Lessing Between Enlightenment Christianity and Romantic Atheism

This is, essentially, the last paper I wrote before graduating, the paper for my senior history seminar. I did write a brief little ditty on Augustine and moral philosophy, but it was written in French, ergo, I myself can't really read it anymore. Nor was it that good. Nor was the French that good. It's unreadable on many levels. But, as you can tell, I'm about to post a bunch of stuff I've already written, rather than write new stuff, to pad the score. So I'll probably post that one, too.

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Gotthold Lessing’s theological writings sit on a bridge between the old and the new. The old in Lessing’s time was the Christian faith. While it still wasn’t entirely kosher to be an outed atheist during the 18^th-century, atheists were becoming more and more brash and philosophers like Voltaire, Hume, and Kant took as one of their prime functions the putting of God in his place. The new at this time was Man’s innate capacity of reason. Enlightenment intellectuals at this time, given immense confidence by Galileo and then Newton’s successes in natural philosophy, thought that they had the power to figure reality out, that God alone did not have this power. Lessing appears on a bridge because he argues for both the reality of revelation and the innate power of reason. Through his use of certain literary tropes, namely through an analogy between revelation and education and a synecdochal relationship between the temporality of history and the eternity of God, Lessing is able to create a religious position that attempts to skirt the supposed doom of atheism. If Lessing fails, it is only because of the path he helped open up.

Before I go further, I would first like to define a few terms that will underwrite the paper. M. H. Abrams defines Romanticism as writers who “undertook … to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.”[1] As Abrams’ book’s title suggests, it was a process of turning the supernatural natural. I would like to call this thesis naturalism and distinguish it from another thesis also frequently present in Romantic writers, namely historicism. Historicists are those who take history seriously, not believing that anything happens outside its confines. Historicism might look to be a natural outgrowth of naturalism, but one of the things I shall argue is that Enlightenment rhetoric about Nature and Reason, which they used as their “natural” replacements of God, is a last ditch effort to retain something supernatural, something outside history. I shall oppose historicism to Enlightenment rationalism, the idea that reason is a natural capacity of humans and that it is everywhere the same. Enlightenment writers, because they believe that universal Reason is able to deduce the outlines of Nature, tend to demote the use of history as being extraneous to a correct apprehension of reality—much like their theological counterparts. Lessing, certainly an Enlightenment writer, sits awkwardly across rationalism and Romanticism by both using the rhetoric of Nature and Reason and also taking history seriously in his attempt to accommodate God.

I. The Analogy Between Education and Revelation

The essay of Lessing’s that has preoccupied most commentators is The Education of the Human Race. In this essay, Lessing attempts to pave the way for reason and nature by reconstruing the history of Christianity in terms of it. Lessing begins by drawing an analogy between education and revelation: “What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race.”[2] This immediately has the effect of drawing a comparison between something commonsensical and human, namely an education we might gain in school, and something considered divine and miraculous, namely God’s voice to his people. Lessing uses this analogy to suggest that just as a person in school suddenly “realizes” the truth of, say, mathematical propositions through the instruction of their teacher, the human race is taught by God through his revelations to them.

Lessing, however, quickly moves to his main thesis, that humankind has within itself the capacity to teach itself, without the aid of an outside teacher. “Education gives man nothing which he could not also get from within himself….”[3] Lessing knows that he is veering dangerously close, by way of his analogy, to the atheistic idea that we could do quite well without God (which then leads us to question his very existence), so he also quickly ameliorates the situation by granting that God simply gets us to the truth quicker than reason: “…only it [revelation] has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things sooner.” Lessing develops this analogy by suggesting that God is a teacher raising children into adulthood. Young children start with easy primers to teach them the basics, but eventually they move on from their old primers to new ones, like moving from a Basic Algebra book to Advanced Calculus. Nothing in the old primer is contradicted by anything later learned, but everything must be learned in steps. “A primer for children may fairly pass over in silence this or that important piece of the science or art it expounds…. But it must contain absolutely nothing which bars the way to the knowledge which is held back…”[4] Pulling us back to the work of reason, however, Lessing adds that some children will perhaps be smarter than the others: “some educate themselves to an astonishing degree.”[5] Lessing is constantly involved in a balancing act between the usefulness of revelation for education and the self-reliance of reason. God teaches us truth, but we could­ have done it on our own.

By establishing this analogy between education and revelation, Lessing is able to turn the history of Christianity into a story of maturation. Lessing argues that the Jews of the Old Testament were God’s chosen people because he chose them to teach the rest of humankind when they had grown up enough through his tutelage.[6] But they must first grow up. Further developing his analogy, Lessing argues that the Jews, like small children, must be taught authoritatively, with rules and discipline: “Of none other but such as is adapted to the age of children, an education by rewards and punishments addressed to the senses.”[7] This again strikes us as commonsensically true based on our experience with children and it makes sense of and explains why the Old Testament reads as it does, with Mosaic Law and the Great Flood. God was taking “a people so raw, so incapable of abstract thoughts, and so entirely in their childhood”[8] and molding them through time—and so through the Old Testament—into something greater than what they had been.

The epochal turning point is then naturally the advent of Jesus Christ and the creation of the New Testament. All the pieces are in place for Lessing. The maturation of children from a first primer to a second, the shift from the Old Testament to the New, from Mosaic Law to the example of Christ. Lessing says that “every primer is only for a certain age,”[9] which plays with a double meaning between the age of a child and a sweeping historical designation. Lessing says that primers are meant to be outgrown and that it is dangerous to hold onto old primers. He thereby makes Jesus a rebel figure who must “tear the exhausted primer from the child’s hands.”[10] Jesus launches us into a new stage in human history by shifting us from rules that must be followed to gain rewards in the afterlife to providing us an example to live by. In Jesus’ example, we would no longer do good to get into heaven but rather we would “direct one’s inner and outer actions in accordance with it.”[11] And all along the way of his argument about Jewish-Christian history are his asides about the self-sufficiency of human reason: “For seventeen hundred years past they [the New Testament Scriptures] have occupied human reason more than all other books, and enlightened it more, were it even only through the light which human reason itself put into them.”[12]

After spelling all of this out, Lessing is finally able to suggest the advent of an even newer age for a finally matured people. Playing off Joachimite tradition, Lessing suggests splitting history into three ages and that we are about to enter this third age: the “new eternal gospel.”[13] Lessing admonishes the impatient for wanting to usher in this age too quickly,[14] again appeasing and accommodating God and theists, but pushes ahead with what this age will look like. Lessing suggests that we must cast aside the old primers by transforming revealed truths into truths of reason: “the development of revealed truths into truths of reason, is absolutely necessary, if the human race is to be assisted by them.”[15] Through his analogy between education and revelation, Lessing is able to shift thinking about religion from either the theist’s dogmatic handling of the Bible’s texts or the ever-emboldening atheist’s dogmatic rejection of God into an historical dialectic. Instead of a plainly universal vertical relation between God and Humanity or Reason and Humanity, Lessing tosses the line over on its side as a horizontal, gradual temporal awakening, the gradual maturation and education of humankind through history.

II. Figural Interpretation and Synecdoche

One of the reasons Lessing is able to effect this shift is because of his use of what Erich Auerbach calls “figural interpretation.” By figural interpretation Auerbach means the establishment of “a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”[16] Lessing enters into a long-standing tradition of figural interpretation that was begun by Paul and the New Testament writers. With this “method of revisional interpretation” Auerbach says that the early Christians played down the Old Testament as “popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of ‘figures,’ that is of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events.”[17] Lessing continues this tradition by interpreting the Judeo-cum-Christian history as a process of maturation, whereby earlier elements can sometimes only be understood in light of later developments.

Figural interpretation thus uses the rhetorical trope of synecdoche as a philosophy of history. The interpreter takes history as their text and uses various events in history as signifying the whole arc of history itself. Auerbach argues that this kind of historical interpretation will in the end devalue history itself, that “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension…. It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding.”[18] The figural interpreter’s focus thus becomes that of the vertical link with God and not the horizontal, temporal linkages between events. This produces a dialectic of interpretation. As history marches on, new events are produced that must be placed in vertical connection with God and made sense with the already in place vertical connections, since after all these vertical connections are eternal. Auerbach says that “wherever the two conceptions [vertical and horizontal] met, there was of necessity a conflict and an attempt to compromise—between, on the one hand, a presentation which carefully interrelated the elements of history, which respected temporal and causal sequence, remained within the domain of the earthly foreground, and, on the other hand, a fragmentary, discrete presentation, constantly seeking an interpretation from above.”[19]

Lessing fits perfectly into this tradition. He takes full advantage of this dialectic by suggesting that Christians themselves are only a stage on the way to something greater. Auerbach suggests that the very process of figural interpretation, or “universal history,” creates a situation in which the frame of interpretation is forced out of necessity to change and shift as time marches on, as new events need interpreting.

Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretive change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe.[20]

Lessing represents a theological reaction to the Enlightenment. Lessing interprets the phenomenon of the Enlightenment, with its rhetoric of reason and nature, as the fulfillment of Christ, who was Himself the fulfillment of Mosaic Law. Lessing takes advantage of the very process by which Christianity was able to supersede Judaism to argue that Christianity itself will be superseded.

By analogizing the Old and New Testaments to educational primers, Lessing suggests that, much like textbooks, the Testaments cannot contain anything that “bars the way to the knowledge which is held back, or misleads the children away from it.”[21] In addition, Lessing is also able to employ figural interpretation. About the Jews in Persia, Lessing says, “Thus enlightened respecting the treasures which they had possessed without knowing it….”[22] Lessing is able to suggest that the Jews had before them in the Old Testament the materials to interpret Jehovah the national deity as God the single, pure universal, but they lacked the ability until they had encountered the Persians. Thus Lessing is able to agree to the figural interpretation of the captivity as “the visible fulfillment of the prophecies which had been spoken and written respecting the Babylonian captivity and the restoration from it,”[23] but is also able to argue that this figural interpretation is only made possible by presupposing “the exalted ideas of God as they now are.”[24] In other words, events only become visible fulfillments or figures after a certain level of education or enlightenment has been reached. Lessing is then able to tie together figural interpretation with education, which makes for the play of history a much more important phenomenon.

Lessing historicizes the vertical connection between events and God by arguing that fulfillment only occurs to the enlightened, thus laying the vertical connection back over on its side. With his publication of fragments from Reimarus, Lessing was at the forefront of what is called the search for the Historical Jesus. And if we look at how Lessing describes the enlightenment of the Jews, how they changed Jehovah into God, Lessing does not refer to figures in the Bible, he refers to the historical event of Persian ideas disseminating into Jewish culture. It was only after learning of the “pure Persian doctrine”[25] that Jews were then able to find God in their sacred writings, instead of the national deity Jehovah. Lessing even goes so far as to insinuate in this passage that God may not actually be in Jewish scripture: “and since they could the more readily find him and show him to others in their sacred writings, inasmuch as he was really in them.”[26] If this were true, it would then call the whole idea of God being anywhere in the Bible into question insofar as Christianity is figuratively built out of Judaic materials.

Lessing seems to suggest that the figural interpretation of history is then an ad hoc, post facto event of the pasting on of divine interpretations on events that had nothing to do with them, that historical forces can be found that causally created the event, but if we want we can stretch our imagination and also come up with how Divine Providence worked parallel to those forces. Near the end of The Education, Lessing says, “Go thine inscrutable way, Eternal Providence! Only let me not despair of thee because of this inscrutableness. Let me not despair of thee, even if thy steps appear to me to be going backward. It is not true that the shortest line is always straight.”[27] Lessing leaves Divine Providence to its own devices because he has already argued that we will not be able to come up with a suitable path between the past and the present until we’ve reached a suitable level of education. Providence thus drops out because it will never be a predictive device, only a “Well, I guess that’s the direction God wanted to go.”

III. Lessing's Defense Against Atheism

It is this kind of talk that has led many scholars to talk about Lessing as an atheist and also of Christianity as naturally and necessarily leading to its own demise in atheism. Through his argument, and particularly his master analogy, Lessing turns the history of Christianity back into history rather than as a tradition of universal history. Mosaic Law was important to us because it disciplined us. Jesus was important to the maturation of humankind because he taught us to internalize God’s code and to live it, thus becoming an example to live by. Lessing is able to argue that these were important historical events leading up to our age. Lessing’s stroke of genius was to use the precepts of universal history, of figural interpretation, to dismantle the tradition of universal history. In another synecdoche, instead of the Bible being history, Lessing made the Bible a part of history. This is the transformation of progressive revelation into the civil history of religion.

The process of Judeo-Christianity turning into secular atheism works by a method of historical accommodation. Stephen Benin says that divine accommodation is the process by which “divine revelation is adjusted to the disparate intellectual and spiritual level of humanity at different times in history.”[28] Benin finds this phenomenon at the roots of Jewish and Christian thought. In explaining the appearance of change in God’s message, a theologian responds that God is simply accommodating us by condescending to the level we are equipped to handle. Different levels means seemingly different received messages. As time pressed forward, however, and this method of biblical exegesis progressed, it became used principally as a method of explaining humanity’s progression, rather than God’s progression. In Enlightenment terms, accommodation was the balancing of God’s revelation with Man’s reason. The shift occurs as humanity changes in ways unexplained or predicted by the Bible. As humanity’s reliance on reason grew, God’s message changed, but eventually humanity’s reason eclipsed revelation on a scale of importance and rather than God accommodating us, a subtle shift was affected in which we now accommodated God, or in Kant’s spirit, we tried to make room for faith in an age of reason. As Karl Löwith says of Kant’s belief in the Enlightenment’s superiority to previous ages, “It is the most advanced expression of the Christian faith for the very reason that it eliminates the irrational presupposition of faith and grace.”[29]

Lessing, however, won’t go down that easily. It is difficult to tell whether he was an atheist condescending to his Christian brothers or a Christian accommodating the rising tide, but there are defenses against atheism in his writings. In several of Lessing’s other theological writings we see the Enlightenment’s rhetoric of reason, along with its atheistical tones, pop through very clearly. In On the Origin of Revealed Religion, Lessing opposes natural religion to positive, revealed religion. Natural religion is the purified common denominator of all historical instantiations of religion. Positive religion was created as a reflection of natural religion to help the community, just as positive law was created out of natural law. Lessing, however, blurs the difference between reason and natural religion by suggesting that natural religion is “To acknowledge one God, to seek to form the ideas most worthy of him, to take account of these most worthy ideas in all our actions and thoughts….”[30] Lessing here spends most of his time talking about ideas or reason, rather than about God, in defining natural religion. And in the end he suggests that “The best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion, and least hinders the good effects of natural religion….”[31] The best religion is the kind that stays out of our way.

In Lessing’s short polemic, The Religion of Christ, he is even more abrupt, though still elusive. The same distinction as before is cut, though this time between the “religion of Christ,” the religion that Jesus himself practiced, and the “Christian religion,” which makes of Jesus an object of worship. In Lessing’s description of the religion of Christ, he makes quick, rapid allusion to Enlightenment reason by first emphasizing that Christ was a “mere man,” i.e. just like us, and that his religion is “that which every man has in common with him.”[32] This alludes to the Enlightenment doctrine, begun by Descartes, of the psychic unity of humanity. As Arthur Lovejoy says, “For in nearly all the provinces of thought in the Enlightenment the ruling assumption was that Reason … is the same in all men and equally possessed by all.”[33] This is the Enlightenment reason we find in Lessing’s writings, the reason by which we can educate ourselves.

All of this might lead to a negative assessment of Lessing’s Christian pose, but I think we find in another of his writings the key to his master plot. In On the Reality of Things Outside of God, Lessing appears to be involved in a short polemical sideswipe at Leibnizian possible worlds. By the end, however, he effectively argues that God contains within himself sheer, temporal contingency, which is typically considered to be the opposite of God’s necessary universality. This gives us the key to Lessing’s master trope. Lessing attempts by another synecdoche to radically place history, with all of its individual events, within God’s eternity, in such a way as to not lose God and to not lose the importance of history and humanity. Change is always embarrassing to the philosopher or theologian talking about the eternal. This created the history of accommodation. Lessing, however, has effectively argued for the enshrinement of Enlightenment Reason, with all of its naturalistic overtones and atheistical leanings, by ensconcing it in a theological argument about the eternity of God, that even contingency itself, the seeming contradistinction of God’s necessity, is contained within God. Lessing is arguing that temporality is dangerous unless we place it within God’s spatial plenitude, effectively raising again Auerbach’s vertical connections.[34]

Lessing’s The Christianity of Reason is a perfect complement to his Education on this count. Whereas the Education presents us with a temporal, horizontal axis on which to place the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and by those means the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Lessing’s “new eternal gospel,” the Christianity presents us with a spatial, vertical axis on which to place God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Lessing’s synecdoche is made clear when he says, “Since these simple beings [God’s creations] are as it were limited gods, their perfections also must be similar to the perfections of God, related as parts to the whole.”[35] This spatial, vertical connection between individuals with God finds its temporal, horizontal complement in the Education when Lessing says, “And what if it were as good as proved that the great, slow wheel, which brings mankind nearer to its perfection, is only set in motion by smaller, faster wheels, each of which contributes its own individual part to the whole?”[36] And just as Lessing says that “the harmony which exists between them [the Father and the Son] is called by Scripture the Spirit which proceeds from the Father and Son,”[37] the harmony between temporal and spatial, between time and eternity, is found in Lessing’s trope for the third age, which is represented by the Holy Spirit: the “new eternal gospel,” which achieves its power by its almost nonsensicalness.

IV. Traveling the Garden Path to Atheism

The rain on Lessing’s parade occurs, however, when we look back to history and how the arguments Lessing is wielding have panned out. We can begin by looking at how Harold Bloom handles synecdoche and Auerbach and Paul. In Bloom’s early theory of poetry, from such books as The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, poets are involved in an agonistic contest with earlier poets, always trying to stave off their own belatedness. One of Bloom’s revisionary ratios is what he calls tessera, which is a completion or fulfillment of the earlier poet’s poem (the most obvious being Paul’s contest with the Redactor and Blake’s contest with Milton). The rhetorical trope used for this revision is, of course, synecdoche. Bloom, however, later seems to take back, or at least shift, this part of his theory in Ruin the Sacred Truths. In their own ways, Auerbach, Benin, and Löwith all chart divine accommodation, or figural interpretation, from the earliest Jewish and Christian origins as a way of reinterpreting the letter of the Scripture to accommodate the changes in history. In Joachim, as Löwith says, we see that “the fundamental law of the history of salvation is the continuous progress from the time of the Old and New Testament ‘letter’ to that of the ‘spirit’.”[38] Bloom, however, wants to argue against Auerbach’s (and others’) “rigorous insistence upon functioning wholly within Pauline interpretive categories of the letter and the spirit.”[39]

Bloom distinguishes between the “allegory of the theologians” and the “allegory of the poets.” The former effectively aligns itself with what Auerbach calls figural interpretation and the latter is a weak strawman set up by these allegorical theologians: “In the allegory of the poets, the first or literal sense is a fiction, and the second or allegorical sense is the true one…. In biblical or theological allegory, the literal sense is true and historical, and the second or allegorical sense is spiritual, being an interpretation of fact and history.”[40] In arguing against Auerbach’s interpretation of Dante, Bloom says, “On this distinction between an allegory of the poets that is so palpably weak and an allegory of the theologians at once true and prophetic, it is obvious why Dante made his choice.”[41] But Bloom does not think this distinction will stand. In answering the question “is the historical Virgil truly a figura of which Dante’s Virgil is the fulfillment?”, Bloom says that,

Dante, and Auerbach, and Saint Paul, cannot really have it both ways at once. You cannot say that Virgil in Dante’s Comedy is the historical Virgil, but then again not. If the historical Virgil or Cato or Moses or Joshua is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that Dante’s Comedy, or the New Testament, reveals, then this fulfillment necessarily is more real, more replete with significance, than the figura was or is. … Instead of the Hebrew Bible of J, Jeremiah, and Job, we get that captive work, the Old or indeed senescent Testament, considerably less vital than the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible becomes the letter, while Saint Paul and Saint John become the spirit.[42]

Bloom is arguing on historico-pragmatic grounds that there can be no fulfillment except transumptive dominance, which is a cancellation, not a fulfillment. “In merest fact, and so in history, no text can fulfill another, except through some self-serving caricature of the earlier text by the later. To argue otherwise is to indulge in a dangerous idealization of the relationship between literary texts.”[43] In this same way, to call Lessing a fulfillment of Christianity, to call atheism a fulfillment of Christianity, would be a dangerous idealization of history. Just as Auerbach’s and Paul’s stance for Bloom refuses “the temporal anguish of literary history,”[44] we must be careful not to suggest that atheism is the natural outcome of Christianity. The temporal agon of history will not allow it.

Rather than arguing, as Lessing might suggest to us, that God has within himself the desire for us to be free of him, we can instead chart the changes in intellectual history that has led to the increasing respectability of atheism. One of these changes is the gradual replacement of internalization by projection. Lessing’s tripartite scheme does seem to chart one thing, and that’s the increasing propensity for internalizing God’s authority. The God of the Old Testament handed down authoritative rules, an outside structure that imposed on us strictures of conduct. With Jesus we reach a man to be emulated. Jesus had internalized God’s rules and we should simply act as Jesus did. This created an increasing role for interpretation, however, as how Jesus acted, and what this should suggest to us, is a little more ambiguous than “thou shalt not kill” (though surely in certain contexts this is debatable). We thus see the rise of a priest class who are the sole authoritative interpreters of the Bible and God’s message. With the Protestant Reformation, however, we see a further internalization as Luther argued that we do not need priests to be intermediaries between us and God, which opens the gates to all to interpret the Bible. In many respects, the Reformation seems to be a fine historical candidate for Lessing’s epochal change into the “new eternal gospel.” Lessing often rails against the priesthood and what Abrams says of the Inner Light Protestant Gerrard Winstanley equally applies to Lessing: “Biblical history is completely internalized and the entire text becomes no more than a sustained metaphoric vehicle for the powers, states, conflicts, and processes of individual minds in the course of their experience on earth.”[45]

Increasingly putting powers into human hands, however, both in terms of interpreting God’s message and our use of reason generally, is what created Lessing’s process of internalization’s transumptive figure, that of projection. A handy figure in this tradition is that of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach says that “Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”[46] Feuerbach is arguing that whatever God says, we put in his mouth. Once we get God stuffed into our inner selves, who’s to say that he wasn’t always already there, or rather that God was simply our own projected creation. Abrams argues that the Romantics culminate this tradition by writing a theodicy without God, by naturalizing the categories of Christian history, of fall, redemption, and ultimate restoration, and transforming them into a progressive education. “This is a theory of progress—or more precisely, a theory of the progressive education of the mind of man—but it is not a philosophy of optimism, except insofar as the Christian view of history is itself optimistic in holding that the best is yet to be….”[47] Thus, as Löwith puts it, “Man will seek to replace providence, but within the established horizon, by secularizing the Christian hope of salvation into an indefinite hope of improvement and faith in God’s providence into the belief in man’s capacity to provide for his own earthly happiness.”[48]

Even with Bloom’s strictures in mind, we can still wonder whether the Enlightenment or the Romantics freed themselves from the Christian religion, from supernaturalism. Many like Carl Becker think that for all of the Enlightenment’s rhetoric about reason and nature, and their sharp break from the prejudice of religions, that Enlightenment philosophy was simply theology by other means.[49] Keeping Lessing’s balancing act between theism and atheism, between reason and enthusiasm, and his writings about natural religion in mind, we see Becker write this of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

In the end Hume manages to chevy Christian mystics and atheists into the same camp, since they obviously agree on the main point, that reason is totally incompetent to answer ultimate questions; and so he concludes with that masterpiece of irony: ‘To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.’ To read Hume’s Dialogues after having read, with sympathetic understanding, the earnest deists and optimistic philosophers of the early century, is to experience a slight chill, a feeling of apprehension. It is as if, at high noon of the Enlightenment, at the hour of the siesta when everything seems so quiet and secure all about, one were suddenly aware of a short, sharp slipping of the foundations, a faint far-off tremor running underneath the solid ground of common sense.[50]

The Enlightenment philosophers found in nature their guiding norm. Everything was to be made natural, religion, morality, law. And to replace God’s voice, his revelation, they looked to themselves, to their reason. But the Enlightenment philosophers found themselves with the same problem as the theologians, that which originally produced theodicy: how do you explain evil? If nature is good and is to be emulated, and man is the product of nature, “then how could man and his customs ever be out of harmony with nature?”[51] Becker suggests that the Enlightenment philosophers faced a dilemma: with nature our guiding norm and reason our guiding light, where do we go? “They have followed reason faithfully. Will they follow her to the end? She is pointing in two directions: back toward Christian faith; forward toward atheism. Which will they choose? It does not really matter much, since in either case she will vanish at last, leaving them to face existence with no other support than hope, or indifference, or despair.”[52]

If we turn back to Lessing, we find our answer in historicism. The problem with the Enlightenment’s naturalism was that it created in Nature and Reason new Gods. Positive theology, the naming of God’s attributes, dies at the hands of Feuerbach. What we still have left, however, is negative theology, the notion that all we can say about God is what he is not. This activity chimes with mystics whose ultimate claim is that you cannot say anything about God because to say something would be to contaminate the springs with anthropomorphic debris—one can only experience God. This is why Hume is able to gerrymander together atheists and mystics: both think that it is pointless to think, or reason, about God. However, in Kant’s great usurpation of Hume, he claimed that reason was a faculty that could limn the true world, thus transcending the world if only to draw a circle around what we can know so as to distinguish the knowable (the world, phenomena) from the unknowable (effectively God, noumena). What we see in Kant we see everywhere with the rhetoric of nature and reason—eternal, universal categories of interpretation.

In discussing the use of nature as a norm in Tertullian, Lovejoy ends by pointing at two implications of Tertullian’s writings. One was “the epistemological assumption that there is a light of nature uniformly and equally present in the minds of all men by virtue of their rationality….”[53] This is what was previously called the psychic unity of humanity and is pervasive in Enlightenment thought. The second implication came from Tertullian’s “efforts to reconcile his faith in a divine revelation contained in the Old Testament writings with the innovations of the Christian doctrine” in which “he was led to contradict his own assertions of the uniformity of operation of the human reason and the immutability of the ‘teaching of Nature,’ and to propound the thesis of the necessarily gradual development of man’s capacity for apprehending truth….”[54] Here we see Lessing’s answer in that, rather than a light ever gleaming, we would have a light slowly getting brighter.

Following Bloom, we can see this as the contradiction Lovejoy says it is. Historicism appears as the full naturalization of the supernatural because it destroys the “absolute authority” that Auerbach suggests is the reason why theology must always “be adapted through interpretative transformation.”[55] There are no absolute authorities in Lessing’s vision, only stopping points in the history of humanity, primers that sum up current human wisdom. This explains why Lessing so blithely dismisses the nature of Providence. Revelation becomes a technique by which positive religions established rules in real human communities, to establish order. Lessing wants to acknowledge that these rules played their role in the progressive history of humanity: “it is recognized as a good thing to make religion a concern for the community, people must be united about certain things and ideas….”[56] However, he also wants to be able to pave the way for new rules and ideas that do not conform to the old. He wants new speculations to be acceptable, even if they are proven to be wrong. “Reproach is due, not to these speculations, but to the folly and tyranny which tried to keep them in bondage; a folly and tyranny which would not allow men to develop their own thoughts.”[57] The only way this is a secularization of Christianity in some substantive way is if hope is the sole province of Christians, of the religious. Because of his attachment to Enlightenment rhetoric, Lessing still sits awkwardly between the two stools of Christianity-cum-rationalism and Romanticism-cum-historicism. But Lessing remains a suggestive figure on the road between them.

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[1] M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 13

[2] Gotthold Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 82

[3] ibid., 83

[4] ibid., 87

[5] ibid., 85

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid., 84

[8] ibid.

[9] ibid., 91

[10] ibid.

[11] ibid., 92

[12] ibid., 93

[13] ibid., 96

[14] ibid., 93

[15] ibid., 95

[16] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 73. Auerbach is here quoting himself from a paper, “Figura.”

[17] ibid., 48

[18] ibid., 73-4

[19] ibid., 74

[20] ibid., 16

[21] Lessing, 87.

[22] ibid., 89. Italics mine.

[23] ibid., 90.

[24] ibid.

[25] ibid., 89.

[26] ibid.

[27] ibid., 97

[28] Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), xiv

[29] Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 244-5, fn. 8

[30] Lessing, 104

[31] ibid., 105

[32] ibid., 106

[33] Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 288

[34] It is useful to remember Lessing’s admiration for Spinoza, the philosopher for whom there was but one substance, namely God, and all else was contained within, that both Henry Chadwick (Lessing, 46-7) and Paul Tillich (Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E Braaten, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 369) recall and that Spinoza was considered an atheist during his time.

[35] Lessing, 101

[36] ibid., 97

[37] ibid., 100. Italics Lessing’s.

[38] Löwith, 149

[39] Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 39

[40] ibid., 40

[41] ibid.

[42] ibid., 42. Considering that Auerbach acknowledges this outcome of figura (“This conception of history is magnificent in its homogeneity, but it was completely alien to the mentality of classical antiquity, it annihilated that mentality down to the very structure of its language, at least of its literary language, which … became wholly superfluous as soon as earthly relations of place, time, and cause had ceased to matter, as soon as a vertical connection, ascending from all that happens, converging in God, alone became significant.” 74) I am less sure about Bloom’s attack on Auerbach than on the Pauline interpretive categories as a whole.

[43] Bloom, 43

[44] ibid.

[45] Abrams, 52

[46] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 12-3, found in Fall Semester 2002 Course Packet

[47] Abrams, 189-90

[48] Löwith, 111

[49] See especially Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

[50] Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 68-9

[51] Becker, 66. Italics Becker’s.

[52] Becker, 69

[53] Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, (New York: John Hopkins Press, 1948), 336

[54] ibid., 338

[55] Auerbach, 15

[56] Lessing, 104

[57] ibid., 96

Philosophy: Times Moves

"Laughter is the best way to move time forward."


-- Wet Hot American Summer

Just Bitching

As a Freaks and Geeks loyalist, I have an unfettered love for Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen. But my love does not keep me from noticing crap when I smell it. I consider Trent Reznor to be a musical genius on several levels, but With Teeth sounded like a derivative, second-tier Gravity Kills album, itself a derivative, second-tier Nine Inch Nails band. On the other hand, the scales have yet to fall from my eyes with regards to Apatow and Co. The pantheon of creators behind the resurgence of rated-R, hyper-intelligent ironicomedy is a robust size, including not only Apatow and Ben Stiller, but Wes Anderson and Will Ferrell. The genealogical map of good comedy these days reads like a six-degrees of Bacon exercise: Judd and Ben created the ill-fated Ben Stiller Show--now do I go to Janeane Garofalo, who was in Wet Hot American Summer, to get to former State members David Wain and Michael Ian Black/Showalter, creators of Stella, or do I go to Bob Odenkirk, who created Mr. Show with David Cross, to get to Jack Black, who guested on Mr. Show before Bob and David produced the original HBO episodes of Tenacious D? Or do I go from Judd to Steve Carrell to Stephen Colbert, who co-created the amazing Strangers With Candy with Amy Sedaris? Or perhaps, to get really cute, Judd to Paul Feig, creator of Freaks and Geeks, to Jay Chandrasekhar (by virtue of them both directing a number of episodes of Arrested Development, which stars both the aforementioned David Cross and Jeffery Tambor, who starred in The Larry Sanders Show, which Judd was showrunner for towards the end), who is a member of Broken Lizard, the group that brought us Supertroopers...?

So I read Meghan O'Rourke's piece in Slate, "Katherine Heigl's Knocked Up: The Demise of the Female Slacker," with a little apprehension, though not without an open mind: I already suspected what it might say--the female characters were bitchy and the male characters were fun. Which was true. The question is, where do you go from there? If you stop with the obvious, you miss the deft skill with which Apatow threaded the needle. So how was it going to hit something that needed hitting?

The piece was prompted by Heigl, co-star with Rogen, who said recently that Knocked Up was "a little sexist." The sexism, as O'Rourke puts it, consists in this:

Knocked Up made time for men to explore their choices on-screen in almost existential ways; they ask themselves whom they want to be, they joke around, they assume the right to experiment. Women, by contrast, are entirely concerned with pragmatic issues.

She has a point. Both gender sets, Rogen and Paul Rudd and Heigl and Leslie Mann, spend most of the movie wrestling with the new couple's future. The difference is that the male set spends it by reflecting on the loss of freedom and the female set by reflecting on how the men lose their freedom. Or, at least that's the frame O'Rourke puts on the movie. I'm not so sure the split is as simple as that.

Autonomy being the distinctive province of Men is an old issue, which Charlotte Perkins Gilman put in visual relief in her Women and Economics by conceptualizing the roles of men and women as centered, and evolving out of, the hunter versus gatherer roles: women tended the hearth, the inside circle of the home, while men went out, circumscribing and protecting the inner circle. In the beginning, this wasn't a big deal: both were preoccupied full-time with survival and the area, the square footage in this metaphor, of each sex's role was roughly the same. But as civilization moved forward, the Man's circle, being on the outside, was able to expand, while the Woman's circle, being circumscribed on the inside, stayed the same.

It's a useful conceptualization, and it is exactly what is at issue in O'Rourke's reading of the movie. In this reading, Rogen and Rudd face the loss of time for Romantic, poetic self-creation, the ability to create a unique self, an inner self. Heigl and Mann face the pragmatic future of trying to create a family that is safe and supplied, a future in which they also have to wrangle-in their husbands to make sure they are not so self-involved. What is interesting, and what I think O'Rourke misses, is the frankness that Apatow brings to this portrayal of the struggle: there is a power ratio here that hasn't always been portrayed in the past. Women being masters of responsibility is a new thematic in our consciousness, though it is old in practice. In the Middle Ages, the Lady of a manor was largely responsible for its functioning, while the Nobleman was out doing whatever he wanted, but it hasn't been until recently that anybody's been talking about it (partially, no doubt, because what counted as "somebody talking about it" hasn't included women). This is a shift in representation, a shift in the web with which we clothe ourselves.

O'Rourke thinks, though, that Apatow is forwarding a critique that is "muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women." I struggle to think of the movie as a critique, but the movie, like all of the comedy I mentioned at the outset, is saturated in irony. What I think O'Rourke is missing is that comedy begins with boundaries--without boundaries there is nothing to break, and thus no comedy. George Carlin understood that, and Dave Chappelle came to understand this dilemma: how do we make fun of stereotypes without implicitly reinforcing them?

It takes great skill to do so, one that O'Rourke finds missing. O'Rourke thinks that Mann's plaintive, "Don't you think I might want some time to myself?" to Rudd falls flat, whereas I think it is the point on which all of this revolves. The rise of the slacker, the irresponsible soul-searcher, is the concurrent rise of the responsible adult--we can't represent the one without the other. O'Rourke identifies the slacker as this generation's representation of the Romantic poet, which I think is right. But what the movie identifies is Emerson's central, irresolvable tension, that between public and private, between other-motivation and self-motivation.

Rorty saw quite clearly that irony requires something to be ironic about. We can't have soul-searching and self-creation without a stable center to come home to. The problem is that the gender relation is balanced against women in the self-creation department: men get to create themselves, while women get to create others. This is what set's up the movie: we need somebody to create more people. Somebody has to be at home to create the children. Being responsible is not bad. In fact, being responsible is the obvious good that irresponsibility flies in the face of. The movie is premised on women being in the morally superior position. It sets women as understanding the balance needed between other- and self-centered action. It is men who need the education, who need to grow up.

I think Apatow has always been quite successful in balancing and not resolving the tensions and problems he sets up. Rather than a parable, Apatow sets a problematic. There is no moral at the end of the story that tells us, "Men need to grow up, women need to loosen up." It has that as its premise. Using it as a staging point for the movie, rather than the end point, Apatow is able to portray the tensions. Women would be able to loosen up if they were given the chance, but men would need to take on some responsibility. What is shown is that these are starting points, culturally inherited positions on a map of roles, and that life is about negotiating them.

In a Time article on Rogen and Apatow, Rogen said that he and Apatow occasionally get asked whether there isn't a socially conservative background to their movies: a forty-year-old virgin, an accidental pregnancy-turn-marriage. Rogen replied that if the characters hadn't kept the baby, it would've been a pretty short movie. I think that's the proper attitude towards the comedy of the constellation surrounding Apatow, Ferrell, and Anderson. There's a premise: its not an endorsement, but the setup. Jokes require straight-men, but the irony this generation of comedians wield is directed at themselves: the straight-men are almost always the morally superior personages (take Zoolander). And what the best of these comedies do is set ironies that bring about illuminations, not in their opposite direction, but in a different, unexpected direction, ironies that bounce back and forth against each other for the duration of the movie.

That and high jinks. They are also about just saying really funny shit.

Diablerie: Paying Tribute to Richard Rorty

On Friday, June 8th, I read Stanley Cavell on Emerson and saw that America was the heart and soul of Emerson. On Saturday I read Harold Bloom on Emerson and saw that Emerson was the voice and mind of America. On Sunday, the seventh day, I rested. On Monday I summoned the most strength I had yet achieved and moved on Rorty’s appropriation of Romanticism, shattering it in a display of declared superiority by changing the name to post-Emersonian (admittedly not an earth shattering shift in philosophical policy, and sadly a mimic of Rorty’s shift from post-modernism to post-Nietzschean, and for the exact same reasons).

On Tuesday I learned that on Friday Richard Rorty had passed away due to complications with pancreatic cancer.

I’m not sure what one is supposed to feel about the death of someone you’ve never met. Certainly there is the general felt loss of life, any life, the empathy for his family and friends. But I received e-mails from friends and acquaintances, many assuming they were telling me something I already knew, a few offering condolences. I didn’t know and I didn’t know how to feel.

How does one feel when one loses a writer?

We have the writer’s books, we continue to have what we had before, the only links we readers have to our writers. What do we lose, what did I lose?

Most of the obituaries are classically wrong about Rorty in the way that outsiders aren’t quite sure how to handle the fire that incenses the insiders. But they performed their duties, their function, admirably well, proliferating snapshots of his life and work. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were his grand works, but his voice remained in the essay, a balance between cunning completion and impatience. Throughout his life Rorty struggled with two daemons, the desire to argue and the desire to be interesting. These arose, like it does in most, in the dynamic between professional and amateur. With his professional face he gained considerable street cred with tightly argued articles on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, though he spent a large amount of time on metaphilosophy, an often neglected angle of presentation in analytic philosophy. His metaphilosophical reflections are where the trouble started, at least from the professional, analytic establishment’s point of view. Metaphilosophy, or talking about how we talk about philosophy, is troublesome because there are hardly any rules for how we should talk about how we should talk.

These reflections are where Rorty’s second muse began bucking for attention. Raising its head in witty cappers on solid arguments, they captivated in their audacity. They worked against professional decorum, the professional attitude of saying no more than what is dialectically allowed. But the amateur attitude is that boredom is a bigger enemy and that the conversation needs to move forward. Rorty balanced in his writing his pure professional face and his professional amateur face, the classic philosophical gadfly. Not an amateur professional as G. E. Moore is sometimes said to have been, charming but not really knowing what everyone else is talking about, but a professional amateur, a line that begins with Socrates, continues to Montaigne and Emerson and on to Bloom and Cavell, and Rorty could not control, though he could restrain, his muse because his muse was the only sense he had that he was going in the right direction.

But how should we feel when we lose a writer? Most of Rorty’s writings had long become transparent to me, disappearing on the page as they’d already become a part of me. In a certain (though pregnant) sense, I know Rorty’s mind better than my own. A few lines here and there, and the best of his essays, are still opaque, still breathing, robust and unflagging in their hidden energy, the hidden source of their power, like few philosophers have had the courage to summon and sustain. For better or for worse, Rorty was a hedgehog, and if he remains a bit foxy to me, the attraction is no doubt incumbent upon the vitality of that one big idea, not exactly his, but endlessly resuscitated, repeated, and reformulated. It is a bit unclear what that big idea is, but I suspect that is mainly because it is unfinished and I suspect it sometimes goes by the name of “America.”

One of Rorty’s most often attacked lines aims directly at this idea: “truth is whatever your peers let you get away with”. The line is quoted so often because it seems on its face so frivolous and cynical, representative of everything that is wrong with Rorty and quoted lovingly by every detractor, just as it is, a gift from Rorty showing his true colors, mocking everything holy. Every time I see detractors jump all over the line, I think, “No, no, he’s not saying something horrible. He’s adding a little speed to the notion that peers aren’t going to let you get away with just anything. It needs to be good!” The line has everything in common with more tempered ones like “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers,” “All that can be done to explicate ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘morality’, ‘virtue’ is to refer us back to the concrete details of the culture in which these terms grew up and developed,” and “…‘method’ and ‘rationality’ are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one’s fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation.” Glossing the line with the others, it’s hard to see what’s so wrong with it. It is neither frivolous nor cynical, though on the other hand it is a tad mocking of the holy, at least that which most analytic philosophers still consider holy.

I will miss Rorty’s jocular teasing, his poking and prodding at the midriffs of philosophers, and I will miss, when they became testy and angry and cried out that they think this is serious, how he would calmly, and with a sad smile, shake his head and reply, “I know, I know my child. But so am I.” I will miss Rorty’s wit and verve, but there is nothing left from him that I wish to know, and that is only because, as he well knew, what we know isn’t what is exciting, isn’t what is worth knowing. I look forward to the posthumous material, I hope he was able to finish his replies to his forthcoming volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, but what I look for, and what I’m saddened we will no longer have the opportunity to wait for, are what Pater called those hardened bits of gemlike flame, the things that give us sustenance, the ideas that we mine seemingly forever.

The most important lesson that Rorty taught me was that writing, and in particular philosophy, is vampirism. The old cliché must be amended in a Bloomian way: good writers borrow, great writers steal, but the genius makes us think that she is the authentic originator, having been so effective at stealing her predecessors’ life blood. I have no questions for Rorty, nothing I wish to know. I have no questions for anybody because they are only tools for me—I don’t care about getting you right, preserving the aura you’ve created, I only care about stealing your strength, creating something new and better. Emerson’s heirs don’t care to mummified, embalmed for future generations to stare glazed eyed at. They don’t want schools or disciples. They only wish for what they did to be returned to them—ritually sacrificed at the height of their powers, diabolized in a frenzy by the young so that they may live on in the young, not stuffed and propped up behind exhibit windows to be looked at by the young.

When a writer dies, when your writer dies, you weep for the person, you weep for their family and loved ones, but more than any of that, you weep for the power they might have unleashed upon the Earth, potentially changing it irrevocably, a power you could have usurped for your own.

The young vamps are gathering now and the fight begins in earnest.

Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig

My confrontation with Pirsig can be said to center around two terms, “philosophy” and “experience.” In particular, it is when you put the two together that, as in a “philosophy of experience” (or, in Pirsig’s terminology, a “Metaphysics of Quality”), that I think you can get problems of a kind that Pirsig is elsewhere at pains to distance himself from and criticize (all depending on how you define the terms, of course). My development of this angle of confrontation and this picture of Pirsig has been in part due to the pressures from my interlocuters, expositors of Pirsig who think that there’s nothing wrong with such a formulation, and vice versa with them. Our pictures of Pirsig, developed in partial dialectic with each other, have over time overflowed into the general pictures of philosophy we may hold and other particular philosophers we may attend to. This has led to surprise, on both sides, when we look in more detail at what the other is describing and drawing in our continuing efforts to expand our own horizons.

This phenomenon shouldn’t itself be surprising. It happens all the time and might most generally be called “education.” The peculiar thing about developing a picture of Pirsig is that there isn’t all that much material of Pirsig’s to keep in mind, not a lot of detail to dig around for or have to remember (though, as always happens to diggers, we may become so focused on the mineshaft we are currently in that we sometimes start to forget about the others). This isn’t so, though, for the job of developing a picture of Pirsig’s place in philosophy (or anything else), for developing a picture of how Pirsig resonates with or reverberates into the rest of what people are saying and doing. There are a lot of mineshafts out there to look through and the phenomenon of surprise is the effect of having a shaft described to you for so long as one thing, and then going into it and finding something else.

This effect, I think, isn’t due to willful mis-description or even partial understanding. All of us move through the world with partial understandings that are further increased, though never made less partial. Some people understand more about one thing than another and should be taken as authorities on X, over this other person over here. Who should be taken as an authority, as having a good understanding, is something developed over time, over conversation and debate and the dialectic. Our finitude is what produces the demand that we never rest totally certain on a platform, but always be looking for or producing a better one.

This is all to say that I’ve had my own little moment of surprise, which turned rapidly, as dawning understanding swept over my face, into joy. The ball got rolling, oddly enough, by me, but not in the usual way. In this case, my girlfriend and I were having a conversation about racism and moral progress and I started to try and impress upon her my slightly counterintuitive viewpoint. She’s studying psychology and has a bit of the scientist in her and I’m, of course, an irrepressible Rortyan and so scientistic rhetoric doesn’t take too well with me. As we were talking, I called upon Dewey to help me out. I pulled out his “means-ends continuum” to try and help me describe my hocked vision of moral progress. Turns out, she was quite taken with it and over the next few days kept asking me for where it was and more information on it.

Here’s my partial: I don’t know where in Dewey it’s from and I don’t have my Dewey books with me anymore. She wants to incorporate it in an art project she’s doing (which, she’s told me, she’d rather have me call an “art experiential” because “art project,” in her words, makes it sound like she’s in eighth grade; I told her she looks like she’s in eighth grade—she has a young face—at which point she called me a “butthead”) and maybe a paper she’s writing, so I read to her sections of Rorty that continues to gloss the notion. She also goes onto the web and grabs some papers about Dewey, art, and the means-ends continuum. They’re lying around the apartment and so I read a few of them. Most of them are lame articles about Dewey and art (not because they are about his vision of art, but because they are just lame), but one article is solely about the means-ends continuum that she picked up from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, a reputable philosophical journal. The scales fell from eyes.

In his paper, “The Means-Ends Continuum and the Reconciliation of Science and Art in the Later Works of John Dewey,” (Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 595-611) Leonard J. Waks seeks to focus on something that has never, apparently, received much isolated focus: Dewey’s analysis of the means-ends continuum. The first part of the paper is an admirable summation of the background that Dewey was reacting to. Nothing out of the ordinary here; just the usual stuff about dehumanizing, technical action, theory and practice, teleology, etc. But then the second part, “Dewey’s Analysis of Means-Ends,” which should be the meat of what I’d like to learn about, begins, “Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls”—and at this point I can hear the choir of antithetical, experience-jargon toting Pirsigians chime in triumphantly—“primary and secondary.” (598)

I rolled my eyes and got ready my thresher, ready to neatly cut out all of that kind of talk as merely the ways of the time, a vocabulary handed down to us from Locke to Kant to Northrop, the kind of thing I had hoped that James and Dewey had gotten away from in the main, or at least not used those damn exact words, words that have haunted me ever since my interlocuters had started reading more Northrop into Pirsig than they should’ve, hammering down every time Pirsig writes that Quality or DQ is the “primary experience.” I got a little ticked because here I am wanting to read about moral progress and the means-ends continuum and I have to go through a negligible discursus on experience. But then I read the next paragraph, which if I hadn’t completely forgotten by the reading of it that I had just started my thresher, I should have thought was a complete non sequitor (all in-text citations of Dewey have been removed, though all italics, before and after when quoting, are Waks’s):

“Let us turn to the deconstructive argument. Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls primary and secondary. This distinction emerges from his ‘doubt-belief’ theory of inquiry.

“According to that theory, the live organism acts to sustain the conditions needed for its continuing life. Every experience is thus situated in a causal continuum of life-sustaining activity. Every feature of experience is conditioned by the life-directing goals of the organism; it is perceived in relation to a reaching, a trying to bring into or sustain in existence the conditions required for life. Every situation is qualitatively felt as enjoyable or unsettling, depending on whether the conditions for life sustaining activity are, or are not, maintained in existence by present activity. The features are potentially cognitively meaningful, because they are all elements in the web of causal connections; they are related to their own antecedent conditions, and they are pregnant with possible consequences bearing on the life goals and life-sustaining ativities of the organism. Doubt is felt as uneasiness or imbalance, as obstacles are encountered that frustrate activity. Frustrations emerge as entrenched habits prove inadequate to the life-sustaining task and must be reconstructed. This reconstructive process, which terminates in new belief as more adequate habits are formed and doubt gives way to renewed action, Dewey, following Peirce, calls inquiry.”

When I finished that paragraph, I nodded my head in agreement. I had read about Peirce and Dewey’s redescription of inquiry and absorbed it from Rorty’s redescription (primarily from “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” ORT). The paragraph was all fairly abstract, but when you navigate your way through the jargon it says something very simple and commonsensical: you putter your way through life as you’ve been puttering until you hit something that you can’t just putter through, which causes doubt in the way you’ve been puttering, which causes you to think about whether you should perhaps find some new way of puttering. In nodding my head serenely, of course, I had completely forgotten that that paragraph was supposed to be explicating primary and secondary experience. I didn’t see anything plainly relevant and forgot all about it.

But then Waks hits me with this simple, straightforward gloss on the previous paragraph: “For Dewey, life activities undergirded by adequate habit and intelligence-in-action constitute primary experience.” (ibid.) Like a ton of bricks, it hit me all at once. First, I went, “Oh yeah, he was supposed to be talking about that.” But then: “Oh…my…God….” The constellation of what primary and secondary experience shifted completely out of kilter from my normal understanding of how neo-Kantians and Pirsigians use it by five simple words: “adequate habit … constitute primary experience.” It was almost as if the word “primary” had been italicized just for me, for the quakes of what those five words mean for a confluence of Dewey and Pirsig are tremendous.

The background is simple: for Pirsigians, Dynamic Quality is the primary experience and static patterns of Quality are secondary, following in a wake behind the cutting edge of pre-intellectual experience. Simply stating it allows one to see it: static patterns are adequate habits, which means that Pirsig is the exact reverse of Dewey.

According to Waks, for Dewey, we make our way about the world following a pattern of accumulated habits. “In this dimension tacit goals adequately direct behavior and condition a relatively fluid field of experience apprehended as a qualitative whole.” (ibid.) We just live when we are in this dimension, we don’t think about what we are doing, we just act. This is often how a Pirsigian will want to describe Dynamic Quality. For Dewey, however, accumulated habits, or static patterns, are the primary experience and the secondary is, though oddly just as in Pirsig, the reflective experience. Dewey, like Pirsig, annoyingly uses the language of “reflective delay,” but the point here is that both agree that reflection causes us to analyze into parts, as opposed to the qualitative whole of primary experience.

Dewey’s description is very convincing and intuitive: we navigate the world by a set of habits, obstacles cause doubt, doubt causes a rethinking of our habits, and the rethinking causes us to change our habits. If one finds this very convincing, however, it puts Pirsig in an awkward position—his description of DQ as the primary experience, as the qualitative whole, has to be rejected. I think one could make a run at trying to creatively put Dewey and Pirsig back together. I’m not going to attempt that here. What I will do is first try and explain why Pirsig would suggest something backwards to Dewey and then try and explain why I prefer and find quite congenial Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction I hadn’t been able to countenance before.

I think Pirsig reverses Dewey (after Dewey had reversed Kant) because he still shows signs of what Heidegger called “nostalgia for immediacy” (and what I have previously called the “pathos of distance”). This comes out in several places, but I think it’s easiest to see when we link together the baby passages in Lila to the hierarchy passages in ZMM. When Pirsig calls DQ the cutting edge of experience, he is obviously making use of a sense of immediacy, our sense that the present is a knife’s edge of conjoined beginning and ending, ever moving onward. Before Pirsig conceives of DQ in Lila, however, he already has one of its functions in mind: “You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. … The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.” (ZMM, 250, italics his)

I’m not going to slap Pirsig on the wrists for saying that the past is unreal because one of the things that I make it a point of trying to do is realign people to ZMM, that the book is not a doctrinal exposition but a dialectical journey. However, even if we don’t take this passage as doctrine, something like it is still in Lila (which much more closely resembles a doctrinal exposition). Even after the refuse of these statements in ZMM is cleared away, there is still left the sense of importance that Pirsig places on them, how emphatic Pirsig is remains.

One might wonder how or why we would want to call this a “nostalgia.” After all, isn’t Pirsig suggesting that immediacy is our only reality? How can one be nostalgic for all that there is? The nostalgia comes in when Pirsig links DQ with the experience of a baby. “One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention.” (Lila, 137, italics his) By this linking, Pirsig makes a very real shift in the meaning of DQ. No longer is DQ simply the only state we are in, how we experience reality. DQ is something that we can lose, something we can be more or less in touch with. The nostalgia for immediacy is the lost, purely new experience of a baby, or that first time we heard that one song that one time.

This creates no small amount of tension, but it is the kind of tension that is required to produce the grand effects that Pirsig claims for DQ on metaphysical thinking. However, it does tend to put a strain on its logical coherence. Further strain comes from Pirsig’s suggestion that we are static patterns, that our ego, our I, is static patterns and does not, as the Cartesian tradition has suggested, have static patterns, are separate from them. It is this suggestion of Pirsig’s that most fully aligns him with Dewey.

If Pirsig had focused more attention on the repercussions of this reversal of the tradition, I think Pirsig may have shifted his emphases in DQ. For the time being, I shall content myself with pointing out why I prefer Dewey’s description (with the idea that it doesn’t take much to see Pirsig’s conception of “static patterns” the same way). The two problems I’ve always had with the formulation of the primary and secondary distinction between experiences are the senses that 1) primary experience is more important (as in the fact that DQ is a trumping good over static patterns) and 2) that the primary experience comes before our concepts (as in DQ as pre-intellectual experience). In Dewey’s formulation, both problems disappear.

Taking the latter sense first, we can see that the supposed “time lag” in Dewey becomes totally innocuous. Waks says that for Dewey, “when habits fail and obstacles frustrate action in a situation, the unease of doubt prompts a transition to a secondary dimension, characterized by reflective delay.” (Waks, 598) This delay in Dewey, however, is not the same delay as in Pirsig. For Pirsig, the time lag is a razor thin delay between experience sans concepts and conceptualized experience. For Dewey, there is no experience that is not conceptualized. Dewey affects this shift from Kantianism by moving from concepts to habits. By dispensing with talk about concepts, and when we have them, where we get them, can we get rid of them, etc., Dewey moves us to talk about our habits of behavior. Instead of talking about how a baby forms concepts, as Pirsig does, Dewey would talk about how a baby forms habits—and the idea of concepts drops right out. This leaves us as being a set of habits, just as Pirsig says we are static patterns, accumulated patterns of behavior.

Reflective delay, then, becomes the same thing you get between the time of placing the nail and hitting the nail. When doubt enters our domain of habit, we cease the habit so that we may think about the habit and how we may reform it. There’s no mysterious time lag here, just the normal lag between hitting your thumb with a crowbar and thinking that maybe you shouldn’t use the crowbar to pound the nail, that perhaps a hammer would work better.

The nostalgia for immediacy also drops out once one recognizes that “primary” and “secondary” are simply two separate modes of being, two dimensions of experience, two different activities. Pirsig and Dewey’s highly philosophical way of putting the point can obscure the effect, but the only reason one is primary to the other is that you can’t have doubt until you have a habit to be doubtful of. Reflection on our habits is secondary because we have to have habits to reflect on. However, reflection is just as much a habitual activity as anything else that goes on in our primary experience.

This is how the first problem, the problem of beatifying primary experience, is muted. The primary and secondary designations are simply ways of distinguishing how we usually make our way about the world and a special case of making our way about the world. What is also interesting in Dewey’s model is the importance placed on secondary experience, which is often lost in Pirsig’s DQ/static set up. For Pirsig, the only reason we have static patterns is so that we won’t fall apart into chaos. Otherwise, Dynamic Quality plays all the good roles in our lives: newness, betterness, wholeness. For Dewey, the very idea of falling apart into chaos doesn’t arise. In Dewey’s arrangement, secondary experience, or inquiry, plays an important role in giving us better habits, static patterns. “Inquiry leads to a re-cognition—a new, explicit view of the situation, a new causal map enabling the formation of new plans that liberate us from doubt and re-engage us, armed with new habits, in cognitively enriched primary experience.” (ibid.) Wholeness cut into parts holds at bay the Otherness of Chaos, the fear of degeneracy, in Pirsig, but for Dewey cutting things into parts enables us to construct a better wholeness.

So much for my notes on experience, Dewey, and Pirsig. Dewey’s vision, and Waks’ article, continues into his conception of the “means-ends continuum,” which I won’t go on to discuss here. I’ll simply note that was interesting about how the distinction between primary and secondary experience links up with the means-ends continuum is that the purposes for which we construct the means to get them (ends-in-view) are incomparable to the end results after following through on our plans. This is because ends-in-view and end results exist in two different dimensions of experience, secondary and primary respectively. This produces the famous oscillation that Rorty emphasizes when we he takes up Dewey’s mantle. This isn’t to say I’m about to start talking about primary and secondary experience. I still think it is needlessly esoteric to talk about two dimensions. But Dewey’s vision in out-of-date jargon still foresees many moves made in the game of philosophy that the best pragmatists are carrying out (most of them acknowledging their debt).