This was initially written from a prompt by Leela, who asked in a discussion at the MD, after suggesting that the quest for metaphysical certainty drove Pirsig to insanity, whether Pirsig achieved a comfortable equilibrium.
----------
From what little appearances we know of Robert Pirsig's life since the time of ZMM, he's been able to control the demons that left him in the corner of a Chicago apartment with cigarettes burning into his knuckles. I think the most important thing to understand about Pirsig's philosophy is the personal nature Pirsig most of the time perceives to be at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. This is the point at which we might bring up the James picture of a hallway with different doors, or an art gallery with a myriad of paintings. This, of course, makes Pirsig sound like he only half-meant the Metaphysics of Quality. Emphasizing the fact that Pirsig thought philosophy was like playing chess, rather than having a perfect set of chess moves, suggests to some Pirsigians that the system Pirsig created is trying to be ignored. The question is: how do we balance Chapter 26 of Lila, the philosophology chapter wherein Pirsig tells us how to read philosophy, with Chapter 12, the levels chapter wherein Pirsig solves a few philosophical problems with his Metaphysics of Quality?
Pirsig attempted to develop a new metaphysics not just for himself, but for others, too--everybody gets that. The Metaphysics of Quality wasn't just for Pirsig. However, the way to balance the self-other equation might be like this: the Metaphysics of Quality is Pirsig's, but the insights of the Metaphysics of Quality are for everyone.
The "comfortable resolution" of a quest can only be decided by the life lived, because that's ultimately where philosophy dumps out. I think one of the greatest passages Pirsig wrote is the gumption chapter in ZMM. In that chapter, Pirsig brought together philosophical abstraction with practical living--he showed us how he thinks his explorations of the "high country of the mind" dump out into the valleys of life. What he shows is how a mind can get trapped in certain thought-loops, like the monkey and the rice. That's what happened to Phaedrus. That's the problem with the Quest for Certainty, as Dewey named it. What Pirsig picked up are techniques for quelling the inferential machine known as the mind--that's what the art of meditation specifically helps with. Pirsig perceived (rightly I think) the modern mind as quickly skipping down a road that will eventually prove to be self-destructive to both individual and society. So Pirsig wanted to expand a different set of roads, to show how we don't need to run into dilemmas like "where is the value, in the subject or object?"
But there are many ways of avoiding certain bad trains of thought--Pirsig's one occasional fault is that he sometimes creates the appearance of yelling out alone at night. But there are a lot of intellectuals who perceive similar evils and propose useful techniques and roads of travel. The one major problem caused by Pirsig's occasional flirtation with superlative uniqueness, which we could forgive in a friend, is that it leads to inflexibility of thought in fellow-travelers. It leads people to perceive themselves as not fellow-travelers, but rather disciples. It leads to the thought that edifices of thought generated by thinkers must be either rejected or accepted wholecloth, and that disagreement with the master is a rejection of everything holy.
Pirsig became comfortable with his quest for certainty because he eventually learned how to tone down the personal ramifications for failure. I think he learned that it isn't a Quest for Certainty that the philosophical tradition is in search of an answer to, but rather a personal quest for the kinds of everyday certainties that we act out of. Phaedrus' quest in ZMM may have begun as Plato's, but Pirsig's quest in writing it down was the quest to resolve doubts about the everyday certainties that are leading to bad things. Phaedrus began with Doubt about the possibility of Certainty, but Pirsig finished with specific doubts about particular certainties. Pirsig eventually became comfortable with the line of thought he'd written down, and the kinds of life-instincts it had given him.
That others may not be comfortable with his resolution only matters insofar as what is being pointed to are limitations in the tools and insights he afforded. Philosophy is autobiographical--we are commending things we've found useful. What philosophy is not is a search for an Answer to an antecedantly posed Question, like from Reality, or some other entity that's big and powerful enough to be able to pose a question antecedantly to spatialtemporal people. Only with the latter understanding of philosophy does it make sense to "reject the MoQ," or any system. Only if one assumes that there are universally perspicuous questions that every philosophy or person must have an answer to would one think that the MoQ's success rests on its ability to please everyone. Only if one thinks there's a big universal Quest humanity is on, rather than a lot of little quests individual people are on, will one take seriously the rhetoric of "demonstration" and "proving."
Philosophy is autobiography for Pirsig, and it is best served by taking it seriously, but not too seriously.
Showing posts with label philosophy as autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy as autobiography. Show all posts
Friday, June 25, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
How Not to Start a Philosophical Conversation
I first started leaving junk I've written around the internet almost nine years ago. From the very beginning, I pasted a note at the very top of the pieces inviting thoughts to my e-mail address. They made it clear that I hardly even cared what it was you thought, just so long as you wrote me to tell me the thought. I probably sounded pretty desperate, and even now I have a note in my rightnav bar, right near the top, trying to make it as easy as possible to talk to me:
I have left my e-mail address all over the internet because I always enjoy a fresh conversation. I even have a special mailbox called "OB Letters" (titled so long ago, that I can't quite remember what it was for, though I think it was "Outta' the Blue Letters," though lately--particularly with the below--it's more like "Oh Boy Letters"). I've received many different responses over the years (indeed, a few people wanting me to do their homework), and some people who e-mailed me cold years ago still keep in touch. Everyone has their own interests, but almost everyone is willing to put their own deep, abiding interests on partial hold long enough to intersect them in some minimal way with my own, which I am willing to do to my own in return.
Almost everyone. A conversation is about linking up two different sets of interests. If no effort is made at this, it is difficult to think of what is going on as a conversation. Conversations are optional and we all have our internal barometers on the kind of time and energy we are willing to put into one. What I am about to recount is an e-mail exchange I had recently, and I'm recounting it mainly because it is funny, though--I won't lie--partly out of revenge.
This is not how you start up a conversation:
And what followed was a 1,200 word "essay," annoyingly set in 18-point font, perhaps to make it look more profound than the previous 10-point "this shit will blow your mind" prologue. Now, when I think of "essay," I think of long trains of thought connected together in a pleasing, progressive kind of way. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think of essays as at the least made up of paragraphs, where "paragraph" is defined as "spatially off-set cavalcade of words of more than one sentence." No such luck for this "essay." Each was just one sentence.
I kind of glanced through the thing, dipped my toes as it were, to get a feel for what it was. Since [blank blank] had done me the kindness of glancing at my blog, I thought I would at least return the favor. The feel went something like this:
And yet, this is "unique, altogether."
So, this is what I replied with, being the nice kind of guy I am:
A kind of "thanks, but no thanks" reply. I didn't want to berate him, because he was no doubt well-meaning, though I did want to convey the kind of thing I am looking for should he want to engage in it. I thought "soliloquy" was a nicer way of saying "monologue," which is what an essay is. And, okay, I did want to tweak his whole "unique, altogether" fantasy. But what more could you ask for from someone you've never talked to before?
Apparently, a lot more:
But other than that, yikes!, right? I don't know--[blank blank]'s just about convinced me. If only he'd thrown in a few more "profounds" and "evers," I think I might have to go back and spend some real quality time with Adi Da. I mean, if [blank blank] knows that the brief smattering of sentences in seemingly random sequence are the "most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place," then he must have some sort of special powers of clairvoyance, no doubt gained from the reading itself, to hear all the things anyone has ever said, right? And that's not even mentioning the powers needed to read everything.
[Blank blank]'s reference to meta-all-caps-philosophy, by the way, is his way of connecting what he's saying to me. That's his extended hand, the attempt to make it look like this is a conversation. I don't know...maybe I should have given him a fairer shake...he did spend all that time clicking on the first link, "Attraction to Metaphilosophy," in the first category of my rightnav bar....
Conversation about really big, abstract topics can be really interesting. Almost all philosophical conversation, whether it's about the meaning of life over a Jägerbomb or an e-mail laced with references to Aristotle, Heidegger, and Camus, are likely to be mostly articulations of our own perspectives and opinions, the kinds of things that we've found useful in the way of thinking and doing, the kinds of things that get us through the day. The conversation is best made when convergence of opinion isn't the explicit goal (though the arrogance of philosophy makes this typically an implicit goal), but rather simply an exchange of viewpoints in the hopes that something said might help the other person.
At least, that's what I've found. What do you think? (The implicit question after every single one of my posts.)
Want to get in touch with me but are too scared to universalize and eternalize your comments for all everywhere and always to see? Just e-mail me: pirsigaffliction@hotmail.comI think it is a common problem for people like me, people who like to think about really big, unanswerable questions, to find other people to talk to about them. You can't count on your friends for everything, for friends are forged in the belly of spatialtemporal happenstance. It can be very lonely. I remember even as a philosophy major, I didn't really find very interesting the people in the department, and professors have their own thing going on. When you do find someone, you tend to latch on and keep blathering for fear that if the conversation ends, it will never start up again (alcohol helps with this kind of phenomenon). The moq.org e-mail discussion group is filled with people who basically just need ears to listen (or rather, eyes to read). There's only so much one can say about Robert Pirsig and the Metaphysics of Quality before it becomes apparent that it's just one more happenstance collection of conversation partners. There's nothing wrong with this--but such a realization about the contingent nature of discussion and the sheer unfairness of such a dearth of interested partners would help relieve some of the stresses and strains that arise when people have their own lives and concerns.
I have left my e-mail address all over the internet because I always enjoy a fresh conversation. I even have a special mailbox called "OB Letters" (titled so long ago, that I can't quite remember what it was for, though I think it was "Outta' the Blue Letters," though lately--particularly with the below--it's more like "Oh Boy Letters"). I've received many different responses over the years (indeed, a few people wanting me to do their homework), and some people who e-mailed me cold years ago still keep in touch. Everyone has their own interests, but almost everyone is willing to put their own deep, abiding interests on partial hold long enough to intersect them in some minimal way with my own, which I am willing to do to my own in return.
Almost everyone. A conversation is about linking up two different sets of interests. If no effort is made at this, it is difficult to think of what is going on as a conversation. Conversations are optional and we all have our internal barometers on the kind of time and energy we are willing to put into one. What I am about to recount is an e-mail exchange I had recently, and I'm recounting it mainly because it is funny, though--I won't lie--partly out of revenge.
This is not how you start up a conversation:
Hi Matt, My name is [blank blank] from [has really big beer]. I came across your blog while browsingOkay, first: don't ever send someone an essay, particularly if the only thing you say about it to connect it to the other person who you are contacting cold, out of the blue, and without further preface, is "I saw your blog" and "this is unique, altogether." The second odd thing to notice are the "related references." What's that about? I felt like I was in an interview, and I was the interviewer. It's like walking down the street and someone accosts you with, "Yes, I would like to apply for the job--here are some phone numbers you can call who will say nice things about me." And here I didn't even know I was offering a job.
Please find a unique Understanding of Reality altogether via this essay by Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
Plus related references.
1. http://global.adidam.org/books/radical-transcendentalism.html
2. http://global.adidam.org/books/ancient-teachings.html The Ancient Reality Teachings
3. www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html Adi Da and postmodernism--Adi Da's unique Understanding of both modernism and postmodernism
4. www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm The Rebirth of Sacred Art
5. www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch1b The Body as Light[blank blank]
And what followed was a 1,200 word "essay," annoyingly set in 18-point font, perhaps to make it look more profound than the previous 10-point "this shit will blow your mind" prologue. Now, when I think of "essay," I think of long trains of thought connected together in a pleasing, progressive kind of way. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think of essays as at the least made up of paragraphs, where "paragraph" is defined as "spatially off-set cavalcade of words of more than one sentence." No such luck for this "essay." Each was just one sentence.
I kind of glanced through the thing, dipped my toes as it were, to get a feel for what it was. Since [blank blank] had done me the kindness of glancing at my blog, I thought I would at least return the favor. The feel went something like this:
Reality Itself egolessly, Indivisibly, and Divinely Is As Is—always already Prior to attention, "point of view", and ego-"I".Yikes. It even had the weird underlining (who uses underlining anymore?), with the broken "Is As Is." Really bizarre. And then there's the content--fairly typical, New Agey, post-Buddhist pseudo-sophistication. Which, ya' know...whatever--it's just not my kind of thing. I shouldn't even call it "pseudo": it is what is, and makes perfectly good sense in a certain tradition of articulation. The kind of ideas behind the stylized aphorisms, however, I truly think are the same kinds of ideas in a lot of post-structuralist thought. I may not like the quasi-metaphysical talk of "reality itself," but when everything is said and done, what the above kind of thing does is dissolve the subject/object dichotomy, which gives sense to "Reality Itself is Nothingness," and leaves the reality we mere mortals toy around with to be the relational junk pragmatists specialize in. Hence all kinds of books and essays linking Buddhism and pragmatism and Buddhism and Derrida.
Reality Itself Is Self-Evidently Divine.
Reality Itself Is The Only Divine.
Reality Itself is not a Deity.
Reality Itself is not a relation of attention, "point of view", or ego-"I".
Reality Itself—or The Divine Itself—Is The egoless and relationless Context of all-and-All.
And yet, this is "unique, altogether."
So, this is what I replied with, being the nice kind of guy I am:
Hi [blank],
Thanks for the essay, but I'm less in the market for soliloquies than I am for conversation. I'm sure the collection of aphorisms that make up the essay, well-worn and reminiscent of a large-scale trend in thinking, work quite well for most purposes, but they are not exactly the direction I usually go.
Take it easy,
[blank--I mean] Matt
A kind of "thanks, but no thanks" reply. I didn't want to berate him, because he was no doubt well-meaning, though I did want to convey the kind of thing I am looking for should he want to engage in it. I thought "soliloquy" was a nicer way of saying "monologue," which is what an essay is. And, okay, I did want to tweak his whole "unique, altogether" fantasy. But what more could you ask for from someone you've never talked to before?
Apparently, a lot more:
Hi Matt, Thankyou for your response which is really an auto-biographical self description, rather than an intelligently considered response to Adi Da's Luminous Wisdom Teaching.Okay, let me stop it right there and say, he's got me there. As it happens, I had checked my e-mail within the first hour after he'd sent it, and I think I took about 15 minutes to read, consider, and craft my reply. And considering how long it probably took him to show up on my website, find my e-mail address, and paste in his no-doubt-ready-to-go cold-call e-mail, I thought it struck just about the right parity.
Plus you could not have thoroughly considerd Adi Da's Wisdom Teaching in the less that hour in which I sent you my email.
The essay that I sent you was not a collection of aphorisms or soliloquies. It was/is the most profound essay ever written on the limiitations of ALL of our usual forms of "knowledge", whether secular or so called religious.Okay, I'm not sure what the last "aphorisms and soliloquies?" means, but I'm guessing it means that whatever is behind the link contradicts that description, though I didn't waste any of my precious time (much better spent in mocking) to find out. However, considering my dictionary tells me that an aphorism is "a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation," I wouldn't wager too much money on it. And the only reason I'm including the links is in the off chance that somebody does a search for the links and finds this page mocking this poor, errant proselytizer (I really hope [blank blank] comes back and leaves comments).
Plus Adi Da's Luminous Wisdom Teaching is the most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place.
This appreciation for instance. 1. www.kneeoflistening.com/f1-kripal.html
Or these words written by Adi Da on His Understanding of Death--easily the most extraordinary lines ever written about death
1. www.easydeathbook.com/purpose.asp aphorisms and soliloquies?
[blank]
But other than that, yikes!, right? I don't know--[blank blank]'s just about convinced me. If only he'd thrown in a few more "profounds" and "evers," I think I might have to go back and spend some real quality time with Adi Da. I mean, if [blank blank] knows that the brief smattering of sentences in seemingly random sequence are the "most profound, complete, and comprehensive META-philosophy ever written and spoken in any time and place," then he must have some sort of special powers of clairvoyance, no doubt gained from the reading itself, to hear all the things anyone has ever said, right? And that's not even mentioning the powers needed to read everything.
[Blank blank]'s reference to meta-all-caps-philosophy, by the way, is his way of connecting what he's saying to me. That's his extended hand, the attempt to make it look like this is a conversation. I don't know...maybe I should have given him a fairer shake...he did spend all that time clicking on the first link, "Attraction to Metaphilosophy," in the first category of my rightnav bar....
Hi [blank],Okay, the "good luck with that" was definitely bitchy, but what do you want from me. (And yes, the "Ladi da" was on purpose, too.)
You are quite perceptive in noting that my response was largely autobiography--I'm a human being with his own own pressures and demands, including that of being a grad student, and as an amateur philosopher I have my own conceived tasks and projects. I enjoy conversation with those who wish it, but I don't consider it good manners to simply send someone an essay and expect them to be overjoyed with the prospect of having to read and spend time considering it--I have a blog because it gives people the option of totally ignoring it. If people want to talk to me about my bog, or really anything at all, they can start a conversation by e-mailing me, but requiring me to read an essay as a prerequisite to the conversation is more than I can commit to. All due apologies. I said "soliloquy" because I thought it would be a polite way of saying, "You sent me a monologue talking about yourself, but I'm not accepting monologues just now."
I perused the essay briefly, and it does look like a collection of aphorisms to me. I don't even know why you would take that to be a slight. Nietzsche was one of the greatest philosophers of the last 200 years, and some of his best work was in the aphoristic style.
You sound very committed to the philosophy enunciated in the essay, and I'm glad you find it to be the most profound, complete, and comprehensive ever. I'm sure such satisfaction makes life's conundrums and stresses easier to bear, but I'm not unhappy with mine just now, and without any indication that dialogue rather than conversion is your goal, I'll take your opinion about Ladi Da to be autobiographical.
Good luck with that,
Matt
Conversation about really big, abstract topics can be really interesting. Almost all philosophical conversation, whether it's about the meaning of life over a Jägerbomb or an e-mail laced with references to Aristotle, Heidegger, and Camus, are likely to be mostly articulations of our own perspectives and opinions, the kinds of things that we've found useful in the way of thinking and doing, the kinds of things that get us through the day. The conversation is best made when convergence of opinion isn't the explicit goal (though the arrogance of philosophy makes this typically an implicit goal), but rather simply an exchange of viewpoints in the hopes that something said might help the other person.
At least, that's what I've found. What do you think? (The implicit question after every single one of my posts.)
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Waiting For More: Gross and Rorty
I thought about being sarcastic and urbane in writing about Neil Gross' new book on Rorty, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the obvious puns coming to mind, but the thought passed as I came to realize that Gross wrote pretty much the book he had intended to write. It is only partly a biography as Gross intends Rorty to be a case study for what Gross calls the "new sociology of ideas." Having only really heard about the book as the first biography, my expectations were for something like what Ray Monk did for Russell and Wittgenstein, though obviously not enough time had passed for something exactly like it. Given this, let me waste no more time and say upfront that if you are looking for a good biography of Rorty's life, keep waiting. This isn't what you are looking for.
I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number of persons may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.
This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.
Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. So--not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, and these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)
As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.
What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.
Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":
Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be a huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":
It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views (not only theoretical but, for instance, his comments about why he liked Princeton's graduate students). In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,
I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who are not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.
An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.
Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,
I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.
For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.
POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 2016
I was extremely gratified to have run across Bruce Kuklick's review of Gross's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 2011, and find that the abstract read: "This review argues that the biographical narrative in Gross’s book is excellent, but that its theory is silly." That is essentially the abstract I would've used, and I find it comforting a heavyweight of American intellectual history agrees with me on pretty much every point I make above. Sometimes in the academic humanities, humanists can feel, in the words of Will Ferrell in Zoolander, like they're taking crazy-pills.
I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number of persons may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.
This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.
Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. So--not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, and these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)
As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.
What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.
Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":
"Rorty sought to be more at the center of the disciplinary action and so refashioned himself as an analytic philosopher, working to bring himself to the attention of the analytic community. These efforts proved successful, allowing him to convert what was to be a temporary position at Princeton into a tenure-track post and giving him new network connections that made possible his further ascent in the disciplinary status structure." (13)All I can think is that, while all basically true enough, this is quite the effort to use some expensive, theoretical tools for obvious, commonsensical junk that everyone already understands. I can just imagine conservatives seeing this as an indictment, because Gross' subject is Rorty, against post-modern, sophistical relativists, but all Gross is saying is that to get tenure, you have to impress the people giving it out. And to do that, you have to talk about what they think it is important to talk about. This doesn't seem insidious to me, as it might to some who haven't really thought much about cultural reproduction, but it also doesn't strike me as something path-breaking. Is the sociology of knowledge really in such a state?
Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be a huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":
"that the shift in Rorty's thought from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist reflected a shift from a career stage in which status considerations were central to one in which self-concept considerations became central." (15)I would certainly agree that there was a shift, and one thing that Gross' digging suggests is that the financial difficulties his parent's struggled during his childhood left an impression on Rorty, which in part explains the energy with which he pursued retooling from, roughly, a metaphysician to an analytic philosopher (and the fact that he was trained by McKeon explains how he could do so without a significant change in his identity as an intellectual). But everyone knows that Rorty suffered a shift of some sort because he did it on an international stage. Gross' thesis is still too reductionistic, and in fact I think it may get Rorty wrong. I think Rorty may indeed have liked having the high status of an "important philosopher" at Princeton, the number one program in the country, but nothing Gross offers as evidence really solidifies 1) status considerations as ever being central and 2) that self-concept struggles didn't guide in a significant way his behavior at all stages.
It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views (not only theoretical but, for instance, his comments about why he liked Princeton's graduate students). In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,
"well positioned in a variety of intellectual networks, may have been better able to anticipate what the book's reception would be. In an environment where many humanists were coming to have their doubts about the new rigorism, there would be tremendous interest in a book--particularly one written by an insider--that used 'rigorous' arguments to make a case for why foundationalist versions of analytic philosophy, and by implication its cognates in other fields, were ill conceived. That Rorty may have realized there would be such interest helps explain why he was eager to write the book and, perhaps--with the idea in mind of eventually accumulating status by writing it--why he allowed himself to drift more out of an analytic orbit over the course of the 1970s." (315)This strikes me as just wrong. In the first case, there was no evidence presented that I read to support that Rorty anticipated PMN's positive reception by non-philosophers, and in fact Rorty's said quite a few times in interviews that it still boggled his mind even years after. In the second, it is possible that Rorty may have thought that the book he was writing might help leverage him into a position outside of Princeton, but I certainly don't think it prompted its writing--when Rorty says he was surprised it's because PMN really is an insider book for insiders, written to continue an insider's conversation.
I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who are not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.
An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.
Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,
"The theory of intellectual self-concept helps us better explain the intellectual choice at hand. Rorty's time at Chicago occurred during prime identity formation years in his life course and was a period when he was making the transition from one institutional affiliation to another. The institution with which he had been most closely affiliated as a child and young adolescent--his family--had all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation." (304)I think the really difficult thing would be to find a family that doesn't have "all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation."
I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.
For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.
POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 2016
I was extremely gratified to have run across Bruce Kuklick's review of Gross's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 2011, and find that the abstract read: "This review argues that the biographical narrative in Gross’s book is excellent, but that its theory is silly." That is essentially the abstract I would've used, and I find it comforting a heavyweight of American intellectual history agrees with me on pretty much every point I make above. Sometimes in the academic humanities, humanists can feel, in the words of Will Ferrell in Zoolander, like they're taking crazy-pills.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Reading Pirsig as a Philosopher
Let me begin with a division: there are two kinds of readers of Pirsig--those who are attracted to Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and those who are attracted Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. While being imperfect, as all such generalizations are, it has the benefit of highlighting one particular tension in Pirsig's works, that between literature and philosophy. The two are often opposed in the philosophical tradition, so it becomes a sort of standing question for all to attend to as to why Pirsig chose the route he did in presenting his philosophy the way he did. The kinds of answers deployed by fans and interpreters range from the more practical, utilitarian (e.g., "you can't write a dissertation for the mass the way they are written for PhD supervisors") to the more theoretical, conceptual (e.g., "he was making a point about the distinction between philosophy and literature"). But either way, we are confronted with the particular ways in which Pirsig deployed his philosophy and, either way, the literary quality of Pirsig's books make for the pulling out of philosophical theses difficult and dangerous work. And what's more, I think that's intended.
When I read others about Pirsig, I find less interesting the attempts to reconstruct the systematic structure of the MoQ. Questions asked about the layout of the levels of static quality, about the interrelation of the social and intellectual levels, about how exactly Dynamic Quality functions in relation to static, these questions can be important, or at least reach a level of some importance, but I question the desire to construct a systematic metaphysics out of Pirsig's writings. Pirsig's writings are the way they are precisely because Pirsig doesn't want to simply create a metaphysics. That would simply be at the intellectual level, to use Pirsig's own terminology, when the point of both books is to present all the facets together to show that all of them are needed.
To hearken back to that old cliche, about losing sight of the forest in the midst of the trees, I fear in study of systems of propositions the loss of sight of the forest of life. We are the entire forest of static patterns, inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual, not just a metaphysics, not just a thirty-thousand-page menu. Pursuing philosophy, which we can broadly call the pursuit of wisdom and seeing how things hang together, fits naturally with the forest metaphor: seeing how our forest hangs together brings us wisdom, particularly as we try and change the forest (which is the DQ/SQ dynamic).
So, pursuing simply a Metaphysics of Quality may be helpful, but it isn't the whole thing (as many would, and certainly should, acknowledge). The whole thing is the living of life, which the breaking into parts, pursuing philosophy, analysis, a metaphysics, may help us to see. When we write about Pirsig as a systematic metaphysician, I think we tend to lose sight of the pragmatic effect of metaphysics. What might be called "literary reading," on the other hand, tends to be more self-consciously contextual then the kind of writing that Pirsig describes in ZMM: "The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance." (ZMM, 172) We should read Pirsig with all their rhetorical tools and tropes and metaphors and analogies and excavate their meaning and significance that way (which is really the only way anyways, but that's another debate). And I think, it would seem, Pirsig would say that that would be the best way to do it, because otherwise you lose sight of the whole.
I'd now like to offer a few very general readings of ZMM, in the hopes of supporting some of the things I've said so far. I think the way to read the book is as a philosophical dialogue the same way as Plato's dialogues are read, but even more complicated (if that's possible). Despite the fact that we know Socrates is the hero, what we don't know, because of Socratic irony, is what Socrates means. Many have read irony to mean the simple contradiction of what is said. Alexander Nehamas, though (in his brilliant book, The Art of Living), argues that irony isn't as easy as all that. Irony completely hides the direction of meaning, so you don't know whether a basic, contradictory 180 is intended, or something completely other. (And, to make matters worse, it is hidden not only from the audience, but from the ironist themselves.) So the philosophy of Socrates is always obscured, behind a curtain, never available for direct scrutiny. You can only see it out of the corner of your eye because wherever Socrates is pointing is not the direction he necessarily wants you looking.
I would argue that the same thing is going on in ZMM except, unlike the Platonic dialogues, we don't even know who the hero is until the end, and even then you are left wondering if we should think that. The book is soaked in allegory and irony and the author's point of view is only available out of the corner of your eye. It is written to be a philosophical journey, a journey that takes you through a set of hoops and stages but has no definite end point. It is designed to make you think, but not necessarily about any particular thing, let alone any particular way. So Pirsig is both all of the views and none of the views of ZMM. And I think this type of reading is going on in Lila, too, though the book isn't nearly so cleverly or fantastically crafted (much as Plato lost his craft as you move from the early to the later dialogues, though for another reflection on this topic, see "Prospectus for an Idiosyncratic and Possibly Controversial Reading of Lila").
So reading ZMM for doctrinal points, for philosophical theses, is fraught with peril as you are never sure what Pirsig means. All you have is the Narrator's presentation, but by the middle of the book you are led to wonder who's in control of the show (having learned of Phaedrus' real identity), and by the end of the book, after Phaedrus' triumphant return, you are led to wonder at what point Phaedrus began to dominate the Narrator, and so the presentation of the book itself. What we are left with, I think, are a clear series of philosophical episodes that start by being dominated by the Narrator, but are gradually replaced by Phaedrus' concerns, so "Narrator sections" (like the section on gumption) come fewer and fewer, until you reach the end of the book which is an extended meditation on Phaedrus' experience in Chicago.
As I mentioned earlier, the most complicated feature of this whole model is that while reading we don't know who the hero is, Narrator or Phaedrus. The Narrator through the beginning half of the book makes Phaedrus look like the bad guy, but through our extended ponderings over Phaedrus' demise we are made to feel sympathetic for Phaedrus which leads us to view Phaedrus as the hero, which reflects in the book by Phaedrus' triumph. The way ZMM is written is to have us move in stages through our feelings for the Narrator and Phaedrus, with the action in the book unfolding as a reflection of our feelings towards the preceding action. As our feelings for Phaedrus wax, so does his dominance in the story.
This, of course, brings us to the perplexing and infinitely interesting conclusion that the real audience of the story is the Author himself, not knowing how the book is going to end until he gets there because he is taking the journey with us, witnessing the events again as we see them for the first time, but the journey he is on is a psychical one. By creating "the Narrator" as a fallible, perspectivized character in Pirsig's own autobiographical story, rather than a traditional, omniscient narrator, the knowing autobiographer telling his own story, we get a third character, "the Author," reading the events as he writes them, trying to figure out his life by telling the story. The Author changes as the story unfolds, but that is the point for us also: we are supposed to change through the story. But because of the obfuscating mask of irony, the change intended is hidden not only from us but from the Author.
I would suggest that we should read ZMM as having three main characters, the Narrator, Phaedrus, and the Author, and we should read them in the fashion of Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer (which is from Plato's Phaedrus and Pirsig touches on it briefly in ZMM): two separate horses, both at war with each other, pulling the chariot in two different directions (though not necessarily completely in opposite directions; think of the physical description of a chariot allegorically and then remember that, as Nehamas argues, irony does not mean that a statement means the opposite of what it says, but simply something different) and the charioteer is trying to find a mean course between the two. The Narrator and Phaedrus are warring over the Author's mind.
Now, Pirsig says that the difference between the Narrator and Phaedrus is the difference between social and intellectual patterns. I think this a bad description. I think a better description (as I suggest in "Confessions") is between the Pragmatist Impulse and the Metaphysical Impulse. These impulses take two forms, one theoretical and one practical. On the theoretical level, the level at which these two impulses take on philosophical garb and become themselves philosophical positions, these two positions are oil and water--they are the warring factions between Protagoras and Plato, rhetoric and dialectic. On this level, Pirsig must be a pragmatist, for if a metaphysician he falls into self-contradiction.
On the practical level, however, we see the actual efforts of Protagoreans and Platonists and the kinds of real life considerations that conspire to make us one or the other. This is the difference between Pirsig's Coleridgean splicing between Platonist and Aristotelian--one focused on generalities, as supposedly the Metaphysician is, the other on particularities, as supposedly the Pragmatist is. The thing about a philosophical position, of course, is that it doesn't come with a focus--only people do. This is the great muddle--we can separate out logically distinct positions, but when it comes to action, the carrying out of beliefs, the living of life, it becomes sometimes quite difficult to tell what the connection is between being a Platonist and professing Platonism. Take the simple, obvious and sometimes overlooked (for the purposes of getting on with professing) contradiction of Plato's hatred of poetry and his poetic practice. Pirsig notes the lifeless quality of essays, preaching on in a void like God, but what could be more omniscient in position than Plato's Forms and more situational life-like than the Dialogues?
These are tangled webs that I can only approach for the moment, but the parallel between Plato and Pirsig should be obvious: on the other end of Plato's knotted theory/practice relationship is Pirsig's knot. Plato bequeathed to us the battle between philosophy and poetry and still to this day many philosophers still take that battle quite seriously. Literature is still looked on by many philosophers as something quite different than philosophy. The question must be confronted: what does it mean for Pirsig to write the way he does?
-----
This was created out of a post in the currently defunct MF ("MoQ Focus") discussion group written in May, 2005. It was originally written in the midst of a beneficial discussion with Rick Budd and Sam Norton.
When I read others about Pirsig, I find less interesting the attempts to reconstruct the systematic structure of the MoQ. Questions asked about the layout of the levels of static quality, about the interrelation of the social and intellectual levels, about how exactly Dynamic Quality functions in relation to static, these questions can be important, or at least reach a level of some importance, but I question the desire to construct a systematic metaphysics out of Pirsig's writings. Pirsig's writings are the way they are precisely because Pirsig doesn't want to simply create a metaphysics. That would simply be at the intellectual level, to use Pirsig's own terminology, when the point of both books is to present all the facets together to show that all of them are needed.
To hearken back to that old cliche, about losing sight of the forest in the midst of the trees, I fear in study of systems of propositions the loss of sight of the forest of life. We are the entire forest of static patterns, inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual, not just a metaphysics, not just a thirty-thousand-page menu. Pursuing philosophy, which we can broadly call the pursuit of wisdom and seeing how things hang together, fits naturally with the forest metaphor: seeing how our forest hangs together brings us wisdom, particularly as we try and change the forest (which is the DQ/SQ dynamic).
So, pursuing simply a Metaphysics of Quality may be helpful, but it isn't the whole thing (as many would, and certainly should, acknowledge). The whole thing is the living of life, which the breaking into parts, pursuing philosophy, analysis, a metaphysics, may help us to see. When we write about Pirsig as a systematic metaphysician, I think we tend to lose sight of the pragmatic effect of metaphysics. What might be called "literary reading," on the other hand, tends to be more self-consciously contextual then the kind of writing that Pirsig describes in ZMM: "The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance." (ZMM, 172) We should read Pirsig with all their rhetorical tools and tropes and metaphors and analogies and excavate their meaning and significance that way (which is really the only way anyways, but that's another debate). And I think, it would seem, Pirsig would say that that would be the best way to do it, because otherwise you lose sight of the whole.
I'd now like to offer a few very general readings of ZMM, in the hopes of supporting some of the things I've said so far. I think the way to read the book is as a philosophical dialogue the same way as Plato's dialogues are read, but even more complicated (if that's possible). Despite the fact that we know Socrates is the hero, what we don't know, because of Socratic irony, is what Socrates means. Many have read irony to mean the simple contradiction of what is said. Alexander Nehamas, though (in his brilliant book, The Art of Living), argues that irony isn't as easy as all that. Irony completely hides the direction of meaning, so you don't know whether a basic, contradictory 180 is intended, or something completely other. (And, to make matters worse, it is hidden not only from the audience, but from the ironist themselves.) So the philosophy of Socrates is always obscured, behind a curtain, never available for direct scrutiny. You can only see it out of the corner of your eye because wherever Socrates is pointing is not the direction he necessarily wants you looking.
I would argue that the same thing is going on in ZMM except, unlike the Platonic dialogues, we don't even know who the hero is until the end, and even then you are left wondering if we should think that. The book is soaked in allegory and irony and the author's point of view is only available out of the corner of your eye. It is written to be a philosophical journey, a journey that takes you through a set of hoops and stages but has no definite end point. It is designed to make you think, but not necessarily about any particular thing, let alone any particular way. So Pirsig is both all of the views and none of the views of ZMM. And I think this type of reading is going on in Lila, too, though the book isn't nearly so cleverly or fantastically crafted (much as Plato lost his craft as you move from the early to the later dialogues, though for another reflection on this topic, see "Prospectus for an Idiosyncratic and Possibly Controversial Reading of Lila").
So reading ZMM for doctrinal points, for philosophical theses, is fraught with peril as you are never sure what Pirsig means. All you have is the Narrator's presentation, but by the middle of the book you are led to wonder who's in control of the show (having learned of Phaedrus' real identity), and by the end of the book, after Phaedrus' triumphant return, you are led to wonder at what point Phaedrus began to dominate the Narrator, and so the presentation of the book itself. What we are left with, I think, are a clear series of philosophical episodes that start by being dominated by the Narrator, but are gradually replaced by Phaedrus' concerns, so "Narrator sections" (like the section on gumption) come fewer and fewer, until you reach the end of the book which is an extended meditation on Phaedrus' experience in Chicago.
As I mentioned earlier, the most complicated feature of this whole model is that while reading we don't know who the hero is, Narrator or Phaedrus. The Narrator through the beginning half of the book makes Phaedrus look like the bad guy, but through our extended ponderings over Phaedrus' demise we are made to feel sympathetic for Phaedrus which leads us to view Phaedrus as the hero, which reflects in the book by Phaedrus' triumph. The way ZMM is written is to have us move in stages through our feelings for the Narrator and Phaedrus, with the action in the book unfolding as a reflection of our feelings towards the preceding action. As our feelings for Phaedrus wax, so does his dominance in the story.
This, of course, brings us to the perplexing and infinitely interesting conclusion that the real audience of the story is the Author himself, not knowing how the book is going to end until he gets there because he is taking the journey with us, witnessing the events again as we see them for the first time, but the journey he is on is a psychical one. By creating "the Narrator" as a fallible, perspectivized character in Pirsig's own autobiographical story, rather than a traditional, omniscient narrator, the knowing autobiographer telling his own story, we get a third character, "the Author," reading the events as he writes them, trying to figure out his life by telling the story. The Author changes as the story unfolds, but that is the point for us also: we are supposed to change through the story. But because of the obfuscating mask of irony, the change intended is hidden not only from us but from the Author.
I would suggest that we should read ZMM as having three main characters, the Narrator, Phaedrus, and the Author, and we should read them in the fashion of Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer (which is from Plato's Phaedrus and Pirsig touches on it briefly in ZMM): two separate horses, both at war with each other, pulling the chariot in two different directions (though not necessarily completely in opposite directions; think of the physical description of a chariot allegorically and then remember that, as Nehamas argues, irony does not mean that a statement means the opposite of what it says, but simply something different) and the charioteer is trying to find a mean course between the two. The Narrator and Phaedrus are warring over the Author's mind.
Now, Pirsig says that the difference between the Narrator and Phaedrus is the difference between social and intellectual patterns. I think this a bad description. I think a better description (as I suggest in "Confessions") is between the Pragmatist Impulse and the Metaphysical Impulse. These impulses take two forms, one theoretical and one practical. On the theoretical level, the level at which these two impulses take on philosophical garb and become themselves philosophical positions, these two positions are oil and water--they are the warring factions between Protagoras and Plato, rhetoric and dialectic. On this level, Pirsig must be a pragmatist, for if a metaphysician he falls into self-contradiction.
On the practical level, however, we see the actual efforts of Protagoreans and Platonists and the kinds of real life considerations that conspire to make us one or the other. This is the difference between Pirsig's Coleridgean splicing between Platonist and Aristotelian--one focused on generalities, as supposedly the Metaphysician is, the other on particularities, as supposedly the Pragmatist is. The thing about a philosophical position, of course, is that it doesn't come with a focus--only people do. This is the great muddle--we can separate out logically distinct positions, but when it comes to action, the carrying out of beliefs, the living of life, it becomes sometimes quite difficult to tell what the connection is between being a Platonist and professing Platonism. Take the simple, obvious and sometimes overlooked (for the purposes of getting on with professing) contradiction of Plato's hatred of poetry and his poetic practice. Pirsig notes the lifeless quality of essays, preaching on in a void like God, but what could be more omniscient in position than Plato's Forms and more situational life-like than the Dialogues?
These are tangled webs that I can only approach for the moment, but the parallel between Plato and Pirsig should be obvious: on the other end of Plato's knotted theory/practice relationship is Pirsig's knot. Plato bequeathed to us the battle between philosophy and poetry and still to this day many philosophers still take that battle quite seriously. Literature is still looked on by many philosophers as something quite different than philosophy. The question must be confronted: what does it mean for Pirsig to write the way he does?
-----
This was created out of a post in the currently defunct MF ("MoQ Focus") discussion group written in May, 2005. It was originally written in the midst of a beneficial discussion with Rick Budd and Sam Norton.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Diablerie: Paying Tribute to Richard Rorty
On Friday, June 8th, I read Stanley Cavell on Emerson and saw that America was the heart and soul of Emerson. On Saturday I read Harold Bloom on Emerson and saw that Emerson was the voice and mind of America. On Sunday, the seventh day, I rested. On Monday I summoned the most strength I had yet achieved and moved on Rorty’s appropriation of Romanticism, shattering it in a display of declared superiority by changing the name to post-Emersonian (admittedly not an earth shattering shift in philosophical policy, and sadly a mimic of Rorty’s shift from post-modernism to post-Nietzschean, and for the exact same reasons).
On Tuesday I learned that on Friday Richard Rorty had passed away due to complications with pancreatic cancer.
I’m not sure what one is supposed to feel about the death of someone you’ve never met. Certainly there is the general felt loss of life, any life, the empathy for his family and friends. But I received e-mails from friends and acquaintances, many assuming they were telling me something I already knew, a few offering condolences. I didn’t know and I didn’t know how to feel.
How does one feel when one loses a writer?
We have the writer’s books, we continue to have what we had before, the only links we readers have to our writers. What do we lose, what did I lose?
Most of the obituaries are classically wrong about Rorty in the way that outsiders aren’t quite sure how to handle the fire that incenses the insiders. But they performed their duties, their function, admirably well, proliferating snapshots of his life and work. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were his grand works, but his voice remained in the essay, a balance between cunning completion and impatience. Throughout his life Rorty struggled with two daemons, the desire to argue and the desire to be interesting. These arose, like it does in most, in the dynamic between professional and amateur. With his professional face he gained considerable street cred with tightly argued articles on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, though he spent a large amount of time on metaphilosophy, an often neglected angle of presentation in analytic philosophy. His metaphilosophical reflections are where the trouble started, at least from the professional, analytic establishment’s point of view. Metaphilosophy, or talking about how we talk about philosophy, is troublesome because there are hardly any rules for how we should talk about how we should talk.
These reflections are where Rorty’s second muse began bucking for attention. Raising its head in witty cappers on solid arguments, they captivated in their audacity. They worked against professional decorum, the professional attitude of saying no more than what is dialectically allowed. But the amateur attitude is that boredom is a bigger enemy and that the conversation needs to move forward. Rorty balanced in his writing his pure professional face and his professional amateur face, the classic philosophical gadfly. Not an amateur professional as G. E. Moore is sometimes said to have been, charming but not really knowing what everyone else is talking about, but a professional amateur, a line that begins with Socrates, continues to Montaigne and Emerson and on to Bloom and Cavell, and Rorty could not control, though he could restrain, his muse because his muse was the only sense he had that he was going in the right direction.
But how should we feel when we lose a writer? Most of Rorty’s writings had long become transparent to me, disappearing on the page as they’d already become a part of me. In a certain (though pregnant) sense, I know Rorty’s mind better than my own. A few lines here and there, and the best of his essays, are still opaque, still breathing, robust and unflagging in their hidden energy, the hidden source of their power, like few philosophers have had the courage to summon and sustain. For better or for worse, Rorty was a hedgehog, and if he remains a bit foxy to me, the attraction is no doubt incumbent upon the vitality of that one big idea, not exactly his, but endlessly resuscitated, repeated, and reformulated. It is a bit unclear what that big idea is, but I suspect that is mainly because it is unfinished and I suspect it sometimes goes by the name of “America.”
One of Rorty’s most often attacked lines aims directly at this idea: “truth is whatever your peers let you get away with”. The line is quoted so often because it seems on its face so frivolous and cynical, representative of everything that is wrong with Rorty and quoted lovingly by every detractor, just as it is, a gift from Rorty showing his true colors, mocking everything holy. Every time I see detractors jump all over the line, I think, “No, no, he’s not saying something horrible. He’s adding a little speed to the notion that peers aren’t going to let you get away with just anything. It needs to be good!” The line has everything in common with more tempered ones like “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers,” “All that can be done to explicate ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘morality’, ‘virtue’ is to refer us back to the concrete details of the culture in which these terms grew up and developed,” and “…‘method’ and ‘rationality’ are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one’s fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation.” Glossing the line with the others, it’s hard to see what’s so wrong with it. It is neither frivolous nor cynical, though on the other hand it is a tad mocking of the holy, at least that which most analytic philosophers still consider holy.
I will miss Rorty’s jocular teasing, his poking and prodding at the midriffs of philosophers, and I will miss, when they became testy and angry and cried out that they think this is serious, how he would calmly, and with a sad smile, shake his head and reply, “I know, I know my child. But so am I.” I will miss Rorty’s wit and verve, but there is nothing left from him that I wish to know, and that is only because, as he well knew, what we know isn’t what is exciting, isn’t what is worth knowing. I look forward to the posthumous material, I hope he was able to finish his replies to his forthcoming volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, but what I look for, and what I’m saddened we will no longer have the opportunity to wait for, are what Pater called those hardened bits of gemlike flame, the things that give us sustenance, the ideas that we mine seemingly forever.
The most important lesson that Rorty taught me was that writing, and in particular philosophy, is vampirism. The old cliché must be amended in a Bloomian way: good writers borrow, great writers steal, but the genius makes us think that she is the authentic originator, having been so effective at stealing her predecessors’ life blood. I have no questions for Rorty, nothing I wish to know. I have no questions for anybody because they are only tools for me—I don’t care about getting you right, preserving the aura you’ve created, I only care about stealing your strength, creating something new and better. Emerson’s heirs don’t care to mummified, embalmed for future generations to stare glazed eyed at. They don’t want schools or disciples. They only wish for what they did to be returned to them—ritually sacrificed at the height of their powers, diabolized in a frenzy by the young so that they may live on in the young, not stuffed and propped up behind exhibit windows to be looked at by the young.
When a writer dies, when your writer dies, you weep for the person, you weep for their family and loved ones, but more than any of that, you weep for the power they might have unleashed upon the Earth, potentially changing it irrevocably, a power you could have usurped for your own.
The young vamps are gathering now and the fight begins in earnest.
On Tuesday I learned that on Friday Richard Rorty had passed away due to complications with pancreatic cancer.
I’m not sure what one is supposed to feel about the death of someone you’ve never met. Certainly there is the general felt loss of life, any life, the empathy for his family and friends. But I received e-mails from friends and acquaintances, many assuming they were telling me something I already knew, a few offering condolences. I didn’t know and I didn’t know how to feel.
How does one feel when one loses a writer?
We have the writer’s books, we continue to have what we had before, the only links we readers have to our writers. What do we lose, what did I lose?
Most of the obituaries are classically wrong about Rorty in the way that outsiders aren’t quite sure how to handle the fire that incenses the insiders. But they performed their duties, their function, admirably well, proliferating snapshots of his life and work. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were his grand works, but his voice remained in the essay, a balance between cunning completion and impatience. Throughout his life Rorty struggled with two daemons, the desire to argue and the desire to be interesting. These arose, like it does in most, in the dynamic between professional and amateur. With his professional face he gained considerable street cred with tightly argued articles on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, though he spent a large amount of time on metaphilosophy, an often neglected angle of presentation in analytic philosophy. His metaphilosophical reflections are where the trouble started, at least from the professional, analytic establishment’s point of view. Metaphilosophy, or talking about how we talk about philosophy, is troublesome because there are hardly any rules for how we should talk about how we should talk.
These reflections are where Rorty’s second muse began bucking for attention. Raising its head in witty cappers on solid arguments, they captivated in their audacity. They worked against professional decorum, the professional attitude of saying no more than what is dialectically allowed. But the amateur attitude is that boredom is a bigger enemy and that the conversation needs to move forward. Rorty balanced in his writing his pure professional face and his professional amateur face, the classic philosophical gadfly. Not an amateur professional as G. E. Moore is sometimes said to have been, charming but not really knowing what everyone else is talking about, but a professional amateur, a line that begins with Socrates, continues to Montaigne and Emerson and on to Bloom and Cavell, and Rorty could not control, though he could restrain, his muse because his muse was the only sense he had that he was going in the right direction.
But how should we feel when we lose a writer? Most of Rorty’s writings had long become transparent to me, disappearing on the page as they’d already become a part of me. In a certain (though pregnant) sense, I know Rorty’s mind better than my own. A few lines here and there, and the best of his essays, are still opaque, still breathing, robust and unflagging in their hidden energy, the hidden source of their power, like few philosophers have had the courage to summon and sustain. For better or for worse, Rorty was a hedgehog, and if he remains a bit foxy to me, the attraction is no doubt incumbent upon the vitality of that one big idea, not exactly his, but endlessly resuscitated, repeated, and reformulated. It is a bit unclear what that big idea is, but I suspect that is mainly because it is unfinished and I suspect it sometimes goes by the name of “America.”
One of Rorty’s most often attacked lines aims directly at this idea: “truth is whatever your peers let you get away with”. The line is quoted so often because it seems on its face so frivolous and cynical, representative of everything that is wrong with Rorty and quoted lovingly by every detractor, just as it is, a gift from Rorty showing his true colors, mocking everything holy. Every time I see detractors jump all over the line, I think, “No, no, he’s not saying something horrible. He’s adding a little speed to the notion that peers aren’t going to let you get away with just anything. It needs to be good!” The line has everything in common with more tempered ones like “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers,” “All that can be done to explicate ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘morality’, ‘virtue’ is to refer us back to the concrete details of the culture in which these terms grew up and developed,” and “…‘method’ and ‘rationality’ are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one’s fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation.” Glossing the line with the others, it’s hard to see what’s so wrong with it. It is neither frivolous nor cynical, though on the other hand it is a tad mocking of the holy, at least that which most analytic philosophers still consider holy.
I will miss Rorty’s jocular teasing, his poking and prodding at the midriffs of philosophers, and I will miss, when they became testy and angry and cried out that they think this is serious, how he would calmly, and with a sad smile, shake his head and reply, “I know, I know my child. But so am I.” I will miss Rorty’s wit and verve, but there is nothing left from him that I wish to know, and that is only because, as he well knew, what we know isn’t what is exciting, isn’t what is worth knowing. I look forward to the posthumous material, I hope he was able to finish his replies to his forthcoming volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, but what I look for, and what I’m saddened we will no longer have the opportunity to wait for, are what Pater called those hardened bits of gemlike flame, the things that give us sustenance, the ideas that we mine seemingly forever.
The most important lesson that Rorty taught me was that writing, and in particular philosophy, is vampirism. The old cliché must be amended in a Bloomian way: good writers borrow, great writers steal, but the genius makes us think that she is the authentic originator, having been so effective at stealing her predecessors’ life blood. I have no questions for Rorty, nothing I wish to know. I have no questions for anybody because they are only tools for me—I don’t care about getting you right, preserving the aura you’ve created, I only care about stealing your strength, creating something new and better. Emerson’s heirs don’t care to mummified, embalmed for future generations to stare glazed eyed at. They don’t want schools or disciples. They only wish for what they did to be returned to them—ritually sacrificed at the height of their powers, diabolized in a frenzy by the young so that they may live on in the young, not stuffed and propped up behind exhibit windows to be looked at by the young.
When a writer dies, when your writer dies, you weep for the person, you weep for their family and loved ones, but more than any of that, you weep for the power they might have unleashed upon the Earth, potentially changing it irrevocably, a power you could have usurped for your own.
The young vamps are gathering now and the fight begins in earnest.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
What is Quality?
In my endless pursuit for Pirsig material, I once stumbled upon a book that contained a number of small reflections by authors on what books affected them the most. Pirsig was there and his answer, as befitting a man choked by the anxiety of influence, was fairly vague. The really interesting find in the book was when I went to the index and checked to see if anyone had chosen ZMM as their book. And lo’ and behold, there was someone. I don’t remember his name (I’m currently bereft of my materials), but he wrote that he was deeply affected after reading ZMM, but he couldn’t remember how. He just remembered that after reading it he felt as if a veil had been lifted.
I think a lot of people have had that same experience with Pirsig. In my own experience, most Baby Boomers, if they haven’t read ZMM, have at least heard of it, though most of them don’t remember much of what the book was about. Even many kids in my generation (yes, I still retain the right to call myself a kid) have read or heard of ZMM. But why, if the book is so revolutionary, or at least seems to deeply affect its readers, do most not remember how it was that they were deeply affected?
I’m not proposing to answer that question. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that most people can’t remember what a book was about or how it affected them five years after the fact. Some people just don’t consider the reading of books a central part of their lives. But what about the philosophy? Pirsig proposes a new kind of philosophy of life in ZMM, and people seem attracted to it, but they neither remember what it was nor seem to alter their lives accordingly. And why did philosophers not pick up on it?
I’m not going to answer that question either, but again, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that “professional” philosophers didn’t find it useful for their own pursuits. In my earlier phase as a Pirsig enthusiast I once wrote Rorty about Pirsig. Nice guy that he is, he wrote me back and said essentially that he remembered reading it, but recalls not being that impressed with the philosophy and not understanding what everybody was so excited about. Which is interesting considering that few these days, apparently, can remember what they were so excited about either.
What I would like to suggest about the effect that ZMM has on people is that, while it doesn’t instill a positive message about how to live one’s life (it isn’t a self-help book), it does instill curiosity in some. I think the reason some don’t remember the message of ZMM is that there isn’t much of one, more or less “live life excellently.” Pirsig’s philosophy revolves around this magical word “Quality,” but people don’t remember what the philosophy is, principally because Pirsig doesn’t flesh it out. That was the purpose of Lila. But ZMM does instill curiosity in us because we see how lack of curiosity almost killed Pirsig, we see how the “establishment” can try and suppress curiosity.
What ZMM makes us curious about is philosophy, and specifically in the question “What is Quality?” If people have been affected by ZMM in a strong way, and in a way that has a lasting effect, it is typically in the fashion of making them interested to read more philosophy. They try and read Plato and Aristotle, and anybody else. That’s what happened to me, at least. What I’ve come to see, however, are two things: one, that “What is Quality?” on Pirsig’s analysis gives way to a second question and two, that this second question is not strictly philosophical in the sense that we’ve been instilled with by Pirsig.
Pirsig’s question, “What is Quality?”, gives way on his reflection to “Who are you?” While the first question is overtly meditated on in the book, the second question is only implicitly given attention to by the functioning of the book itself. Pirsig is drawn to the first question because he has an analytical mind, or as he says, a Platonic streak. He has to answer that question at the prompting of the Bozeman English Department and this is what leads him to the University of Chicago. It is there that the book ends supposedly. But, upon further reflection, the trail of the book continues and wraps all the way around to the beginning. The trail is foreshadowed by the very beginning of the book, the no-doubt-forgotten-about-by-the-time-you've-reached-the-end-of-the-book inscription prefacing the entire novel—“And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good—/Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
The only person we need to ask about Quality is ourselves. But how should we answer that question? As Pirsig shows in Bozeman, most kids are puzzled by the question, and yet they seem to know intuitively that some things have higher Quality than others. Why is that? Pirsig’s later answer is that “we,” each person’s “person,” is built out of our history, cultural and biographical, those “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.” And thus we see that Pirsig’s first, Platonic question, “What is Quality?”, gives way to the second, non-Platonic question, “Who are you?” And, as I’ve already alluded to, this second question gives way to a third, almost anti-Platonic question, “Where have you been?” And thus the trail of the book continues on after the University of Chicago. Pirsig leads us through his past, showing us how he came to be who he is, and that trail continues on all the way up to the very writing of the book, his effort to confront fully the consequences of his own analysis of his question “What is Quality?”
Of course, I’m not at all sure that this is Pirsig’s intended effect. First, while I’m sure that the first question gives way to the second, and that Pirsig would be okay with this, I’m fairly positive that his explicit philosophical stance is antagonistic to the functioning of his book to reach the third question. The second question, after all, can still be given a Platonic spin to it, but the third certainly cannot. Using Pirsig’s own categories, Phaedrus is the Platonist and the narrator is the Aristotelian, and the narrator is the one who is vanquished in the end, the narrator is the one to be found to be holding the hero, Phaedrus, the real Pirsig, down. Plato created philosophy. Plato followed his teacher, Socrates’, lead in asking, for every instance of justice, piety, and the good, “What is it? What is it outside of these instances?” This flung us into the arid climate of generalities. It is Aristotle, on the other hand, who wanted to keep us in the details. And the third question is all about the details and history, something that a Platonist has no use for.
If we settle on for the moment that “What is Quality?” is Platonic, and therefore philosophical (because Plato is philosophy), and that “Who are you?” is not Platonic, and therefore not philosophical (because we are usually drawn by such a question to detailed autobiography), then the tension in Pirsig can be drawn not only by the questions or by Pirsig’s Plato/Aristotle categories, but by drawing a contrast between philosophy and literary criticism. We know that Pirsig hates literary criticism, thinking it a parasitic enterprise best left to second-rate minds, and that most of all of what professional philosophers do is no better than literary criticism. I want to suggest that the second question belongs to literary criticism.
The reason can be seen in the very look of what we typically canonize “philosophical” texts versus “literary” texts. Philosophy is abstract, it deals with concepts by themselves. Plato’s dialogues are explained as simply the method of conveyance for his philosophy, Descartes’ meditations as simply a heuristic, the first grand modern thought-experiment. Kant is taken to be paradigmatic, Spinoza is taken to be the most pure, and Montaigne and Voltaire aren’t even taught in philosophy departments because they wrote too topically, too much about themselves. As for literary texts, we can take the novel as the obvious example: a novel charts the course of a character’s life. It is all about the details. It may give you ideas, but it gives you a whole lot more than that.
Philosophy’s roots are in the search for wisdom, but since Descartes invented modern philosophy, philosophy has largely abdicated that role in favor of the abstract manipulation of symbols, of the search for foundations or transcendental outlines. Wisdom has been left for novelists and poets to convey and explore. Dealing in the abstract can indeed help us, but, as Pirsig tells us, only if it can cash out into real life, only if it can be applied. But most philosophers in the modern period have thought of “applied philosophy” as a secondary effort, as opposed to their pure pursuits. Pirsig oscillates between the two, which is just as well, but by explicitly focusing on “What is Quality?” as opposed to “Who are you?” he gives new lease on life to the Platonic impulse, the impulse to ignore life. This is what ZMM can tend to instill in the reader. The way to read Pirsig is not as a philosopher, but as a literary critic. If we read as a philosopher we will be led to Platonism. But reading as literary critics, we can see the rootedness of his philosophy in life.
Another way of seeing the tension in Pirsig’s philosophy, and not just in ZMM, however, is by seeing what his philosophy does to literary criticism. One of the things that I’ve found suggested by Rorty’s philosophy is that there are two ways to read texts, two purposes that we can find them attuned to. One is the search for moral wisdom and the other is the search for aesthetic power. Harold Bloom has spent most of his life charting the intricacies of the search for aesthetic power, centered in what he calls the anxiety of influence and charted by criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 96) Aesthetic power in its pure form is originality, centered around the question “What is new?” Bloom has often been accused of being too narrowly focused, but Bloom would be the first to acknowledge his narrowness, and he would simply claim to be reacting to the literary critical establishment of his time that has lost its way in performing one of its duties. But indeed, Bloom has not ignored moral wisdom, and in one of his latest books, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (dedicated coincidentally enough to Rorty), he reflects at length on the great writers in our Western wisdom traditions. Moral wisdom is centered around the question “What is best?” For true pragmatists like Rorty and Bloom, it is experiencing the actualities of life and reading the possibilities of books that gives us the wisdom to navigate our way through life and find what is best.
The reason I should put together such possibly odd pairings of words, “moral wisdom” and “aesthetic power,” as literary categories is because of my readings of Pirsig, Rorty, and Bloom. Pirsig has particularly taught us that all wisdom is a moral effort, that there is no distinction between morality and ethics and other categories of choice, such as prudence and taste. And Bloom has taught me, not only that to find what is new you must struggle with the vastness of time past, but that originality is a powerful force that changes us, the more original, the more we are changed.
What I should like to meditate on is how I’m making a distinction between the two and how Pirsig would not. This is crystallized in Pirsig’s concept of Dynamic Quality. DQ is both what is best and what is most new. DQ for Pirsig is a punch to the face that we cannot ignore, that changes us whether we like it or not. But for Bloom, originality does not mean wisdom. We can appreciate the power of new metaphors without being enticed into picking them up. Metaphors, for Rorty, are meaningless, and so, linguistically speaking, something like punches to the face. The trap that Pirsig falls into is twofold: first, he falls into the Heideggerian trap of searching for elemental words, words that can never be banalized by use and thus given meanings (hence DQ/Quality’s undefinition) and second, the Platonic trap of thinking that power and the good are the same thing.
On one of Rorty’s readings, Heidegger (as he says in Being and Time) is in search for elemental words and that we can trace his movement from early to late by the changes in those words he takes as elemental. In Heidegger, these words move from German candidates like Dasein to Greek candidates like noein. What Heidegger wants are words that slough off meaning, words that simply have force. By moving back to Greek words, to words that Plato first imbued with philosophical senses, Heidegger wants to reclaim these originary words by shedding the history of philosophy from them, thereby making them metaphors again. Heidegger thus, on Rorty’s reading, evinces Bloom’s sense of poetic anxiety.
I think it is instructive to read Pirsig as searching for, not just indestructible metaphors, but elemental words for two reasons. For one, Pirsig goes back to the Greeks and the roots of language much like Heidegger, such as his recapturing of arete in ZMM and rta in Lila. For two, and more importantly, Pirsig’s DQ/Quality is originary in a cosmic sense, whereby Pirsig traces them to being reality itself, and thus the causes of reality. DQ is both originary and permanently new, always a force and never banal. Pirsig hopes not only to find a metaphor that is always a metaphor, but a metaphor that has created all the others in its wake. The Heideggerian trap is one that is set for all those who feel the strain of their predecessors. Because Pirsig’s poetic metaphors are set for philosophical purposes, however, his production of DQ/Quality causes us to lose sight of history. By focusing on the question “What is Quality?”, Pirsig’s answer in the form of an elemental word produces the Platonic tendency of metaphysical speculation rather than autobiographical introspection.
The Platonic trap is one that is produced by Plato’s attempt to, in Yeats’ phrase, “hold reality and justice in a single vision.” Rorty spins the history of philosophy out of this phrase and it is epitomized in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue, Plato attempts to philosophically explain why his fellow Athenians were wrong to convict his hero and mentor, Socrates, by showing that the Form of Good is reality behind the appearances. Heidegger, like Rorty following him later, traces the modern fixation on Reason to Plato (seen in the dialectic), which produces the modern ethical manifestation of Platonism in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. Pirsig, too, traces modern philosophy to Greek roots, but he still insists on equating the Good with Reality.
Pirsig obviously does not want us to repeat the failures of Plato. The Pirsig of ZMM has certainly located the roots of SOM in Plato, particularly in his dialectic, and there is no doubt he attacks him for it. Nevertheless, however, Pirsig does find that the Greeks were up to something good and that what this is is something like abstract thinking, which is why Pirsig suggests that he be seen as a Platonist as opposed to an Aristotelian in temperament. If Platonism and Aristotelianism are taken to be impulses towards abstraction and details respectively, then certainly these temperaments exist and are helpful and not to be denied. And yet Pirsig does seem to fall into the trap. The trap comes out clearly in what we might call the indeterminacy of Dynamic Quality thesis, when, after identifying reality with the good and with the new, Pirsig cogently says that one cannot ever tell whether one is being Dynamic or degenerate in the moment—only history can tell us that. If DQ is something that punches us in the face, how is it that we could be wrong about being punched? How does DQ help us then?
The reason Pirsig falls into the trap, I think, is not because he’s a crypto-Platonist, but because he places too much stock in abstraction. Pirsig wisely hitches his boat with pragmatism at the end of Lila, but after Rorty, having a “pragmatist metaphysics” looks like an oxymoron—and Pirsig even sees it coming when, attempting to split the difference between positivists and mystics, he says that a Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Pirsig takes that as a good sign for building bridges, but I should like to think that that would be a good time to look around for new terms.
From a metaphysical point of view—the view from which we make hard, deep cuts into Reality, splitting it into the correct pieces, the pieces Reality wants to be in—pragmatism is a monism because it denies that deep cuts can be made. Pirsig senses this and this makes pragmatism of a piece with the Buddhist strain in Pirsig. But while from a metaphysical point of view reality is monistic, from a pragmatic point of view reality is in as many pieces as you need it to be. There is an important sense in which Pirsig captures this in his distinction between DQ and static patterns. But I think there was a casualty in the process and that is the distinction between moral wisdom and aesthetic power, between what’s best and what’s new. After abstractly chopping everything down, I think Pirsig misplayed his hand in putting things back together.
So while Pirsig’s philosophy blurs the difference between moral wisdom and aesthetic power because a pragmatist metaphysics is a monism, there certainly is a pragmatic difference between the two that is lost in Pirsig because he takes “What is Quality?” to be the more serious question than “Who are you?” Pirsig takes metaphysics too seriously and so loses sight of life, lost in the mountains without a clear way home. Pirsig says that metaphysics ain’t worth a damn if it doesn’t help out in life and I can’t think of a clearer case of forgetting what we already intuitively and commonsensically know—the new may just be a passing fad.
This reflection has taken quite a few turns. I’d like to close by reiterating the difference between “What is Quality?” and “Who are you?” If we take the first question seriously, we will become lost in a sea of concepts, terms that can be pushed around in almost any direction, in an infinite number of constellations. If we take the second question seriously, however, concepts or terms we use become grounded in our lives, which is where they have their meaning. Literary criticism becomes the preferred discipline to exemplify because our lives are narratives that we reflect on. In the end, if we focus on the second question and literary criticism, the difference between the first and second question, and philosophy and literary criticism, disappears as we draw back to the roots of philosophy—the search for wisdom. Abstraction and details only gain their meaning when in harmony with each other, rooted in a narrative, the story we tell ourselves about history, our culture, our nation, our lives.
I think a lot of people have had that same experience with Pirsig. In my own experience, most Baby Boomers, if they haven’t read ZMM, have at least heard of it, though most of them don’t remember much of what the book was about. Even many kids in my generation (yes, I still retain the right to call myself a kid) have read or heard of ZMM. But why, if the book is so revolutionary, or at least seems to deeply affect its readers, do most not remember how it was that they were deeply affected?
I’m not proposing to answer that question. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that most people can’t remember what a book was about or how it affected them five years after the fact. Some people just don’t consider the reading of books a central part of their lives. But what about the philosophy? Pirsig proposes a new kind of philosophy of life in ZMM, and people seem attracted to it, but they neither remember what it was nor seem to alter their lives accordingly. And why did philosophers not pick up on it?
I’m not going to answer that question either, but again, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that “professional” philosophers didn’t find it useful for their own pursuits. In my earlier phase as a Pirsig enthusiast I once wrote Rorty about Pirsig. Nice guy that he is, he wrote me back and said essentially that he remembered reading it, but recalls not being that impressed with the philosophy and not understanding what everybody was so excited about. Which is interesting considering that few these days, apparently, can remember what they were so excited about either.
What I would like to suggest about the effect that ZMM has on people is that, while it doesn’t instill a positive message about how to live one’s life (it isn’t a self-help book), it does instill curiosity in some. I think the reason some don’t remember the message of ZMM is that there isn’t much of one, more or less “live life excellently.” Pirsig’s philosophy revolves around this magical word “Quality,” but people don’t remember what the philosophy is, principally because Pirsig doesn’t flesh it out. That was the purpose of Lila. But ZMM does instill curiosity in us because we see how lack of curiosity almost killed Pirsig, we see how the “establishment” can try and suppress curiosity.
What ZMM makes us curious about is philosophy, and specifically in the question “What is Quality?” If people have been affected by ZMM in a strong way, and in a way that has a lasting effect, it is typically in the fashion of making them interested to read more philosophy. They try and read Plato and Aristotle, and anybody else. That’s what happened to me, at least. What I’ve come to see, however, are two things: one, that “What is Quality?” on Pirsig’s analysis gives way to a second question and two, that this second question is not strictly philosophical in the sense that we’ve been instilled with by Pirsig.
Pirsig’s question, “What is Quality?”, gives way on his reflection to “Who are you?” While the first question is overtly meditated on in the book, the second question is only implicitly given attention to by the functioning of the book itself. Pirsig is drawn to the first question because he has an analytical mind, or as he says, a Platonic streak. He has to answer that question at the prompting of the Bozeman English Department and this is what leads him to the University of Chicago. It is there that the book ends supposedly. But, upon further reflection, the trail of the book continues and wraps all the way around to the beginning. The trail is foreshadowed by the very beginning of the book, the no-doubt-forgotten-about-by-the-time-you've-reached-the-end-of-the-book inscription prefacing the entire novel—“And what is good, Phaedrus,/And what is not good—/Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
The only person we need to ask about Quality is ourselves. But how should we answer that question? As Pirsig shows in Bozeman, most kids are puzzled by the question, and yet they seem to know intuitively that some things have higher Quality than others. Why is that? Pirsig’s later answer is that “we,” each person’s “person,” is built out of our history, cultural and biographical, those “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.” And thus we see that Pirsig’s first, Platonic question, “What is Quality?”, gives way to the second, non-Platonic question, “Who are you?” And, as I’ve already alluded to, this second question gives way to a third, almost anti-Platonic question, “Where have you been?” And thus the trail of the book continues on after the University of Chicago. Pirsig leads us through his past, showing us how he came to be who he is, and that trail continues on all the way up to the very writing of the book, his effort to confront fully the consequences of his own analysis of his question “What is Quality?”
Of course, I’m not at all sure that this is Pirsig’s intended effect. First, while I’m sure that the first question gives way to the second, and that Pirsig would be okay with this, I’m fairly positive that his explicit philosophical stance is antagonistic to the functioning of his book to reach the third question. The second question, after all, can still be given a Platonic spin to it, but the third certainly cannot. Using Pirsig’s own categories, Phaedrus is the Platonist and the narrator is the Aristotelian, and the narrator is the one who is vanquished in the end, the narrator is the one to be found to be holding the hero, Phaedrus, the real Pirsig, down. Plato created philosophy. Plato followed his teacher, Socrates’, lead in asking, for every instance of justice, piety, and the good, “What is it? What is it outside of these instances?” This flung us into the arid climate of generalities. It is Aristotle, on the other hand, who wanted to keep us in the details. And the third question is all about the details and history, something that a Platonist has no use for.
If we settle on for the moment that “What is Quality?” is Platonic, and therefore philosophical (because Plato is philosophy), and that “Who are you?” is not Platonic, and therefore not philosophical (because we are usually drawn by such a question to detailed autobiography), then the tension in Pirsig can be drawn not only by the questions or by Pirsig’s Plato/Aristotle categories, but by drawing a contrast between philosophy and literary criticism. We know that Pirsig hates literary criticism, thinking it a parasitic enterprise best left to second-rate minds, and that most of all of what professional philosophers do is no better than literary criticism. I want to suggest that the second question belongs to literary criticism.
The reason can be seen in the very look of what we typically canonize “philosophical” texts versus “literary” texts. Philosophy is abstract, it deals with concepts by themselves. Plato’s dialogues are explained as simply the method of conveyance for his philosophy, Descartes’ meditations as simply a heuristic, the first grand modern thought-experiment. Kant is taken to be paradigmatic, Spinoza is taken to be the most pure, and Montaigne and Voltaire aren’t even taught in philosophy departments because they wrote too topically, too much about themselves. As for literary texts, we can take the novel as the obvious example: a novel charts the course of a character’s life. It is all about the details. It may give you ideas, but it gives you a whole lot more than that.
Philosophy’s roots are in the search for wisdom, but since Descartes invented modern philosophy, philosophy has largely abdicated that role in favor of the abstract manipulation of symbols, of the search for foundations or transcendental outlines. Wisdom has been left for novelists and poets to convey and explore. Dealing in the abstract can indeed help us, but, as Pirsig tells us, only if it can cash out into real life, only if it can be applied. But most philosophers in the modern period have thought of “applied philosophy” as a secondary effort, as opposed to their pure pursuits. Pirsig oscillates between the two, which is just as well, but by explicitly focusing on “What is Quality?” as opposed to “Who are you?” he gives new lease on life to the Platonic impulse, the impulse to ignore life. This is what ZMM can tend to instill in the reader. The way to read Pirsig is not as a philosopher, but as a literary critic. If we read as a philosopher we will be led to Platonism. But reading as literary critics, we can see the rootedness of his philosophy in life.
Another way of seeing the tension in Pirsig’s philosophy, and not just in ZMM, however, is by seeing what his philosophy does to literary criticism. One of the things that I’ve found suggested by Rorty’s philosophy is that there are two ways to read texts, two purposes that we can find them attuned to. One is the search for moral wisdom and the other is the search for aesthetic power. Harold Bloom has spent most of his life charting the intricacies of the search for aesthetic power, centered in what he calls the anxiety of influence and charted by criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 96) Aesthetic power in its pure form is originality, centered around the question “What is new?” Bloom has often been accused of being too narrowly focused, but Bloom would be the first to acknowledge his narrowness, and he would simply claim to be reacting to the literary critical establishment of his time that has lost its way in performing one of its duties. But indeed, Bloom has not ignored moral wisdom, and in one of his latest books, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (dedicated coincidentally enough to Rorty), he reflects at length on the great writers in our Western wisdom traditions. Moral wisdom is centered around the question “What is best?” For true pragmatists like Rorty and Bloom, it is experiencing the actualities of life and reading the possibilities of books that gives us the wisdom to navigate our way through life and find what is best.
The reason I should put together such possibly odd pairings of words, “moral wisdom” and “aesthetic power,” as literary categories is because of my readings of Pirsig, Rorty, and Bloom. Pirsig has particularly taught us that all wisdom is a moral effort, that there is no distinction between morality and ethics and other categories of choice, such as prudence and taste. And Bloom has taught me, not only that to find what is new you must struggle with the vastness of time past, but that originality is a powerful force that changes us, the more original, the more we are changed.
What I should like to meditate on is how I’m making a distinction between the two and how Pirsig would not. This is crystallized in Pirsig’s concept of Dynamic Quality. DQ is both what is best and what is most new. DQ for Pirsig is a punch to the face that we cannot ignore, that changes us whether we like it or not. But for Bloom, originality does not mean wisdom. We can appreciate the power of new metaphors without being enticed into picking them up. Metaphors, for Rorty, are meaningless, and so, linguistically speaking, something like punches to the face. The trap that Pirsig falls into is twofold: first, he falls into the Heideggerian trap of searching for elemental words, words that can never be banalized by use and thus given meanings (hence DQ/Quality’s undefinition) and second, the Platonic trap of thinking that power and the good are the same thing.
On one of Rorty’s readings, Heidegger (as he says in Being and Time) is in search for elemental words and that we can trace his movement from early to late by the changes in those words he takes as elemental. In Heidegger, these words move from German candidates like Dasein to Greek candidates like noein. What Heidegger wants are words that slough off meaning, words that simply have force. By moving back to Greek words, to words that Plato first imbued with philosophical senses, Heidegger wants to reclaim these originary words by shedding the history of philosophy from them, thereby making them metaphors again. Heidegger thus, on Rorty’s reading, evinces Bloom’s sense of poetic anxiety.
I think it is instructive to read Pirsig as searching for, not just indestructible metaphors, but elemental words for two reasons. For one, Pirsig goes back to the Greeks and the roots of language much like Heidegger, such as his recapturing of arete in ZMM and rta in Lila. For two, and more importantly, Pirsig’s DQ/Quality is originary in a cosmic sense, whereby Pirsig traces them to being reality itself, and thus the causes of reality. DQ is both originary and permanently new, always a force and never banal. Pirsig hopes not only to find a metaphor that is always a metaphor, but a metaphor that has created all the others in its wake. The Heideggerian trap is one that is set for all those who feel the strain of their predecessors. Because Pirsig’s poetic metaphors are set for philosophical purposes, however, his production of DQ/Quality causes us to lose sight of history. By focusing on the question “What is Quality?”, Pirsig’s answer in the form of an elemental word produces the Platonic tendency of metaphysical speculation rather than autobiographical introspection.
The Platonic trap is one that is produced by Plato’s attempt to, in Yeats’ phrase, “hold reality and justice in a single vision.” Rorty spins the history of philosophy out of this phrase and it is epitomized in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue, Plato attempts to philosophically explain why his fellow Athenians were wrong to convict his hero and mentor, Socrates, by showing that the Form of Good is reality behind the appearances. Heidegger, like Rorty following him later, traces the modern fixation on Reason to Plato (seen in the dialectic), which produces the modern ethical manifestation of Platonism in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. Pirsig, too, traces modern philosophy to Greek roots, but he still insists on equating the Good with Reality.
Pirsig obviously does not want us to repeat the failures of Plato. The Pirsig of ZMM has certainly located the roots of SOM in Plato, particularly in his dialectic, and there is no doubt he attacks him for it. Nevertheless, however, Pirsig does find that the Greeks were up to something good and that what this is is something like abstract thinking, which is why Pirsig suggests that he be seen as a Platonist as opposed to an Aristotelian in temperament. If Platonism and Aristotelianism are taken to be impulses towards abstraction and details respectively, then certainly these temperaments exist and are helpful and not to be denied. And yet Pirsig does seem to fall into the trap. The trap comes out clearly in what we might call the indeterminacy of Dynamic Quality thesis, when, after identifying reality with the good and with the new, Pirsig cogently says that one cannot ever tell whether one is being Dynamic or degenerate in the moment—only history can tell us that. If DQ is something that punches us in the face, how is it that we could be wrong about being punched? How does DQ help us then?
The reason Pirsig falls into the trap, I think, is not because he’s a crypto-Platonist, but because he places too much stock in abstraction. Pirsig wisely hitches his boat with pragmatism at the end of Lila, but after Rorty, having a “pragmatist metaphysics” looks like an oxymoron—and Pirsig even sees it coming when, attempting to split the difference between positivists and mystics, he says that a Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Pirsig takes that as a good sign for building bridges, but I should like to think that that would be a good time to look around for new terms.
From a metaphysical point of view—the view from which we make hard, deep cuts into Reality, splitting it into the correct pieces, the pieces Reality wants to be in—pragmatism is a monism because it denies that deep cuts can be made. Pirsig senses this and this makes pragmatism of a piece with the Buddhist strain in Pirsig. But while from a metaphysical point of view reality is monistic, from a pragmatic point of view reality is in as many pieces as you need it to be. There is an important sense in which Pirsig captures this in his distinction between DQ and static patterns. But I think there was a casualty in the process and that is the distinction between moral wisdom and aesthetic power, between what’s best and what’s new. After abstractly chopping everything down, I think Pirsig misplayed his hand in putting things back together.
So while Pirsig’s philosophy blurs the difference between moral wisdom and aesthetic power because a pragmatist metaphysics is a monism, there certainly is a pragmatic difference between the two that is lost in Pirsig because he takes “What is Quality?” to be the more serious question than “Who are you?” Pirsig takes metaphysics too seriously and so loses sight of life, lost in the mountains without a clear way home. Pirsig says that metaphysics ain’t worth a damn if it doesn’t help out in life and I can’t think of a clearer case of forgetting what we already intuitively and commonsensically know—the new may just be a passing fad.
This reflection has taken quite a few turns. I’d like to close by reiterating the difference between “What is Quality?” and “Who are you?” If we take the first question seriously, we will become lost in a sea of concepts, terms that can be pushed around in almost any direction, in an infinite number of constellations. If we take the second question seriously, however, concepts or terms we use become grounded in our lives, which is where they have their meaning. Literary criticism becomes the preferred discipline to exemplify because our lives are narratives that we reflect on. In the end, if we focus on the second question and literary criticism, the difference between the first and second question, and philosophy and literary criticism, disappears as we draw back to the roots of philosophy—the search for wisdom. Abstraction and details only gain their meaning when in harmony with each other, rooted in a narrative, the story we tell ourselves about history, our culture, our nation, our lives.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Midwestern Megalomania
I've been tipped off to a new interview with Pirsig. Its another jounalistic style interview that narrates more than it reports, which is all fine for what it is, but when you have an autobiographical book, it doesn't do all that much for those of us who've read it recently. It's nice, but I prefer the Baggini interview because it tries to engage Pirsig's philosophical thoughts. It's also sad because it sounds like this may be his last trip into the public eye.
Not much struck me in the interview, except the new oddball details of his life and the recurring thematic of Midwestern megalomania--a reserved, polite, self-aggrandized revolutionariness that's so soft spoken as to be barely heard.
On the new details score, I have to admit that I'm having trouble fitting in this newbie: "When his wife [Nancy] came to see him [in the asylum] he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital." Excuse me, what? Nancy divorced Bob before they lived in Minnesota, before Bob took Chris on the trip out west, before he wrote ZMM? Something doesn't fit right. At any rate, if that's true, it certainly means I have to revise somewhat my wild speculations about the subterranean origins of Lila.
However, one thing does fit a lot of pieces together. When Pirsig suggests that, as the interviewer summarizes it, "he was just a man outside his time," and that, as Pirsig puts it, "It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself," I feel like I can say with renewed conviction that--maybe, just maybe--it wasn't Pirsig's ideas that got him hooked up to a mind incinerator and was perhaps, ya' know, the gun he wagged in someone's face.
Maybe it's just my experience dealing with reflected-glory hounds, but I can't say that I have a lot of patience with Pirsig's outsider persona. To the point, I can't say that I have a lot of patience with anybody's outsider persona--"Oh, look at me, I'm so outside the norm. Aren't I cool?" I've run into more than a few of these comme il faut, très chic scenesters with a warm, nuggety center of sublimated I-just-want-to-be-loved to be absolutely sick to death of the goddamn cliché--which, of course, doesn't make it any less true. And why look here:
And you know what? A lot of people did do that kind of thing and they aren't read or discussed. A lot of people did that and won't be discussed much after they die. Does this mean that their ideas are ahead of their time or that there is a cultural immune system protecting itself from the heretic? Maybe, but probably not. There are many, many particular reasons for every possible outcome that has happened to a philosopher or intellectual-at-large. Does anybody take Santayana's philosophy seriously anymore? Or Royce? Or Brand Blanshard? These figures loomed during their time, but like Stanley Cavell will probably end up, they passed on into the dustbin of active philosophical opinion for one reason or another.
I do know one thing. Santayana, Royce, and Blanshard aren't taken seriously because they were out of style during their time and out of style now. That means that they never left behind a school of followers to continue on in their vein. They may yet come back into style, be rediscovered. And the same thing could happen to Pirsig. But Pirsig ain't makin' it any easier. If he wants to make it into the canon, he has to engage the canon. And Santayana and the rest are example enough that even if you do, nothing is certain.
Personally, I think he's fine right where he is (which is also why I don't cry much about Santayana or lose much sleep over Cavell's probable future). I think the interviewer is right, Pirsig's value is in the spiritual autobiography he's left us, at his attempt to create himself on the page. Why would you want a bunch of stuffed shirts preaching about you when you can have the young generation living through you?
--------------------
p.s. I now have the links to the Q&A interview. One day too late for my first paragraph. Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. And from what I've read of it in the short time I have available, it seems much more like the kind of thing I'm happy to see from Pirsig. Not that the interviewer butchered Pirsig or anything, but the conversation is much more, well, conversational and likable then the trimmed narrated version of his lines. I still think Midwestern megalomania is a fairly decent hook for some of the things that come out of Pirsig's mouth (I still don't think Pirsig has his pulse on philosophy departments enough to tell what's going on, though I must say he's right about this: "Americans tend to be always just interested in the latest thing." I'm not so sure the Brits aren't culpable in the same thing, but isn't a short term memory good for following the Dynamic nose?), but hey, I certainly ain't sayin' I'm not a Midwestern egomaniac. It shouldn't take anyone that long to figure that out.
p.p.s. I had a really weird dream last night where I dreamt that I read in the interview that Pirsig has been divorced nine times. I woke up and had to shake the sleep from my head and say, "No, no he hasn't. That was a dream." Weird.
Not much struck me in the interview, except the new oddball details of his life and the recurring thematic of Midwestern megalomania--a reserved, polite, self-aggrandized revolutionariness that's so soft spoken as to be barely heard.
On the new details score, I have to admit that I'm having trouble fitting in this newbie: "When his wife [Nancy] came to see him [in the asylum] he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital." Excuse me, what? Nancy divorced Bob before they lived in Minnesota, before Bob took Chris on the trip out west, before he wrote ZMM? Something doesn't fit right. At any rate, if that's true, it certainly means I have to revise somewhat my wild speculations about the subterranean origins of Lila.
However, one thing does fit a lot of pieces together. When Pirsig suggests that, as the interviewer summarizes it, "he was just a man outside his time," and that, as Pirsig puts it, "It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself," I feel like I can say with renewed conviction that--maybe, just maybe--it wasn't Pirsig's ideas that got him hooked up to a mind incinerator and was perhaps, ya' know, the gun he wagged in someone's face.
Maybe it's just my experience dealing with reflected-glory hounds, but I can't say that I have a lot of patience with Pirsig's outsider persona. To the point, I can't say that I have a lot of patience with anybody's outsider persona--"Oh, look at me, I'm so outside the norm. Aren't I cool?" I've run into more than a few of these comme il faut, très chic scenesters with a warm, nuggety center of sublimated I-just-want-to-be-loved to be absolutely sick to death of the goddamn cliché--which, of course, doesn't make it any less true. And why look here:
He hoped Lila would force the 'metaphysics of quality' from the New Age shelves to the philosophy ones, but that has not happened. Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. 'Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that "quality" can not be defined,' he says.It does seem a little odd, now doesn't it? But let me just lay this to rest: Pirsig is not "ignored" because of his insistence that Quality cannot be defined. Pirsig is ignored (if that's the term you want to use) because he didn't teach philosophy at any univerisities, because he never wrote books for any university presses, because he never wrote essays in any journals, because he never read papers or chaired panels at an APA Conference.
This desire to be incorporated in a philosophy canon seems odd anyhow, since the power of Pirsig's books lie in their dynamic personal quest for value, rather than any fixed statement of it. But maybe eventually every iconoclast wants to be accepted.
And you know what? A lot of people did do that kind of thing and they aren't read or discussed. A lot of people did that and won't be discussed much after they die. Does this mean that their ideas are ahead of their time or that there is a cultural immune system protecting itself from the heretic? Maybe, but probably not. There are many, many particular reasons for every possible outcome that has happened to a philosopher or intellectual-at-large. Does anybody take Santayana's philosophy seriously anymore? Or Royce? Or Brand Blanshard? These figures loomed during their time, but like Stanley Cavell will probably end up, they passed on into the dustbin of active philosophical opinion for one reason or another.
I do know one thing. Santayana, Royce, and Blanshard aren't taken seriously because they were out of style during their time and out of style now. That means that they never left behind a school of followers to continue on in their vein. They may yet come back into style, be rediscovered. And the same thing could happen to Pirsig. But Pirsig ain't makin' it any easier. If he wants to make it into the canon, he has to engage the canon. And Santayana and the rest are example enough that even if you do, nothing is certain.
Personally, I think he's fine right where he is (which is also why I don't cry much about Santayana or lose much sleep over Cavell's probable future). I think the interviewer is right, Pirsig's value is in the spiritual autobiography he's left us, at his attempt to create himself on the page. Why would you want a bunch of stuffed shirts preaching about you when you can have the young generation living through you?
--------------------
p.s. I now have the links to the Q&A interview. One day too late for my first paragraph. Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. And from what I've read of it in the short time I have available, it seems much more like the kind of thing I'm happy to see from Pirsig. Not that the interviewer butchered Pirsig or anything, but the conversation is much more, well, conversational and likable then the trimmed narrated version of his lines. I still think Midwestern megalomania is a fairly decent hook for some of the things that come out of Pirsig's mouth (I still don't think Pirsig has his pulse on philosophy departments enough to tell what's going on, though I must say he's right about this: "Americans tend to be always just interested in the latest thing." I'm not so sure the Brits aren't culpable in the same thing, but isn't a short term memory good for following the Dynamic nose?), but hey, I certainly ain't sayin' I'm not a Midwestern egomaniac. It shouldn't take anyone that long to figure that out.
p.p.s. I had a really weird dream last night where I dreamt that I read in the interview that Pirsig has been divorced nine times. I woke up and had to shake the sleep from my head and say, "No, no he hasn't. That was a dream." Weird.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The Difference: Conversion and Articulation
I've been thinking lately about the differences between me, Rorty, and Pirsig. There are, of course, many differences, at least between Rorty and Pirsig, but one of the areas one can search for differences or similarities is in the area of a person's biography, in their own self-image as a philosopher and how they got from childhood to where they are now. Pirsig's biography, of course, is linked intimately and explicitly to his philosophy (despite the fact that we often suffocate those links to recontruct his philosophy), but Rorty's biography is only now just gaining more attention. With the publication of his autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and particularly with the publication of a collection of interviews, Take Care of Freedom and Truth will Take Care of Itself, Rorty's biography is becoming more explicitly seen.
One of the things that comes out of Rorty's writings is the notion that he's a fallen metaphysician. In "Trotsky", he says quite explicitly that he wanted as a child to have that kind of state of bliss that is associated with religion and Platonism. Until he was 20, he looked for a way to be a metaphysician. People use this knowledge to characterize why he is often considered to be an "end of philosophy" philosopher. Almost all philosophers of note who are even symathetic to Rorty still have qualms about the extremes he goes to. They take it that Rorty is a person who was fooled by Platonism, and he never wants to be fooled again.
Pirsig's path is a bit different. We might describe Pirsig as a recovering metaphysician. Pirsig sees something worth rehabilitating in the area that both he and Rorty want to vacate. The difference may be that Pirsig saw something ailing, something dying that needed help, whereas Rorty sees much ado about nothing. Pirsig's reaction to his experience in scientific study suggests that Pirsig took it as very important that somebody mount a response to the problems in the philosophy of science he inadvertantly discovered (which eventually leads to larger problems about reason). Rorty, on the other hand, thinks that for the most part we get along just fine in day to day life, and that the only short-term importance in mounting these responses are for those philosophers that are plagued by them.
What typifies both of them is a fall. Rorty fell after attempting to be a Platonist, to find the One, and Pirsig fell after attempting to be a realist scientist. My difference to the two is that I fell from nothing to nowhere. I went from mumbling about God to mumbling about Reason or Science, not really believing in either, so my conversion to Rortyan pragmatism didn't resemble a rejection of anything, or really a conversion at all, I simply felt like I was better able to articulate what I had been believing and acting for quite awhile.
I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the feeling of conversion or articulation. I have a feeling it amounts to what a person becomes obsessed with or fearful of. I find further enunciation of pragmatism to be interesting, but I have a feeling I'd be far more reconciliatory to those who think Rorty goes too far than Rorty might be. I'm less likely to become engrossed in subsidiaries of the epistemology industry. And much the same goes for Pirsig. I think his fear for the fate of the West, its spiritual crisis, is too overblown. I think it grows out of his own biography and creates an hysteria over the problems he considers. Things are neither as bad in the old framework as Pirsig thinks them, nor better in the framework Pirsig suggests. What Rorty helped me enunciate is the sense that just not that much hinges on what philosophers talk about--at least it looks that way compared to the scope at which most philosophers talk.
One of the things that comes out of Rorty's writings is the notion that he's a fallen metaphysician. In "Trotsky", he says quite explicitly that he wanted as a child to have that kind of state of bliss that is associated with religion and Platonism. Until he was 20, he looked for a way to be a metaphysician. People use this knowledge to characterize why he is often considered to be an "end of philosophy" philosopher. Almost all philosophers of note who are even symathetic to Rorty still have qualms about the extremes he goes to. They take it that Rorty is a person who was fooled by Platonism, and he never wants to be fooled again.
Pirsig's path is a bit different. We might describe Pirsig as a recovering metaphysician. Pirsig sees something worth rehabilitating in the area that both he and Rorty want to vacate. The difference may be that Pirsig saw something ailing, something dying that needed help, whereas Rorty sees much ado about nothing. Pirsig's reaction to his experience in scientific study suggests that Pirsig took it as very important that somebody mount a response to the problems in the philosophy of science he inadvertantly discovered (which eventually leads to larger problems about reason). Rorty, on the other hand, thinks that for the most part we get along just fine in day to day life, and that the only short-term importance in mounting these responses are for those philosophers that are plagued by them.
What typifies both of them is a fall. Rorty fell after attempting to be a Platonist, to find the One, and Pirsig fell after attempting to be a realist scientist. My difference to the two is that I fell from nothing to nowhere. I went from mumbling about God to mumbling about Reason or Science, not really believing in either, so my conversion to Rortyan pragmatism didn't resemble a rejection of anything, or really a conversion at all, I simply felt like I was better able to articulate what I had been believing and acting for quite awhile.
I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the feeling of conversion or articulation. I have a feeling it amounts to what a person becomes obsessed with or fearful of. I find further enunciation of pragmatism to be interesting, but I have a feeling I'd be far more reconciliatory to those who think Rorty goes too far than Rorty might be. I'm less likely to become engrossed in subsidiaries of the epistemology industry. And much the same goes for Pirsig. I think his fear for the fate of the West, its spiritual crisis, is too overblown. I think it grows out of his own biography and creates an hysteria over the problems he considers. Things are neither as bad in the old framework as Pirsig thinks them, nor better in the framework Pirsig suggests. What Rorty helped me enunciate is the sense that just not that much hinges on what philosophers talk about--at least it looks that way compared to the scope at which most philosophers talk.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Voice, Mind, Heart, Spirit
I first became aware of Arthur Danto while going through Nietzsche studies. His 1965 Nietzsche as Philosopher, despite Walter Kaufmann’s earlier efforts, did the most to make anglophone philosophers aware of Nietzsche as a serious philosopher, or rather, a philosopher to pay attention to. Danto was an able and up and coming analytic philosopher at the time and related Nietzsche to English-speakers by taking him to have philosophical theses that they recognized. I since found out that Danto was an aesthetician and art critic, though I also found a little book of his called Mysticism and Morality which covers Eastern philosophy for Westerners. Obviously a well-rounded guy. The other day I picked up a recent book of his used, The Body/Body Problem, which is a collection of essays. I was particularly excited to read it because its last essay was called “In Their Own Voice: Philosophical Writing and Actual Experience”. This is an area I am particularly interested in.
The essay itself is fairly tricky. Firstly, I should apologize to every teacher, friend, TA, or critic who has yelped at me for being easily distracted and side-tracked—to which I normally respond, “Oh, quiet! It’s part of the larger plan, man! Off my case!” I now know what they mean. Danto moves over several topics in the course of the essay and it’s not entirely clear that they all involve one another. They all do relate to each other, but Danto’s movements are so quick that you don’t realize until later that while he’s talking about blind submission now, he used to be talking about Cavell. So I apologize for snapping at anyone over my penchant for following my mind wherever it goes.
Danto begins his essay with some interesting talk about the difference between philosophers who have to submit papers to editors and philosophers who are requested to give papers. He says that Donald Davidson once told him that he’s never had to submit a paper to editorial review, and comments, “Instead, those parts of his papers which an editor might peremptorily have written ‘Clarify!!!’ next to in the margin have given rise to mighty rivers of commentary and analysis, and doubtless have seen more than one critic through to tenure as a specialist in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.” (228) Danto continues his musing on this topic by noting that, possibly since most of these star philosophers write papers to be read before audiences, they are filled with devices designed to hold an audience’s attention. These interesting insights continue until Danto reaches Wittgenstein (and Heidegger and Dewey), reckoning that the strongest philosophers have the strongest styles, styles others wouldn’t dare try to imitate, at which point he asks, “Does that mean that philosophy and philosopher are inseparable? Or that there is a deep connection between philosophy and voice?” (229)
I tend to want to answer in the affirmative. Ever since Rorty tossed off the locution “philosophy as a kind of writing” while further implanting the latent notion (that only Toulmin pulled out explicitly) of “philosophy as a kind of autobiography,” I’ve been excited and energized by the idea. I take such a slogan to infuse many of the other philosophical positions pragmatists take. However, from those same readings, I know it's not entirely true. Or rather, Danto’s questions cannot be answered entirely in the affirmative. Pragmatists are suspicious of anything deep, especially anything related to that amorphous subject “philosophy.” You can’t help but define philosophy by the very activity of doing it, but every definition eventually bites you in the ass. But if there is something deep about philosophy, it would be the connection between philosopher and philosophy, philosophy and voice, but still—how deep is that?
By moving to Wittgenstein, Danto proceeds very slowly to answer those questions negatively. The rest of the essay is basically a long, drawn out and unfinished, slowly spoken “Nooooooooowell, maybe.” He moves by first telling us in a parenthetical, after writing “Wittgensteinian ‘truths’”, that “I am employing quotation marks because I want to leave the reader a bit edgy with the idea that there are such things as Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian truths rather than truths which happen to have been uttered by Heidegger or Wittgenstein”. This indeed leaves me a bit edgy. This raises the specter of truth distinguished from rhetoric, the Platonic distinctions that Rorty and Pirsig tell us got us into all of this footnote trouble in the first place. Rortyans would prefer to say that, maybe there aren’t Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian truths, but there are truths we began to speak only after we began to speak Wittgensteinese or Heideggerese.
But still, Danto isn’t entirely off point here. There is a difference between the style a truth (or point) is made in and the truth (or point) that is made. This has to do with translatability, in the ability of a particular point to be made in different styles or vocabularies. We see Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey all making the same points when we translate them all into a vocabulary that houses them all, which is what Rorty specializes in. However, not all truths or points can be made in every vocabulary, which is probably the point at which we can call them false. And Danto’s style of making this point, the language or vocabulary, probably makes me suspicious because of his penchant for making the distinction too coarsely between truth and rhetoric. Danto does this, I think, because he takes much more seriously the notion of “representation” than do pragmatists. Danto is at odds with pragmatists over this issue, but Danto, despite being an unrequited user of it in the face of antirepresentationalists like Rorty, seems to use it an ameliorated sense that raises less problems for pragmatists.
The next section of Danto’s paper sees him bridge from Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell on Wittgenstein, providing a tremendously illuminating commentary on Cavell and his style of writing. He eventually makes the point that Cavell mirrors Wittgenstein in that his writing style embodies the philosophy put forward. The style of the Philosophical Investigations embodies Wittgenstein’s suggested attitude towards philosophy (one of therapy) and Cavell’s writings, particularly A Pitch of Philosophy, embodies Cavell’s suggested attitudes towards philosophy (one of dialogic conversation). “…what is the connection, if any, between the what and the how of saying? The philosopher may be the writing, which means that to discipline the writing is to regiment the philosopher. But is there any internal connection between the writing and the thought? Can, that is, any thought be expressed in any voice, even if not all styles will embody or exemplify it?” (238) I have already answered this last question in the negative. Not all thoughts can be expressed in any voice, that is, not all things can be said in every vocabulary. To answer the question positively, as Danto intimates he would, would be to fall for Plato’s fantasy of universal truths that underlie all ephemeral ways of speaking. Rorty’s point in creating what his student Robert Brandom has called the “vocabulary vocabulary” was to dissuade us of such a notion.
But Danto continues by quickly bridging to the topic of blind submission. His comments here, again, are very illuminating. I won’t cover them (except to say that Danto half-imagines a case of blind submission in which a star philosopher writes in defending his own philosophy and a lesser philosopher writes in defending the star’s philosophy, and both of them are equally cogent to the point of flipping a coin over which one to blindly choose for publication—a situation, I have to confess, I daydreamed myself being in with Rorty) and instead skip to the end. One could imagine from what has come before that Danto will land in favor of blind submission—what, afterall, could matter if truth is divorced from rhetoric?—but Danto actually lands a bit on the other side. “The reason voice is relevant to philosophical writing is that philosophical writings by a single person form complex systems and constellations of ideas—they have pasts and futures as well as presents—and the reasons we are interested in voice are those which explain our interest in philosophical creativity. Creative philosophers do not do philosophy by producing atoms of bottom-line ‘good’ philosophy. What they write carries what they have written and what they hope to write as the aura of a total vision.” (242-3)
I have my suspicions about “total vision,” but I see what Danto is talking about. And he’s quite right. “This means that suppression of our facticities results in a distorted representation of the world, the world according to Nobody. And this makes bottom-line philosophy abstract and distorted and surrealistic.” (244) We see Danto’s latent realism rising up again, but his conclusions are resonant: “Philosophy in its professional practice has loosened itself more and more from the world as we really experience it anyway, in our embodied and historical natures, in its drive to secure something disembodied and timeless. And I think a dreadful price, the price of irrelevance, is paid for this: nobody reads philosophy but philosophers. … Let blind review continue, but blind philosophy might to everyone’s profit stop being written. Philosophers should be encouraged to speak in their own voice about the world that means something to them. The freer the voice, the better the philosophy. For now, that is the only connection I see.” (244-5)
That’s not the only connection I see and that’s probably because of Danto’s seeming realism, but I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on Danto (least of all through his roaming essay), but I feel like his heart is in the right place—if that is to be discerned from the last pages of a piece. But if that were true, I would have to accept “Good is a noun” and there’s no way I’m swallowing that. But perhaps there’s a difference between a person’s heart and their spirit and perhaps Pirsig’s spirit lies elsewhere from his heart. Mind, heart, spirit: the written lines, the written conclusion, and everything else in between—the lines or otherwise.
This lands us in the lap of translation, or interpretation (which is how Davidson translates that Quineanism), which is where I left us with voice. “Voice” is a metaphor that pragmatists can get along with. Ever since Gadamer and Sellars, Dewey and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Nietzsche, it’s been harder and harder for philosophers to just assume that we can break away from language, harder for them to use bodily metaphors, and harder for them to use theological metaphors. If Dennett is to be believed, the “mind” isn’t all we thought it was. If Susan Neiman, then the “heart” must include more than good intentions. If Bloom, the “spirit” just is what we make of it. However, I think all three combine to make up the “voice” of a philosopher. This is all like Davidson’s triangulation of world-person-community, which, translated into textual interpretation, plays out into text-writer-reader. Understanding a language takes Davidson’s triangle and understanding a philosopher takes it, too. Interpretation is the collusion of the three parts, and no part can be understood separately.
A philosopher’s voice includes her mind, her heart, and her spirit. It includes how she’s getting to a place, where she’s going, and where she will end up being—the now, the little bit later, and the far into the future. Not all minds are cogent, not all hearts good, not all spirits living—not all arguments sound, conclusions useful, or philosophies engaging. But the philosopher, the voice, includes all of these. Not all of Pirsig’s arguments are successful, not all of Pirsig’s conclusions are acceptable, and not all of his philosophy is interesting. But Pirsig’s voice is powerful and inimitable, capturing our attention still. And though Pirsig’s voice may cease to echo someday, that voice will still be a sharp, loud thunderclap for those who discover him, if one delivered in a room with bad acoustics.
The essay itself is fairly tricky. Firstly, I should apologize to every teacher, friend, TA, or critic who has yelped at me for being easily distracted and side-tracked—to which I normally respond, “Oh, quiet! It’s part of the larger plan, man! Off my case!” I now know what they mean. Danto moves over several topics in the course of the essay and it’s not entirely clear that they all involve one another. They all do relate to each other, but Danto’s movements are so quick that you don’t realize until later that while he’s talking about blind submission now, he used to be talking about Cavell. So I apologize for snapping at anyone over my penchant for following my mind wherever it goes.
Danto begins his essay with some interesting talk about the difference between philosophers who have to submit papers to editors and philosophers who are requested to give papers. He says that Donald Davidson once told him that he’s never had to submit a paper to editorial review, and comments, “Instead, those parts of his papers which an editor might peremptorily have written ‘Clarify!!!’ next to in the margin have given rise to mighty rivers of commentary and analysis, and doubtless have seen more than one critic through to tenure as a specialist in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.” (228) Danto continues his musing on this topic by noting that, possibly since most of these star philosophers write papers to be read before audiences, they are filled with devices designed to hold an audience’s attention. These interesting insights continue until Danto reaches Wittgenstein (and Heidegger and Dewey), reckoning that the strongest philosophers have the strongest styles, styles others wouldn’t dare try to imitate, at which point he asks, “Does that mean that philosophy and philosopher are inseparable? Or that there is a deep connection between philosophy and voice?” (229)
I tend to want to answer in the affirmative. Ever since Rorty tossed off the locution “philosophy as a kind of writing” while further implanting the latent notion (that only Toulmin pulled out explicitly) of “philosophy as a kind of autobiography,” I’ve been excited and energized by the idea. I take such a slogan to infuse many of the other philosophical positions pragmatists take. However, from those same readings, I know it's not entirely true. Or rather, Danto’s questions cannot be answered entirely in the affirmative. Pragmatists are suspicious of anything deep, especially anything related to that amorphous subject “philosophy.” You can’t help but define philosophy by the very activity of doing it, but every definition eventually bites you in the ass. But if there is something deep about philosophy, it would be the connection between philosopher and philosophy, philosophy and voice, but still—how deep is that?
By moving to Wittgenstein, Danto proceeds very slowly to answer those questions negatively. The rest of the essay is basically a long, drawn out and unfinished, slowly spoken “Nooooooooowell, maybe.” He moves by first telling us in a parenthetical, after writing “Wittgensteinian ‘truths’”, that “I am employing quotation marks because I want to leave the reader a bit edgy with the idea that there are such things as Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian truths rather than truths which happen to have been uttered by Heidegger or Wittgenstein”. This indeed leaves me a bit edgy. This raises the specter of truth distinguished from rhetoric, the Platonic distinctions that Rorty and Pirsig tell us got us into all of this footnote trouble in the first place. Rortyans would prefer to say that, maybe there aren’t Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian truths, but there are truths we began to speak only after we began to speak Wittgensteinese or Heideggerese.
But still, Danto isn’t entirely off point here. There is a difference between the style a truth (or point) is made in and the truth (or point) that is made. This has to do with translatability, in the ability of a particular point to be made in different styles or vocabularies. We see Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey all making the same points when we translate them all into a vocabulary that houses them all, which is what Rorty specializes in. However, not all truths or points can be made in every vocabulary, which is probably the point at which we can call them false. And Danto’s style of making this point, the language or vocabulary, probably makes me suspicious because of his penchant for making the distinction too coarsely between truth and rhetoric. Danto does this, I think, because he takes much more seriously the notion of “representation” than do pragmatists. Danto is at odds with pragmatists over this issue, but Danto, despite being an unrequited user of it in the face of antirepresentationalists like Rorty, seems to use it an ameliorated sense that raises less problems for pragmatists.
The next section of Danto’s paper sees him bridge from Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell on Wittgenstein, providing a tremendously illuminating commentary on Cavell and his style of writing. He eventually makes the point that Cavell mirrors Wittgenstein in that his writing style embodies the philosophy put forward. The style of the Philosophical Investigations embodies Wittgenstein’s suggested attitude towards philosophy (one of therapy) and Cavell’s writings, particularly A Pitch of Philosophy, embodies Cavell’s suggested attitudes towards philosophy (one of dialogic conversation). “…what is the connection, if any, between the what and the how of saying? The philosopher may be the writing, which means that to discipline the writing is to regiment the philosopher. But is there any internal connection between the writing and the thought? Can, that is, any thought be expressed in any voice, even if not all styles will embody or exemplify it?” (238) I have already answered this last question in the negative. Not all thoughts can be expressed in any voice, that is, not all things can be said in every vocabulary. To answer the question positively, as Danto intimates he would, would be to fall for Plato’s fantasy of universal truths that underlie all ephemeral ways of speaking. Rorty’s point in creating what his student Robert Brandom has called the “vocabulary vocabulary” was to dissuade us of such a notion.
But Danto continues by quickly bridging to the topic of blind submission. His comments here, again, are very illuminating. I won’t cover them (except to say that Danto half-imagines a case of blind submission in which a star philosopher writes in defending his own philosophy and a lesser philosopher writes in defending the star’s philosophy, and both of them are equally cogent to the point of flipping a coin over which one to blindly choose for publication—a situation, I have to confess, I daydreamed myself being in with Rorty) and instead skip to the end. One could imagine from what has come before that Danto will land in favor of blind submission—what, afterall, could matter if truth is divorced from rhetoric?—but Danto actually lands a bit on the other side. “The reason voice is relevant to philosophical writing is that philosophical writings by a single person form complex systems and constellations of ideas—they have pasts and futures as well as presents—and the reasons we are interested in voice are those which explain our interest in philosophical creativity. Creative philosophers do not do philosophy by producing atoms of bottom-line ‘good’ philosophy. What they write carries what they have written and what they hope to write as the aura of a total vision.” (242-3)
I have my suspicions about “total vision,” but I see what Danto is talking about. And he’s quite right. “This means that suppression of our facticities results in a distorted representation of the world, the world according to Nobody. And this makes bottom-line philosophy abstract and distorted and surrealistic.” (244) We see Danto’s latent realism rising up again, but his conclusions are resonant: “Philosophy in its professional practice has loosened itself more and more from the world as we really experience it anyway, in our embodied and historical natures, in its drive to secure something disembodied and timeless. And I think a dreadful price, the price of irrelevance, is paid for this: nobody reads philosophy but philosophers. … Let blind review continue, but blind philosophy might to everyone’s profit stop being written. Philosophers should be encouraged to speak in their own voice about the world that means something to them. The freer the voice, the better the philosophy. For now, that is the only connection I see.” (244-5)
That’s not the only connection I see and that’s probably because of Danto’s seeming realism, but I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on Danto (least of all through his roaming essay), but I feel like his heart is in the right place—if that is to be discerned from the last pages of a piece. But if that were true, I would have to accept “Good is a noun” and there’s no way I’m swallowing that. But perhaps there’s a difference between a person’s heart and their spirit and perhaps Pirsig’s spirit lies elsewhere from his heart. Mind, heart, spirit: the written lines, the written conclusion, and everything else in between—the lines or otherwise.
This lands us in the lap of translation, or interpretation (which is how Davidson translates that Quineanism), which is where I left us with voice. “Voice” is a metaphor that pragmatists can get along with. Ever since Gadamer and Sellars, Dewey and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Nietzsche, it’s been harder and harder for philosophers to just assume that we can break away from language, harder for them to use bodily metaphors, and harder for them to use theological metaphors. If Dennett is to be believed, the “mind” isn’t all we thought it was. If Susan Neiman, then the “heart” must include more than good intentions. If Bloom, the “spirit” just is what we make of it. However, I think all three combine to make up the “voice” of a philosopher. This is all like Davidson’s triangulation of world-person-community, which, translated into textual interpretation, plays out into text-writer-reader. Understanding a language takes Davidson’s triangle and understanding a philosopher takes it, too. Interpretation is the collusion of the three parts, and no part can be understood separately.
A philosopher’s voice includes her mind, her heart, and her spirit. It includes how she’s getting to a place, where she’s going, and where she will end up being—the now, the little bit later, and the far into the future. Not all minds are cogent, not all hearts good, not all spirits living—not all arguments sound, conclusions useful, or philosophies engaging. But the philosopher, the voice, includes all of these. Not all of Pirsig’s arguments are successful, not all of Pirsig’s conclusions are acceptable, and not all of his philosophy is interesting. But Pirsig’s voice is powerful and inimitable, capturing our attention still. And though Pirsig’s voice may cease to echo someday, that voice will still be a sharp, loud thunderclap for those who discover him, if one delivered in a room with bad acoustics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
