[MD] Rorty and Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

Jim,

I suppose the duty of answering some of your questions probably falls to me. 
  To say I was a tad surprised to see you write, "I seem to recall that a 
lot of you MOQ folk were also big fans of Rorty," would be a bit of an 
understatement.  I'm not sure how everyone feels, after all these years, but 
I'm fairly certain that most of the talk about Rorty was due to my influence 
and that, in my experience, his reception has been mixed at best.  I'm not 
sure how everyone else perceives the last few years.

As a professed Rortyan pragmatist and obsessed reader of Pirsig (and, 
depending on circumstances, a professed Pirsigian), I'll answer some of your 
questions and offer my interpretation of how to put Rorty and Pirsig 
together.  I'll also try and balance that with what others have said about 
Rorty and Pirsig.

Your question of "How Rorty and Pirsig?" and summation of the difficulties I 
find spot on and it is those difficulties I've struggled with every since 
becoming convinced that Rorty does a pretty good job with the topics he 
handles.  (Leaving the MD aside, I first struggled at length in my 
"Confessions of a Fallen Priest" posted in the Essay Forum.)  I'm not sure 
how Ian is suggesting we distinguish between a "'final theory' of truth" and 
a "theory of 'final truth,'" but I think your suggestion is right: final 
theories are out and an identification of Quality with Truth is in.  To be 
sure, Jos may be technically right, but such an identification shouldn't be 
taken literally (as Plato would do), but metaphorically.  After all, Pirsig 
deploys a very similiar metaphor (though I think it strays him _towards_ 
Plato) when at the end of LILA he says that "Good is a noun."  For Pirsig, 
that has to be a metaphor because the Good is Quality, a simple linguistic 
difference, whereas to add "is a noun" would surely run afoul of Jos's 
objection if taken literally.

The slogan "Quality is Truth" is easily seen as a variation on what the 
classical pragmatists were suggesting, the similarity to which Pirsig tried 
to draw our attention to with his cooptation of James.  As such, pace your 
suggestion, the only difference on the score of Truth between Rorty and 
Pirsig is phrasing.  If we unpack the slogan I think you correctly attribute 
to Pirsig, it amounts to: the true is what we value (not "has value" because 
the only things that have value are things that _somebody_, or something, 
values), which is only a short hop from James's "true is what is good in the 
way of belief."

Once one accepts that continuity, I think everything else starts falling 
into place.  For instance, you suggest that Rorty is suggesting that we "use 
theory in an instrumental fashion" and that Pirsig isn't.  I can see where 
you'd get that impression, but if you travel into Pirsig through his 
pragmatic roots, then you'll be more likely to emphasize passages where 
Pirsig says that if metaphysics doesn't help in life, then it isn't worth 
doing.  I hasten to add, however, that not everything does fall into place 
and some things in Pirsig might have to be passed silently over.  My view of 
Pirsig is that he was caught between a pragmatist instinct and a Platonist 
instinct and that he was unsuccessful in balancing them, namely because I 
don't think they _can_ be balanced.  (One way of getting at that issue is by 
focusing on his neologism "philosophology" which I've gone on about at some 
length in "Philosophologology" and again in "Pirsig Institutionalized," both 
housed in the Essay Forum.)

Your reference to Rorty's conception of the strong poet is particularly 
interesting to me.  David Buchanan has recently written a paper called 
"Clash of the Pragmatists" (housed at Anthony McWatt's website, a fellow 
disagreer with Rorty: http://www.robertpirsig.org/Buchanan.htm; see also my 
brief post on it at 
http://opensubscriber.com/message/moq_discuss@moqtalk.org/5934798.html) 
which spends some time developing a conflict between Rorty on the one side 
and Pirsig and James on the other.  At the end of it, David says, "I think 
the whole idea of truth as agreement among one's cultural peers is a 
dangerous view.  Mentioning Nazis at this point is likely to give the 
impression that I'm a little too desperate for drama, but fascism is 
ethnocentrism gone wild. At best, truth by agreement would all but eliminate 
the marginal cranks, the hopeless dreamers and others who disagree with 
their cultural peers. In my opinion, the finest examples of humanity come 
from these ranks and any version of truth that excludes them has to be 
wrong. Those are the people most worth telling stories about, after all."

I think David, here, gets Rorty all wrong.  Like many of Rorty's opponents, 
David refers to Rorty's conception of truth as "agreement among one's 
cultural peers," which I think is misleading at best.  One way to see how 
misleading it is is to read about Rorty's conception of the strong poet in 
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.  Rorty's point is that, like David's, 
the marginal cranks and hopeless dreamers are the ones that change the 
world.  What Rorty would like to emphasize is that, not only do not all 
cranks and dreamers catch on, are world-shaking, but that some of them shake 
the world badly, with low Quality.

This is one of the things that I find a little off about Pirsig's 
descriptions of Dynamic Quality.  On the one hand (Pirsig's personal 
realization of the strong poet aside), I would suggest contra you that 
Pirsig makes greater strides towards that conception in the movement from 
ZMM to LILA.  However, what leaves me a little squeamish about Pirsig's 
description is that DQ is identified both as betterness itself and as 
change, or newness, itself.  I have no doubt that David understands 
perfectly well that not all cranks are good and that Hitler's Dream was 
horrible.  And Pirsig himself identifies the problem in LILA, what I like to 
call the "indeterminancy of DQ thesis," that we won't know what is 
degenerate or Dynamic until later generations.  But I don't think Pirsig 
spends long enough on that problem, because if he had, we'd have a lot more 
passages where what Rorty calls the "strong poet" looks a lot like what 
Pirsig means by Dynamic Quality and what Rorty calls "solidarity" looks a 
lot like what Pirsig means by static patterns.  And if that had happened, 
there would be a lot less controversy about the similarity between Rorty and 
Pirsig.

So, in answer to your last question, I see a very strong common thread 
between Rorty and Pirsig and the right way to see it is to go through their 
pragmatism (the wrong way is to get caught up in differences between writing 
style, what "real" philosophy is, or the difference between talking about 
language and talking about experience).  What can I tell you, the 
grasshopper, about it in more depth?  Well, quite a lot, actually.  It's all 
I've really written about for the past four or five years.  Aside from the 
tedious task of reading my past MD posts (god help you), there are my 
post-Confessions Forum writings (three essays, two reviews, and an "open 
letter" that reflects the bridge between the two) and my mainly shorter 
writings at my blog, http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com.

I promised some summation of other people's views, but I didn't weave them 
in very well.  So I'll just pedantically list what I take a few of them to 
be (my apologies if you don't make the list: you should've been more vocal).

DMB's paper summarizes a dispute he and I have been having for years.  David 
basically thinks that Rorty's view of truth, because of an over-the-top 
"linguistic turn," is a regression towards SOM.  In Rorty's attempt to be 
post-postivistic, he goes much too far into a kind of subjectivism.

Anthony McWatt's view, I think, is similar, though most of his criticism has 
been aimed at Rorty's political philosophy, his view of solidarity, viewing 
it as breeding complacency.  I think both of David's and Anthony's reaction 
can be summed up by saying that they are extremely skeptical about accepting 
continuities between the philosopher of the "Metaphysics of Quality" who 
talks of the importance of "direct experience" with a philosopher who 
"rejects metaphysics" and takes the "linguistic turn."  Anthony's website is 
at http://www.robertpirsig.org.

Mark Maxwell's (formerly Squonk) views over the years have changed (or last 
his enunciation of them has), though I suspect that he opposes Rorty, or 
would, for similar reasons as the above.

Platt Holden once viewed Rorty as abdicating "fact" and "truth" for 
nihilistic subjectivism, similar to DMB's view, though Platt is much more 
likely to talk about "objectivity," "universality," and "absoluteness," than 
are either DMB or Anthony.  Oh, and Platt hates all liberals (calling them, 
like a good Greatest Generationist, "commies"), so Rorty is damned on that 
count, too (the opposite count, in fact, than Anthony; too liberal for 
Platt, not radical enough for Anthony).  However, Platt and I rarely discuss 
such matters anymore, and despite the fact that what I do read of his lately 
still sounds like the same ole' absolutism-sounding Platt (which seems to me 
completely antithetical to Pirsig), a little while back Platt and I came 
into contact and had a short conversation in which I think we finally agreed 
that Rorty's view of truth isn't as nihilistic as Platt had initially 
thought.

David Morey likes much of Rorty, but sees something missing, mainly that he 
appears overdramatic and so misses out on redescribing our "ontology."

Ian Glendinning likes much of what he hears about Rorty, but sees something 
more interesting in the connection between science and philosophy (e.g., 
cognitive science) than Rorty does.  Ian's website is at 
http://psybertron.org (his site also contains some very interesting research 
on the chronology of Pirsig's life).

Sam Norton is an Anglican priest, which most people thinks gets in the way 
of an appreciation of Pirsig.  I do not.  If Buddhism doesn't, neither does 
Christianity.  Sam's opinion is that Rorty does some good work on defeating 
SOM, but his atheism is a further result of SOMic sterility (a MacIntyrean 
view of modernity).  Sam's website is at http://elizaphanian.blogspot.com.

Scott Roberts is a Merrell-Wolffian philosophical mystic and like Sam thinks 
that Rorty makes good work of SOM, but that the consequences of this view 
are much different, from me and from Sam.  It's hard for me to describe 
(both because it has been so long since I've talked to Scott and because 
I've never really understood), but I think if you read Barfield's Saving the 
Appearances, you'll get a good idea.  Rorty, MacIntyre, and Barfield all can 
be seen as attacking the same enemy, that which Pirsig calls SOM, but after 
swinging around that tree, all four seem to move in different directions, 
sometimes wildly different.  I've been trying to convince people that Pirsig 
and Rorty are the most similar.

Paul Turner (who has a paper housed at Anthony's website, "Brief Notes on 
the Tetralemma") has written some interesting things about Pirsig, and 
lately has taken on Rorty as one of his philosophical heroes.  Like Scott, 
Paul takes a great interest in Nagarjuna and Eastern mysticism, but moves 
them closer to American pragmatism, rather than further apart.  He and I are 
unified in (over- and repeatedly) emphasizing that, for Pirsig, we don't 
_have_ static patterns, we _are_ static patterns, and that this accords 
perfectly with Rorty's image (coopted from Quine) of the self as a web of 
beliefs and desires. Paul's website is at http://twelvelinks.blogspot.com.

Glenn Bradford's view is that both Rorty and Pirsig stray too far away from 
the notion of "objectivity," leaving science and rationality itself to 
squander.  Glenn's website is at http://home.comcast.net/~moq/.

That, I think, is a fairly decent casting call of those who have weighed in 
with an opinion about Rorty.  One final addition should be an original 
Lila's Squad member, Dave Thomas, or 3dwavedave.  Right about the time that 
I was sinking my teeth into my four or fifth full Rorty essay (i.e. before I 
had converted), Dave caught on to Rorty, the possible connections, and 
e-mailed him about it.  This was Rorty's reply:

"I thought there were some good lines in 'Zen and...', but I never quite saw 
why people liked the book as much as they did. I tried to read 'Lila', but 
didn't get very far. I guess Pirsig and I just aren't on the same 
wavelength."

People used to love to cite that against me for a long time, but I always 
took it as proof that we ourselves are not necessarily the best judges of us 
ourselves.

Matt

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