time to look around for new terms.

From a metaphysical point of view—the view from which we make hard, deep cuts into Reality, splitting it into the correct pieces, the pieces Reality wants to be in—pragmatism is a monism because it denies that deep cuts can be made. Pirsig senses this and this makes pragmatism of a piece with the Buddhist strain in Pirsig. But while from a metaphysical point of view reality is monistic, from a pragmatic point of view reality is in as many pieces as you need it to be. There is an important sense in which Pirsig captures this in his distinction between DQ and static patterns. But I think there was a casualty in the process and that is the distinction between moral wisdom and aesthetic power, between what’s best and what’s new. After abstractly chopping everything down, I think Pirsig misplayed his hand in putting things back together.

So while Pirsig’s philosophy blurs the difference between moral wisdom and aesthetic power because a pragmatist metaphysics is a monism, there certainly is a pragmatic difference between the two that is lost in Pirsig because he takes “What is Quality?” to be the more serious question than “Who are you?” Pirsig takes metaphysics too seriously and so loses sight of life, lost in the mountains without a clear way home. Pirsig says that metaphysics ain’t worth a damn if it doesn’t help out in life and I can’t think of a clearer case of forgetting what we already intuitively and commonsensically know—the new may just be a passing fad.

This reflection has taken quite a few turns. I’d like to close by reiterating the difference between “What is Quality?” and “Who are you?” If we take the first question seriously, we will become lost in a sea of concepts, terms that can be pushed around in almost any direction, in an infinite number of constellations. If we take the second question seriously, however, concepts or terms we use become grounded in our lives, which is where they have their meaning. Literary criticism becomes the preferred discipline to exemplify because our lives are narratives that we reflect on. In the end, if we focus on the second question and literary criticism, the difference between the first and second question, and philosophy and literary criticism, disappears as we draw back to the roots of philosophy—the search for wisdom. Abstraction and details only gain their meaning when in harmony with each other, rooted in a narrative, the story we tell ourselves about history, our culture, our nation, our lives.

Pirsig, Baggini, and the First Rule of Philosophy

The first rule of philosophy is to keep the conversation going.

Socrates was told by the oracle that he was the wisest in Athens. Socrates had no idea why the oracle would say such a thing because he knew nothing. So he spent his days wandering Greece to prove the oracle wrong by engaging others who thought they were wise. Socrates marked the beginning of philosophy and we live in his image and by his example. Without the conversation, there is only the dogmatism of those who think themselves wise.

It would appear that in Julian Baggini's interview with Pirsig that the conversation did indeed break down and founder. I'm not entirely sure why it did. But the thing that struck me the most about the interview was Pirsig's certainty about his own wisdom. For instance, his specious contrast between "one who only tries to explain a few things and succeeds or one who tries to explain everything and succeeds." Of course more is better than less, but success is exactly what is at issue. If it is indeed wisdom is exactly what is attempting to be determined. And the only way to make strides is to keep the conversation going, to keep searching, to always be questioning.

The central problem that Pirsig raises in Lila is how we are to tell Dynamic Quality from degeneracy. He never answers the question, nor should he because there is no general way to tell. You just experiment and find out. I would think that the only way we could tell is if static latching occured, that is, looking back at our past from where we are now. One of the ways in which we use "DQ" is as a compliment. Calling something "Dynamic" is either an empty compliment about something currently being experimented with (empty because there's still no way to tell whether the experiment will be degenerate or Dynamic, though the only reason you're experimenting is because you indeed think it will succeed, but of course everyone knows that you think so already, for why else would people experiment?) or a full compliment paid to something in the past, something that was Dynamic, but is now the static patterns it left behind. Static latching is what gives you a defensible sense of success, else you'd just have a baseless opinion which might be either superiority or degeneracy. This means that Pirsig's already some ways into the conversation, or else Pirsig (and we) would have very bad opinions indeed.

Kant said that you can't learn philosophy, you can only learn how to philosophize. Philosophy is an activity. Pirsig brings that out well when he says in the introduction to Lila's Child that philosophy is like chess and "real chess is the game you play with your neighbor." Some of those neighbors we play against, of course, are those who are no longer alive, those great masters of the tradition. We cut our teeth on their books, we engage them to learn how to philosophize, we engage them to steal their wisdom. Baggini's interview brings out strongly Pirsig's desire to not engage with those of the past, but it also shows him not really engaging with those of the present, like Baggini. Pirsig's sometimes refusal to enter the "Western conversation" isn't really to be explained by some specious contrast between Pirsig's Dynamism and the Western tradition's staticness, between philosophy and philosophology. I think its to be explained by Pirsig's incarnation of rugged, American hyperindividualism, which toes along the fear of being influenced.

Pirsig's desire to ignore other philosophers, other chess partners, is tied into the anxiety of influence, Pirsig's unwillingness to see himself in anybody else's eyes. But unlike strong poets like Socrates, Nietzsche, and Hegel, Pirsig's tactic sometimes seems more like closing his eyes then staring down his predecessors and saying with Nietzsche, "Thus I willed it." Pirsig does indeed want to be original and, like Nietzsche, not owe it to anybody, but without engaging in the conversation, how are we to know if it is indeed wisdom? Wisdom arises through the conversation, not outside of it.

What I think we see in the interview is the playing out of static and Dynamic as they are instantiated in intellectual virtues: focus and curiosity. When we focus on one thing we are following through as far as possible on a single idea or subject. We are focusing our attention, like Phaedrus' laser beam cutting through the darkness. But curiosity is what keeps us on our toes. Curiosity is the virtue of the fallible conversant, always engaging others in the hopes of finding something better than they already have. Curiosity is what led Pirsig from chemistry to philosophy and then to Benares. Focus is what led Pirsig from Montana to the University of Chicago, where he chides himself on not learning more than he could of because of his obsession with his own Quality thesis. As Pirsig says in the interview, both static and Dynamic are absolutely essential. A balance is needed between focus and curiosity.

In philosophy, you always need to keep the conversation going. Without the conversation, we'll all just sit around with our own little ideas of what is good and right. Philosophy is indeed an individual's activity as Pirsig says. Every individual is a collection of beliefs and attitudes and it is the activity of philosophy that causes them to clash to see which ones are best. But because of philosophy's high level of abstraction, it is fairly easy (given time and ingenuity) to build a fairly impregnable fortress. Philosophy is the game of changing the rules, of questioning everything. When you do philosophy, potentially everything is up for grabs. The question then becomes, is the fortress you've built useful? Does it constitute wisdom?

That is why the conversation must always be kept going. If Pirsig's right in saying that "the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe," then we really are solipsistic monads if not for the conversation with other philosophers. The game of philosophy demands that we keep building bridges between each of our fortresses, all the fortresses that have been built throughout history. Good philosophy is performed when we both focus on ourselves and are curious about others.

Cult Followers and Free Thinkers

One of the things that comes up more than a little in relation to people attracted Pirsig, particularly when they find themselves at moq.org, is that Pirsig's philosophy is a little cultish, or that the people surrounding it are little more than a cult. Actually, that's kinda' what happens around any genius from any discipline, but I imagine Pirsig gets it in part because ZMM is sometimes filed under the "New Age" section of the bookstore. But Pirsig's philosophy, however, is built around the Individual's search for Quality. "And what is good, Phaedrus--should we ask anyone these things?" Pirsig links his notion of Dynamic Quality with the notion of freedom. One of the uses to which Pirsig's vocabulary is sometimes put to use is by saying, "You're thinking Dynamically" or "statically". In what follows, I'd like to redescribe what it means to be a Dynamic or static thinker in terms of the notions of a "free thinker" and cult follower, but in such a way as it avoids the SOMic assumptions built into them.

A "freethinker" was an appellation atheists used for a time a while ago (and still do, sort of). A polemical title, the idea was spawned by Enlightenment secularists who thought that belief in God was a prejudice, or worse a superstition, that precluded rational thought, much like the Marxist idea of ideology as being a blanket that blocks light. If one threw off this blanket, then one would be able to use the cool light of reason to properly judge this or that. This conception of reason is what Pirsig was trying to reform or displace in ZMM. Pirsig's reversal of the Platonic hierarchy in ZMM, so that dialectic comes out of rhetoric, is followed up by his vision of a person being a set of static patterns. Any Enlightenment-style dichotomy between unconstrained thinking and constrained thinking is spurious because thinking and reasoning can only occur against a backdrop of, roughly, thoughts and reasons (though more appropriately for Pirsig, judgements). There is no empty monad, like the transcendental Subject (which the existentialists picked up and ran with), that looks around at the available options and picks the best one (Iris Murdoch does a wonderful job of attacking this picture in her The Sovereignty of Good). Rather, a held-in-place set of intellectual patterns judges other possible patterns for inclusion.

This means, then, that we need a new conception of what it means to be a "free thinker". Surely there's something that's different between people, between, say, fundamentalists and intellectuals? One thing I think Pirsig is misleading about is that I think he says that some static patterns are freer than others. I think this is a mistake. When it comes to patterns within a level, I think they are all as static as any other. (I think Pirsig gives this impression because he oscillates between saying that some static patterns are freer than others and that some static patterns lead to more freedom, but this second sense of freedom is the more commonsensical notion of political freedom, while the former is the more ontological kind.)

If we look at intellectual patterns, we can take two views of them. From a first-person point of view, you can say that we hold static patterns, but it is also just as true that the patterns hold us. For a pattern to be "freer" than another is to say that you could let it go easier than another. But could you say you really held it then, or that it held you, that you really believed it? After all, how free, in this sense, are we to let go of the static pattern we call "Pirsig's philosophy"? We are drawn to it, it holds us just as much as we hold it. With all his talk about "care", I don't think Pirsig is talking about patterns that you can't hold on to. I think he's just talking about patterns that enable you to consider more better patterns than others (I think this is where his example of communism and capitalism comes in, which I still think is misleading and muddy at best). Static patterns enable lines of thought, they enable what you can consider to be good or bad, better or worse. What we want, though, is to get the best patterns. How do you know if you have the best patterns or whether there is something better out there? How do you know whether its their theism or your atheism that's constraining, that's worse?

Those are epistemological quesitons and I don't think they have answers. But those are the answers you have to come up with if you hold Enlightenment-style dichotomies between reason and superstition, rational thought and prejudiced thought. You won't ever know with any epistemic certainty whether you have the best beliefs or ideas or arguments or patterns. Reflecting on epistemology won't help you decide which of your beliefs are bad. But if you are bugged about whether you have the best ones or not, then there is something practical you can do: sift through a lot of alternatives, what Rorty called being an "ironist". I think being a free thinker means having a lot of intellectual curiosity, not being content with what you currently believe, being restless in trying to expand your range of knowledge and acquaintance. Being a free thinker means trying to get inside the heads of other people and trying to figure out how they think, in the hopes of finding something that maybe'll fit in your head.

This leads to the opposite, the cult follower. I remember when I was in Sunday School as a high schooler, my teacher described to us what it means to be in a cult. He said that we are all in cults. Being in band, being a cheerleader, on the baseball team, going to church, the Math Group, Forensics Squad, your group of friends--those are all cults in the sense that some people do it, others don't, some are included, others excluded. This loosened up the way we think about cults--cult behavior could happen in any group you're in. What keeps you from actually being in a cult, from displaying cult behavior, is being in lots of cults, lots of groups. I think this fits in somewhat with the above free thinker conception. A free thinker is someone who has a broad range of interests and groups and a cult follower is someone who doesn't. This is what the worst of theists and atheists are. They don't have any curiosity. Intellectually, this can be death (though not necessarily).

This leads me to my redescription of Dynamic Quality and static patterns. To follow Dynamic Quality intellectually means to always be expanding your range of intellectual acquaintance. To be static is to not be curious. But there is a balance between the two. We aren't always going to be curious about everything. There's only so much one can do. And what enables you to follow Dynamic Quality in one area, what allows you to judge different ideas, is keeping another area in the background stable, static. Wilfrid Sellars said that science was just that sort of thing that could put any claim in jeopardy--just not all at once. When repairing Neurath's Ship, we can't pull up all the planks at once. I think this is exactly the sentiment Pirsig was after when he said science had a built-in eraser--though, one should add, you don't erase everything all at once. You work with the page you are given. We can't be Dynamic about everything without falling into chaos and not being able to judge--that's what the moral paralysis Pirsig talked about is. And neither can we simply rest with the patterns we were born with--well, we can, but there is something wrong with someone who calls themself an intellectual who does. I would think an intellectual is necessarily someone who is curious, who is interested in expanding the set of alternatives he has currently available to acheive the best possible set of intellectual static patterns--which is, incidently, another way of saying being the best possible person you can be. A good person.