Rhetoric and Dialectic in Plato

This was a paper I wrote in 2002. It is a fairly typical discussion of Plato's Republic in relation to the rhetoric/dialectic controversy and nothing very interesting happens in it. However, for all it's typicality, it is still more or less right, just boring. So in this respect, it might be a useful rehearsal for those who aren't familiar with Platonic scholarship (some of which is in a lot of ways assumed in many of my other writings).
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In the Republic, Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) is attempting to define what justice is when he begins to describe a city. His hope is that if he can find justice writ-large in the city, he can then find what justice between individuals is. In this section of the dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, Socrates uses an interesting rhetorical device: description/re-description. Socrates takes a description by Glaucon and re-describes it in his own terms. This simple rhetorical stratagem becomes interesting and problematic in light of Plato’s apparent relation to rhetoric in the Republic and elsewhere. We find that Plato continually disparages rhetoric and, in particular, its teachers, the Sophists. If we place Plato’s rhetorical device of description/re-description within a larger context of the nature of rhetoric and dialectic, we will find that Plato has an inherent tension between his espousal of dialectic and his use of rhetoric for which he never accounts. This tension produces two different definitions of dialectic: one as universal dialectic, the other as contingent dialectic. Plato espouses the first, but is continually in use of the second.

After Socrates and the others decide to find justice in the city, Socrates begins his “origin of cities” argument. He begins by saying that, “Society originates … because the individual is not self-sufficient, but has many needs which he can’t supply himself.”[1] (369b) Thus, the city or community is created out of necessity. People cannot survive on their own, so they form small communities to aid each other in survival. But then Socrates introduces the division of labor, the notion that people should specialize in that which they are best suited. “Quantity and quality are therefore more easily produced when a man specializes appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others.”[2] (370c) This inflates the population of Socrates’ formally small city of five into a community of many. This is Socrates’ healthy city or, in Solon’s sequence, the city of wealth or olbos.

Glaucon, however, interrupts and identifies this city as the city of pigs. (372d) The sequence of events that occur here is important. Socrates paints the picture of the city, Glaucon identifies it as the city of pigs, and Socrates then re-describes it as his healthy city. Glaucon then describes his luxurious city as having citizens who “recline in comfort on couches and eat off tables, and have the sort of food we have today.” (372d) Then, Socrates re-describes this city (“it will want couches and tables” (372e)) as a city with a fever, the city of koros. Socrates even quips, “With our new luxuries we shall need doctors too, far more than we did before.” (373d)

The struggle in this section is over who gets to identify the current description. If Glaucon had his way, Socrates’ healthy city would be a city fit for animals. Glaucon, clearly, is portrayed as an anti-primitivist. A tolerable, livable, civilized life begins with luxury. Socrates, on the other hand, is here portrayed as a primitivist, preferring a small, simple community and life. But this is simply one stage in a much larger argument for justice. Due to his superior dialectical agility and acumen, Socrates, as always, wins and moves on with his argument.

The rhetorical device used in this struggle proves interesting when sat side by side with Plato’s apparent distaste for rhetoric. In Book 6, Plato uses the allegory of a ship at sea to describe why philosophers are not the most important men in a state, in particular a democracy. The ship of state allegory is characterized by its three participants: the captain, the crew, and the navigators. Plato describes the captain as “larger and stronger than any of the crew, but a bit deaf and short-sighted, and similarly limited in seamanship.” (488a-b) The crew spends all of its time “milling round the captain and doing all they can to get him to give them the helm.” (488c) The true navigators, on the other hand, spend all of their time studying the weather and the stars. For this they are laughed at and reviled by the other crew. The allegory is simple: the captain is the voting populace, the crew represents the people running for office, and the true navigators are the philosophers. Where the philosophers actually know how to run a state, the crew is merely intent upon being put in charge to run the state. To do so they concentrate on trying to convince the captain to let them.

The moral of the story is that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is bad because it allows ignorant people to sound like they are not ignorant. The crew can convince the captain to let them navigate, not because they know how to navigate, but because they portray themselves as knowing how to navigate. The ship of state allegory does not stop there, though. The crew are masters of rhetoric and the true navigators are masters of dialectic (as philosophers modeled after Plato). The implication of the allegory is that rhetoric is bad because it supersedes the dialectic.

The tension between Plato’s distaste of rhetoric and his use of it becomes all the stronger as we find that Plato uses rhetorical methods all the time. In fact, a fortiori, Plato’s most famous pieces of philosophy are rhetorical in nature. The dialectic is the rigorous method of reasoning upon which one can find the true definitions of things, thereby discovering its Form. For Plato, it was the sole method by which truth was attained. But here we have Plato consistently using analogies, allegories, metaphors, and narrative themes to great effect.

The purpose of the Republic is to find the Form of Justice. As has already been pointed out, Plato hopes to,

“find justice on a larger scale in the larger entity [the community], and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our inquiry with the community, and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find in the conformation of the smaller entity anything similar to what we have found in the larger.” (368e-369a)

Plato wants to find something similar in community-justice to individual-justice. The entire argument of the Republic is cast in the form of an analogy between the two kinds of justice. An analogy is not a form of rigorous argumentation. An analogy is a pictorial or metaphorical mode of thinking.

Plato also uses allegories everywhere. There’s the allegory of the cave and ship of state in the Republic[3], the allegory of the charioteer in the Phaedrus[4], and, its been argued, the entire Phaedrus as a whole.[5] Allegories are clearly not included in the dialectic. Allegories are stories or narratives that carry a second metaphorical meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words. Plato also uses simpler metaphors as in the origin of cities argument. The “city of pigs” is not literally a city filled with pigs. Though this metaphor is introduced by Glaucon, Plato re-describes the metaphor in terms of the sickness or health of a city and ends with the metaphorical doctor of the city, in the form of the philosopher-king.

Finally, and most ambiguously, is Plato’s relation to writing. Christopher Norris, in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, points out that in the Phaedrus writing is,

“the dangerous ‘supplement’ which lures language away from its authentic origins in speech and self-presence. To commit one’s thoughts to writing is to yield them up to the public domain, to risk being misconstrued by all the promiscuous wiles of interpretation. Writing is the ‘death’ that lies in wait for living thought, the subtle agent of corruption whose workings infect the very sources of truth. Plato’s case against rhetoric is therefore of a piece with his attitude to writing. Both are seen as the rebellious servant to a master (truth or dialectic) whose authority they flout by setting themselves up as alternative paths to wisdom.”[6]

But here we have Plato’s vast body of writing. And not only did Plato commit his own thoughts to writing, he committed the thoughts of his beloved master, Socrates. The strength of this ambiguity between Plato’s professed distaste for writing and the existence of his own writing takes on new proportions when we consider the fact that Plato is no slouch when it comes to writing. Plato is considered an unexcelled Greek writer. The Republic is not only a series of metaphors and allegories within an overarching analogy, the entire narrative of the Republic is framed in a katebasis motif. As Voegelin says, “The first chapter of the Republic sets the dialogue into motion. Its opening passage … assembles symbols that recur in its course. And the first word, kateben (I went down), sounds the great theme that runs through it to its end.”[7] The theme suggests that saving knowledge is attained in another world and that one must go there to receive it. In the Republic, Socrates goes down to the harbor and engages in the argument for true knowledge of justice and so then returns with his friends back up to Athens.[8] This theme is even mirrored in the allegory of the cave.[9]

All of this suggests that Plato and Socrates were both distrustful of rhetoric and concurrently quite good at it. Many scholars have pointed out that Socrates is actually quite closer to his professed enemies, the Sophists, practitioners and teachers of rhetoric, then Plato would have liked. W. T. Jones says, in The Classical Mind, “[Socrates] must have seemed to his fellow citizens more like a Sophist than anything else.”[10] In the Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, Eduard Zeller says,

“Socrates had much in common with the Sophists; first a critical attitude towards everything that seemed to be founded merely on tradition; further the chief object of his thought—man as knowing, active, social being; thirdly, that in his philosophic reflections he always started from experience.”[11]

But as Paul R. Helsel says, “Socrates was born among the Sophists, he was educated by the Sophists, he used the method of the Sophists, but Socrates was not a sophist.”[12] The difference is that the Sophists did not believe in an ultimate truth, but Socrates (or, at least Plato’s Socrates) did.

The interesting inconsistency of Plato’s distaste for rhetoric and his use of it becomes even more problematic in light of this last statement: “he used the method of the Sophists.” This seems to obscure the line between dialectic and rhetoric, the method of Socrates and the method of the Sophists. The line blurs even further when we take into account Golden, Berquist, and Coleman’s rendering of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus in The Rhetoric of Western Thought. They characterize the Gorgias as a study of false rhetoric. “Rhetoric … was a pseudo-art of appearances rather than a vehicle for conveying truth.”[13] In the Phaedrus, on the other hand, Plato articulates “true rhetoric.”

“The second or ‘true rhetoric’ he himself exemplified. The rhetoric he embraced was truthful, self-effacing, and real. Plato’s noble lover [true rhetorician] was part philosopher, part logician, part psychologist. He must know the truth. He must be a master of dialectic, the Platonic instrument for the discovery and dissemination of the truth.”[14]

The problem with this description of “true rhetoric” is that it sounds exactly like the dialectic. In a systematic diagram of Plato’s true rhetoric, Golden, Berquist, and Coleman define rhetoric as “the art of winning the Soul by discourse” and that “it’s one and the same for every type of speaking.”[15] If that is not Plato’s definition of dialectic, then classicists have been translating dialektikē wrong for a long time.[16] Alongside this seeming equivocation of rhetoric and dialectic come the claims of Socrates and Plato being rhetoricians themselves.[17] So what exactly is going on here? The difficulty in placing Socrates and Plato as rhetoricians or not exists because of equivocations in defining dialectic. There are, in effect, two definitions co-existing at the same time: Sophistic dialectic and Platonic dialectic.

Sophistic dialectic is closely aligned to the original translation of the word dialektikē: the art of conversation or discourse. Following Protagoras’ famous saying, “Man is the measure of all things,” Sophistic dialectic depends on who the conversers are. Because of this, it is also contingent upon the conversers’ cultural background and place in history. Two Greek men from 440 BCE are going to have a much different dialectic then two American men from 2002 CE. Sophistic dialectic is a contingent, historicized dialectic. Definitions produced by the dialectic are stipulative, nominal definitions. Dialectic, in this light, is usually thought of as a branch of rhetoric.[18] Platonic dialectic, on the other hand, is the sole method towards universal truth. It’s “one and the same for every type of speaking.” It’s “the only procedure which proceeds by the destruction of assumptions to the very first principle, so as to give itself a firm base.” (533c-d) Platonic dialectic is a universal, eternal dialectic and is properly thought of as a branch of logic (or vice versa).

With these two concepts we can see two things happening in the Platonic dialogues. When a Sophist enters into an argument with Socrates, he is arguing contingently. He uses all of his rhetorical skills and abilities to win and, if he were to win, the position that won wouldn’t be ultimate “Truth”, but rather simply “true” of this particular moment. When Socrates enters into an argument, he also uses all of his rhetorical skills and abilities to win. However, the position Socrates is ultimately arguing for is the enshrinement of the Truth. Socrates is entering into a contingent dialectic to enshrine universal dialectic. Along the way, Socrates began to distinguish between good rhetoric and bad rhetoric, good dialectic and bad dialectic. Good rhetoric became simply dialectic and bad rhetoric became rhetoric. And because Socrates was so good at the branch of rhetoric known as dialectic, he won. At the very least, this is bad faith on the part of Socrates.

It is in this light, in the context of a battle over the definition of rhetoric and dialectic, a battle of competing descriptions of rhetoric and dialectic, that we should view his use of the rhetorical device of description/re-description. For, if viewed in this light, we can see Socrates using the same rhetorical tricks and gambits as that of his enemy, the Sophists, all the while denying its use and instead placing the success of his victories on the mantle of dialectic. As Norris says of Nietzsche:

“The dialectical method of eliciting ‘truth’ from a carefully contrived encounter of wisdom and ignorance was – according to Nietzsche – no more than a rhetorical ploy. Its persuasiveness, however, was such as to monopolize for itself all claims to reason, dignity and truth. … Behind all the big guns of reason and morality is a fundamental will to persuade which craftily disguises its workings by imputing them always to the adversary camp. … If anything, the sophist comes closer to wisdom by implicitly acknowledging what Socrates has to deny: that thinking is always and inseparably bound to the rhetorical devices that support it.”[19]

In this sense, dialectic is a tool of repression in the rhetorical game of persuasion. Dialectic forces people down one path of argumentation. Socrates’ game is to get his opponent to accept the opening points of his argument, force his opponent through a labyrinth of logic, and any objection he re-describes to either discredit it or force his opponent back into the labyrinth, thus fueling Socrates’ own argument. Norris describes a scene where

“Socrates is shown running circles of argument round one of their [sophists’] number in Plato’s dialogue The Gorgias. Here dialectic wins out, as always, by placing its questions with strategic skill and forcing the opponent into a position of weakness on Socrates’ terms.”[20]

This isn’t to say that the Sophists aren’t engaged in the same program. They also enter into the dialectic in the hopes of winning. However, their ultimate goal is not the enshrinement of some universal truth. Their goal is contingent upon the moment, as per their understanding of rhetoric and dialectic.

If we interpret dialectic the way Plato would want us to, as the logic of universals, the path to the Forms, then conflict occurs with other pieces of Platonic argumentation. However, if we interpret dialectic in Plato as a branch of rhetoric, as simply the historically contingent discourse of a particular time and place, then the problems with Platonic allegory and metaphor disappear, but we are left without universal Forms, which are instrumental to Plato’s systematic philosophy. Thus we have two descriptions of dialectic. If we take dialectic as the universal method towards truth, we must reject Plato as a practicioner because of his continued aberrations into rhetoric. However, if we take dialectic as a branch of rhetoric, contingent upon its every use, a description that Plato seems to, in some sense, have understood in his equivocation of rhetoric and dialectic in the Phaedrus, we will see how Plato was attempting to enshrine a method of truth by any means at his disposal. The use of description/re-description in the opening sections of the Republic is just one of many examples.

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[1] All quotations of the Republic are from the Desmond Lee translation.

[2] It should be noted that this is the first appearance of Plato’s conception of justice. Compare “… a man specializes appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others.” (370c) with Plato’s ultimate construction “… justice consists in minding your own business and not interfering with other people.” (433b) The common principle to both is that a person should mind their own business and do their own thing. Plato seems to want us to believe that this justice is then naturally emergent, but, argumentatively speaking, it is not good policy to use what you are trying to prove in the proof, i.e. from a dialectical standpoint, Plato is begging the question. This becomes apparent at 374a when Glaucon asks if the people could not fight for themselves if attacked by another state. Socrates replies, “Not if the principle, on which we all, yourself included, agreed when we started constructing our state, is sound. And that was, if you remember, that one man could not do more than one job or profession well.” (374a) It is quite clear, at this point, that Plato is constructing a dialectical argument for justice. And since Plato’s professed method towards truth, in general, is the dialectic, this provision in the “origin of cities” argument becomes suspect. He is supposed to be proving his principle, not assuming it. However, as a rhetorical description of the origin of society, it proves effective or, at the least, relatively inoffensive.

[3] Book 7 and 6 respectively.

[4] 246a-247b

[5] James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman, The Rhetoric of Western Thought, (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1976), 20

[6] Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, (New York: Routledge, 1982), 63

[7] Eric Voegelin, “The Way Up and the Way Down”, in History-208 Course Packet, (Spring 2002), 139 (originally in the third volume of Voegelin’s Order and History)

[8] ibid.

[9] In the allegory of the cave, the katebasis theme is reversed so that the prisoner breaks free and travels up out of the cave, receives knowledge, and then travels back down to the cave, rather than down to the harbor for knowledge and up to Athens to spread it.

[10] W. T. Jones, The Classical Mind, (New York: Harcourt, 1952), 110

[11] Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 118

[12] Paul R. Helsel, “Early Greek Moralists,” in History of Philosophical Systems, ed. Vergilius Ferm, (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1961), 89

[13] Golden, Berquist, and Coleman, 20

[14] ibid., 25

[15] ibid., 26

[16] “Dialectic, in fact, is the only procedure which proceeds by the destruction of assumptions to the very first principle, so as to give itself a firm base.” (533c-d) The main thing to stress here is that dialectic is “the only procedure” and the first principle spoken of is the Form of the Good which orients the Soul.

[17] This includes Nietzsche’s attack, being “not to deny the potential aberrations of rhetoric but to argue, on the contrary, that Socrates himself is a wily rhetorician who scores his points by sheer tactical cunning.” (Norris, 61)

[18] Take for example, dialectic’s submersion under rhetoric in The Aims of Argument: A Brief Rhetoric: “The ancient Greeks called argument as inquiry dialectic; today we might think of it as dialogue, or serious conversation.” As a branch of rhetoric, dialectic becomes one of many avenues of inquiry, though for Plato, dialectic was the only avenue towards truth.

[19] Norris, 60-1

[20] ibid., 60

Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

“Metaphysics” is an overworked word that gets people into trouble, particularly pragmatists. There are so many ways of defining metaphysics, like epistemology, that Rorty has remarked that we should just leave it alone, that it is undefinable. While true, philosophical conversation would be a good deal harder since everybody still insists on using it, even Rorty. Given that Pirsig defines his philosophy as a “metaphysics” and Rorty defines metaphysics as the most basic philosophical wrong turn, I’ve often been asked how the two are supposed to hang together, as I’ve claimed they can. My answer is typically that Pirsig’s definition of “metaphysics” is basically the same as what Rorty and pragmatists would define “philosophy”: a really big, general view of things. Rorty’s use of metaphysics, however, is more narrow than that, basically commensurate with the way Heidegger defined it: Platonism. Maybe not Plato himself, but the whole line of footnotes that extend from him. In what follows, I’d first like to offer definitions (in the form of questions) of my title characters and suggest the ways in which I see them hanging together.

1) Metaphilosophy: What way of life are we going to follow?

2) Philosophy: How do things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term?

3) Metaphysics: How do things really hang together?

The first is taken from Pierre Hadot (in, for instance, What is Ancient Philosophy?), which is a use that rhymes quite well with Wittgenstein. Each form of life uses certain vocabularies with which they make sense of the world. So while doing philosophy (stolen from Wilfrid Sellars), we try and develop a vocabulary with which we try and get the rest of our vocabularies (scientific, moral, religious, literary, political, etc.) to hang together. Doing metaphilosophy involves a conversation about which form of life is better, which kind of philosophical vocabulary we should be using to get our other vocabularies to hang together. One way of describing metaphysics, then, is as a particular kind of philosophical vocabulary, a kind of philosophy that tries to force metaphilosophical consequences by an outside source. By bit by bit hammering down how things really hang together, the choice of what form of life we are going to be is taken away from us, determined instead by something other than us (e.g., Reality or God).

In the sense of these terms, most propounded philosophies by philosophers are a tangle of metaphilosophical and philosophical theses, though most philosophers in the past (and present for that matter) take their meta- theses for granted and disentangling them is a bit of a chore. What Rorty shunts under the name “pragmatism” is mostly just metaphilosophical theses, though from time to time he’ll be inconsistent (in the sense that pragmatism is only the name for a metaphilosophical stance, which historically it hasn’t only been) and attribute a philosophical thesis to pragmatism. But with the above distinctions in hand, it is fairly easy to distinguish Rorty’s meta- from philosophical theses (with the realization, then, that he spends most of his time doing metaphilosophy).

Doing philosophy can sometimes vault us up into metaphilosophy. Philosophy can have metaphilosophical consequences, or rather, some philosophies won’t be appropriate for some forms of life. This isn’t so much because of any “metaphysical hammering,” but because the two are more like on a continuum, there isn’t a hard and fast distinction between the two (which is why philosophers like Stanley Cavell say that there isn’t any such thing as metaphilosophy). Sometimes when doing philosophy you are forced into a discussion about what form of life we want to be. This happens when, for instance, there isn’t anywhere else for the conversation to go, when a straight out argument isn’t going to work because both sides seem to be begging the question over each other. What distinguishes metaphysical philosophy from nonmetaphysical philosophy is that metaphysics tries to get things hammered down by something else, e.g. Reality or Facts, whereas in nonmetaphysical philosophy the only thing doing any hammering are people.

What I'm trying to get a distinction between is the view that “there is a way things are” and “there is a way things really are.” The way pragmatists see philosophy is as taking common sense and finding something wrong with it. Common sense, as ways in which we make our way about the world, entails a way things are. That's what it is. A rock is a rock exactly because it is a rock and not a book of philosophy or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What the metaphysicians have taken to be philosophy is the correction of common sense by getting at the way the things really are. What fully pragmatized thought tries to do is change common sense by offering us better ways of thinking how things are.

So, if I, as a (hopefully) fully pragmatized philosopher, am to be identified as a materialist (as in thinking that corpuscularianism is a good way of thinking about what science does), or a nominalist (as in thinking that, if there is distinction between universals and particulars, it can only be made within a language and not between language (universals) and non-language (particulars)), or a Darwinian (as in thinking that humans are simply one more species of animal doing its best), it is not because I think that any of those ways entail a way things really are (or rather, the way things really are entails them), but that they entail a way things are, in that I act and behave and think as if those things are the way they are--because that's what common sense is: “the way I act and behave and think.”

What metaphysicians think is that our common sense can be corrected by the way things really are, that the ways we act, behave, and think can be changed by ascertaining the way things really are in the world. Pragmatists only think that the ways we act, behave, and think can be changed by alternative ways of acting, behaving, and thinking and that the “ascertainment of the really real” is a wheel that plays no part in the system. It’s not that the metaphysicians aren’t motivated in their redescriptions by their belief that their redescription is closer to the way things really are, but I’m suggesting that there’s no difference between redescriptions offered by metaphysicians who think that they finally have it and by pragmatists who think that this is just one more potentially better alternative to try out. So by an act of Ockham’s Razor, we’d like to cut out the wheel spinning all by itself.

So in practice there is often no difference between what a metaphysician and a poet does: they offer redescriptions of our language to expand the space of reasons, to expand what we can talk about and direct our attention towards what we should talk about. We can offer a distinction between two different kinds of metaphysicians to be more detailed: speculative and empirical (see the beginning of "Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?"). Speculative metaphysicians proceed by offering gigantic redescriptions of their subject and eventually tack on the claim “this is how things really are.” Empirical metaphysicians proceed by making an inquiry into a suitably large and fundamental topic like “Truth” or “Reality” or “Language” and, when finished with such an inquiry, suppose they’ve found out something essential about their subject. But on both sides these are tack-ons. For instance, sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker think that their work in biology or the brain or language say something about the large, important sounding topic philosophers have called “Human Nature” and that finding out the way we are will tell us something about what we should do. Pragmatists think that not only is the notion of “Human Nature” too metaphysical to tell us anything useful, but that how we are or have been will never do more than give us a starting point or possibly guidance towards what we should do or become.

Particularly with empirical metaphysicians, the difference in practice between metaphysicians and non- is that metaphysicians will tend to waste time and effort trying to make an impossible establishment of essence, of how things really are rather than sufficing with making the case that this is the way things should be. Pragmatists side with the Romantics in thinking that the human species is an infinitely malleable creature. Platonists believe that there is an essential way we are and it is by distorting this essence that bad things happen, like injustice. Neo-Romantics like pragmatists, however, think we can toss the representational notion of “distortion” and still be able tell the difference between better and worse and change are practices to make things better.

The choice between Romanticism and Platonism is the major struggle in metaphilosophy. One of the particular battles is over whether pragmatists can be Romantics and still hope for the same things Platonists hope for, like the end of injustice. Platonists don’t think they can. Pragmatists think that shared hopes about the end of injustice and the particular possibilities opened up by redescriptions are more important than the Platonist tack-on. But Platonists think that without the tack-on you cannot have the hope or the redescriptions. So for philosophers, the last major site of battle is over Platonism, though nothing else seems to hang in the balance. Platonists think everything hangs, pragmatists think nothing hangs, but at the end of the day they both have the same hopes and dreams. Pragmatists think this bodes well for them, for it at least foists the burden of proof on Platonists. 2500 years of having the burden of proof and being driven further and further back has marginalized Platonic philosophy (i.e. academic philosophy) from the rest of society. The more society gets on well enough and improves itself without having what Platonists think it requires, the more pragmatists think this suggests that Platonism is a scholastic endeavor that adds little to society. Pragmatists would like to end the scholasticism and get on with something else. Rather than harassing everyone else about how they are living in bad faith, nonmetaphysical philosophers would at least be able to add some small measure of perspective to their compatriots work in other areas.

Introduction to Rorty

The not-so-silent partner in this blog is Richard Rorty. Rorty is the philosopher from whom I've learned most, and all of my philosophical meanderings are infused with his influence. For people who don't know me from moq.org, I can imagine a situation much like Pirsig in ZMM realizing what's going on at the University of Chicago ("In the title of your blog, you've omitted one important name." "Yeah, whose that?" ". . . Rorty . . ." "Oh, I see . . . you didn't know . . ."). So, again very belatedly, I thought I'd offer a brief introduction of some of Rorty's philosophy.

Rorty, in fact, studied at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins School while it was still around. It was there that he studied with Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon (who were mentioned in ZMM, McKeon being the "Chairman"), but also with Leo Strauss, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Hartshorne. Rorty was most attracted to the classical, history-oriented side of philosophy that occured with McKeon and Hartshorne, but he did learn a bit from Carnap. It is a coincidence of life that he should have studied with three philosophers at Chicago and then at Yale (for his PhD) that so parrallel each other: McKeon and then Robert Brumbaugh, Carnap and then Carl Hempel, Hartshorne and then Paul Weiss. But despite studying with Carnap and Hempel, he came out the other side ill-prepared for work in the linguistic philosophy that had taken over most American philosophy departments. Rorty was well-versed in the history of philosophy, but not in the logic and linguistic tools that, because of emigrees like Carnap and Hempel, had swept from the Vienna Circle. So he spent a few years at Wellesley, and then after being hired by Gregory Vlastos to teach Greek philosophy at Princeton, his first few years at Princeton, the primere philosophy department in the United States, retooling himself as an analytic philosopher, figuring out what everybody was talking about.

The point in this little detour through Rorty's biography is that Rorty never felt totally at home in analytic philosophy and he also had far more historical depth then those who came out of Harvard and Princeton. Through the course of the 60s and 70s, watching the downfall of logical positivism at the hands of Quine and Sellars, Rorty began putting pressure on his collegues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, calling into question their most basic premises. And then in the late 70s he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which summarized the problems he saw in analytic philosophy both in the short view (by neatly showing the dialectical path of self-destruction in 50s and 60s philosophy) and the long view (how this path is part of a larger path stretching from Plato and Aristotle, though more particularly from Descartes to Kant). His acheivement was to not only dialectically tangle with those various positions that had arisen in the course of mid-20th century philosophy, but to also sketch a historical narrative that attempted to show the recurring folly the mode of logical positivism, and analytic philosophy generally during this period, kept repeating, something they had learned from their predecessors.

The position Rorty found himself in during the 70s was that of pragmatism. He took up its mantle and carried it forward, taking what he took to be advances in philosophy (by, for instance, Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett) to show more of the same thing, the things James and Dewey were trying to show us. Three very general positions taken by pragmatism (or at least Rorty's version of it) can roughly be summed up by three slogans (culled from the titles of lectures he gave in Germany and France and published in Philosophy and Social Hope): "truth without correspondence", "a world without essence", and "ethics without principle".

If you take Philosophy 101 and you cover theories of truth, they'll usually describe three: the correspodence theory of truth, the coherence theory of truth, and the pragmatist theory of truth. The first says truth is what corresponds correctly to reality, the second that truth is what coheres best with everything else, and the third that truth is what works. None of those theories work (which is why many philosophers joke that adopting pragmatism will only cause you to reject it). The correspodence theory is roughly something we've had since Plato and the other two have been reactions to that default position of philosophical inquiry--that our statements need to cut through the appearances to the reality of a situation. The coherence theory is something that arose with idealists like Royce. It was also forwarded somewhat by Davidson early in his career. The pragmatist theory came about with Peirce, James, and Dewey's responses to Plato. Rorty's aligned himself with all of them through the course of the sixties and seventies, but by 1980 he had seen that what Davidson and the classical pragmatists should be seen as suggesting is not a theory of truth but the idea that "truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about." (CP, xiii)

The basic gist of this position is that if truth is correspondence to reality (a position sometimes called "representationalism"), then we need to have specific, definable criteria for determining when we've correctly connected up to reality. However, all we have as criteria are such pragmatic criteria as corroboration by evidence, coherence with other beliefs, efficiency of explanation, etc. None of these could tell us that we've correctly seen reality because history quite plainly shows us that our beliefs keep changing according to these criteria. Pragmatic criteria are good for justifying a belief, but not for telling us if it is universally and eternally true. Hence, pragmatists suggest that, though truth may be absolute, there's no sense in having a theory about it because all we'll be able to do is justify our beliefs.

What follows from this is the second slogan, "a world without essence". When one renounces the correspondence theory of truth, one also renounces the idea that there is an essence to reality (or any other particulate). The existence of essences are what produced the idea that we should correspond to them. So with the failure of correspondence, we should redescribe our situation without the use of essences. Rorty says that philosophers like James, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Foucault are "trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a flux of continually changing relations. One effect of this panrelationalism is that it lets us put aside the distinction between subject and object, between elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind and those contributed by the world, and thereby helps us put aside the correspondence theory of truth." (PSH, 47. This is the same panrelationalism I talked about with Pirsig and Pirsig also begins to show how the Eastern philosophical tradition can help us shrug these dualisms off, connections that Paul Turner has continued to make explicit, particularly here, here, and here.)

What philosophers need to shrug off is representationalism, the idea that knowledge is an accurate representation of the object. Pragmatists suggest redescribing knowledge in terms of power, "that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else." (PSH, 50) To be able to make this description stick, pragmatists also need to "break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic," (ibid.) between an intrinsic, nonrelational property of X (which is what makes it X) and an extrinsic, relational property that can change as much as it wants without affecting X (defined by its intrinsic essence). Pragmatists reject the notion of a nonrelational property on the basis that all attempts to get at this property are going to be ways of relating to it. "Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations." (PSH, 53-4)

One of the most important areas that this pragmatism impacts is that of moral philosophy, which is what gives us "ethics without principles." Kant conceived of morality as different in kind from that of mere prudence. Prudence are those habits of action that are merely convenient, that arise in our interactions with others. Morality, however, is an area of intrinsic authority, giving us laws of action that must be obeyed. The attack on essentialism and representationalism, however, leaves us without any sense of being able to find these laws. Pragmatism thus breaks down the distinction between morality and prudence and leaves us with rules of thumb ranging from uncontroversial situations ("trust family more than strangers") to controversial ones ("treat others as you would have them treat you"). Morality ceases to be a law-finding enterprise and reasserts itself in the contingent web of relations that we find ourselves. It ceases to be the reflective exercise of finding a priori guides and strictures to action that Kant conceived of and becomes an exercise that must include history and anthropology and literature, the learning of how other people interact with each other to accumulate the experience and wisdom in dealing with different people in sometimes surprising circumstances. General, arid authoritative structures of action are out and living in the detailed, sloppy mess of life with other people is in.

Pragmatism suggests that we give up the attempt to find philosophical foundations for morality or knowledge. Such attempts at trying to undergird science or our human rights culture simply end in drained out principles that are no more universal than the details of life they were culled from. Life is increasingly complex and we can search for wisdom and guidance. It would make it all a lot easier if there was a book with the Meaning of Life inscribed in its pages that would tell us exactly what to do in which circumstances. This book is what Plato was after, but all the attempts to find it have failed because life keeps changing. Heraclitus was right, reality is flux. But it is exactly this flux and complexity that gives all the color and joy in life. If you knew everything that was going to happen, would life really be worth living, would it really be all that fun? The Platonic flight from complexity to simplicity, from surprise to knowingness, is the philosophical flight from the exorbitant richness of life to the austere metaphysical foundations of life, from the details of one's own life to the cloistered search for ascetic purity away from all the hubbub going on around you. Kierkegaard first made that connection between asceticism and the Greeks and Nietzsche rejected it in favor of effusive self-creation. Likewise, pragmatism rejects all those dualisms which naturally direct our attention towards ascetic purity and suggests that you just get on with life and do what you can and what you may. Asceticism can be useful, but it is no truer or better a life than any other.


Common book acronyms for Rorty
----------------

PMN -- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
CP -- Consequences of Pragmatism
CIS -- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
ORT -- Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
EHO -- Essays on Heidegger and Others
AOC -- Acheiving Our Country
TP -- Truth and Progress
PSH -- Philosophy and Social Hope

Against Northrop

A month or two ago in the MD, some people were using Northrop in expositions on Pirsig's philosophy. Understanding Northrop should be important to understand how Pirsig's philosophy grew to be what it is, and I don't deny that, but from what I understand of Northrop, I don't like him much. I first read some sections of his books when I was writing a review of one of Anthony McWatt's papers and I didn't like what I found, and recently I picked up a book called The New American Philosophers by Andrew J. Reck ("new" circa 1968) that had a number of expositions on philosophers, including Northrop. What I read there did not please me either and simply deepened my suspicion that Northrop is a neo-Kantian. Which only deepens my suspicion that Pirsig is still caught in the philosophical web he hoped to rend and replace.

The first thing that makes me leery is that Northrop apparently is of the mind to make everything "scientific." This was a problem that Dewey had, too, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything really bad, it just means they are probably using a really wide sense of "science", probably as coextensive with "inquiry". This is all confirmed in the Reck book, but the way it is confirmed is not enticing. "...Northrop defines logic broadly 'to include any form of knowing in religion and art as well as the sciences,'" which sounds a lot like what Pirsig is up to in his redefinitions, but then Reck continues "closely linking it with epistemology, which examines the relation between the knower and the subject matter as known." (200) Knower/known distinction? Not a great sign.

Northrop adopts a "methodological pluralism," each appropriate to different problems or stages of inquiry. That sounds appropriate, but one repetitive note is sounded over and over again throughout the chapter: Northrop's distinction between the aesthetic and conceptual, the immediate and the postulate. This is what some expositers have been using with Pirsig and it is exactly that distinction that makes me so wary. Here's an instance in Reck: "Although the second stage of scientific inquiry opens with pure fact under observation, it terminates with described fact or classified fact, fact no longer pure but altered by concepts. Pure fact, 'defined as that which is known by immediate apprehension alone,' is 'a continuum of ineffable aesthetic qualities, not an external material object.' The bedrock of empirical knowledge is drenched with intuited quality, evincing an essential relation between fact and the sort of values mirrored in impressionistic art." (201)

The passage holds both resonance and dissonance with Pirsig and plays to some of the "red flag words" I've been suggesting people stay away from. Words like "pure", "immediate", and "ineffable". Pirsigians will think that "drenched with intuited quality" sounds good, but how they can coutenance an "essential relation" between fact and value is beyond me. I thought Pirsig's primary move was to make everything value. It is this kind of thing that suggests to me that Pirsig still, in the moments when he describes that which is most immediate to us (DQ), is reinscribing a fact/value distinction into his philosophy. And this is bad. Not good.

To just briefly attack Northrop's distinction between intuition and postulation, Northrop says that a concept of intuition is one "which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by, something which is immediately apprehended." (ibid.) Now, first realize that Northrop's philosophy seems to hinge on the notion of "sense data". Sense impressionism is way, way out of vogue these days, and with good reason. It is based on bad Humean psychology, which may have pushed us down the track to pragmatism, but is a ladder best left behind. Northrop may want to replace much of bad Humeanism, but I don't think he did it radically enough. Second, try and think of what "meaning" is given by something not under a description. As quoted above, "pure fact" is not "described fact," which means that a pure intuition is not under any description. Where is the meaning? This is one of the reasons why the "linguistic turn" became so popular. There seemed to be something funny going on when we talk a lot about "pure experience" and such. How do we get meaning if there is no language? Northrop and many others have forwarded answers, but I think all of them fall under Quine and Sellars' swords. It's just bad, Cartesian/Kantian-engendered philosophy.

Another thing that makes me leery is Northrop's attempt at "philosophy of culture." He suggests, reasonably enough, that ideologies underlie cultural beliefs and that we should understand these ideologies. (He also says, roughly, that a culture has an implicit philosophy, but this is either repetition of the first point or saying, very badly, that all cultures have philosophical presuppositions. I think he leans towards the latter.) But his notion of "scientific inquiry" comes lurching foward and leads him to suggest, in Reck's words, that "Consequently, world peace hinges upon the ability of men to understand the differing ideologies which motivate the behavior of nations, in order to reconcile them when they are compatible and to correct them in consonance with impartial criteria when they are incompatible." (204) Impartial criteria? Where the hell are we going to get those? Wouldn't any "impartial" criteria you come up with, when it goes against a given ideology's beliefs, be rejected as being partial, as begging the question over it? Isn't the point of Pirsig's attack on Subject-Object Metaphysics to disimbue us of the notion of an objective, impartial viewpoint? That we are all partial, valuistic?

All of this comes to a head in Reck's exposition of Northrop's legal philosophy.

If legal science is to contain objective norms for the criticism of living laws, it must include natural law ethics and natural law jurisprudence. To clarify and justify this claim Northrop distinguishes bewteen "first-order" and "second-order" facts. "First-order facts are the introspected or sensed raw data antecedent to all theory and all cultures, given in anyone's experience in any culture. Second-order facts are cultural artifacts; that is, they are the result in part at least of human theory of first-order facts. Nature and natural law are the names for all first-order facts and their relations. Culture and living law are the names for all second-order facts and their inner order." On the next page he continues: "Stated more precisely, therefore, natural law jurisprudence is the thesis that scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts provides the cognitive standard for measuring the goodness or badness of second-order artifacts. Thus just as sociological jurisprudence uses the scientifically verified theory of the 'is' of the living law to judge both legislation and the cases of positive law, so natural law jurisprudence uses the empirically verified theory of the 'is' of first-order facts to judge the goodness or badness of the living law." (214-5)

Do I even need to go over this? First, fact v. artifact. An artifact is an artificial fact, something made up, something not real. Second, we are supposed to get our second-order facts, the fake, artificial ones, looking closer like the first-order facts, the real ones. And a closely following third, first-order facts judge our second-order facts. The first-order facts provide the "cognitive standard for measuring goodness or badness." Cognitive standard? Again, doesn't Pirsig get rid of Kant's idea of a tribunal of pure practical reason sitting in judgement over us? Of an "is" imposing itself over our "oughts"?

I think Pirsig, in his better moments, does get rid of all those things. But I think Northrop works out fairly consistently what is required of an intuition/postulation distinction. Northrop is quite obviously trying to find that God's-eye point of view so we can find impartial criteria on which to judge other people and cultures. Pirsig says we can judge other cultures, but I hope to God there isn't any kind of notion of impartiality built in there. But I think that is exactly what is built into the intuition/postulation distinction. Things we gain by "intuition" are those things that everybody would gain in perfect symmetry, without variation.

Rocks may be such a thing, but are morals such a thing? This prima facie sense that we can get agreement on rocks and not on morals is what led to scientism. Northrop still has the sense of scientism in thinking that we can ultimately get morals to kow-tow the line. But pragmatists want to go the other direction and say that rocks aren't kow-towing any line and neither are morals. Its just the case that we can get agreement on rocks better than morals most of the time. That doesn't say anything about reality, that just means we're going to have to work hard to get people to start paying decent living wages and stop persecuting women. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time of Galileo and Newton to do to ethics and morals what they did to planets and rocks, but all that the attempts to do so have seemed to have shown us is that it wasn't, in fact, a good idea.

Begging the Question, Part II

Answering the Nazi
--------------------------
What I would like to bring out of Pirsig's texts is how Pirsig seems to want to usurp the rhetoric of the "hard" sciences as paradigms of argumentation, that Pirsig seems to want to make morals arguable. Whether, in the end, Pirsig does want to make the Nazi answerable, I think, is still left open.

To do this, I would like to use the example of the Nazi as the paradigm case of a morally corrupted individual. For our purposes, the case of the Nazi is only interesting if he is a convinced Nazi, as convinced of the morality of Nazism as we are convinced of its immorality, and a sophisticated philosopher, as sophisticated in the art of argumentation and rhetoric as we are. What many individuals want is a knock-down, logical argument, the force of which would, if the Nazi were to remain a sane, logical interlocuter, demand that the Nazi recant his erroneous ways.

Rorty's reply to such a request is that "there is no neutral, common ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles." (p. 15, PSH) Rorty says that we cannot answer the Nazi because we do not hold enough of the relevant premises in common to have an argument in which our arguments and his arguments are engageable, answerable in terms we both would recognize as good, sufficient, and relevant.

It has been pointed out on many occasions that Pirsig has this to say about morality and pragmatism: "James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement." People have tried to say that this makes the MoQ impossible for the Nazi to use, that, in effect, you can answer the Nazi by using the MoQ.

There are several problems with Pirsig's analysis of pragmatism and the Nazis. For one, the reason why pragmatism appears to be cooptable is because pragmatism only makes a negative point about the state of philosophy, it makes no positive contributions to our discourse about literature, morality, or politics. James would not have been horrified at the cooptation of his philosophy because James held too much in common with Nietzsche. What protected James from the Nazi was his American politics, not his philosophy. It was his Whitmanian faith in democracy and plurality that confronted the Nazi. This, however, isn't the problem I want to focus on, so I will not attend to the various arguments and counters.

The second problem is that I see no reason to think that a sophisticated Nazi philosopher could not co-opt the MoQ just as easily as an American rhetoric teacher. Just as a sophisticated rhetoric teacher can redescribe the history of philosophy in terms of Quality, so can a sophisticated Nazi redescribe a metaphysical system and tailor it to fit his needs. The problem with metaphysical systems, with philosophy in general, is that it is too general. When you have a systematic moral hierarchy of Dynamic Quality, intellectual static patterns, social static patterns, biological static patterns, and inorganic static patterns, what's to stop the Nazi from describing Jews as no more than animals, the fascist state as being the most evolved government, Alfred Rosenberg's "blood, race, and soil" interpretation of the MoQ as the greatest philosophical achievement, and Adolf Hitler the great brujo of our generation? As far as I can see, as long as we stay at generalities, nothing.

What stops the Nazi is concretizing the MoQ, defining the terms of the MoQ so that democracy is the greatest government and freedom the greatest intellectual achievement. However, this creates the third problem of reading Pirsig as answering the Nazi, in being able to do something that James cannot: if we insist on our definitions of the MoQ, we beg the question in our favor over the Nazi. In effect, we don't answer him, we merely exclude him from our conversation. In fact, when we look closely, it isn't clear that Pirsig is saying that the MoQ answers the Nazi. He says that the MoQ "prevents this kind of debasement", meaning that the way the MoQ should be interpreted prevents the Nazi from arguing for his own morals, in other words, it excludes him from continuing the conversation in terms he would use. It stops him cold and causes him to reply, "Well, have it your way. I refuse to enter the arena."

But it certainly seems like Pirsig wants to answer the Nazi, particularly if he denies he can be criticized the same way he criticizes James. The problem is that Pirsig seems to want to say that we can argue about morals, that reason in the Platonic, dialectical sense, is something that should not be divorced from morals. In ZMM, Pirsig felt that the solution to the Platonic, SOM mess was "a new philosophy ... a new spiritual rationality--in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical." (ZMM, 368) Pirsig wants to erect a new philosophy, a new rationality, a new five-step deductive proof in which, with our new assumptions in tow like how Quality comes before subjects and objects, we can argue with people about morals and art. "Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other" (ibid., 368) and Pirsig wants to bring them back together.

Pirsig continues his cooptation of an argumentative model of morality in his rhetoric in Lila by usurping the rhetoric of the sciences. On page 183 he says, "it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer a patient. ... We're at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before." "[A]bsolutely, scientifically", "the basis of reason", "deduce codes", "precision". These are things we find routinely in physics and chemistry, but not so often in ethics. Two more times: "Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a human being?" (ibid., 184) and "A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not...." (ibid., 357) His use of this rhetoric isn't extensive, but it is evocative and overbearing. It overshadows all of his moral pronouncements and his system.

To reformulate everything I've been saying so far, pragmatists are Humeans, they think reason the slave of the passions. Pragmatists think this because they think you can be a perfectly logical and reasonable and intellectual if you are a convinced Nazi, just the same as a convinced liberal or conservative or religious fundamentalist. The moral engine is not reason, as if you could argue a Nazi down, but passion, getting people to feel sorry about the immiseration of other people, jerking their tears at the sight of Holocaust victims. Rorty's point is that there is no way to answer the Nazi, there is no way to argue with him. The Nazi has different moral intuitions. We beg the question over each other when we argue because we are using different assumptions. However, while we can't answer the Nazi, Rorty urges that we can convert him. This doesn't occur by argumentation, it occurs by persuading him with pictures of the atrocities he has done, accounts of how the Jewish family acts and behaves and loves just like the Nazi family, that the Nazi shouldn't exclude the Jew from his we-consciousness. Clear thinking and reason and rationality are great. But Hume's point is that our clear thinking will always be in the service of our passional natures. In other words, clear thinking occurs on the model of a 5-step proof and that will always be in the service of a final vocabulary.

Pirsig's big enemy is the lack of value in science and reason, but what is he really doing, what is going on? Pirsig was right, there was nothing to stop the Nazi from coopting James' pragmatism, but Pirsig was sorely wrong to think that his MoQ was somehow safe from cooptation if it is simply based on his new hierarchy for reality. If you abstract away from the concrete, away from moral intuitions, you are either easily cooptable (like pragmatism and the morally abstract MoQ), or begging the question (like when you fill in the abstract with the concrete).

So we are led back to our question: does Pirsig want to answer the Nazi? I think the answer is still inconclusive. I think given the language he uses, it still appears that Pirsig wants to be able to wrestle the Nazi down, he wants to rely on more than our "soup of sentiments". But can he, can Pirsig, given the tools laid out presently, wrestle the Nazi down? No, he cannot. Even if Pirsig wants to create a new spiritual rationality, a logical game where the Nazi couldn't possibly win, it isn't clear yet that Pirsig is implying that the Nazi is forced to play this game, is compelled to play by our assumptions, in our terms. The question is still open.

To bring this question through one last twist, one last spin of the hermeneutical wheel, I will offer the most compelling reason I've found to believe that Pirsig thinks that the Nazi should be compelled to play our game. It hinges on the acquisition of our moral intuitions and hence, as one might guess, on Dynamic Quality.

To Part III

The Parable of the Reductionist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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