[MD] Rorty and Pirsig

[david buchanan]

Jim, Matt and y'all:

Matt said to Jim:
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."

dmb says:
I don't think we can attribute such a slogan to Pirsig. Its pretty clear 
that he rejects the notion of "Truth" with a capital "T". Arlo recently 
quoted from Lila where Pirsig wrote, "..one doesn't seek the absolute 
'Truth'. One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual description of 
things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this 
explanation must be taken provisionally: as useful until something better 
comes along." This is where he uses the art gallery analogy. But even here I 
think we can see that he's not exactly agreeing with James. Pirsig uses the 
distinction between the social and intellectual levels to further qualify 
the notion of what's good in the way of belief. It, at least, begins to 
answer questions like, "Good for who? Good for what?". Notice here that 
truth is only spelled with a small "t" and that it refers to certain kinds 
of intellectual descriptions rather rather than statements of social values 
or deeply felt beliefs. Those might be said to be good in some other sense, 
but not in the way of belief, not with respect to truth even with a "t" of 
proper modesty.

Matt said to Jim:
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" (at robertpirsig.org and moq.org) 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." ...

dmb says:
Thanks for mentioning the essay and for your "marginal notes" on it.

Matt continued:
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.

dmb says:
I guess you'd have to say more about this. I mean, if Rorty's point is that 
cranks sometimes shake the world baldly, which is painfully obvious, then it 
would only be consistent with his love of solidarity and agreement among 
peers. So how do I have him all wrong, exactly?

Matt said:
..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.

dmb says:
Well, I don't know if Rorty's idea of a strong poet can be equated to 
Pirsig's contrarians. The role of the rare genuis is something everyone 
recognizes and the continental philosophers have placed the creative genius 
at the center of things for a couple of centuries now. I mean, it seems to 
me that Rorty and Pirsig each have something to say on the same widely 
discussed topic, but I'm not so sure there is much agreement past that. 
Pirsig's notion of such figures is intimately connected to his DQ while 
Rorty never even entertains any such concept.

Matt said to Jim:
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.  What can I tell you, the grasshopper, about it in more depth?  
Well, quite a lot, actually....

dmb says:
Well, if David Hildebrand (University of Colorado Philosophy professor) is 
right then pragmatism is actually something that Pirsig and Rorty do NOT 
have in common. The focus and scope of my paper was originally going to deal 
with that issue, to see how Rorty stacks up against the original Pragmatists 
but I found Dr. Hildebrand's work and realized he already did that. I 
literally had to change my thesis because it was almost exactly the same as 
his. To make matters worse, I was writing the paper for a class taught by 
his wife. I would have looked like a parrot at best. Anyway, Hildebrand 
makes a case that Rorty's view actually "constitutes an eviseration of 
pragmatism".. He has a nice web site and there are a few papers out there 
too. Susan Haack and others have come to the same conclusion and say that 
he's not a pragmatist at all. But, if you're interested, my essay is not 
about that. Instead, I mark the difference between Rorty and Pirsig by way 
of William James's Radical Empiricism, which Rorty rejects as "useless" 
while Pirsig explicitly adopts.

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
Well, I basically think that Rorty's view is a result of being stuck with 
the assumptions of SOM. See, I think Rorty and Pirsig both reject the idea 
of objective truth, a single exclusive construction of things. But Pirsig's 
rejection specifically entails a rejection of those assumptions while Rorty 
tries to find an alternative from within those assumptions. In my paper, 
Hildebrand's book is quoted on this very point. You can imagine how smug I 
felt to have this view confirmed by a professional. :-)

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
That's about right, I guess. Here's how I like to put it...  Rorty's view is 
exactly like the Metaphysics of Quality but without the metaphysics or the 
quality. Also, Pirsig is a philosophical mystic while Rorty is not. He's 
more like an analytic philosopher, a disillusioned and defeated Platonist 
who became an academic literary critic instead. As a result, I think Rorty 
is a little too fond of telling everybody what kind of truth they can't 
have. Don't get me wrong. These negative points about absolute truth or 
objective truth being unattainable are not in dispute. But I don't think 
Pirsig needs any help from him on this matter either. Quite the opposite.

This was Rorty's reply (when asked about Pirsig's work):
"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."

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
You mean to say that Rorty and Pirsig ARE on the same wavelength, despite 
what Rorty says? I guess I don't understand why you want them to be in sync. 
They agree on some pretty important points and they have some pretty 
important disagreements too. So what's the problem? I find these differences 
are useful in pointing out what Pirsig is NOT saying. I think Rorty is a 
useful example because he's alive and still working and many agree with him. 
But I don't get your apparent desire to synthesize them. Schopenhaur would 
be a more likely match. Maybe one of the process philosophers or from the 
East. But there is a breif passage in Lila where Pirsig confesses to having 
studied under one of the original positivists of the Vienna circle, Fergie I 
think - or maybe I've confused him with the  Duchess of York. In any case, 
he say's that he had no taste for such a thing and the whole idea that truth 
had anything to do with the logical analysis of language sounded false to 
him. Contrast that with Rorty's background as a philosopher. I'm sorry, but 
it seems to me that they've always been on different wavelengths. But they 
are both famous philosophers who speak english. Neither of them are 
Positivists now, even if one of them used to be. I'll give you that much. 
:-)

dmb

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