If my notes here have gotten a bit dismissive sounding, it's largely to provide a counterweight to Dave's discipleship. This is not to diss Dave (or Bo or other Pirsig fans posting on our board here), but my approach, and the approach I see in enthusiasts like Katie re. Foucault or Matt Evans did for Plato is yes, to try to figure how out to charitably elaborate and defend the view, but perhaps moreso to independently parse and critically appraise it: you pick it apart, test the limits, and see what remains. (Again, this is not to diss Dave, who I'm sure is seeing his role here as sharing his enthusiasm and trying to get more folks interested in Pirsig.)
While of course you want to get out of a reading every bit of richness you can (so as to make it worth your time to have read it), I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who focuses too exclusively on any one philosopher (for non-professional reasons; if you're a Kant scholar, than of course you have some reason to get obsessed, though of course to be a good Kant scholar you'd need to really know your Hume and Leibniz and many others), whether it be Marx or Ayn Rand or Jesus or whomever. Genius is overrated... even great thinkers steal 90% of their ideas from their predecessors and contemporaries, and don't necessary end up with the greatest versions of these ideas. The progress of ideas makes any one thinker to some extent instantly obsolete. Pirsig provides a fine model of a very smart guy thinking through things deeply to come to his own conclusions, but don't think for a second that he invented the idea of overcoming subject-object dualism, which is one of dozen or so major themes pervading philosophical history in the 20th century (see Heidegger, for one, though arguably he was just following on to Hegel), and Pirsig's account, taking up a whole two books of musings totaling something like 100 pages when you get rid of all the travelogue stuff, is just not going to be the most developed and comprehensive take on this however you slice it.
OK, enough with the general cautionary words to keep perspective, which no one in need of them is likely to listen to anyway. I wanted to recount here a part of Lila that struck me as a particularly stark example of casual overreach: pages 152 to 157. Here he explains how denying subject-object metaphysics solves a whole mass of traditional philosophical problems.
First, he thinks it allows you to solve the basic problem of metaphysics: ontology. What kinds of things are there? Well, the only reason you ask the question with the word "things" is due to the bogus idea that perceivers are fundamentally different than perceiveds. Once you get rid of that, you pay attention to the phenomena themselves, which tell you a story of teleology, of purposes, of values. What gets picked out as objects in the phenomenal stream (and keep in mind, this phrase phenomenal stream doesn't itself imply subject-object metaphysics; I recommend listening to our Sartre discussion if this sounds wrong to you) is a function of values, but Pirsig doesn't want this to be a mater of either a Schopenhauer-type Will, i.e. this uber-force that underlies and actually drives own own desires, or merely a matter of our personal values shaping our perceptions. The point of his teleological levels is to set up a hierarchy of types of purposes.
Here's how Pirsig makes the point, from p. 152:
In a subject-object metaphysics value has always been the most vague and ambiguous of terms. What is it? ...The word is too vague. The "value" that holds a glass of water together and the "value" that holds a nation together are obviously not the same thing. Therefore to say that the world is nothing but value is just confusing, not clarifying. Now this vagueness is removed by sorting out values according to levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value. The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other because they are at different evolutionary levels. And they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause the most sceptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove. These patterns have nothing in common except the historic evolutionary process that created all of them. But that process is a process of value evolution. Therefore the name "static pattern of values" applies to all.
Continuing the same passage on 153, he moves to mind-matter (recently discussed in this context in a different post):
That's one puzzle cleared up. Another huge one is the mind-matter puzzle.
If the world consists only of patterns of mind and patterns of matter, what is the relationship between the two? ...[This] is one of the most tormenting problems of the physics to which positivism looks for guidance. The torment occurs not because of anything discovered in the laboratory. Data are data. It is the intellectual framework with which one deals with the data that is at fault. The fault is within subject-object metaphysics itself.
A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static patterns as the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of two: inorganic-biological patterns called 'matter,' and social-intellectual patterns called 'mind.' But this division is the source of the problem... It has to make this fatal division because it gives top position in its structure to subjects and objects. Everything has got to be object or subject, substance or non-substance, because that's the primary division of the universe. Inorganic-biological patterns are composed of 'substance,' and are therefore 'objective.' Social-intellectual patterns are not composed of 'substance' and are therefore called 'subjective.' Then, having made this arbitrary division based on 'substance,' conventional metaphysics then asks, 'What is the relationship between mind and matter, between subject and object?'
One answer is to fudge both mind and matter and the whole question that goes with them into another [ill-formed concept] called 'man.' 'Man' has a body (and therefore is not himself a body) and he also has a mind (and therefore is not himself a mind). But if one asks what is this 'man' (which is not a body and not a mind) one doesn't come up with anything. There isn't any 'man' independent of the patterns. Man is the patterns.
This fictitious 'man' has many synonyms; 'mankind,' 'people,' 'the public,' and even such pronouns as 'I,' 'he,' and 'they.' Our language is so organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like 'substance' they can be used as long as it is remembered that they're terms for collections of patterns and not some independent primary reality of their own.
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality the four sets of static patterns are not isolated into separate compartments of mind and matter. Matter is just a name for certain inorganic value patterns. Biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns are supported by this pattern of matter but are independent of it. They have rules and laws of their own that are not derivable from the rules or laws of substance...
So what the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that all schools are right on the mind-matter question. Mind is contained in static inorganic patterns. Matter is contained in static intellectual patterns. Both mind and matter are completely separate evolutionary levels of static patterns of value, and as such are capable of each containing the other without contradiction.
The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, 'We are suspended in language.' Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.
The third piece of Pirsig's account I want to throw out there starts on p. 155, just a paragraph after the above:
A third puzzle illuminated by the Metaphysics of Quality is the ancient "free will vs. determinism controversy." Determinism is the philosophic doctrine that man, like all other objects in the universe, follows fixed scientific laws, and does so without exception. Free will is the philosophic doctrine that man makes choices independent of the atoms of his body.
...If the belief in free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong. On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to deny the truth of science. If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. If "everything" is included in the class of "substance and its properties," and if "substance and its properties" is included in the class of "things that always follow laws," and if "people" are included in the class "everything," then it is an airtight logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.
To be sure, it doesn't seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those illusions that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences, including anthropology, were founded on the bedrock metaphysical belief that these physical cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world. A "moral" person acts conventionally, "watches out for the cops," "keeps his nose clean," and nothing more.
In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn't come up. To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior is free.
It should be clear that I think these solutions are much too glib, but I'd like to hear the thoughts of other folks reading this blog who are not Pirsig specialists re. what might be wrong with these accounts as he's formulated them.
-Mark Linsenmayer
I don’t have more to add directly to this conversation except to note that perhaps Gadamer’s Truth and Method would be a nice follow up to Structuralism/Derrida
and a lead into more recent work including experimental philo and the Dreyfus/Searle debates.
good show (in a great series) on the risky business of importing scientific ideas in the social/political realm:
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1—24-listen/#episode15
“It should be clear that I think these solutions are much too glib, but I’d like to hear the thoughts of other folks reading this blog who are not Pirsig specialists re. what might be wrong with these accounts as he’s formulated them.”
Mark
The explanation for your (and, apparently nearly all other PEL posters’) disdain of Pirsig is simple:
Since the early 20th century, academic philosophy has vociferously expressed disdain of metaphysics, and you guys are among the most avid followers and consumers of what academic philosophers say. This overly skeptical prejudicial mindset that metaphysics is lunacy is so ubiquitously deeply-embedded in philosophy, that none of you can any longer understand its purpose.
“I hate Whitehead. After all, who can sanely wish to plod through his tediously precise volumes of work to learn that reality is experiential activity interrelating in various processes, and vacuous, enduring substance is illusion.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6cDp0C-I8
“I hate Pirsig. After all, who can give credibility to such efficient, clean prose (I think you say glib) that expounds such thinking as that reality is interrelating patterns of process, and vacuous, enduring substance is illusion.”
Stupid stuff, this. Much better and more important to spend two hours podcasting on three pages from, of all the overrated and regrettable works of philosophy, the idealist processualist, Hegel.
And if you really want to see glib, do Rorty.
This is very timely, Burl, because you’re expressing exactly the kind of misplaced anger that I attribute to Pirsig in the post I just put up (part 5).
I don’t dislike metaphysics, and neither do Wes and Dylan at least (not sure about Seth, but he’s definitely more interested in ethics and politics). We’ve been planning for quite a while a series of metaphysics episodes starting (probably) with some PreSocratics, of which I think Heraclitus (granddad of process philosophy) seems the most sensible. We already spent a lot of energy on the existence of God (i.e. what constitutes a satisfying metaphysical ending point: do you need an intelligence, or is sheer, raw being any better), among other episodes. What you mean is that we’re all fucked up just because we haven’t done Whitehead yet. Well, hey, we haven’t done Marx yet either; we have lots of work ahead of us.
Your aggressive Alfiephelia produces an immediate gut reaction which actually makes it harder for me to want to have anything to do with him. Nonetheless, I’m natively sympathetic to his view, and generally view opaque writing as a welcome challenge. I recommend you skim Solomon’s “In the Spirit of Hegel;” you clearly didn’t get the message re. the good/early Hegel that we were trying to get across in the phenomenology eps from last year. I think you’re equally at fault for ignoring Whitehead’s debt to him as Pirsig followers are for not seeing the trend in ideas there.
Pirsig is glib not because of his message but because he’s glib. Coming up with a conceptual scheme that definitionally removes the mind/body problem, for instance, is just about as offensive as the positivists’ move to, via an epistemological stipulation, choke off all metaphysics (which is basically what you’re reacting to here and attributing it wrongly to the entire philosophical establishment).
If I have the energy later, I’ll try to parse one of the above chunks myself, but I don’t have time right now and would prefer that someone else with some academic philosophy chops do some of the work for me. Frankly, I shouldn’t have to; if you go listen to our mind episode (re. that issue; we’ve talked about the fact/value distinction on other episodes), that will give you plenty of argument for why there’s still a problem even if you admit, as nearly everyone does, that substance dualism is wrong.
(For the record, Wes agrees that Rorty is glib. I’ve not read much of him myself, and I know Dylan considers him a substantial influence.)
Thanks Mark, for engaging in this discussion. Debating philosophy with cults is like talking politics with bigots.
From my standpoint however you seem to be less generous to Pirsig than you are to the canonized philosophers.
Am I wrong in thinking that every podcast has referenced weak arguments somewhere in work of the philosophers under discussion.
Yet it seems as if you’re contrasting the glibness of Pirsig the amateur, with rigour of the academic professionals.
I hope this is the sort of response you’re after.
My objection is to the proud defense of amateurism; see my Pt. 5 post. My writing on this blog if of course amateur as hell, but if and when I write another book, it’ll either purposely be entertainment (like my only real book Tripe, which is certainly informed by what philosophy I knew when I wrote it, but is specifically intended to be brain candy), or I’ll be more careful about it.
Nietzsche was as amateur as Pirsig, I think. He had been a classics professor, but there’s no evidence that he had spent any time on Kant or much other more modern philosophy. What makes Nietzsche rewarding (besides his being very smart and perceptive and funny, of course) is that he KEPT WRITING and reacting to things, so we have him reflecting on basically the same small set of revolutionary ideas and giving us really quite a lot to sink our teeth into. Had Pirsig become, like Danto, a commentator, hell, even a travel author like the video I posted recommends, then it would be easier for us to have a more balanced take on him.
As it is, he’s a bit like John Kennedy Toole, who wrote one swell book and committed suicide; in the latter case, I think you can appreciate what the work has to offer without arguing that Toole was as great as Hemingway or any other author that refined his craft over a period of years. I’m extra critical of Pirsig (in this context; like I said, I like the books or I wouldn’t be spending so much time with them) because I think you could argue that he fundamentally didn’t LIKE philosophy, and as a fan of many philosophers, that saddens me. You just don’t deify a guy like that as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (and certainly Pirig had no desire to be so deified).
I should add that a lot of our (or my, at least) criticisms of academic philosophers center around their pretension to be system-builders. In so many cases, these guys had some great individual insights, but they felt compelled to put it in a 1000-page comprehensive volume of everything that was mostly unnecessary and certainly flawed in its details. (It’s almost better that Heidegger envisioned this massive Being & Time, meaning he had an idea how his core ideas fit into this giant structure, but then he gave up after Part I when he’d put forth all the really novel bits… though even that presentation is comically overwrought.)
I’ve been reluctant to complain but I have to agree with Bruce. Mark’s criticism of Pirsig seems uncharitable and a bit too personal and some of the criticism has no legitimate basis. The claim that Pirsig was the first one in history to ever reject subject-object dualism, for example, is Bodvar’s idea, not Pirsig’s and in fact Pirsig is on record disagreeing with that claim. His complaints about “Philosophology” are not meant to praise the amateur over professional competence but to distinguish genuinely creative thinking from any post hoc analysis of such work. William James was complaining about “The Ph.D. Octopus” over a hundred years ago, when professional philosophy just being invented. Thoreau had said as much in the 1830s in “The American Scholar”. “Man should not be subdued by his instruments,” he said, declaring independence from tradition in favor of originality. I mean, Pirsig is only putting his spin on a well-established American tradition and it is surely not a legitimate reason to call the man a crank. The titular complaint, that Pirsig is too glib about solving all the big philosophical problems, is a little more plausible but still seems to be based on some kind of distortion. I think he is not claiming to solve the big problems so much as he’s listing all the fake problems that dissolve when subject-object dualism is rejected. James was saying that we have fake problems because of this fake idea more than a hundred years ago.
“The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the ‘apprehension’ by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible, is given in full.”
And finally, I’d like to make a very broad point about the “amateur” style of guys like James, Nietzsche and Pirsig: that manner of presentation is only consistent with the content of their respective philosophies. Each one, in their own way, is attacking the otherworldly and hyper-rational stance of MOST philosophers. They are pushing back against vicious abstractionism and excessive intellectualism and otherwise insisting that the purpose of thought is to serve life. As Emerson might have put it, thought is an instrument and not the goal.
Good points all, David. The crankism issue (see Part 5) for me is not to declaim him as a crank, but to ask the question, what is a crank? and see if considering Pirsig and his effects helps answer the question. I ask this as someone trying to do philosophy outside of academia.
James was the antithesis of the amateur. He wrote constantly and continually reformulated his ideas for new audiences and purposes. Peirce was more the loner crank in that line. 🙂
I’m both grateful and maddened that Pirsig only wrote two books. On the one hand, having finished this episode and reading Lila, I can feel like I’m done: that he’s pointed me at some more avenues to explore, but I’ve got him more or less covered, and there’s not a whole world still left to sink into… whereas with so many of these other guys we talk about, their careers are so huge that I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. On the other hand, I don’t think I’m being uncharitable to Pirsig in saying his readings of many other philosophers are uncharitable, and the accounts quoted above, though interesting, to me beg for further analysis, and from what I saw, Pirsig just wasn’t interested enough to do that.
To focus on the free will example (as I’m giving up hope of any readers w/o a dog in this fight jumping in at this point): He’s got 4 paragraphs as I’ve reproduced it, the first two of which set up the traditional problem. Then I quote:
“To be sure, it doesn’t seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those illusions that science is forever exposing.”
It’s a given that in complex systems, micro-level determinism is not going to be obvious. Unless you’re someone like Hobbes who insists on determinate psychological laws (and even he would probably say that individual factors can vary enough that we still can’t predict in even most cases what someone will do), then you’re not going to have this “illusion that science is forever exposing.” It’s a straw man: an caricature of some oversimplified assumptions of some particularly behaviorist-type anthropologists that he’s reacting against.
Another quote: “Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world. A “moral” person acts conventionally, “watches out for the cops,” “keeps his nose clean,” and nothing more.”
This view in no way follows from determinism as he’s set it out. Yes, there’s a problem given naturalism for how normative, transcendent moral rules can exist, but the alternative need not be a thoroughgoing conventionalism that considers morality fictitious. Hegel, for instance, saw morality as conventional, but acknowledged dialectical relations among ideas, such that the ethic of a given society, say 19th-20th century white America, could be analyzed and yield pseudo-logical conclusions, in this case that human rights as conceived as foundational in this code should be extended to non-whites as well. (I gave a comparable example of gay marriage as following from the idea of marriage in another recent post.) Now, dialectical relations are not matters of logical deduction: one might be able to pick up some different part of “Americanism” and make that the main thread in the next development. The point is merely that there’s room for non-arbitrary development, which would be surprising if these were purely fictional.
Of course, other committed-to-causality folks have no problem grounding morality because they sharply distinguish between motives and obligation. So for Kant, we can determine what obligation is apart from any motives we might have for pursuing those obligations. Morality for Kant is not simply a social code and are in no way artificial.
Beyond these different versions and degrees of moral realism, you might just bite the bullet and say that really, there is nothing like what we called morality before we started philosophizing, and a grown-up society should just deal with that instead of pretending otherwise (either as traditional morality does by positing these objective moral laws or as Pirsig does by positing an objectively hierarchical value structure).
Last quote:
“In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn’t come up. To the extent that one’s behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one’s behavior is free.”
To insist that Dynamic Quality is undefinable is to deny any discernible logic to what we find valuable on a moment to moment basis. I agree with Pirsig that any attempts to codify (e.g. via a system of aesthetics) what we find valuable are post-hoc analyses, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a mechanism that we can theorize about (with at least equal warrant as we’d theorize about metaphysical systems) that determines this. So, I like Frithjof Bergmann’s theory of freedom that we feel free when we’re doing something we identify with. That formulation matches up very well with Pirsig’s actual examples, but doesn’t imply that there’s anything undefinable about it. Can we determine beforehand what all we will identify with? Well, no, but if we understand human nature (Bergmann runs more or less with the results form analyses from Nietzsche and Hegel on this, with some Sartre in there too), then we can (and should) predict in general the kinds of stuff that will and won’t fulfill us, which in turn (he thinks) should guide social policy (I’ve given the details of this here before: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/01/25/more-on-bergmanns-new-work/).
According to a long speech by Dave on the podcast that we had to edit out because his audio went hinky, the metaphysical levels that Pirsig posits, and in fact all his talk of things extending beyond human experience (amoebas and all that) are just pragmatic models for us to try on and consider. They only, therefore, needed to be detailed enough for his purposes, which were personal and humanistic, and secondarily (as discussed some in Lila) political, but still not intended to lead to recommendations for social engineering, much less work in the physical/biological sciences. He just didn’t have the same purposes, then, as Whitehead, and this explains why he doesn’t require the kinds of details that Whitehead gives. So (according to Dave), here’s Pirsig’s picture, and it’s a nice picture that’s worthy for inclusion in the gallery of ideas, but if it’s not suiting what you need it for, then go back and draw another.
This is the strain in Pirsig that I’m most sympathetic too, but at the same time (as Bo says), it’s a much less bold, and in that sense weaker claim than to insist that Quality itself (meaning not just Dynamic Quality but this whole hierarchical structure) constitutes a metaphysics in the old-timey sense (though honestly I still don’t think I understand what that could coherently mean, much like I think Schopenhauer’s notion of world as ultimately Will is intuitively unpalatable).
Thanks to both Mark and David for their responses above.
David has covered my objections better than I could, but I’d just like to add one small point to his last paragraph.
The manner of presentation gave, as a context ,the world we live in. Academic philosophy , to the novice, may as well be on other planets , for all we know or want to know , of ancient Greece, medieval Europe or pre-war Germany.
That said I’d like to repeat my thanks to both of you for pursuing this positively from both sides.
And thank you for chiming in, Bruce! Best, -Mark