[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

Scott, Ian, Mike,

Forgive me, but I hate proliferating posts so I'm tying together the three 
seperate topics you guys brought up. 1) the "rhetorical style" question, 2) 
the Plato question, and 3) Pirsig in the Western tradition.

Matt said:
Does Pirsig saying, "in philosophy rhetorical styles are supposed to be 
irrelevant to the truth" strike anybody else as incredibly weird for Pirsig 
to say?

Ian said:
The key word is "supposed" - is he just saying that traditionally in the 
eyes of most metaphysicists it's supposed to be (meant to be) irrelevant ? 
Whereas Pirsig's position really is that rhetoric is just as relevant as 
logic ?

Mike concurred:
I think it was an attempt to use SOM against itself.... This tactic seems to 
fall some way short of giving the reader (or Baggini) any idea of what 
Pirsig actually believes.

Matt:
The first rule of interpretation when stumbling across a remark that strikes 
you as weird is to imagine how the author would have meant, to be as 
charitable as possible in making it fit in with the rest of the authors 
views.  The tough part for me about the line is the full context of the 
situation, the context that gives the line its first-step meaning.

Baggini said:
I was struck by an uncomfortable tension in LILA between the way in which 
the MOQ was presented as a static philosophy and the idea of dynamic 
quality. ... For example, a phrase you often use, with many variants, is, 
“The Metaphysics of Quality says” as though the MOQ was a kind of 
philosophical Rosetta Stone....

Do you think you made a mistake in presenting the MOQ in such static terms 
in LILA?

Pirsig responded:
The alternative to “The Metaphysics of Quality says,” would be “I, Robert 
Pirsig, says,” and that repeated many times sounds worse to me. I don't 
understand this objection to a complete metaphysical system that someone has 
worked out. It seems to imply that some kind of confusion is preferable. It 
also seems to be an objection to the rhetorical style of the Metaphysics of 
Quality rather than a discovery of any falsehood in it, and in philosophy 
rhetorical styles are supposed to be irrelevant to the truth.

Matt:
Without getting into the actual issue involved in this selection (which I 
talk about at the end of "Philosophologology"), we can see Pirsig's response 
as a reply to an attack.  Baggini said, "Do you think you made a mistake?"  
Pirsig said, "It seems to be an objection to the rhetorical style _rather_ 
than a discovery of any falsehood.  _In philosophy_ (which we are doing 
right now), rhetorical styles are supposed to be irrelevant to the truth."

Do you see what I'm getting at?  It seems to me that Pirsig was responding 
for himself, not pointing out the way traditional metaphysicians think or 
launching into a deconstructing attack on SOM (which is what the end of ZMM 
is).  I think both of you, Ian and Mike, are right to want to construe 
Pirsig differently because the statement does seem to go against the grain.  
But it looks to me like he was and I think it was a bad mistake.  There are 
ways to make a distinction between style and substance, but they are always 
rough and ready and I don't think this was a good way of doing it.

Scott said:
I want to also raise a different issue re philosophology, and that is about 
Pirsig's dissing Plato with respect to the Sophists by saying that Plato 
tried to corral the Good by talking of the Idea of the Good. ... But the 
point I want to make here is that Pirsig's criticism of Plato is based on a 
modernist view of ideas, not on a Platonic understanding of them. For 
modernists (I'm thinking of the Lockean tradition), an idea is something 
produced in the human mind as a consequence of having a lot of sense 
impressions. Hence, an idea is a secondary reality, while the contents of 
the senses are primary. For Plato, of course, ideas are primary, and are 
primarily external to the human mind (the human only "knows" by 
participating in an independently existing idea, not by constructing it 
internally). Thus, when Plato speaks of the Idea of the Good, he is 
referring to what he takes to be the *real* Good (the permanent, eternal 
Good) as opposed to the transient goods of everyday life. The significance 
of this is that what Plato was up to is the same thing that mystics say to 
do: don't be attached to the impermanent.

Matt:
First, I should say that with respect to 
philosophology-as-intellectual-history, which is the task of trying to find 
out what people in the past thought of themselves, the modern interpretation 
of Plato may be a mistake, but it is the kind of mistake people in the 
present make when they try and dig up the good in past figures and ditch the 
bad stuff.  In other words, they are then not _doing_ intellectual history 
so much as they are using it for their own purposes.  I don't see anything 
wrong with that.  I would take it to be a mandatory mistake to be able to 
write a progressive (or regressive) narrative of how we got from there to 
here.

Second, I'm not so sure Pirsig did make the particular mistake you think in 
reading Plato.  I think Pirsig is in some sense aware that Plato was trying 
to be in the same business as the mystics.  The mistake that Pirsig thought 
Plato made was in making dialectic commander-in-chief over Truth, or rather 
Truth in control of the Good.  This had the effect of making whatever 
mysticism was subordinate to Reason.  So, in a sense, modern philosophy 
itself is a misreading of Plato.  Pirsig's point is to identify where modern 
philosophy came from and I think he hits the mark pretty good by identifying 
the battle of rhetoric vs. dialectic and Plato's dialectic victory over the 
Sophists' rhetoric.

Mike said:
Also, has anyone noticed the static/Dynamic nature of the division between 
Baggini's talk of philosophology providing "checks and balances", and 
Pirsig's refusal (most of the time) to engage in philosophology? Perhaps 
what's needed is some philosophological static-latching in order to further 
assert the superiority of Pirsig's Dynamic leap forward?

Matt:
I'd generally rather stay away from this sort of characterization of 
philosophy/philosophology and Dynamic/static.  But there is a good point 
here with it.  The central problem that Pirsig raises in LILA is how we are 
to tell Dynamic Quality from degeneracy.  He never answers the question, nor 
should he because there is no general way to tell.  You just experiment and 
find out.  I would think that the only way we could tell is if static 
latching occured, that is, looking back at our past from where we are now.  
This was the entire point of my infamous deviation of DQ-as-compliment.  
Calling something "Dynamic" is either an empty compliment about something 
currently being experimented with (empty because there's still no way to 
tell whether the experiment will be degenerate or Dynamic, but the only 
reason you're experimenting is because _you_ indeed think it will succeed, 
but of course everyone knows that already for why else would people 
experiment?) or a full compliment paid to something in the past, something 
that _was_ Dynamic, but is now the static patterns it left behind.

So, I think its a slight mistake to say that we should _further_ assert 
Pirsig's superiority by static latching by entering the philosophical 
conversation.  The only way _to assert_ Pirsig's superiority is by entering 
the conversation, i.e. by static latching.  The static latching is what 
gives you a defensible sense of superiority, else you'd just have a baseless 
opinion which might either be superiority or degeneracy.  This means that 
Pirsig's already some ways into the conversation, or else Pirsig (and we) 
would have very bad opinions indeed.  That's why I think Pirsig's refusal to 
enter the "Western conversation" isn't really to be explained by a contrast 
between Pirsig's Dynamism and the conversation's static latching.  I think 
its to be explained by Pirsig's incarnation of rugged, American 
hyperindividualism, which toes along the fear of being influenced.

If I had to venture a guess about Pirsig's future in the Western tradition 
of philosophy, it would be pessimistic.  It's not because Pirsig's a bad 
philosopher.  The first thing (and most important thing) working against him 
are the obvious things: he wrote novels not treatises, he didn't write very 
much, he didn't teach (which means he doesn't have several generations of 
students wandering away from his vision of philosophy having been 
influenced).  But I think there's another reason.  There are roughly two 
kinds of philosophers: charismatics and program directors (though the two do 
swing free from each other, some people are both and most are neither).  
Charismatics offer a vision of philosophy.  Program directors offer a 
problematic to be worked out by others.  The great philosophers who caught 
on are almost universally program directors: they left work for their 
students to do.  If you only leave a vision with no work to be done, chances 
are you'll be forgotten as the student looks around for something to do 
(think of Montainge or Santayana).  If you want a gross 
over-though-tantalizing-generalization: Socrates was the First and Last 
great Charismatic to be canonized (and if you're making a game of finding 
couterexamples, which I'm sure there are plenty of, Wittgenstein and 
Heidegger don't count because they were both programmatic in their early 
work before becoming simply charismatic in their later work).  His charisma 
was so great that he convinced Plato to create the First great Program to 
capture that charisma.  A program we've for the most part been working under 
ever since.

For Pirsig, I don't think he'll catch on because, though he does kind of 
offer a program, he's mainly a highly eccentric charismatic.  For Pirsig to 
become more of a canon philosopher than, say, Santayana, he'd need to pull a 
Socrates: influence a student so greatly that by _their_ sheer force of 
will, they get Pirsig canonized.  Philosophers have done it to their 
teachers before.  Heidegger brought Nietzsche into the canon, for instance.

Matt

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