Touchstones

1. Arnold's touchstone theory — Deaf and dumb cultural conservatism 2. Arnold, Eliot, and New Criticism — The Theory Revolution — Humanism at the scene of instruction; 3. Touchstone practices of reading — Personal relationships with texts; 4. Monumental reading — The necessity of close reading — Two touchstones cross the same commons; 5. The figure — Dramatic reading — Imaginations haunted by spectral figures; 6. Four objections — Objection 1: Esotericism — The elitism of strenuous study — Objection 2: Hero-worship — Knowingness and theories of human motivation; 7. Objection 3: Whitewashing history — Conflict: You can only fight whitewashing with elitish strenuous study — Creating the historical sacred; 8. The common reader and scholarship — Objection 4: Figuralizing violates technical niceties — Anti-romanticism: A land without heroes; 9. Afflictive reading — Obsessives can be annoying, though — Critical thinking and instruments of self-enlargement

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1.     

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. ... [W]e shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. (Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”)

David Bromwich calls this Arnold’s “touchstone theory,” and it’s the locus classicus of the neo-cultural conservative’s idea of the “Western canon.” I don’t think there have been many actual mandarin cultural conservatives who have wielded this obviously silly theory—not even Allan Bloom, I should think—but one does find it in any number of the jingoistic defenders of “culture” that pass for American neoconservative intellectuals. I suppose it is not hard to tell how little use I have for them. The silliness is encapsulated in “infallible”—really? Do no wrong? Worse than thinking, like your child or your guru, that anyone or thing could be infallible is the epistemological problem scared up by the application of the concept: if infallibility is the prize, how does one get to be one of these touchstones? The trick is that if there were independent criteria from the touchstones, then we wouldn’t need the touchstones. So the problem is precisely how to pick out a touchstone when all you have as criteria are your touchstones. At best, that’s a deaf and dumb cultural conservatism that no one has ever followed, even if it’s what comes out of their mouth.

2.      Matthew Arnold’s legacy somehow got bound up with T. S. Eliot’s cultural and political conservatism, and both of them with what literary critics call New Criticism. Both Arnold and Eliot are more interesting than the Theory Revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s gave them credit for, and New Criticism generally got a bad rap. The effect of this triple rejection was to make reading an impersonal activity. This is ironic, given that Arnold’s touchstone was there precisely to correct against personal taste in favor of disinterestedness. However, the Theory Revolution was in part an attempt to correct against the un-disinterested blocking of candidates to the “canon of great literature” such as, say, women, blacks, gays, etc., etc. It was Anti-Old White Dude. And because the touchstone theory so obviously blocked from view any actual criteria for induction into the canon, universalist and unhistorical criteria of all kinds became suspicious. This was how formalist New Criticism came to be rolled up in this. New Criticism was supposed to be just you and a poem, performing an act called “close reading,” but the Theory Revolution said, quite rightly, that you and the poem are always against the backdrop of historical circumstances. Texts are always in contexts—we cannot shut our eyes to it as the New Critics advise.

But with the Theory Revolution, the combined effect that some onlookers have put in different ways was to subordinate the text to the context—to make the context the primary object of investigation. This was largely an unintended consequence, but it’s why when you obligatorily study literary theory now, you learn theories as different modes of unpacking texts. Many of these courses are taught with one central text, and then each section you learn and apply alternately Freud, Lacan, Derrida, de Man, Kristeva, Greenblatt, Foucault, etc. This is fine as far as it goes, but what happened in the journals was that the focus became the jockeying of modes. Battles over interpretations became implicitly battles over theories (or even, over one’s favored theory-guru), rather than battles over readings of texts. The texts themselves got lost. [1]

What happened with Arnold, Eliot, and New Criticism is a tempest in a teapot. The only reason it might be of concern outside of the discipline of literary studies is because of a phenomenon Harold Bloom crystallized years ago in a passage Richard Rorty liked to quote:

The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature alone at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest. (A Map of Misreading 39)

I take it Bloom means that the torch of humanism, or “liberal education”—i.e. the reason why you have to take General Education credits—is now being held by only denizens of English departments. The 400 meter relay has turned unexpectedly into a dash. Rorty quoted the passage in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979 because he thought he was witnessing (or rather, had witnessed) the unfortunate abdication of this responsibility by his colleagues in philosophy. What he didn’t realize was that literary studies was heading in the same direction. [2]

3.      The problem with the state of literary studies as it relates to wider responsibilities to the community is that English departments teach students sets of reading practices. [3] They still do, but these practices are different than the ones they used to teach, and it seems to me that many of them are arcane. One of the bits of useful wisdom flattened out from Derrida—or really, the general milieu of mid-20^th century French theory—was that the world is usefully seen as a text, and our relationship to it as one of reading. One thing this highlights is the importance of assumptions in guiding reasoning, for those assumptions can give rise to different interpretations of the same phenomena. Once we flatten reading out this way, however, then all the humanistic disciplines, and really, all the disciplines generally, teach students different sets of reading practices, practices with which to read the world around them, practices that help shape and give meaning to the world. [4]

My concern here is with something like a “touchstone practice of reading.” This is something I think was much more natural to previous generations, and is something like what we meant by “erudite.” We don’t get it anymore from our English departments because too often we aren’t encouraged to have a personal relationship with the text. It’s too analytical. Who cares about analyzing the (obviously sexist) gender dynamics of Richardson’s 18^th-century novel Pamela? It becomes an exercise in telling you something you already know—though maybe you didn’t. One can find wisdom this way, but it’s an indirect search for historical distance that then becomes the true object of the exercise. And it’s that very indirectness that attenuates the probability of learning the lesson and of (impatient undergraduate) students having the patience required.

Having a personal relationship with a text means being allowed the space to not get anything out of it. This is the problem with teaching literary studies in the educational setting: you have to give grades, which means you need to have assignments, which means you need to assign them tasks to complete. That inherently turns the relationship with the text into a pragmatic, utilitarian relationship: “okay, text: I need something from you—so please hand it over.” That’s not a great way to begin a friendship. [5]

4.      What I have in mind as a touchstone practice of reading comes in three different species. The first is roughly the one Arnold professed: “have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters.” This species (unbelievably) is like what Bloom had in mind when he defined antithetical practical criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” [6] For this species, the practice of close reading is very important. I’ll call this monumental reading—passages fall off from the textual whole, fragmenting themselves, and landing like epitaphs to considerations one finds by the way-sides. Typically, these passages stick in your craw; they generally find you, not the other way around. Sometimes a great reader will show how a passage sticks; great readers help you read by making inroads, showing off the difficulty while at the same time making it easier. These aren’t keys to locks, but more like maps to difficult terrain—you are still called upon to travel the distance. The trick with great readers is that their fragments become yours, though the fragment feels as if it was always yours.

The practice of close reading is important because the only way to turn on a touchstone fragment is to read it. In the process of reading it one calls out the power one sees working in it—a thought, an image, a theme, a feeling, an argument. The reason one seeks such power, of course, is to use it. But this isn’t the pragmatic, externally imposed use one finds in exams (though great teaching plants the seeds of this internalized use). Touchstones help you think, often by antagonism. Take Emerson’s “one can’t spend the day in explanation” (“Self-Reliance”). This bugs me deeply. One can’t spend the entire day explaining yourself, but couldn’t this turn into a copout? The problem with the fragment is that it is covering just the bit that seems so deeply subversive: Emerson’s heroic plea for solitude—whim. “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” Nothing poses the problem of genius so distinctly. What you do best, your vocation, your calling, your inner self—all of your explanations and defenses of your withdrawal from your responsibilities could amount to nothing more than a whim, to caprice, to a conceited fantasy that is a fig leaf covering naked desire and mere wish-fulfillment. But what else is there to do? You can’t spend the day in explanation.

In monumental reading, the power that is pulled is put to use on either yourself or another fragment. All that is required for monumental reading is that the two touchstones cross the same commons. And this generally happens unexpectedly, and only after much practice. Do readings like the above riff on Emerson happen the first time around? Generally not, not on call, or a whim. It’s because the passage has been bouncing around my head, and against other passages, for so long. And this “bouncing” is writing. The transition from reading to writing is where the power occurs—the process of reading and writing, the friction between the two, is what generates the power. Otherwise the text will sit inert. It is during that process of transitioning a text from something read to written that allows other fragments to flow in. It is only by reading the fragment above that a break might open up and, in this case, a Freudianism might slip in. Will it pay off? Will Freud help me understand Emerson better, or the two of them to understand genius or explanation or the balance between solitude and society? Perhaps. But only if I move to read Freud.

5.      The second species of touchstone reading is located in the notion of the figure. I adapt the concept from crossing Rorty with Lionel Trilling. Here’s Rorty on the literary ironist’s contextual definition of a figure:

We ironists treat these people not as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for a certain final vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users. The older Hegel became a name for such a vocabulary, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have become names for others. If we are told that the actual lives such men lived had little to do with the books and the terminology which attracted our attention to them, we brush this aside. We treat the names of such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from saeva indignatio, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust from Marcel the narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination. We do not care whether these writers managed to live up to their own self-images. What we want to know is whether to adopt those images – to re-create ourselves, in whole or in part, in these people’s image. We go about answering this question by experimenting with the vocabularies which these people concocted. We redescribe ourselves, our situation, our past, in those terms and compare the results with alternative redescriptions which use the vocabularies of alternative figures. We ironists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the best selves for ourselves that we can.

Such comparison, such playing off of figures against each other, is the principal activity now covered by the term “literary criticism.” (CIS 79-80)

I think one can see how everything I said about reading and writing gets reapplied in this context. The reason why this form of abbreviation makes sense is because Rorty thinks of individuals as “incarnated vocabularies” (80). I want to call this species of touchstone reading dramatic reading. These are tales of the mighty dead doing battle with each other on the stage of your imagination. This is one reason why having a personal relationship with the book is important: it’s how the stage gets set up in the first place. And though we might always reserve the right to have personal favorites, our pets and darlings, Trilling’s criteria are important for rendering the imaginative space of the ironist:

Instructed and lively intellects do not make pets and darlings and dears out of the writers they admire but they do make them into what can be called “figures”—that is to say, creative spirits whose work requires an especially conscientious study because in it are to be discerned significances, even mysteries, even powers, which carry it beyond what in a loose and general sense we call literature, beyond even what we think of as very good literature, and bring it to as close an approximation of a sacred wisdom as can be achieved in our culture. [7]

“Spirit” seems to me a very precise word in this context. Turning an author, or character, or any individual for that matter, into a figure is very much a process of spectralization—our imaginations are haunted by these spectres. And very often we don’t know why at first. People are figures in another very precise sense as well—the names are figurative, they are symbols, tropes, metaphors. That’s why the author’s actual life matters little in this kind of reading, for their afterlife is in our minds—and in, I should add, how we use them to change the world.

6.      There are four things that speak against dramatic reading that I think are important to retail. (Some of these apply equally to monumental reading, though I won’t specify which and how.) Three of them are important. Two are tied to one’s opinion of the intellectual current we still call romanticism. The third is a pragmatic concern about the process. The fourth is technical, and important only in regards to how we are taught literature today, for it only makes sense in the context of some opinion about romanticism.

To disentangle what I regard as four separate objections, it will be helpful to note that Rorty’s notion of a “figure” is derived from Trilling. (So, I’ve really crossed Trilling with Trilling.) Rorty quotes the above passage from Trilling at the end of “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism. The essay is an important precursor to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and in it Rorty identifies the proclivity to figuralize with romanticism, and notes that Trilling distrusts this tendency. This distrust, Rorty says, comes from an instinctive democratic attitude. It’s the same Rousseauvian attitude that motivated Kant’s understanding of morality. Everyone, Kant thought, could act morally because morality was relatively simple. You didn’t need to study for it. So the idea that there’s “a sacred wisdom which takes precedence over the common moral consciousness” (CP 158) repulses people like Kant and Trilling. The elitism in the figularizing process is located in the “conscientious study” bit, what Trilling calls “the redemptive strenuosities of the intellectual life.” This makes whatever it is the “instructed and lively intellect” is after an esotericism, the kind of thing that breeds priesthoods.

The democratic attitude’s anti-esotericism is one source for being suspicious of figuralizing, and thus dramatic reading. Another, slightly different source is suspicion of hero-worship. One can see in hero-worship a kind of elitism, but the suspicion of heroes is more general than anti-esotericism. The Founding Fathers aren’t priests, though their image seems sacred. Esoteric priesthoods arise in response to the sacralizing process. You need a hero first, then you can have a priest. Because this suspicion of heroes is more general it has manifested itself in different ways. One important way is the movement by historians of different grades to “expose” the Founding Fathers and the myths that have clothed them. Another way, typically found in the academy, is the attitude of knowingness. Rorty calls knowingness “a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.” [8] In the academy, this knowingness often attends having some theory of human motivation: utilitarian, Freudian, Marxist, Foucauldian, etc. You always know why people really do things when you have such a theory. But sometimes it manifests itself as ironic detachment—sometimes numbed, sometimes haughty, but always dry.

7.      The suspicion of heroes that attends the historian’s exposés is motivated by a good fear of whitewashing history. The figuralizing process does move you away from the “what happened” to something we can just call “significance.” Good history needs to make that move or else all one has is a chronicle, like early tablatures of how much grain was taken in by taxes. But if you get caught up in the significance of events, you can sometimes lose your hold on those events, like a balloon having its tether cut. This is the third objection, which is pragmatic. Recall Rorty’s description of the figure as an abbreviation of a vocabulary. The pragmatic concern is that the figuralizing process tends to whitewash events and persons because you forget (or never learned) how you got to the abbreviation.

This is a real concern, just as the threat to our democratic attitudes is and heroes turning into gods are. The pragmatic concern, however, is where we see the first two concerns come into conflict. Because the only way to make sure heroes don’t turn into gods is to make sure that the historical tether stays in place. But we don’t have those tethers at our finger-tips—it requires historical work, conscientious study. [9] And so generally, returning to dramatic reading, the only way to fight against whitewashing is to read again. Rorty was often criticized for taking liberties with his figures, and I think rightly so sometimes. Sometimes you need to stop and unpack that abbreviation to make sure it’s the thing you say it is. Dramatic reading requires conscientious study because it’s the only way to form the historical sacred: heroes with warts, mysteries that aren’t mysterious because ineffable (and thus watched over by priests) but because they are difficult (and thus to be worked on by honest inquirers).

8.      Trilling’s concern was that books were being taken away from what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader.” This concern has been resurrected by anti-Theory Revolution literary critics like Harold Bloom, Robert Alter, Andrew Delbanco, and Bromwich. Trilling was worried that academic knowingness was creating distance between the books and nonacademic readers, the uninitiated. This is what’s behind my lament in section 3 that we aren’t encouraged to have personal relationships with books anymore. As scholars, we need, quite rightly, to know things about texts. But this can get in the way of why we should read the text in the first place. And this is how the unimportant technical objection to the figuralizing process comes up. It’s unimportant because it can be brushed aside, but it is important insofar as English professors are the only ones at the Altar of Humanism in the Scene of Instruction. Before I got into all this, I knew someone who’d dropped out of UW-Madison’s first tier literature program. Why? “Because I didn’t enjoy reading anymore.”

The technical objection comes up when you recall Rorty saying that ironists “treat the names of such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from saeva indignatio, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust from Marcel the narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination.” Perhaps there is no problem with Swift, Hegel, or Trilling, but identifying an author with a narrator is a big mistake we teach all students in Literature 101. The author is not the narrator, the poet is not the speaker. An older style of criticism often didn’t care, and made such identifications willy-nilly. But, technically, we need to pause before making those inferences. “The speaker” is a technical device for referring to the voice out of which the poem emits, and it’s important because identifying traits of that voice is terribly important to figuring out what the poem is about. But if you too quickly assume that the voice is the poet’s, you might import all kinds of things you know about the poet into your understanding of the poem—and it might be wrong. What if a male poet wanted to write from a female point of view? What if a typically optimistic poet wanted to write a poem that is ironically tragic, but you miss the irony because you too quickly assimilate the poem to your assumed picture of the poet?

“Narrator” and “speaker” are useful devices to check your entitlement to inferences about the author or poet from material found in their books. Rorty says the ironist is blithe about this, but the devices are important to the figuralizing process insofar as the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter might be a different figure from the one of The Marble Faun. They aren’t really, I would assert, but you won’t know that until you do the work. The trouble with many academicians, though, is that they use the technical point to implicitly block the process of figuralizing, to stop dramatic reading. Dramatic reading is difficult, and requires time, but its excesses need room to spill so the seeds of a love of reading can be sown. Getting bogged down in technical details can strangle it in the crib. It’s the how while forgetting the why, the inverse of the problem of figuralizing. This implicit blocking only makes sense in the context of an anti-romanticism. And indeed, all-too-knowing exposers of the past have run rampant over many of our studies, as if the reason to study Emerson was to expose some of the racist attitudes that still attended the prophet of self-reliance. [10] The knowing attitude wants a land without heroes, and perhaps only demons. Dramatic reading is antithetical to that.

9.      If monumental reading is about identifying with pieces and parts and dramatic reading is about identifying with the whole, then the last species of touchstone reading combines the two. I’ll call it afflictive reading. This is the kind of reading and writing that is marked by an obsessive return to the pieces and parts of a single figure. For whatever reason, returning again and again to read and relate the writings of this figure helps you identify who you are and where you are. Afflictive readers aren’t necessarily group-worshippers; they might never want or need to talk to others about their obsessions. Their imaginations are simply haunted, afflicted by the presence of this other imagination, for good or for ill, as demon or hero. Sometimes the obsession takes the form of an implicit inquiry, an extended, attenuated etiological investigation to discover just what that reason is for the obsession.

Afflictive readers, like all obsessives, can be really annoying. Talk about anything, and their obsession is bound to come up. When I was young, my High School Sunday School teacher asked us to think about what the difference was between a cult and a religion. His answer was that being in a cult meant being a member of only one group, at its limit. If Erin—our representative cheerleader—was only a cheerleader, then you might say she was in a cheerleading cult. But no, she’s a cheerleader, a Christian, a member of the Hill family, etc., etc. The spiritual affliction of a single figure can become cult-like in this way—you might only have one hero, one affliction. The best remedy for this is to read widely. Maybe you continue to return over and over to the same person or thing, but you will at least have the perspective to see better why your obsession is worth obsessing over. Hero-worship is best if it’s pantheonistic. Even if you have a Zeus, you’ll only understand why he’s Zeus by comparison with Apollo and Athena.

I’d like to think that touchstone readers with their obsessions are in some way better off than those without such obsessions. But my democratic fiber resists the thought. In colleges, we like to think we’re there to teach “critical thinking,” but when it comes down to it, critical thinking isn’t ours alone. But still...there must be value in some people being capable of long chains of inference, in some people devoting themselves to conscientious study to make sure the tethers stay in place. Jefferson and Hamilton thought education to be massively important to the democratic process, and the laments of the academic class about our continued illiteracy have to be understood as Jeffersonian expressions. [11] The fear some of us have about literature is that a formerly important instrument of self-enlargement might be passing with no replacement. It isn’t all the English professors’ fault, but some of them aren’t helping.

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Endnotes

[1] I’ll add that this made critical battles essentially philosophical battles. And philosophical battles fought by people untrained in philosophy are dangerous—like giving automatic weapons to people who haven’t been to the firing range, innocent bystanders and users alike are going to get hurt. The great always rise to the top—Stanley Fish, for example, is as philosophically sophisticated as they come, with no philosophical training. But so much of it is dreadful, and written with a brazen self-confidence that one finds awkward if one has read any philosophy at all.

[2] There are, however, hold-outs everywhere. I had several professors of history at UW-Madison as an undergrad who I would count as having held that torch, but they were largely old. Indeed, there were several political theorists in the Poli-Sci department that I would also count. The theorists were anomalous (and all fled or retired), but my experience with history professors leads me to think that history hasn’t quite left the altar. Bernard Bailyn, an eminent and aging historian, in a short pamphlet recording an extended interview, On the Teaching and Writing of History, gives me hope that undergraduate history education is happening as he teaches and thinks about it—after all, he has had many graduate students.

[3] There’s something also to be said about the production of K-12 English teachers from university English departments, and thus the relationship of what has happened at the university level to K-12 education. But my sense of this is dim, and it is further mediated by my sense that K-12 education has in general much bigger problems having to do with funding. In my experience in a School of Education, though, my sense was that the prospective English teachers—who were, after all, only going to have a B.A. in English—hardly knew who Derrida or Foucault were, and didn’t care if they did. But if you were going to get a job at the university level from 1980 on, you had better. The relationship between lower and higher education is less like trickledown than it seems like some cultural conservatives feared in the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s. (For more on the Culture Wars of recent memory, see my forthcoming “The Legacy of Group Thinking.”)

[4] For two good statements by Rorty of what happens when you treat everything, including fossils and other lumps, as a text (and how unradical at a disciplinary level such a redescription is), see the third section of “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in CP) and “Texts and Lumps” (in ORT).

[5] There’s something further to be learned about the type of person that does, then, go in for academic, humanistic study. After all, if it’s the utilitarian and pragmatic reader fulfilling short-term goals that is rewarded at the lower levels (writing papers, finishing a class), then since there are no short-term goals fulfilled by going into it as a business (i.e. money), who is it that is going into humanistic study? What kind of profile do these graduate students have? I think one answer that goes a long way to explaining why all these kinds of post-Theory Revolution alternatives to humanistic reading took off is power—some people enjoy the feel of dominating a text. (It’s similar to the feel of winning an argument.) Power is the impulse at work in the strong poet of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which for Rorty is the Shelleyan unacknowledged legislator of the world. So one explanation is that these theory-gurus started purveying strategies for dominating texts (some more unintentionally than others). The theories appear difficult on the outside, but once you get the hang of deconstruction or Foucault, it becomes easy to endlessly reapply to texts—thus, each time, giving you that high of domination. Combine that with the mid-range reward of a job for being able to do this easy thing, and you have what happened to English departments. It happened to philosophy as well, when logical positivists declared that philosophical problems were really linguistic problems—thinking that dissolving the philosophical problems would be really easy after that. However, in both cases, what gets you high easily at first becomes more difficult after a while if you take too much of it. If that isn’t precisely the case at the individual level, it is at the institutional level, with people increasingly wondering whether there’s a larger point to the activity besides the ephemeral power-high.

Power, too, seems antithetical to being friends, and that’s a deep question Rorty’s perspective opens up on the practices of reading. There’s nothing friendly about the strong poet’s approach to opening up new vistas of thought (though it is quite personal). But must we all be strong poets, and thus unfriendly? Must we be strong all of the time? The patterns I outline as touchstone reading below are something I believe are useful to all readers, and especially the amateur connoisseur who has no interest in power (or, very little at least). One might, however, in response to the impulse of power located in Rorty’s conception of the strong poet, deny the premise that power, and thus cruelty, is at the heart of our creators of new vistas of thought. The denial of this premise can be found in many post-Marxist utopic visions (those that turn away from Marx’s violence), but it is especially common in feminist thinkers. This is the line of thought in Dianne Rothleder’s book, The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity (1999). As I hope I’ve suggested, I take this to be a very fruitful line of thought to take to Rorty’s work. For example, Annette Baier’s feminism, praised by Rorty, could be brought into closer contact, like her work on the concept of trust and its masculinization through its assimilation to the contract rather than the personal relationships of a family.

However, Rothleder takes the easy route of criticism, rather than pushing Rorty to his limits. She says, “What we need to ask is why the ironist would want to redescribe others in terms that, if made public, would humiliate?” (64) The answer implicit in her discussion is power—we would do it because it makes us feel powerful. And we need that power, in Rorty’s vision, to overturn the bad in the world. Rothleder, I think, avoids saying “power” out loud, though, because she isn’t convinced that power is needed for the work of revolution (whether conceptual or political). The ironist would risk humiliating because what the ironist really wants to be is a strong poet. (Rothleder conflates the two, but that’s mainly Rorty’s fault for having deployed the terms somewhat inconsistently.) But Rothleder avoids facing the problem of utopic change without power by calling the strong poet’s impulse the “Bloomian desire to destroy otherness in order to be original” (64). That’s true, and self-centered, but that originality and cruelty might have great public utility is left unsaid. So Rothleder needs to deny the premise that change requires power, and is thus in some sense a cruel act. Instead, Rothleder focuses on the terms of cruelty and humiliation, and their forced semi-privacy in Rorty’s utopia, saying, “what is sad about the reasoning here is that the desire not to be cruel seems to come not from a goodness of heart, but from a fear of one’s own suffering” (64). Rothleder is correct here, and cites CIS 91 for evidence, but she again avoids the more promising avenue of reflection, which is that this idea isn’t Rorty’s, but the feminist political theorist Judith Shklar’s. Shklar didn’t think this was sad, but the centerpiece of liberal thinking about politics—the “liberalism of fear” (from the essay of that name, collected in her Political Thought and Political Thinkers). Rorty’s line of thought about this, whether heart or fear, is in fact more complicated than Shklar’s seems at times, because of Rorty’s commitment to moral sentimentalism. (See especially “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in Truth and Progress.)

What further stunts Rothleder’s take on Rorty is that she misses Rorty’s own tenderness over and against the power-mad strong poet. The image of Proust is juxtaposed with the power-strong Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida sequence in order to talk about the difference between a tender focus on “beauty” and a tough focus on “the sublime.” It is these passages in CIS that have gone underrecognized in attempting to understand Rorty’s strong poet and ironist, and they bear directly on practices of reading, for beauty is to friendship what sublimity is to power. Read this discussion about power against my discussion of Rorty at the beginning of “Asceticism and the Fire of the Imagination,” and particularly thinking of the line “a lyric which you recite, but do not (for fear of injuring it) relate to anything else.” I don’t talk about power there, but perpendicular issues across these central passages.

[6] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 96. Bloom did not mean just allusion, or a narrow definition of it, but something much more pregnant and difficult to make out. Reading through Arnold is one way of putting this dark line to use, though I do not think it travels as far into the darkness as Bloom wished.

[7] “Why We Read Jane Austen” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, 519

[8] “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” in AOC, 126

[9] You might wonder about the rejection of heroes entirely, which came in two flavors. I regard the form of knowingness that attends theories of human motivation as anti-democratic esotericism (did you understand Foucault right off the bat?), and so disregard them because what I’m concerned with is the attempt to be anti-esoteric with regards to people. The problem, I’m suggesting, is that it takes quite a bit of work to get to know people.

[10] Edgar Dryden lamentingly retails some of these attitudes in the recent history of Americanist criticism at the beginning of his Monumental Melville.

[11] I’ve learned most about Jefferson and the other Founders from Judith Shklar. For a review of her use of Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams, see “Shklar’s Vision of American Political Thought,” sections 5 and 6. What’s most interesting to me about the antithesis of Jefferson and Adams on education is how education comes out—as it has here—as anti-democratic in some manner, though in Hamilton’s sense education and information is what makes things more democratic. And indeed, that seems a core American democratic value—the right to education as egalitarian.

Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense

*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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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.

Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.

Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.

These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.

What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.

The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.

Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.

While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?

Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.

With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.

It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.

Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?

One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.

With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]

Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.

There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.

My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.

Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”

I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.

Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.

Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.

There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.

Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.

If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.

Endnotes

[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.