Cavell and What We Are Doing

Just as Santayana is my favorite name to throw out when I need an example of an early 20th century philosopher, Stanley Cavell is clearly my favorite of a late 20th century one. They aren’t quite arbitrary examples, for the reason I usually need an example, and the reason why I’m usually grasping for them, is because the topic I’m often discussing is the difference between charismatic and systematic philosophers, philosophers who are respected and brilliant while they are alive and philosophers who leave behind a problematic and a school of followers. Santayana has no school, and as far as I can tell Cavell does not either. However, like Santayana (who famously left philosophy mid-semester when it was just too beautiful in Harvard Yard to spend it in a class room), Cavell is an extraordinarily intriguing figure and I’ve been collecting his books for some time.

Cavell made his name as a brilliant interpreter of both Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. He was one of the foremost members, though most certainly the most idiosyncratic, of the now defunct school of “ordinary language philosophy,” or “Oxford philosophy.” I’ve known about Cavell for many years from my readings of Rorty, but he has remained enigmatic. After reading Danto’s essay, and having the book in question on my shelf, it became too irresistible to ignore. However, while the book isn’t unreadable, it isn’t exactly what you’d want if you were either trying to get into Cavell’s philosophy or find stuff you might find useful for yours. You’d already have to have a preexisting desire to know more about Cavell (which isn’t to say that it isn’t interesting to read).

I do have on my shelf, though, Cavell’s earliest book of essays, which shows how powerful he was early on and how little he’s changed in the subsequent fifty years. I’d read his opening preface a little while ago and had taken a few good lines from it, but I knew at the time that, if not quite inscrutable, Cavell wasn’t exactly “ordinary,” as his supposed school implies. Just as Danto says he has in his recent writings, Cavell’s been attempting to make his style reflect his theses since the very beginning, which is to say that Cavell wants “to make philosophy another kind of problem for itself.” (74) What that means is another thing altogether. But suffice it to say, I’ve found in Cavell’s writings an interesting window into a time now past. Cavell isn’t the clearest guide to Wittgenstein or Austin, but he is fascinating to watch.

I read two essays in his collection, Must We Mean What We Say?, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” and “Austin at Criticism.” It’s difficult to read books in your free time if you have no compass, if there’s no particular reason why you’re reading, if you have no purpose. Most of the time when I struggle with books it’s because I find them boring because I’m just not that interested in the problems the author is struggling with. Cavell’s no exception, and his style makes it even more difficult, but as I worked my way through them (the shortest essays in his collection) I began to get a clearer picture of how they could help me. And there are a plethora of sumptuous lines to chew on.

“Aesthetic Problems” was interesting to read because of the lack of attention usually given by philosophers considered to be in the midst of the “central problems” in the field at that time (epistemology, philosophy of language or science) to “peripheral” fields like aesthetics. It gives us a good indication as to why Cavell is seen as marching to the beat of his own drum, even from the very beginning (though even more so from his essays on Beckett and Shakespeare). It is difficult to put the essay together, as it runs in two parts: a first section on two problems in aesthetics (the paraphrasability of poems and the tonality of atonal music) and a second section on the general problem of aesthetic judgment. I’m still not quite clear on how to connect them, but I think it runs along the lines of two specific examples of the general problem, that lack of consensus on the general problem of aesthetic judgment would preclude answering the specific problems of paraphrasability and tonality. Cavell’s treatment of the two specific problems are interesting, though that depends on if you find the problems of literary criticism exciting (I certainly do) or if you could give a rat’s ass about music theory (I could not).

The problem of paraphrasability, as Cavell generates it from a quarrel between Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters, is one about what we are doing when we are reading a poem, or more specifically, what is it really that the literary critic is in the business of doing. Brooks suggests that a paraphrase of a poem, i.e. a reading of a poem, does not limn the true essence of the poem, though it does point the way—as long as it’s properly done. Cavell rightly wonders who it is that “has just flatly given it out that the essence, core, structure, and the rest, of a poem is its paraphrase,” considering we should have some trouble “in understanding what is any or all of these things, since it takes so much philosophy just to state them.” (75)

It is in this that we begin to taste the power that Cavell wields from the ordinary language tradition. Cavell, at this stage, talks a bit about the “methods” or “procedures” of ordinary language philosophy, but I should think that, just as Rorty suggests that we distinguish between “deconstruction” as whatever it is that Derrida is doing and “deconstruction” as a method of reading texts (see “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in EHO), we should distinguish “ordinary language philosophy” as whatever it is that Austin is doing and “ordinary language philosophy” as a method that his less imaginative and skilled followers employ. Cavell is certainly not one of these less skilled followers, and whatever it is that Cavell is doing I would be apt to say is the heart of the wisdom in Austin and that so-called school.

Cavell, in the above, is just getting started, and runs us through an imaginary dialectical encounter between a Brooksian critic and his defense of what he is doing. Jumping on Brooks’ concession, that a paraphrase is all right if you know what you are doing, Cavell retorts, “Which is about like saying that of course criticism is all right, in its place.” Cavell then offers a wonderful little description making fun of the lit crit’s typical habits of writing books:

“But how, in particular, are we to assess a critic’s reading the opening stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ Ode and writing: ‘… the poet begins by saying that he has lost something’ [Well Wrought Urn, 116]? We can ransack that stanza and never find the expression ‘lost something’ in it. Then the critic will be offended—rightly—and he may reply: Well, it does not actually say this, but it means it, it implies it; do you suggest that it does not mean that? And of course we do not. But then the critic has a theory about what he is doing when he says what a poem means, and so he will have to add some appendices to his readings of the poetry explaining that when he says what a poem means he does not say exactly quite just what the poem means; that is, he only points to its meaning, or rather ‘points to the area in which meaning lies.’ But even this last does not seem to him humility enough, and he may be moved to a footnote in which he says that his own analyses are ‘at best crude approximations of the poem’ [189]. By this time someone is likely to burst out with: But of course a paraphrase says what the poem says, and an approximate paraphrase is merely a bad paraphrase; with greater effort or sensibility you could have got it exactly right. To which one response would be: ‘Oh, I can tell you exactly what the Ode means,’ and then read the Ode aloud.” (75-6)

Cavell is thus able to quite quickly thrust himself into the middle of a dispute about the self-image of literary critics: what is it that they are doing? Not, what do they think they are doing, but what are they doing? I find the above passage hilarious, if for no other reason than I’ve had such dialectical encounters before, and ended them with something like, “Well, if you’re being such an ass about it, I can just read you the section from Pirsig.” Those are definite endpoints because being pushed there, with no other outlet of response, effectively evacuates the area in which both you and your difficult counter-interpreter were existing—the position of a writer. And we even find in a literary critic like Stanley Fish, from a book from that era, Self-Consuming Artifacts, just those kinds of appendices.

Of course, the need that Fish was forced into fulfilling was entirely antithetical to the need being fulfilled by the New Critics. As Fish would later make more clear in books like Is There a Text in This Class?, he was providing an anti-theoretical rebuttal to the continual theoretical repositionings that literary critics felt they were forced to include ever since Eliot and Frye and their lot became hegemonic. And this is the splash of cold water that Cavell is involved in giving us. The part that should make us laugh is the idea that we need a theory to justify what we are doing. “If you put such phrases as ‘giving the meaning,’ ‘giving a paraphrase,’ ‘saying exactly what something means (or what somebody said),’ and so on, into the ordinary contexts … in which they are used, you will not find that you are worried that you have not really done these things. We could say: That is what doing them really is. Only that serenity will last just so long as someone does not start philosophizing about it.” (77)

Cavell’s Wittgensteinian project is then to try and diagnose why we think we need a theory. Why are commonsensical descriptions not enough? Why must we get into a debate about what metaphors are and what the literal/metaphorical distinction is that allows a theory, and a condemnation of paraphrase on the part of Brooks, to be possible? Cavell would like to get us on the couch and apply the right kind of therapy so that we may stop philosophizing when we want to. The hope is that we may then be able to face up to the self-image problem in literary, and artistic criticism generally (which can just as easily be applied to philosophy): “namely what it is we are doing when we describe or explain a work of art; what function criticism serves; whether different arts, or forms of art, require different forms of criticism; what we may expect to learn from criticism, both about a particular piece of art and about the nature of art generally.” (82)

The next, thankfully brief, part of his essay is about music theory, and specifically tonality. As you may have guessed from my earlier comment, I found it boring and would like to jump right over it. On reflection, however, my gut reaction might highlight something about the problem Cavell is dealing with. I’ve never understood what music or art theory thinks it is doing. It has always seemed to me to be quite stupid. The catch is that, while I’ve always found theory about music or paintings to be stupid, I’ve not always felt the same about philosophy. Why is that? I have a feeling that my gut reaction to music theory is the gut reaction that Wittgenstein and Cavell would like to instill in us in general (not exactly true for either of them, but I’ve read too much Rorty and Fish to care). Why on earth do we need theory?

My general feeling is that aesthetics, and music and art theory, never took off as, or at least are still not today, philosophical hot topics is because they seem on their face to be silly (which isn’t to say that you wouldn’t have to take a theory class if you were in a Music or Art, or even Dance, department). The difference between theories of music or art and theories of knowledge or texts is that, on their face, the former are non-discursive, while the latter discursive. This made it easier for reflections on the latter to be more easily confused with their objects (Cavell’s problem of paraphrasability), whereas nobody confuses a painting with its critical review. As Cavell suggests, for all his talk of approximation, the critic himself “furthers the suggestion that paraphrase and poem operate, as it were, at the same level, are the same kind of thing. … And then he has to do everything at his philosophical disposal to keep paraphrase and poem from coinciding….” (76) But nobody confuses a poem for an essay about the poem. (Pace Bloom, who says delightfully that “All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology—in which the poem is and means itself—and reduction—in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a poem not itself.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 70) But discussion of Bloom’s engrossing attempts to make poetry a kind of criticism, and criticism a kind of poetry, a grand pragmatic attempt I must say, are for another time. Until then, see my “Bloom and Criticism.”) It is this position from common sense, where nobody confuses Iggy Pop with Lester Bangs or Michelangelo with Freud or Shakespeare with Samuel Johnson or reality with dreams, apples with sensations, or people with robots, that Cavell and Wittgenstein would like to return us to. For as long as we make the distinction between theory and practice that traditional philosophy since Plato has taught us to make, theory will itself seem pointless, superfluous, and generally unhelpful.

(I might at this point say something about Wittgenstein, silence, and the fact that I’ve just made the differentiation of discursive modalities as easy as that between the discursive and non-discursive, but I don’t know enough about Wittgenstein to do so. However, for all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that differentiation between discursive modalities is necessarily easy. It can be hard, just as science fiction tells us that the differentiation between people and robots might someday be hard. For instance, is it easy to tell the difference between what Derrida does and Christopher Norris or Jonathon Culler does? Probably. But what about Foucault and Ian Hacking? Or worse, Heidegger and Gadamer? It’s a practical problem, not a theoretical problem. At his worst, Pirsig seems to think that its easy to tell the difference between what Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus and Heidegger did in his lectures on Nietzsche (reflective system-building versus parasitic criticism), but Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology has nothing to do with the continuum I just drew. For more on criticism and philosophy, with special attention to Pirsig, see the first part of my “Philosophologology”.)

Moving on to Cavell’s second section on a general problem of aesthetics, Cavell suggests that “the aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs.” (86) This is a good suggestion because one of the problems Platonic philosophy set itself is the rationality of its own claims. As time wore on, fields like mathematics, science, and logic all showed themselves to be able to gain consensus, whereas philosophy more and more looked like a field like aesthetics, where the slogan “in the eye of the beholder” rose to prominence. Plato wanted philosophy to look like geometry and contemporary philosophers want philosophy to look like science for this very reason—the ability to gain consensus seems to mark its rationality. Cavell, however, comes to much the same conclusion that Rorty has, that philosophy is something different. Cavell even uses the same Hegelianism, aufhebung, to refer to what (as Rorty calls them) strong poets do to philosophical issues, “a criticism in which it is pointless for one side to refute the other, because its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way.” (85) If this gloss on a familiar Rortyan point remains obscure, it is only by working through what Cavell is saying (and saying Wittgenstein is saying) that some of his more opaque lines (usually left to sparkle by Cavell) gain resonance.

Cavell provides an interesting discussion of the genesis of the aesthetic problematic in Hume and Kant before facing us off between the positivist and post-positivist: “the positivist grits his teeth when he hears an analysis given out as a logical one which is so painfully remote from formality, so obviously a question of how you happen to feel at the moment, so psychological; the philosopher who proceeds from everyday language stares back helplessly, asking, ‘Don’t you feel the difference: Listen: you must see it.’” (90) In a fascinating reversal, Cavell aligns the anti-pragmatist efforts of Frege, Husserl, and Kant with the efforts of Wittgenstein to help suggest a way out of this standoff:

“We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the ‘psychologizing’ of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.” (91)

In an excellent footnote, Cavell adds:

“Consider, for example, the question: ‘Could someone have a feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second—no matter what preceded or followed this second?’ [Philosophical Investigations, §583]. We shall not wish to say that this is logically impossible, or that it can in no way be imagined. But we might say: given our world this cannot happen; it is not, in our language, what ‘love’ or ‘hope’ mean; necessary in our world that this is not what love and hope are. I take it that our most common philosophical understanding of such notions as necessity, contingency, synthetic and analytic statements, will not know what to make of our saying such things.”

I think this is a tremendous description of Wittgenstein’s achievement and it links quite well with the hopes of Iris Murdoch, who, in The Sovereignty of Good, reacts to the underpinnings of analytic and existentialist moral philosophy, with their conception of the individual as a monad who chooses freely, by suggesting a phenomenology of choices that seems to make more sense with the way in which we proceed in our lives: we don’t simply choose, willy-nilly, between two alternatives, our attempts to choose by weighing pros and cons and the like force our hand into making the choices we make. By the time we make a choice (at least in the things that matter), the route we choose doesn’t even appear to us as a choice, but rather as the only good option available. This is the kind of real life necessity that Cavell is talking about that analytic philosophy can hardly acknowledge.

I’m going to leave to the side for now Cavell’s perceptive treatment of the “procedures of ordinary language philosophy” at the end of his paper, one in which we find an illuminating cross light for Rorty’s legendary “we’s” (I will continue on in a second reflection on Cavell), and instead end with a comment about where Cavell leaves us with this description of Wittgenstein’s achievement, with the hopes of illuminating Cavell’s earlier opaque claim that the cause and topic of philosophical criticism is “the self getting in its own way.” With where he leaves us, Cavell says that is difficult to name it, that “Wittgenstein called it ‘grammar’; others might call it ‘phenomenology.’” (93) Murdoch herself doesn’t, I believe, use “phenomenology” to describe what I noted above, but these seem like fitting descriptions, and as Cavell notes in “Austin at Criticism,” Austin’s nigh only title for what he did, thrown out sheepishly once, was “linguistic phenomenology.” (99) The title captures something important, that what Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, and Murdoch were all doing is making themselves at home in the language games we find ourselves inhabiting. They wish to shove aside some recent philosophy as pathetic, failed attempts to flee these language games, these forms of life.

But can we flee our language games? I believe we can, but my grasp of Cavell leads me to believe that he isn’t so sure we should want to, that all fleeing endeavors are perverse. As I understand it, in recent years Cavell has been apt to talk about something called the “Ordinary” that is supposed to be the object philosophers strive after. This, to me, seems to be a maneuver that kills the imaginative genius of our poets, those intellectuals that try and conceive a new form of life. No doubt, Plato created a new form of life, but not all new creations are necessarily good ones. Talk about the “Ordinary” as some kind of control on what we should be able to think about or conceive seems to me to be just one more Platonic twist on ending philosophy, ending the progress of intellectual life, as if once everything were “ordinary” it’d all be hunky-dory and we philosophers would be out of a job.

There are two other ways of putting this point. One is by reference to the wisdom Rorty pulls out of the two competing schools of linguistic philosophy circa 1960. In Rorty’s brilliant, expansive and informative introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, Rorty pits “ordinary language philosophy” (with alums like Austin, Strawson, Cavell, and Urmson) against “ideal language philosophy” (with alums like Carnap, Quine, Goodman, and Bergmann) to see what their differences might be. His concluding wisdom runs along the lines of, “Any stick will do to beat the devil, and it would seem that offering an alternative to ordinary English might be effective in some cases, whereas demonstrating a misuse of English would be effective in others.” (LT, 15) What lies at the bottom of Rorty’s difference with Cavell is that Cavell would like to read Wittgenstein as simply returning us to common sense, whereas Rorty would like to read Wittgenstein as envisioning a new form of life, that for the Philosophical Investigations to “return” us to common sense, we must also extirpate the Platonisms and Cartesianisms that are our common sense, thus changing it and not leaving it as it always was, us where we always were.

The other way of putting this point is to say that Cavell’s description of Wittgenstein as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, which itself ironically psychologizes philosophy, parallels precisely Rorty’s description of Davidson’s achievement: “Davidson, in other words, seems to me to have found a transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments—one which tears down the scaffolding upon which the standard paradigms of ‘realistic’ transcendental arguments were mounted.” (“Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism,” 78*) The idea Rorty is suggesting about Davidson, and that I think Cavell is suggesting about Wittgenstein (though unwittingly counter-productively), is that they worked through the dialectical structure of the language game of Platonic-Cartesian philosophy to its very end and showed how it defeated itself, and was therefore a pointless, superfluous, and self-defeating enterprise (“its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way”).

And we see in Cavell things that sound reminiscent of Davidson’s working out of this “transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments” first proposed in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” The one that should leap out is when he says, “the philosophy of ordinary language is not about language, anyway not in any sense in which it is not also about the world.” (95) That counterintuitive statement about what Austin is doing should remind us of Davidson saying, “we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally,” which leads to his shocking formulation: “I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.” (“A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 107**) The erasure occurs, according to Davidson, once we drop the notion of conventions as ruling linguistic behavior and adopt a holistic picture of functioning, Davidson’s picture of triangulation between world, community, and person.

Cavell, I believe, is gesturing towards what Davidson worked out systematically, which isn’t too surprising given Cavell’s love of Wittgenstein and Rorty’s love of both Wittgenstein and Davidson. Unlike Davidson, however, Cavell is a more romantic thinker who is not content to plug away at posed problems, but is also concerned with self-creation, with the giving of wisdom for us, not just the wisdom Davidson dispenses primarily to other philosophers of language. The primary bit of wisdom is this: just as Cavell says that “Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about,” we should see that what we do in life is about whatever it is that we do—there is nothing deeper, or secret, underlying our actions. We may not always understand what we are doing, and should always seek better descriptions of them, but there is no key to unlock what’s truly happening, certainly not any philosophy can provide.



*Found in Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds. Peter Bieri, Rolf-P. Horstmann, Lorenz Krüger Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.
**Collected in Davidson’s Truth, Language, and History.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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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.

A monologue we should all memorize

I've never been subjected all that often to questions like, "So...what you gonna' do with that degree...?" It is true that my extended family doesn't understand my pursuits much at all, but my parents inherited from their respective families an awareness that different people lead different lives, even if you can't for the life of you imagine what that might be.

And my friends, well, they're all pretty much like me: overeducated, smart types that, though they don't fit the classic humanist intellectual mold like I do, are well aware that reading esoteric books might be good for somebody. Between that and my scintillating wit, blazing sarcasm, and oversized genius, I've mainly been able to squelch any possible jokes made at my effete sophistication.

But this is hilarious, sent to me by a friend of mine, an English major lost in the woods of Library Book Delivery.

Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan

A little background: When I fell in love with Pirsig, it was for all the wrong reasons. Well, maybe not all the reasons were wrong, but I see much more clearly now that the biggest reason was because reading and liking him would piss off my teachers. Or, at least that's what I imagined. After all, it was my Phil 101 teacher, the petite, lithe, dancer extraordinaire, Kay Picart, who (re)introduced me to Pirsig. Reading Pirsig was more fun than Plato or Nietzsche, let alone Sartre or Russell (and god forbid, Heidegger), so when it came time to write a final paper for my Contemporary Philosophy class, I chose Pirsig and dove into Lila. And Pirsig told me that academic philosophers hate him. And lo' and behold, when I told my teacher (who, unlike Picart, shall remain nameless, though largely because she was forgettable and forgotten) that I wanted to write on Bob, she said that I should write a comparison between Pirsig and someone else more established. The Man was holdin' me down, a feeling I then transferred to Pirsig. The Man was holdin' Pirsig down. And really--neither of us were being held down.

Having aged a bit since then, I think it was quite nice that my teacher should even have let me write about Pirsig at all. And, more extraordinarily still, that my Existentialism teacher, Edward Beach, should not hold it against me when I turned a 10-12 page final paper into a 20 page monstrosity that contained far more excursus on one Robert Pirsig than one would expect in a paper on Albert Camus (though its not as if he even had any idea it was coming down the pike; he didn't "let" me, I just did it). I have a much greater appreciation for the role of the teacher these days, and sometimes kids just have to be reigned in. In the old days, I would've been cuffed up side the head, and I probably would've deserved it.

I think it was a total quirk of fate, a complete accident, that led to my obsession with Robert Pirsig. I read Pirsig saying he's being ignored and reviled by the institution, and then I immediately "see" first hand his backhand treatment. Being something of an outsider myself (a feeling that is itself paradoxically balanced by what you might call my cultural traditionalism), my mind latched on to this. Pirsig's philosophy inflammed my mind and I began the journey that has led me here. Before I became literally here, at this little blogspot I call my own, my obsession and meanderings in thought were housed by moq.org. That website is dedicated to Robert Pirsig, and anybody who lasts any length of time at its discussion groups is in some way obsessed with Pirsig.

Now, if Pirsig had been a putz, then clearly I wouldn't still be obsessed. But Pirsig isn't a putz, though I now see that he isn't everything I wanted him to be. Pirsig was a useful halfway point, a stepping stone, between the way I naively saw philosophy then and the way I see it now. As I see it now, Pirsig was a useful mix of old-school traditional style philosophy, the kind that dealt in big concepts and revolutionary changes, the kind that kids think of when they think of philosophy and Plato and Nietzsche, and the kind of pragmatic, ironic philosophy that makes fun of Plato and Nietzsche.

It is that kind of talk right there, of course, which has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years at moq.org. When I started evolving from Pirsigian monotheism into a more polytheistic, open-ended pantheon, I started making noise about this movement. And because everybody already talked about Pirsig, I began to talk about my new hero, Richard Rorty. And I talked a lot about him because I thought he could help us, all of us, in our shared desires of extending Pirsigian philosophy.

That was my mistake. Granted we should all talk about Pirsig at moq.org. But is it necessary that everybody be as excited about Rorty as I am? Granted he might yet be of interest, but I made a huge error in judgment in my angle of presentation: I criticized Robert Pirsig. A lot. For a long time. In the end, it was totally predictable. What led me to latch on to Pirsig is likely the same thing that led me to latch on to Rorty: I was bucking the establishment. I had illusions of grandeur that I was pissing off academia by writing about Pirsig, and now that there was a new establishment in my town, one fairly sedimented moq.org audience, I proceeded to piss them off.

But at moq.org, this was a little less than a complete illusion. I mean, on the one hand, who was I, a barely twenty undergrad at a minor, piss-ant state school in Wisconsin, going to piss off in academia? I didn't even know who they were (and that's the first sign that you're making up your enemy). But the ruckus I've caused off and on over the years at moq.org is a little more real and evident. Which isn't to say that I still don't have an overdramatization streak that extends to this very moment (just take a look at the title). I may have the memory of an elephant, but most people at moq.org forget all too quickly who was raining fire and brimstone a week ago if they're no longer writing. Such is the way these things are, and it's just as well for the discussion group, better in fact. Less anxiety about being the first to write about whatever. Let's you feel like a pioneer, of which, sadly though predictably, I wasn't even one of (though it's a trait Pirsig's commentators share with Pirsig). So, grant the fact that I'm probably indulging in a little hyperbole and just keep your saltshaker around.

Back to my "a little background" story which is supposed to be a small preface before I get to some actual philosophy: I made the mistake of criticizing Pirsig. That, of course, as any rhetorically sane person will tell you, is not a mistake. And yet on the other hand, Aristotle did tell us to know our audiences if you hope for any legitimate shot of being heard fairly. My audience, surprise, surprise, was a lot like me: Pirsig fanatics (or, "enthusiasts", to put it more politely) whose lives rose and set with ZMM and Lila and, most importantly, had an incorrigible cynicism, distrust, and almost preternatural revulsion for academia. They were outsiders. That's why they were there and not in universitity departments. You don't go into a Catholic Church and start badmouthing God and neither do you go to moq.org and describe yourself as a "fallen Pirsigian priest". On the one hand, I do think I wasn't treated fairly or understood, but in their defense, I was a little punchy. It would have just been plain smarter to sing the praises of Pirsig and Rorty together, in harmony, for a while before pointing out where I think there are some discordant notes. But no, I seemed pretty eager to kill my intellectual father at the altar of my new one.

Because I started by adopting a critical stance towards Pirsig in my post-Rortyan years, it became almost impossible to take any other stance. Every time I might open my mouth, I was taken to be a heretic. Rightly or wrongly, the rest is history. As I grew, though, particularly at those times when I was away from the hustle and bustle of moq.org, I began to see the error in my first, overly enthusiastic steps as a pragmatist. I saw why people reacted so vehemently, I saw where my original writings went askew. In moments of correction, though, my original sin was never fully forgiven. Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, I almost single-handedly gave Rorty a bad name at the moq.org discussion groups.

Thank God for short memories, right? Well, there are others who have longer memories. And those are my main interlocutors. What prompted this reflection was a letter from one of my most outspoken critics at moq.org, David Buchanan. David has taken up the study of pragmatism, particularly Dewey, and he has been pleasantly surprised at how much better he likes Dewey through the eyes of his professor, David L. Hildebrand, than through the eyes of Rorty (which are then filtered through my eyes). He is particularly excited by the fact that Hildebrand is critical of Rorty, giving voice to the same things he's been critical of me for over the years. So David invited me to comment on one of Prof. Hildebrand's short pieces about Rorty available at his website.

The paper is a short, succinct summary of things Hildebrand has expanded on elsewhere in his retreat from Rorty and it does sound like the things David and others have been telling me for years. But I still can't see my way around it. Hildebrand does a pretty good job of summarizing Rorty up and notes, more or less correctly, the sides of Rorty that would seemingly get in the way (for instance, what he calls Rorty's theoretical approach). I'm just not at all sure they do.

On the face of it, it all revolves around this term “experience.” I'm still not sure what people who dislike Rorty and love Dewey/Pirsig think it is. Take one example from the second page. Hildebrand says, “Linguistic pragmatism, then, eschews philosophical terms that refer to non-linguistic entities or effects.” This gives me a queer feeling because I feel like I'm being led into a trap. On the one hand, do I agree because the specifically analytic notion of “reference” never panned out (which is one reason the correspondence theory of truth can’t get off the ground)? Or do I disagree, noting that Rorty has no trouble with the word “rock”?

On the one hand, Hildebrand does specifically say "philosophical terms," which leads me to think he is talking about the whole reference problem. But what's the problem with that? After all, do a lot of people have "rock" as a central term in their specifically philosophical vocabulary? On the other hand, however, why would Hildebrand reference "non-linguistic entities or events" unless he was talking about rocks, which is the constant complaint about linguistic pragmatism--its solipsism by (only slightly) other means. But I've never been able to wrap my head around that complaint. Rorty isn't saying that we shouldn’t use words that don't refer, or even that words don't refer at all--all words refer to something.

The trouble was when philosophers tried to isolate one half of our language, the half that referred to non-linguistic entities (like "rock"), from the other half of our language, the half that only referred to other linguistic entities (like "good"). (I should add that that example isn't the only attempt to isolate language into types, just one example of isolation.) These philosophers then set up one side as "really referring" or some such better, or more assured, relation. Classic representationalism. On this formulation of Rorty's point, linguistic pragmatism isn't suggesting that we get rid of reference, its simply suggesting that we stop trying to figure out when we are referring or not--its pretty obvious we are always referring.

The "reference problem" is something that distracted positivists and we can use their example to see how this invidious distinction is created. For early positivists following the Vienna Circle, particularly Rudolph Carnap, propositions were broken into three different groups: analytic, cognitively meaningful, and cognitively meaningless (or emotive). Analytic propositions were those true by definition, i.e. they only referred to other language, the classic being "All bachelors are single." All non-analytic statements were then taken through the verifiability test: if they can be empirically verified, they are meaningful, if not, then not. Rocks yes, morals no (hence ethical emotivism). The positivists did this in part because they were a little tired of all the wide-ranging, completely unarguable metaphysical speculation. They wanted some results, like the sciences. This is why Carnap, and Quine for that matter, hated Heidegger.

This all fell apart for the positivists, of course, when you ask if the verifiability criterion for meaningfulness is itself verifiable. It is obviously not true by definition, but neither is it empirically true according to the definition of empirical that they were using. That is, of course, where Pirsig enters to hammer on how everything is empirical, i.e. experience. Blowing that door open, however, also blows many of the other walls on positivism off. (For more on verificationism, see my "Verificationism and the Shibboleth Problem".)

The reference problem comes in when you try to save the idea of empirical verification as a criterion for truth (something that Pirsig flirts with in his list of criteria for truth). How do you know your words are hooking up properly and accurately to non-language so that you know your statement "there is a rock" is empirically true as opposed to something less empirically true, like analytic statements? For common sense, asking the question just seems plain stupid, but for hi-tech analytic philosophy it became a major problem. The only reason they kept fighting about it, and using increasingly sophisticated, complicated, and remote tools and jargon, is because they wanted to save the correspondence theory of truth. They wanted to say that science (and rocks) are made true by something "out there" (because they obviously and commonsensically do) whereas morality and values are not (because it is not at all obvious what commonsensically “out there” “good” would correspond to). They expanded from the trivial sense that "there is a rock" is made true by the fact that there is a rock in front of me (which I can point to) to an invidious distinction between facts and values. This is where Pirsig steps in again. Pirsig did see presciently that knocking down the empirical/non-empirical distinction down also knocks the fact/value distinction--experience = reality = value. It should excite Pirsigians to hear Dewey say that reality is itself an evaulative term.

Once we free ourselves from representationalism, we can get along quite fine with the trivial sense in which "there is a rock" corresponds to the rock (or is isomorphic with the rock, as one of the hi-tech tools would have it). Rorty admitted as much many years ago, though people who fear the loss of representationalism still take his long-ago titled paper "The World Well Lost" (which even by the early 80s he thought was misleading) too seriously and think he's saying there's nothing at all out there, mysteriously or trivially, that we need pay attention to.

This is why I've probably done a great disservice to Rorty during my first year or two talking about him at moq.org. I understand why people like Platt Holden or the more recent Ham Priday don't like Rorty. They show all the reaction traits of representationalists, and are even explicit about it sometimes. But with David and Anthony McWatt, I think I've mislead them into a poorer image than need be. Anthony has usually harped most on Rorty's political philosophy, but I might be willing to say that that's a separate beast than his post-linguistic antirepresentationalism (besides which, I’m sure his image of Rorty was gained elsewhere). I've never been quite sure what I did that turned so many people off about it--no, wait, all that "language, not experience" talk.

Well, I really think it’s not as big a deal as I or anybody else has made it. What I think reading Rorty can do for pragmatist-leaners of all strips is give a number of argumentative tools that are useful in puncturing representationalism. I remember when I squabbled with Paul Turner for a while about Rorty some time ago. I think what happened is that he left for a while, read some Rorty away from my distracting taint, and came to his own appreciation for him. If you look at his blog, he considers Rorty and Pirsig to be two of his philosophical heroes. I think the big thing he gained was a bunch of tools. Stuff he doesn't like, he disregards.

Another way of getting at what I think makes many disgruntled with Rorty is taking the footnote that occurs directly before the line I quoted above from Hildebrand’s paper. In footnote five, Hildebrand quotes Rorty in response to Hartshorne (found in Rorty & Pragmatism):

"Because I think of the enrichment of language as the only way to enrich experience, and because I think that language has no transcendental limits, I think of experience as potentially infinitely enrichable."

Hildebrand himself emphasizes with italics this portion of Rorty, but does not comment any further. However, I can almost preternaturally sense what, I would guess, raised hackles on Hildebrand. Rorty says that language is the only way to enrich experience. Rorty's just plain wrong here. But as far as I can tell, it’s more like he misspoke than he was repeating for the 100th time a fundamental plank in neopragmatism. Who knows what new non-linguistic items we will create in the future that will expand and enrich experience? New metals, materials, activities, drugs—whatever. The invention of the activity of surfing expanded our experience over and against the invention of the word "surfing," which also then expanded our experience. There is nothing in Rorty's philosophy, as far as I can tell, that would necessitate the thesis that language is the only way to enrich experience. The thesis is obviously false on its face. Rorty's emphasis in this passage, and the part that is both indispensable to Rorty's philosophy and, as far as I've ever been able to tell, agreeable to Deweyans and Pirsigians alike, is the notion that experience is "potentially infinitely enrichable." I think everyone who likes Rorty or Dewey or Pirsig can get behind that.

What I think lays at the heart of Hildebrand's criticisms, which leads him to say (what I would call) quasi-dubious things about Rorty's philosophy (though as I suggested before, Hildebrand is refreshingly clean, fair, and agreeable in this paper, much more so than many, many I've read on Rorty) is his distinction between the "theoretical" and the "practical". Now, things get pretty hairy and nuanced at this point, and I don't think I have the time or energy or experience to get it right. But I would like to say this: I think we need to keep his distinction between Rorty's (supposed) theoretical approach to philosophy and Dewey's (supposed) practical approach distinct from his distinction between "reflective" and "pre-reflective". Hildebrand, following Dewey, raises this distinction, but I get the impression that people kinda' conflate the two: that because Rorty does (what we are calling) "theoretical" philosophy, he ignores the "pre-reflective". Hildebrand never does explicitly pull those two sets of distinctions together (I think wisely), but if he doesn't, then it isn't at all clear what the problem with Rorty's approach to philosophy is. (For more on what I currently think of "pre-reflective", see my "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience".)

Many people have criticized Rorty's approach, some fairly, most not so much. What I think people misunderstand about Rorty's approach is that it isn't exclusive. There can be many different approaches. Whatever this "theoretical approach" is that Rorty's engaged in (diagnosis of and elaboration of these differences being the hairy part and not something I have time to pursue currently), there is nothing in Rorty's writing that suggests that there is a right or wrong way to do philosophy--there is no first philosophy that all must pass through (as Descartes saw epistemology and Michael Dummett saw philosophy of language). There are only more and less efficacious and useful ways of doing philosophy for various particular things. Are Rorty's writings always the most efficacious and useful according to his own philosophy's lights? No. That's the part many people can't wrap their heads around. There are many things that Rorty leaves untouched. Rorty has always remained modest and always been surprised by those who attribtute to him prophetic or revolutionary sight, or some such thing. Many people, however, seem to think that the truth of, say, antirepresentationalism stands or falls on its espousers ability to say something about everything. Rorty, on the other hand, doesn't think he's equipped to be able to do everything. He writes about philosophy. He sometimes writes about politics, but even then most of that is advocation of the cool things someone else has said better in the hopes that he can turn a few people on to the other writer.

In his letter to me, David repeats an often applied diagnosis, one Rorty has acknowledged in a certain way: Rorty is a broken-hearted positivist. I think one of the bad impressions that I may have given (and that Rorty has regretted giving himself) is that, as David also says of Rorty, "the failure of the positivistic project is central in such a way that it changes everything about philosophy". It is a big deal for a certain kind of philosophy (the post-Cartesian "epistemology industry," as Dewey called it, and all the subsidiaries who work in its shadow), but philosophy is one of those things where there is always more than any particular, arbitrarily demarcated section of it (remember Pirsig's advice from Lila that Pirsig sometimes forgets: never define philosophy). Rorty's past works feed that image whenever he said something to the effect of "the linguistic turn was the greatest thing to ever happen to philosophy." Hildebrand picked out a quote like that in his paper: “By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition.” (from Rorty’s “Dewey’s Metaphysics”) Rorty regrets to a certain extent saying things like that now.

It is instructive to pick up the reprint of his famous anthology, The Linguistic Turn, and read the postscripts to it. The intro to the anthology is gigantic, judicious and extremely informative on what analytics thought of themselves at that period (reading it is as good as most classes on positivism). He says in it, though, that:

Linguistic philosophy, over the last thirty years, has succeeded in putting the entire philosophical tradition, from Parmenides through Descartes and Hume to Bradley and Whitehead, on the defensive. It has done so by a careful and thorough scrutiny of the ways in which traditional philosophers have used language in the formulation of their problems. This achievement is sufficient to place this period among the great ages of the history of philosophy.

In the "Ten Years Later" postscript, he talks less enthusiastically about analytic philosophy (he was writing PMN, the book analytics hate, at that time). But in the "Twenty-five Years Later" postscript, he says “What I find most striking about my 1965 essay is how seriously I took the phenomenon of the ‘linguistic turn,’ how portentous it then seemed to me. I am startled, embarrassed, and amused to reread the [above] passage…. That last sentence now strikes me as merely the attempt of a thirty-three-year-old philosopher to convince himself that he had had the luck to be born at the right time….” Or, “Er, yeah, ya’ know when I said linguistic philosophy was better than sliced bread? Yeeeah, that was a little overboard, wasn’t it?”

What I suggest what one does with all those passages where he lauds the linguistic turn is to read them as saying, "the linguistic turn was good for academic philosophy because it has led them to more and more doubt representationalism" (which we can see by the renaissance of pragmatism). There isn't any necessary reason for this to have happened. Becoming post-linguistic doesn't give you necessarily a better philosophy, nor does it necessarily make you immediately more predisposed to pragmatism. Many of the doctrines pragmatists call their own, for instance holism, were precursored by philosophers who didn’t think all that much about language.

Saying that, though, I do tend to agree with Rorty that antirepresentationalism does seem less counterintuitively when stated in "linguistic terms," or, as Hildbrand quotes him, “‘Language’ is a more suitable notion than ‘experience’ for saying the holistic and anti-foundational things which James and Dewey had wanted to say.” Again, “suitable” is perhaps the wrong word, but the point is that it really doesn't matter which notion we use. I suggest we read those comments as historical comments about the way things have turned out and progressed, not as statements about where we should necessarily go or how we should necessarily do things. Its philosophy: there are all sorts of things we can do and still stay out of the way of representationalism.

So when David defines radical empiricism in his letter as "there is no reality outside of experience AND that there is no good reason to exclude any kind of experience from an account of reality," I can only concur and say that Dewey, James, Pirsig, and Rorty would all fall into place, too. I think there are two things that bug Pirsigians about Rorty in this regard. One, he doesn't talk about mysticism, which Pirsig is quite focused. In this regard, the answer I've been trying to forward over the years is that Rorty isn't denying the empirical nature of mystical experience. He just doesn't have anything to say about it. He isn't offering a general account of reality, he's giving arguments against representationalism (which is very pervasive, far more than some think, though that's probably a debatable point). Like I said before, there are a lot more different kinds of philosophy than the kind Rorty and academics do and Rorty considers the function he plays is as an underlaborer (an image pioneered by Locke and used a lot by Dewey, and even by Pirsig at the beginning of ZMM) for clearing out all the arbitrary divisions that keep out stuff like mysticism. Its kinda' like Rorty engages the academics on the behalf of mystics (and others), though not as a mystic. He wants people to stop thinking that philosophy looks like this and not like anything else. It is possible that Rorty doesn’t find mysticism interesting, but surely it doesn’t follow that the effect is that he denies its possibility. If one can accept the idea of beer and not become a beer drinker, then one can find beer uninteresting and still find a place for it in their account of reality.

The second thing that I think gives Pirsigians a bad taste about Rorty is the fact that Rorty doesn't give a general account of reality. They see Rorty suggesting that Dewey's hankering after a general account of reality and experience in Experience and Nature is bad metaphysics and, because they like that kind of thing (which is what Pirsig does), they get the feeling that Rorty's doing something bad. What I want to suggest is that giving an "account of reality" is necessarily a never-ending task if one accepts what I suggested all pragmatists can get behind—experience is infinitely expandable. And if that's the case, than a non-exclusionary "account of reality" will look less and less like a series of propositions about reality and more and more like a series of history books that keeps adding volumes. If there is "no good reason to exclude any kind of experience from an account of reality," then because there will always be the open-endness of experience, there will always be the possibility of new kinds of experience. That means that a truly full "account" will look less like something you can do generally and more like something you need to stay in the particular about. That, I think, lays at the heart of Rorty's suspicions about Dewey's Experience and Nature, which is where most of Rorty's talk against the philosophical concept of "experience" comes from (and even Dewey later in life distanced himself from that book). And remember: it’s just about "experience" as a philosophical concept. He just finds it personally easier to stay away from it when attacking representationalism.

This aversion of the general is also what keeps me from sidling up easily to David’s sometimes virulent anti-theism. I've never been quite able to put my head around it, how one can stay pragmatist and not think that James was right in "The Will to Believe". Don't get me wrong: when it comes to politics, screw Bush, Robertson, and Fatwell. But when it comes to individual believers, and not politics and institutions, I have trouble dissociating what Christians would call an "experience of God" from what mystics would call a "mystical experience". I'm not saying they're totally interchangeable terms, that what Buddhists call Enlightenment, Christians call God. What I am saying, however, is that when we consider that what gets mystical experience in the door of radical empiricism is that it is reported as happening (because that is exactly what gets every experience in the door, from rocks to moral disgust), then I'm not sure how "experience of God" gets booted, thus making theism look stupid and making one an anti-theist as opposed to anti-Christian Coalition or anti-clerical (which is what Rorty has started to call himself in the last six or seven years). (For some other takes on mysticism and atheism, see my "What is Enlightenment?" and "How is Atheism a Religion?".)

Granted the above contains some possibly disputed points (like "reporting" being the door to radical empiricism) which can be discussed, but the simpler question is simply, "How can we say 'experience of God' has never happened and 'mystical experience' has?" As far as I can tell, when I go to write up my account of reality, I'll have to include both. I haven't experienced either, but other people have and I have no good reason to exclude them from my account.

One thing I really wish I could persuade people like David and Pirsig in doing is dropping talk about language's inability to capture an experience. I know what is being driven at: "beer" is not the same thing as a beer. However, I still think the idea that language cannot ever capture experience is the flip side of representationalism's idea that it can sometimes. What we ought to do is just drop the idea that it is in the capturing business. David and I have had a long conversation about this exact thing, and it spurred me on to what I consider some of my best writing, but as I said then, language is not a pirate. (See my "Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance".) I think that that generalization from the trivial and acceptable point that "beer" is not the same as a beer is the same kind of mistake that I suggested the representationlists made in generalizing from the trivial sense in which "there is a rock" corresponds to a rock to a full-blown correspondence theory of truth. I think both our flip-sides of each other and I think both are best left behind. Just as Rorty seems to be captivated by language, I think Pirsigians look like their captivated by its flip-side—not-language. We need to stop being enchanted by either notion. The movement from theoria to praxis, as Deweyans and Pirsigians might point out, doesn't mean we leave language behind or our ignoring it. But I think it should be stressed that it doesn't have anything to do with language at all—which is exactly what I take the point with the movement to be: we're no longer captivated by its image, pro or con. We don't occupy our time with thinking about the Forms, or God, or the mind, or language isolated from everything else. Instead we think about our practices in a society with other people. Those practices may make reference to any or all of the above, but the above are not in isolation from the practices that reference them.To bring it around again to Hildebrand, the distinctions between “theoretical/practical” and “reflective/pre-reflective” may lay at the heart of the dispute over "experience" as a philosophical term, the dispute between Deweyans and Rortyans. Is there a correct way of doing philosophy? What is theoretical philosophy as opposed to practical philosophy, and why is theoretical philosophy banned, or at least displaced? How does the notion of “pre-reflective” play into this?

I see two probable directions: either one defines "experience" as something less than completely synonymous with reality so that you can oppose experience to something that is not-experience and argue (initially plausibly given the baggage of the terms) that practical philosophy deals with experience (and is therefore good) and theoretical philosophy does not (and is therefore bad and disengaged), or one defines "experience" as totally synonymous with reality, which effectively makes everything an experience, everything a practical activity—theoretical philosophy as much as any other kind of philosophy. If the first direction, it would be easy to make Rorty look bad, but then it would be hard to justify the places in Dewey and Pirsig that suggest the second direction. If the second direction, then one has effectively disarmed themselves of the weapons they were using (the theoretical/practical distinction so conceived) and a new weapon must be taken up.

The first direction silently makes the leap from "experience" to "non-linguistic entities" which Hildebrand made in his paper, the same leap I silently left uncovered at the very beginning of my remarks about Hildebrand. The second direction says that talking and language is just one more facet of experience. Until somebody explicates the connection between experience and non-linguistic entities, one which does not hold between experience and linguistic entities and finally takes a stand and says that talking, reading, thinking, and language is not an experience, then Dewey and Deweyans like Hildebrand, Sleeper, Margolis, McDermott, etc., look like they're waffling between two definitions of experience, dipping into both, and claiming all the advantages and none of the disadvantages.

--------------------

This overlong meditation has functioned as something of a brief rejoinder to Hildebrand, a kind of elaboration on the continuities and discontinuities between Dewey, Pirsig, and Rorty, a furthering of my conversation with David, and as a personal apology to David and all others who despise Rorty because of me. No one should despise another because of what somebody else has said about them and I regret the actions that may have led anyone to a certain, despicable impression. One should be able to read Rorty, or anyone for that matter, without the persistent voice of another in their ear. Rorty should rise and fall on his own merits, not my meager ones.

David said to me in his letter that our conversations were helpful in preparing him for his return to academia. Indeed, our conversations have been an integral element in my own evolution. I thank David for his constant criticism. Though our conversations were often heated, unruly, and belligerently antagonistic, it is certainly an obvious and undeniable fact that he has been the direct impetus for many of the views I've developed, elaborated, and now hold. We may not agree, but David has certainly pushed me to greater and greater levels of writing.

Somebody should make me stop

Genuine
--------------------

It is easier said
Than done, after fed
Canard after canard
Told us by the bard,
To wake one day satisfied in your bed.

It would be foolish to suppose, I suppose,
For honesty to be expected from those
Who would enrich our inner thought, I thought,
But perhaps some more candor might have wrought

Something less utopic,
Though sadly more myopic,
For unless I am
Mistaken or damned
Love isn't worth it if not less than idyllic.

This is getting embarrassing

Pour-soi
--------------------

In between this line
You will see a sign
Of how hard I tried
To have this signified
Less degree and more difference in kind.

It is a messier affair than we once thought
To have our time and the cake we bought,
But suffice to say its more difficult by far
To limn the world with tear-drops and stars.

So will you not please
Take the time to seize
Whatever is in reach,
And say not my peach,
For I 'spect the words are nothing more than a tease.

My Voice

Listen to Me!

At the beginning of Arthur Danto's paper, "In Their Own Voice", Danto comments that most contemporary star-philosophers have fairly distinct writing styles, "possibly in consequence of the fact that so much of what they have written has been composed to be read before audiences, and hence is filled with devices of a kind calculated to hold an audience...." When I first read that, it resonated with a long held image I've had of myself. When I was young, an English teacher told me that I wrote how I talked--and that this was bad. Being a defiant, antiauthoritarian as I was, I latched onto it rather than rebuffed it. I write how I talk, that's how I write. Get used to it. From the age of 12 to 19 I was impossible to teach (writing that is, though I suspect that wasn't the only thing).

When I was 21, I did end up having to take another writing class, but by that time I wasn't all that bad. Because let's face it--I was insolent in the face of subpar writing. I always managed to get through, though, because I wasn't that bad. What saved me during my youthful bouts of arrogance was the fact that, by and large, most people can't write their way out of a paper bag. (The reason I took a writing class when I was 21 was because I had transfered to UW-Madison, which several years earlier had installed a new set of requirements: Comm A and B, and Quant A and B. They created them because apparently businesses were complaining that UW graduates couldn't write or count.) So my writing has always existed on the bottom edge of above average--a fair number of people wrote better, but I could be ignored because the vast majority wrote like Dr. Seuss (which probably would've been a step up for them).

But even at 21, my writing wasn't all that great. Like almost everything else in my life it would seem, what changed everything was reading Richard Rorty. I began to unconsciously emulate his writing style. I think that happened because I already had a similar style to his, which is probably why I got into Rorty so much in the first place. I found him so easy, fun, and entertaining to read because my favorite writer is me. I could sit and read me all day. Of course, my writing has taken gigantic leaps forward in the last five years. Now, I think, I actually am a decent writer, whereas before I was just a defiant writer.

Danto's comment really hit home with me because it connected up the fact that I've always imagined myself as writing like I talk with the fact that Rorty, being one of Danto's instances of a star-philosopher, writes like he talks to a certain extent, at least insofar as many of his writings since Consequences of Pragmatism have been lectures.

That gave me an idea. A common pratice of mine is to read my blog posts, or MD posts, or essays, outloud. I do that because so much of my style (the pacing, rhythm, etc.) is bound up with my delivery. At least, I think so. As James Conant said, hearing Rorty for the first time changed the way he thought about his philosophy. I had the same experience with hearing Rorty online. (Well, maybe it didn't change anything, but it deepened something.) My idea was to offer my posts in audio form in addition to text. I got an iRiver for Christmas from my mother and one of the perks is that it has a voice recorder. So I thought, hey, why don't I let people hear me?

Of course, it has occured to me that it is a little egocentric for me to do so. I mean, who's gonna' listen to them? The text is right there, why would you spend more time listening to it? But, I figure, I got nothing better to do, so why not? I know most of the people who spend any time on my blog, and maybe it'll let those tiny few (you know who you are) get to know me a little better, considering none of us have actually met, and some of them I'd like to refer to as friends.

At the very least, I can listen to them. Hey, I can even put them on my iRiver and listen to them. Maybe then I'll hear something interesting during class.

How is Atheism a Religion?

Why would people say that atheism is a religion? The face of the question does seem pretty silly and should probably be "Who would say that atheism is a religion?" But people do get told sometimes that, say, atheism or Marxism or secularism is a religion. For instance, when I was a freshman in college, the textbook we used for my Religious Studies class classified those three things as religious viewpoints--as, in fact, religions.

But why? Why would somebody classify them that way? For the man on the street, the classification just seems dumb. What kind of crazy logic does one use to make that statement?

The logic behind these kinds of classifications (atheism, Marxism, secularism are just three more religious instantiations) isn't exactly crazy or convoluted, but it does seem a little silly--think of everything you'd have to include. The enabler of the classification is an expanded definition of "religion." This usually only occurs in academic circles, and one example is religion as "a system of belief." If we are using that definition, then the others all seem to fall into place--sort of. Think of how small an atheist's (as opposed to a Marxist's) "system of belief" is--one belief, "God does not exist." However, if one pulls implications from this, like the truth of, say, existentialism or Darwinian evolution, then one plausibly starts extending the number of beliefs housed under the system of belief called "atheism."

But it's still silly. This all started when the Enlightenment started opposing "beliefs" to "knowledge" (which is actually something that started earlier, with the Greeks). They did so to put Christians on the defensive. You couldn't be an open atheist in the old days, but as the Renaissance wore into the Reformation, and then with the advent of the New Science, atheists (all of whom were intellectuals) became bolder and bolder. And they had a lot of built up resentment over having to be in the closet. The Enlightenment was the explosion of all this. Particularly with Galileo and Newton doing such fine work, they started asserting their supremacy over Christians by making invidious distinctions between tradition and reason, prejudice and rationality, superstition and facts, beliefs and knowledge, etc.

As time has worn on, however, religious intellectuals have learned from their mistakes. In particular, they've gone on the offensive. The Enlightenment was able to make all of these invidious distinctions because they believed (mostly because Kant had said so) that their philosophy was presuppositionless--bereft of assumptions. Christians had made the mistake (from this point of view, a tactical mistake) of resting their philosophy on faith, on the unarguable nature of God. Well, Enlightenment philosophers jumped all over this. The New Science opened up massive hope for not just having to accept things on faith, but being able to prove them. So, everything unprovable, unarguable, must be based on second-rate faith. Like faith that unicorns do, in fact, exist.

Theologians tottered off into a corner, licked their wounds, and began to scrutinize just what had happened. They noticed that these Enlightenment folks liked to talk about everything, that offering clipped "the Bible tells us so" (even when you sing it) isn't good enough for them. They wanted arguments that played by the rules of logic. "Okay," they said, "we'll give you an argument." They honed in on the notion of "presuppositionless," noticing that the atheists' most-used weapons hinged on it. They noticed that for an argument to get off the ground, you need to take for granted certain things--you can't argue about everything all at once. The Enlightenment notion of "presuppositionlessness," however, seemed to suppose that Enlightenment philosophers didn't have to take anything for granted--they had no assumptions. But any argument that is made clearly shows that to be false--every argument has assumptions.

They rolled that around in their heads for a while and eventually figured out that if Enlightenment philosophy was true, it was impossible, but since it was not impossible (it being an historically instantiated actuality), it had assumptions--assumptions that could be attacked, just as their's had been attacked. One line of attack is this: if beliefs are opposed to knowledge based on the fact that you can't argue or prove beliefs and you can about knowledge, then your "knowledge" (for instance, "there is no God") has a background of belief that cannot be argued or proven.

This little story is, of course, not literally what happened (atheists, in fact, had more to do with giving Christians these weapons then they themselves had to do with creating them). But I hope it shows the outlines of how calling atheism a "system of belief" makes sense. This little tall tale is, in fact, what leads directly to the contemporary inflammation of creationism, or intelligent design as they're calling it these days. ID defenders like Phillip Johnson, Ken Ham, and Michael Behe blend together things learned from evil post-modernism with wonderful Bible dogmatism in the weirdest possible way--and yet it is fairly coherent, just really stupid. I take the recent "backlash" against Darwin to be the clearest signal, far more powerful than anything Rorty or anybody else has written, for us to finally and forever ditch Enlightenment philosophy and all of its remenants. Adherence to Enlightenment philosophy and its rhetoric is what allows Johnson and his compatriots a foothold, or a "wedge" as they like to call it. If we ditch Enlightenment, scientistic rhetoric, the wedge has no crack to enter.

To sum up: atheism is a religion only if you define religion in broad, almost useless ways like "system of belief." Such a definition might be useful for certain, narrow academic purposes, but for the most part those of us in the real world need something with a little more bite. If your definition involves the accumulation of multiple labels for a person (i.e., a Christian is also a democratic citizen, meaning that Christianity as a system of belief does not include democracy as a system of belief), that a person is the intersection of a number of "systems of belief", then atheism is a pretty weak system of belief because "system" seems to imply more than one belief: God doesn't exist. Atheism then becomes the call for the abandonment of a particular kind of system of belief. It becomes the suggestion that the sector in our network of systems of belief, where beliefs that revolve around the word "God" exist, should cease to be a sector in which we do any thinking, it should be emptied out and left alone.

So if somebody brings up the "fact" that atheism is a religion for polemical purposes, just counter by saying, "Yeah, okay, if you stretch religion so far as to include atheism, then its a religion. But it's still the religion that says that all this God-talk is pretty pointless." Switching the grounds of debate from "belief" to "stuff we talk about" is fairly effective.