What Is Metaphysics?

Here are two definitions of metaphysics:

1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious and in some cases modify (this activity is also known in some circles as “philosophy”).

2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this activity is also sometimes known in some circles as “Platonism,” and in a few circles the acronymic “SOM”).

The above are designed for one purpose—to elaborate my position on “metaphysics,” which is Janus-faced because I have two philosophical parents. Mom (Pirsig) likes the word “metaphysics” and uses it freely to describe his philosophy. Dad (Rorty) doesn’t like the word “metaphysics,” generally because it causes headaches, and occasionally uses it to describe what he’s critiquing. What to do?

Well, it turns out that if you look closely, they are generally using two different definitions of what “metaphysics” is. With these two definitions we can split philosophers up into four groups:

A) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (1).
B) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (2).
C) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (1).
D) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (2).

Exemplars of each type:

A) Pirsig
B) Logical postivists
C) Rorty
D) Plato

The first side of the classifications, who likes which definition, is intended to display which definition of “metaphysics” people are wont to use when they are doing philosophy. The second, who does which, is intended to display—whether or not they understand themselves as doing so—which kind of metaphysics they were enacting. Hence: Pirsig likes and does the first definition and Rorty likes the second, but does the first. This happens because people who like the second definition fall into two categories: 1) unabashed Platonists/SOMists who fight against pragmatists/Pirsigians (D, above) and 2) pragmatists/Pirsigians who use “metaphysics” as the handle on which to grasp their enemy, Platonists/SOMists (C, above). Pirsig doesn’t use the word for that purpose, but I understand his purpose and so don’t get too upset what he uses the word neutrally and Rorty uses it pejoratively. (Also note the logical positivists, who thought they’d swept aside metaphysics, but were later shown to be enacting Plato’s involutions just as assuredly.)

At any rate, classifying stuff, slicing and dicing data, can be fun, but it must always be for some purpose—there is no neutrally motivated cut of the analytic knife (“neutral motivation” being in this context something of an oxymoron). Mine was to move Pirsig and Rorty together, but some questions arise as too how close that can be, and to how useful metaphysics(1) is in capturing the field of metaphysicians who aren’t Platonists. For, surely, metaphysics isn’t a turn inward, a personal investigation as metaphysics(1) seems to imply, but rather is about reality, as metaphysics(2) says. This objector may be quite noncommittal about Platonism, but they are interested in displaying the basic features of reality, not our minds or interpretive structure (or some other clever arrangement of words conveying the same thing). They are interested in creating a linguistic model of reality, much as physics creates a mathematical model of reality. These take seriously the etymological roots of “metaphysics,” noting that, alright, physics can do its thing, but metaphysicians still have to come in and mop up by noting, roughly, what makes physics possible—the structure of reality that escapes the mathematical models of physics.

This thought still seems to run in two different directions at once: in “mopping up,” does the metaphysician describe the basic structure of reality lurking behind the math, or do they describe the interrelation between physics and the rest of the world, or even, the interrelation between the disciplines that describe the world (which includes such “disciplines” as our regular effort at getting by day to day, i.e. “common sense”). After all, isn’t what escapes physics the stuff that chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc., do? Isn’t that why other disciplines got set up in the first place?

The fear of floating down the path laid out by metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward to the way that we, I, understand my relation to the world? Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, my relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the question of how our understanding relates to reality, and the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we understand it)?

The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises with the snide comment: “You seem to want to talk about how we talk about reality, but I want to talk about reality.” This is often punctuated by referencing, for example, the difference between tigers and talking about tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it be better to know about tigers, rather than how National Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how National Geographic and other professionals talk about tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a lot about the activities of zoologists without learning anything about what they study?

What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch with reality because we are focused on something other than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup called “Reality.” There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the other person believed about reality, then the communication would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more systematic anomalies might be taken to be different languages, with attendant “difficulties in translation” for persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between people might be labeled “insanity” and tremendous discontinuity is likely to be referred to as “noise.”

This is the conclusion that was reached by Donald Davidson in his work on philosophy of language, and its coordination with communication and truth. Davidson concluded that most of anyone’s beliefs must be true for communication to work—though that still leaves us in the dark about which ones are the true ones, let alone the problem of figuring out, with significant mismeasure, which person the crazy one. But Davidson’s conclusion does help dispel the Cartesian fear of solipsism—as long as communication works, we have as much certainty as we need that there is not only an External World, but also Other Minds.

So: we can investigate our understanding of reality and not fear subjectivism because it is our understanding we are investigating, most of our beliefs having been engendered by the community we grew up in, and we need not fear losing our grip on reality because this community’s understanding is its reality, in the sense, a very Darwinian one, that an understanding of the world that is around after all this time is one that works, and one that works must be one that largely teaches people how the world is.

A non-Platonist may still have some objection to metaphysics(1). After all, is not Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality more appropriately seen as a model of reality and not simply an understanding through which we see the world? Isn’t it a splicing of reality with Phædrus’ analytic knife, not just a splicing of our assumptions? The feeling behind this objection is that, yeah, investigating the way we individuals function in the world is good, but we also need an ontology, an investigation into how reality is apart from us. “You can show how reality, on the one side, and our experience of reality, on the other, must converge all you want, I think you can still talk about both of them separately and doing so will give us slightly different pieces of knowledge of the world.”

Ontology, study of the reality half of the experience/reality equation, is roughly the study of being, and it is often seen as the investigation into different kinds of being, or existence. Reading a random selection of writings on this topic over the course of the last 2,500 years will get you, not just different answers, but different kinds of answers. The metaphysical imagination has, however, been reigned in over the years, as some of its early speculations, say, in suggesting that water or fire was the root of all existence, were a little wild, indeed. In trying to circumvent all the speculative, metaphysical nonsense of preceding generations, Kant said that, rather than explain what kinds of existence there were (rather more poorly than other disciplines like the New Science), philosophy needed to show what was needed for existence to exist: what are the underpinnings, the structure that shapes the way this house exists?

There are a few problems with transcendental philosophy, but the broad thought—what has to exist for us to be able to do all of the things we are doing—is largely something that can, and should, be done. There is an infinite regress problem that arises, though, if you aren’t careful: unless a Pirsigian, for instance, is going to posit a non-physical kind of existence—which is a dangerous proposition—when somebody asks you what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, one of the few routes people feel comfortable anymore with is “it has the existence of a metaphysical proposition,” i.e. it’s something stated by people (which is Pirsig’s answer with “Western ghosts”). This, it is true, creates a circle that some people think is damaging—people need to exist for metaphysics to exist, which needs to exist for physics to exist, which needs to exist for people to exist—but pragmatists think that the circle becomes damaging and silly in equal measure: only by taking it too seriously. Part of what the word “universe” means is “that which would exist whether people do or not” and the only sense in which the universe is dependent on people is the sense in which “universe” is a word, and only people use words.

In the end, we are driven back to the Davidsonian outlook I described earlier: what we say about reality must converge with reality because there is no way we would keep saying these things if they weren’t useful, if they didn’t work, if they got reality drastically wrong. If what I said about the tiger got the tiger wrong, that way of speaking about tigers wouldn’t last. If I said, “tigers are cute and nice and love to play with me,” then I would likely get eaten upon meeting a tiger, and eventually everybody who believed that would get eaten, and thus nobody would be left thinking that about tigers. Forms of life, in Wittgenstein’s sense, evolve just as readily as biological life.

Some recalcitrant might still object, though, that just because a model of reality works doesn’t mean it is the right model, the correct model of reality. Shouldn’t we be searching for this model? Isn’t that what physics does? Since physics searches for the correct model of physical reality, shouldn’t metaphysics search for the correct model of reality in general?

The motivation behind “metaphysics,” under all definitions, but in particular those who want something more reality driven than my potted definition of metaphysics(1), is that there is more to the world, reality, and life than science. We need models of reality that display what this “more” is. This is all well and good, but the analogy with what science still displays the two sides of metaphysics, Platonic and non-Platonic. If metaphysics, like physics, is both a proliferation of hypotheses, of models, of how reality works and a winnowing of better ones, and we are willing to say with Davidson that these models do tell us how reality is, this doesn’t mean that our better and better models get closer to how reality is actually apart from our descriptions, how it should correctly be modeled. Not just Pirsig’s youthful fear of infinitely proliferating theories gets the Platonist here: how does the scientist, or metaphysician, know that he’s found the correct model, as opposed to the best one so far?

The origin of metaphysics, we say following Aristotle, was in trying to explain how reality was, like “water” (Thales) or “fire” (Anaximander) or “One” (Parmenides). The Greeks started to offer models of how reality worked. As some of the cosmologists got better and better at explaining how the “stuff” of the world worked, Plato said grandly that they were merely Giants, and that we should instead hope to be Gods. Plato saw clearly the rising tide of what we now call “science” and staked out quickly that there is more to the world than what it can tell us.

The trouble with Platonism—Plato worked out through history—is that it reduced to, not a set of hypotheses, but a method with which to tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. And since philosophy—the original inquiry—kept spinning out different disciplines that worked out according to their own particular methods the difference between a good and a bad hypothesis, philosophy had to look for a job that it could do. Platonism, distinguished carefully from philosophy/metaphysics(1), settled on looking for the way to tell the difference between a hypothesis that worked (which is what a non-philosophy discipline will tell you) and a hypothesis that is correct—a certification procedure that has itself nothing to do with, say, what physics, psychology, or history does.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between Platonism and metaphysics(1). Metaphysics seeks to investigate our models of reality because they don’t always work the greatest. For instance, some philosophers have thought that Plato was wrong, that all we need are Giants, science, physics (call some of them "logical positivists"). We have learned, however, through experimentation and the testing of models, that Plato was probably right that there was more in the world than what science can describe. But the heart of a pragmatist philosophy of science is, roughly, “Of course, there’s more in this world than what science can describe because we still need more descriptions than scientific ones.” As long as there’s an audience for baseball, there will be a need for more than physics.

Platonism wants more, however. They want to know why and how these models are correct, as opposed to just the best ones available. This aim at correctness is what Pirsig and Rorty both want to deny. Pirsig's journey in ZMM was from the contemporary Subject/Object dilemma to the more deeply rooted problem of dialectic, “the parvenu.” SOM is paradigmatic of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, but it has first been infected by the larger problem of the Platonic search for basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings to reality-as-such, a search that, given the production of individual disciplines of inquiry into how stuff in reality works (physics, psychology, history, etc.), will naturally give way to the production of a method—the dialectic. This is Pirsig's enemy in ZMM, and it is an enemy that is multifaceted in intellectual history.

Some Pirsigians think that materialism is the pernicious enemy that Pirsig was fighting with his philosophy. They believe that the growth of science was the growth of SOM, and both were the growth of our alienation from technology and, ultimately, our world. There are subtle connections between science, technology, SOM and alienation, but I don’t think Pirsig ever quite reduced SOM to what science does—SOM is an add-on to an otherwise wonderful tool called “science.”

In my view, one very general way to recapitulate the movement of ZMM is 1) Pirsig got caught in problems in the philosophy of science: what is a scientific theory? His solution was to say that a theory is a ghost generated by our evaluation of reality. 2) Pirsig got caught on the horns of the S/O Dilemma: if we have an evaluative relationship to reality, is the value in the subject or in the object? Pirsig's solution was to wonder how everything got split into subject and objects in the first place. 3) Pirsig trails the source to Plato: Plato thought there was a method, dialectic, that could detect Truth wherever it was. Pirsig sided with the Sophists who thought that Truth was an interplay of opinions, i.e. evaluations, between people.

It is the movement from (2) to (3)—or rather, history’s movement from Plato to Galileo’s science—that Pirsig leaves relatively obscure, and it hasn’t helped interpretations of him. With regard to the question of how the activity of science and the philosophical outlook of SOM relate, I would distinguish between two modern manifestations of what I’ve been calling “Platonism”: 1) scientific materialism and 2) Kantian realism. The first is the idea that science is a) the only route to Truth and b) everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. The second is the idea that a) Truth needs a foundation and b) both the mind and the world can only exist because of the other.

The Platonic common denominator of both scientific materialism and Kantian realism are contained in the (a) clauses. I would suggest that the (a) clauses can safely be detached from the (b) clauses, and that doing so eliminates the pernicious enemy Pirsig found in Plato and leaves us with two rather boring propositions. On the one hand, the first (b) clause: everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. Some may recoil, but I would pause and suggest that everything can be reduced to physical descriptions, but we also need more than just these physical descriptions to describe our world. (On reductionism generally, see my “Parable of the Reductionist”.) A metaphysical proposition can be reduced to the physical description of the breath leaving my lungs or the chemical properties of ink or the electrical properties of computer hardware, but doing so wouldn’t tell us anything about what the metaphysical proposition means and so we still would need metaphysical descriptions. The first (b) clause reduces to a bland physicalism which basically says, “Science is great, but we need more than physics to talk about what we want to talk about. Science isn’t the only Truth.” And the second (b) clause reduces to the tidy little transcendental circle I talked about earlier: people need to exist for language to exist, language needs to exist for physics to exist, physics needs to exist for people to exist.

I think the ultimate lesson to be drawn from this discussion is that it is difficult to answer the lead question: what is metaphysics? It is difficult because there have been many historical understandings of what the activity is and how it should be done. Any answer has to deal with a number of objections from slightly different understandings. The route with which I have dealt with the problem of what we are doing when we do philosophy/metaphysics is the route of finding a common enemy—it is a problem-oriented understanding of philosophical discourse. Every language has their own word for “tiger,” but somehow both the English and the French are able to deal with tigers—for the most part. Though I think there is an analogy between natural languages and the idiosyncratic philosophical jargons every particular philosopher develops in isolation from every other philosopher, I do not think everybody must be talking about the same exact thing. Davidson points towards this truth—most of our beliefs must be true, not all of them. This means that Cartesian skepticism is lame, but it does not mean that inquiry into better and better beliefs, better models of reality, must stop, or is pointless.

Philosophical discourse makes progress by assessing how individual jargons deal with the problems of reality. This problem-oriented understanding of philosophy and metaphysics allows us to see that, while Pirsig, Rorty, and Plato all talk differently, there are certain things that can be intertranslated well—and things that cannot. I have named a root that is untranslatable into the languages of Pirsig and Rorty—though they between them speak differently of it—Platonism. Seeing this root well, I think, is a precondition for understanding what more can and cannot be translated between the two, and this general process goes for philosophers generally.

Begging the Question, Moral Intuition(s), and Answering the Nazi, Part I

I mentioned to Sam in a comment that I was saving for posterity some of my old posts at the MD by reposting them (with some minor revisions) here. I consider one of my state of the art posts, one of the posts that shows where my thinking currently is abut Pirsig, to be this one, "Begging the Question." What's funny is that I can never find it in the archives when I look for it because I wrote it two and a half years ago. I'm like, "There's no way it could be from 2003." But there it is.

The difficulty with this series of posts is that my opinion hasn't changed much and I think it says something important. I've tried on several occasions to prepare to write it up as an essay, which still needs to be done, but every time I can't quite figure out how to frame it, what background is necessary. I can never quite figure out which direction to go. So it sits. But now I'll repost it with minor revisions, hopefully that will help me think about what to do with it. And of course more peer review always helps.

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One of the things that is commonly misunderstood about Rorty and pragmatism is that people think that it is irrationalist. That what we find in Rorty, particularly in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is a complete disregard for argumentation and that pragmatism in general leads to fuzzy thinking. I think this is a slight misunderstanding, or at least misleading. I think it is from a keen understanding of logic that leads Rorty to some of his conclusions about the limits of logical argumentation (or as some alarmists may put it, the limits of reason). In three parts, I hope to string together the related subjects of argumentation and morals in light of Pirsig and Rorty. Pirsig argues that his "Metaphysics of Quality" gives us a firm foundation for our moral thinking, something that stems the tide of "moral paralysis" and gives us something with which to beat the heads of our moral enemies. I would like to test the parameters of this foundation to see what exactly is being used to beat our enemies, what exactly Pirsig's philosophy gives us that he thinks is lacking from, for instance, James' pragmatism. I will first begin by exploring an important, if not the most important, argumentative fallacy--the act of begging the question.

Begging the Question
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Petitio principii, begging the question, as an informal fallacy means "the procedure of taking for granted, in a statement or argument, precisely what is in dispute" (according to Anthony Flew's fine dictionary of philosophy) or "arriving at a conclusion from statements that themselves are questionable and have to be proved but are assumed true" (according to Peter Angeles' equally fine philosophical dictionary). The technical, formal meaning of "begging the question" is "assuming the conclusion or part of the conclusion in the premises of an argument". (Angeles) This leads to circular reasoning. Circular reasoning and question begging go hand in hand. You can't argue with "All bachelors are single" because the definition of bachelor is singlehood.

In Rorty's hands, begging the question takes on a new form. John Stuart Mill said that, "if logic did not contain real inferences, all deductive reasoning would be petitio principii, a begging of the question." (Oxford Companion to Philosophy) However, this contains an element of Kantianism. Mill contrasts between verbal inferences and real inferences and this matches up to the distinction Kant drew between analytic judgements and synthetic judgements. After Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", however, it has been increasingly hard for philosophers to hold this distinction. This pans out to mean that Mill was inadvertantly right, all deductive reasoning does beg the question.

To help see what I mean by this, I'm going to give a short lesson in formal logic. This is what a logical proof looks like in formal mode:

~P, Q->P, RvQ - R

Formal logic is like algebra, except with stand-ins for propositions, rather than numbers. Each capital letter stands for a proposition, and each combination of capital letters with other symbols stand for propositions. What that line of symbols means is that you assume (i.e. they are your premises) "~P" (i.e. "not P"), "Q->P" (i.e. "if Q, then P"), and "RvQ" (i.e. "R or Q"). The "-" means that stuff on the left are your assumptions and stuff on the right is what you are trying to prove, i.e. your conclusion.

Okay, here's how the proof looks:

1. ~P ------- A (meaning Assumption)
2. Q->P ---- A
3. RvQ ----- A
4. ~Q ------ MT 1,2
("Modus Tollens" on lines 1 and 2. Why? Because if you assume "if Q, then P" and you find out "not P", that means it couldn't possibly be "Q" because if it were "Q" then it would have to be "P". And you already have "not P". That would make a contradiction.)

5. R ------- vE 3,4
("'Or' elimination" on lines 3 and 4. Why? Because "R or Q" means you must have either "R" or "Q". Since you've found out "not Q", it couldn't possibly be "Q" (that would be a contradiction) so it must be "R".)

A simple five step proof.

In Rortyan terms, the capital letters ("P", "Q", and "R") and every combination of those letters in our proof ("~P", "Q->P", "RvQ", "~Q", and "R") is our vocabulary. Our final vocabulary corresponds to our assumptions. The final vocabulary of our five-step proof was lines 1-3. We didn't ask if those assumptions were true, we assumed them and then performed logical machinations to see what our assumptions would yield us (we got both lines 4 and 5).

When Rorty talks about the shifts between vocabularies as falling outside the bounds of argumentation, he's saying that there is no argumentative way to shift the truth-value of your assumptions, because to argue is to be inside of a logical proof, so to speak. If you find that you can argue about some particular assumption, that means that there is a bigger logical proof with other assumptions working in the background, that "~P" is really the conclusion of another logical proof. Rorty's point about vocabularies is the Millian point that all argumentative reasoning is circular, that if you try and argue about an assumption, you will be led back to another proof with assumptions, and if you argued about those assumptions, you will be led further back to another proof, ad infinitum. And what will more than likely occur is that, at some point, you will start to find some of the conclusions of your first few proofs as assumptions in your later proofs. That's circular.

Given a vocabulary, given a set of assumptions (e.g. lines 1-3) you will always reach your conclusions (lines 4-5), i.e. the conclusion is implied in the set of assumptions. That means that if you don't assume the same propositions, you will not get the same conclusions. If you assume "~P", ala our 5-step proof, and I assume "P", that means I will not get "R", given the rest of the assumptions. It means I'm working in a different logic proof, a different vocabulary. And because we can't argue over the truth-value of our assumptions, because it would be hopelessly circular, we are both begging the question over each other.

This explains, for instance, the title of Rorty's first book of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty isn't simply recapitulating Dewey, or James, or Quine, or Sellars, or Davidson. He's working out the logical consequences of the vocabulary that these men have suggested that we start using, rather than this other vocabulary called "Platonic metaphysics". In Rorty's suggestion that there is no way to logically move from one vocabulary to another, he is playing out the consequences of Quine's inadvertant rendering of Mill. And in working out these consequences, he has pointed out along the way when these same people fall short of endorsing these consequences. That, in a nut shell, is what I use Rorty to do with Pirsig. Given certain assumptions in Pirsig, I find that he's a pragmatist. But Pirsig also has these other conclusions that don't seem to jive with pragmatism. So I try and tease out all of his assumptions, his entire vocabulary, and see whether they mesh, or whether we don't, in the end, end up with a series of short 5-step logical proofs and find that in Proof 8 he assumes "P" and in Proof 16 he assumes "~P".

When we look at philosophy in general, I think we will find that logical argumentation of the kind I laid out rarely, if ever, occurs between philosophers. My five-step problem is a useful heuristic, but probably only that. We typically only find logical argumentation in a book written by one philosopher. What occurs between philosophers is a long series of circumventions. One philosopher constructs an argument, another philosopher criticizes it as bearing out the wrong conclusions, and the first philosopher either capitulates (because he shares the same assumptions as the second philosopher and he did make an error of some kind) or he shifts the terms of debate from the criticizing philosopher's terms back into his own and refines his terms. Take, for instance, arguments about "post-modernism". Philosopher A says, "Post-modernism is great because it eschews metanarratives." Philosopher B says, "Post-modernism sucks because it leads to nihilism." PhA says, "No, pomo doesn't lead to nihilism because, even though it eschews metanarratives, it doesn't say that narratives do not exist." PhB says, "Yeah, but without a metanarrative, how could a narrative mean anything?" PhA says, "A narrative means something the same way a metanarrative means something. If you hold your proposition to be true, why wouldn't the metanarrative be meaningless unless there was a meta-metanarrative?" PhB says, "Because a metanarrative means the buck stops here." PhA says, "Well, that's what a narrative means. The pomo point is that our narratives aren't ahistorical like a metanarrative is supposed to be." And on and on it goes.

My point is that circumvention really isn't all that rare, that it is in fact a commonplace of communication. It only becomes important to point out when two people's vocabularies differ to such a great extent that they can't agree on anything of concern. This is the point when "begging the question" becomes an important phrase. This is the point where philosophy meets metaphilosophy. When doing philosophy, the vocabulary being used is somewhat agreed upon. Engagements are more or less in argumentative form in which the back and forth between philosophers takes the form of refinement, or small circumventions. When doing metaphilosophy, the vocabulary we should be using to do philosophy is up for grabs. Engagements more or less do not look like engagements at all, and the back and forth is in the form of explication. The circumventions are so large it becomes convenient to speak of "begging the question" and the only thing to do is describe what your position is and why you think it better. In ZMM, Pirsig is doing metaphilosophy when he suggests that we drop the SOM vocabulary and instead create a Quality vocabulary. The MoQ is his attempt at setting out what that vocabulary would look like.

What should be recognized is that in ZMM, Pirsig does not argue conclusively that we should drop SOM. He argues periodically (like his brief taking on of each of the horns of the Subject/Object Dilemma), but he typically drops these arguments because he finds the terms in which he argues are unsuitable because they are their's, they are SOM's terms. What drives Pirsig is the apparent SOM conclusion that we should "do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good." (ZMM, 368) Pirsig's key attempts at persuasion are rhetorical: he recontextualizes in an attempt to make the old picture appear inadequate and he redescribes in an attempt to paint an alternative picture that looks better than the old one.

Pirsig's major attempt at recontextualization in ZMM is his sections on Greek philosophy at the end of the book. Pirsig's first move is to set a new context for Plato's Dialogues. Are they transcripts of what Socrates and his interlocuters actually said? "When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too." (380) Pirsig's second step is to reconstitute the Sophists' reputations by pointing out that they were ambassadors. This sets up his narrative where he goes through the Homeric myths, to the pre-Socratics via Thales, Anaximenes, etc. to Parmenides and Zeno, and then to the Sophists which sets up what Socrates and Plato were up to: a historical synthesis of his predecessors. Pirsig is not arguing here that Plato is wrong, he is not dialectically engaging Plato. He is showing us that Plato's achievement in philosophy was contingent on his predecessors. Pirsig is thereby suggesting that the problems of Plato's achievement are contingent, that they can be changed by changing the problematic, changing our philosophy, changing our vocabulary.

Pirsig's alternative comes in the form of redescribing things in terms of his new vocabulary and asking us to compare the old with the new. He does this when he substitutes "Quality" in place of "Dao" in the Daodejing, (256-7) when he restructures our metaphysical hierarchy (252-3), and when he performs his Copernican inversion by suggesting that Quality sits behind subjects and objects and not the other way around. (250)

His inversion is of particular interest to us here given his description of his options in the Subject/Object Dilemma. He says that he has "three classical logical refutations" and several "illogical, 'rhetorical' ones". (232) However, his third logical refutation is to "go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices." This isn't, however, "logical" given our analysis of how logical arguments work. Going between the horns is the same as saying, "Sorry, my friendly Bozeman English faculty cohorts. You are begging the question." Pirsig is saying that he doesn't accept the Subject/Object Dilemma as a dilemma. This isn't a refutation. He didn't argue with them. He refused to answer the question because he didn't accept their terms. He shifted the debate.

On this count, his answer is rhetorical and akin to the third rhetorical option he uses, "refuse to enter the arena". However, I think there is a difference between what Pirsig calls his third classical answer and his third rhetorical answer. The difference is that the classical answer, the inversion, still sufficiently plays by enough of the rules of philosophy to count as a small circumvention, a refinement. The stark refusal to enter the arena, to take the "easy escape of mysticism" (which I would argue is not the only way to refuse entrance), would count as a large circumvention, a significant begging of the question, a call for explication. The consequence of the difference I am drawing is that Pirsig is still playing by enough of Plato's rules to count as doing philosophy in Whitehead's sense of being footnotes to Plato. He has not sufficiently disputed Plato's project to count as doing metaphilosophy. This means he could be still playing with the vocabulary of the SOM.

That Pirsig doesn't completely circumvent Plato's project doesn't mean that he is playing SOM's rules. What remains to be seen is if Pirsig's refinement of Plato's project dodges sufficiently what Pirsig takes to be the dangers of SOM. To see this, I would like to show how Pirsig attempts in some way to conflate argumentation and morality, how Pirsig tries to envision moral problems as arguable, as answerable to reason, how Pirsig wants to answer the Nazi and not simply convert him.

To Part II

Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Parable of the Reductionist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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