[MD] Rorty and Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

Hey DMB,

Matt said:
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....

DMB said:
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"....

Matt:
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that Pirsig _did_ conceive of a notion of absolute 
truth, or anything like that.  I was trying to suggest that what we see in a 
slogan like that is a metaphor that I think Pirsig would agree 
with--basically replacing ZMM's epigram with "true" instead of "good."  And 
I can't say that I really disagreed much with anything you further said in 
riposte to what I had said.

Matt said:
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 said:
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:
Now I'm confused.  Mind you, Rorty has many points when he appropriates the 
image of the strong poet.  But if you weren't implying that Rorty's 
conception of truth leads to an unfair neglect of the marginal crank and 
hopeless dreamer, which Pirsig's does not, then I'm not at all sure what you 
were saying in the passage I pulled.  And if that _was_ what you were 
implying, what don't you understand in my response?  You say: "Rorty's truth 
leads to fascist conformity.  Love cranks more."  I say: "You can see you're 
wrong about Rorty's conception of truth by seeing how he loves cranks, just 
like Pirsig."  Aside from the utter oversimplification of it all, what did I 
miss?

And saying Rorty loves "solidarity and agreement among peers" is even more 
misleading than before.

DMB said:
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:
I'm not sure how you can say that Rorty "never even entertains any such 
concept" as Dynamic Quality.  You couldn't be suggesting that philosophical 
synthesis, translation between philosophical vocabularies, is impossible, 
that because Rorty doesn't use the words "Dynamic Quality" he never 
entertains it, because so much of Pirsig's project involves that kind of 
synthesis.  But if you aren't saying that, I'm not at all sure I trust your 
instincts about what Rorty's entertained or employs in his philosophy.  It 
looks to me more and more that you simply have a blindspot for philosophers 
who write in the analytic idiom.

To flesh out your claim, you'd have to first define DQ and then suggest how 
Rorty rejects the essential parts of it.  This, of course, puts you in an 
odd argumentative dilemma because half the people here would damn you if you 
defined DQ, it being undefinable, but if you don't then it is unclear how 
Rorty _could_ entertain it, or even how Pirsig could.  If you cheer to the 
crowd that wants you to leave it alone, then you'll have to face the idea 
that the only thing you'd need in a philosophy for it to be suitably similar 
to DQ is to have something undefined--and Rorty, indeed, does: primitive 
predicates like true and good.  If, however, you boldly go where Pirsig 
expressly states we cannot go (and yet himself of course does because, after 
all, how could we talk so much about his philosophy if he didn't) and define 
DQ as a concept, all its parts and how it works, we could then investigate 
whether Rorty has similar devices in his writings.  I think he does.

DMB said:
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:
Well, I think you are very wrong indeed about that.  And you can't imagine 
how good it makes my antiauthoritarian streak (the side of my ego that warms 
to Pirsig and Rorty) to see me rejecting not only your understanding of 
Rorty, but a professional's, too! ;-)  (Actually, I've been disagreeing with 
almost everybody I read on Rorty for quite a while, so it wasn't that 
surprising an experience.)

DMB said:
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.

Matt:
1) If Freud's right, then we certainly aren't the best judges of ourselves.  
If we do have an infallible sense of ourselves, then the whole field of 
psychology and therapy is bunk.  I have the working assumption that 
psychology is useful.

So why should I care about Rorty's gut reaction (memories of gut reactions, 
even) about a guy he hasn't thought all that much about?  UNLESS--Rorty was 
responding to DQ when he read Pirsig, put the book down, and never thought 
about it again!

2) If it were intellectually illegal to put two seemingly disparate things 
together, wouldn't Pirsig's books be ruled against multiple times over?

3) I don't _want_ them to be in sync, I just think that they are more than 
you do.  And I don't think I have to work all that hard to do it.  In fact, 
I think it's a lot harder (massively harder) to make Rorty fit in SOM's box 
while keeping Pirsig out of it, then it is to show how Pirsig and Rorty are 
both out of it.

4) It's not that I think they _are_ on the _same exact_ wavelength.  Let me 
put it to you this way: every human being has a unique wavelength, their own 
unique pattern of static patterns (Pirsig) or constellation of beliefs 
(Rorty).  Whatever wavelength I am is one that harmonizes with both Pirsig 
and Rorty.  And just as I think Rorty's wrong (and not even wrong, it wasn't 
like he said Pirsig was full of shit, he just said he didn't think it was 
interesting or his cup of tea) about Pirsig, I could be wrong about 
harmonizing with both Rorty and Pirsig.  Maybe I'm out of tune.  Then again, 
maybe I'm creating 12-tone, which will be all the rage.  But at any rate, 
knowing I _could_ be wrong doesn't bring me any closer to being wrong.

Matt

_________________________________________________________________
>From predictions to trailers, check out the MSN Entertainment Guide to the 
Academy Awards® 
http://movies.msn.com/movies/oscars2007/?icid=ncoscartagline1