[MD] Quality Conversations

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Krimel,

Krimel said:
I honestly have no idea what SOM is supposed to mean anymore. Pirsig's version is largely an argument against positions that no one actually holds. And his rants against science are mostly about his own idealized view of it.

Matt:
I feel your pain.  I think it gets bandied about in so many different kinds of ways that it begins to lose focus.  It is not always so bad, but it is tough if your case hinges on it.

I wanted to say this, though: Pirsig's "SOM" is not an argument against positions no one actually holds.  This was something Galen Strawson once said about Lila, and it is unfortunate because I think Strawson, in saying it, fails to see that it cuts back at him: most people hold none of the views philosophers attribute to them (ya' know, "common folk").  Nobody holds metaphysical views, only philosophers do.  It's like Socrates' trick in the Meno: to show that everybody understands intuitively geometry, he shows how a slave-boy understands the basics of geometry, even though he didn't know it.  Socrates calls it "anamnesis": Oh, the boy was "recalling" something he'd forgotten.  No, Socrates--you just trained him in geometry.  All Plato showed in the Meno is how easy it is to learn geometry, not how geometry is in a different class of reality/knowledge, further up the divided line.

Philosophers do this all the time.  It's sticky business, attributing all these kinds of beliefs that regular people hold, yet they wouldn't recognize them if you told them about what they supposedly believe.  But we, as philosophers, have to do it, or else we wouldn't be able to do anything at all.  It's basically the same kind of disciplinary move as the physicist--you see a table, but really it is a cloud of electrons.  Physics has to make that move for it to make progress _as physics_, and it is the same for all specialized disciplines.  The trick is translation back to common sense: how do we go about that?

I think it's a nudging process, and I've talked some about that with you, Krimel, and I don't want to run through that brier patch again just yet.  What I wanted to say is that, if by "no one" you (and Strawson) mean "no average person you meet at a bar," then you are right, but you've also disarmed pretty much everything else _you_ want to say, too--_as philosophers_.  On the other hand, if "no one" refers to the community of philosophers, then you are only partially right--no particular, actual philosopher holds the conglomerate of views that occur under the mantle of "Subject-Object Metaphysics," but that is also true of every general classification of philosophers and "what they believe," which _every_ philosopher has to recur to if they want to say anything to more than a single, other philosopher.  You have to generalize about classes of philosophers to cast your net wider than a single, other person.  We _are_ all unique snowflakes, and it is easy to rebut a generalization with recourse to the "no one holds every single one of the views you've just attributed to a whole class of people," but that's not why we use the generalizations, so the rebuttal falls a little flat on the critical level (though sometimes people are just making shit up).

I'm not trying to denigrate your personal critical eye on Pirsig, Krimel, because I think you're handle on issues, when they are more specific than the general dismissal above, is pretty good (unlike Strawson, who in regards to Pirsig doesn't do a very good job at all).  The trouble for many is seeing the interconnections between what Pirsig says and what others are saying.  I think a clear case can be made that what Pirsig identifies as "SOM" is the same type of thing, say, James was railing against in his Lowell Institute/Columbia lectures contained in Pragmatism and that Dewey was railing against in his Gifford lectures in The Quest for Certainty.  And nobody wants to just dismiss them, but the interconnection does need to be made explicit.  For Pirsig's generalizations exist at a level that straddles both common sense and philosophical discourse.  He does so because he (like all philosophers) wants to effect both, but doing both at the same time means he runs the risk of being too easily dismissed by both, as not attending to their, more specific, demands.  In other words, by straddling both, both sides find it easier than normal (like if he'd just addressed one crowd and not both) to say, "Peh, I don't believe those things."

What I think needs to happen with Pirsig studies is a concerted effort to extend fingers out in both the directions of common sense (i.e., common cultural understandings and concerns) _and_ towards contemporary, professional philosophy.  Professional philosophy is oftentimes too concerned with its own, dare I say, special interests to make connections to the rest of culture, and so common folk find it easy to ignore them.  But they are doing things that have effects on common understandings, they just need to be made explicit.  Pirsig's ZMM, I think, succeeds at this at a level Lila never quite made it to, in particular when he talks about science.  You say Pirsig is reacting against his own idealized version of what science is and is supposed to do--that is absolutely the case, but it is not _his_, it _was_ his, and his interest in exploiting his own autobiographical history is because this idealized version is _often_ what regular people kind of think about science (only "kind of," because it is not as if regular joes at the bar think about "what science is" a lot, but they do react to science a lot).  Pirsig's story is told the way it is to help work people out of this idealization, which is also, I might add, an idealization that was held by actual philosophers, who then helped foster it in the common understanding.  Pirsig doesn't have time to make explicit these connections, particularly with specific philosophers and specific philosophical views, but it is in the lining of his text, and the force of the _way_ that Pirsig does his philosophical work is that if we spend a little time working on making the connections, they do pan out in hooking on to actual problems--in both common understanding _and_ philosophical discourse--and _then_ we start to see how to put to work some of the bits of wisdom Pirsig has thrown us.

Remember: Pirsig _likes_ science.  It is easy to forget sometimes, when we get caught into a particular angle on Pirsig, that his view of science, and philosophy, is a lot more complex then when we grasp a piece of his philosophy to get a handle on it.  The idealized view at the beginning of ZMM is one that sets him on the trail of a _better understanding of_ science, so that philosophers don't say stupid things and common people, like his friends, don't get turned off by its products, technology.

On a similar note, what's funny to me, now, about Pirsig's ZMM, is that it seems, on the one hand, so behind the times--who feels this way about science and technology?  James and Dewey were largely in a cultural war that was about the relation between science and religion.  But that was fin-de-siecle culture, we've moved on.  Pirsig was interceding in another cultural battle that was similar, but "religion" doesn't seem like quite the right word for what the hippies were reacting on behalf of, right?  I think Pirsig's guess that it _was_ a sublimated version of what used to go under the label "religion," and hence the title of the book, was a lot more right than he knew, and I thought, and we are seeing _why_ only now at the turn of this century, we are seeing why _people keep reading ZMM, even though no one is quite sure why or what they take out of it_: I had no idea, when I first read ZMM on the eve of George W. Bush's ascension, that the exact same culture war, between science and religion, was going to bubble to the surface.

Perhaps I'm late to the party, but I guess I never thought it was that obvious.  And I do think that the culture has shifted enough that, if we are going to use the old labors of James and Dewey, and even of Pirsig, we are going to have to do updating, we are going to have to interpret, we are going to have to grasp our own wisdom from their pages, not _their wisdom_, but our wisdom _from them_.  Intellectual historians will tell us we are getting them wrong, but philosophical interpreters shouldn't care because we aren't concerned about _their_ concerns _exactly_ because enough time has gone by to throw up slightly different concerns on our shores.  Us philosophers, particularly us amateur philosophers who do this mostly for ourselves and a small circle around us, are concerned about the "here and now" more than the "then" such that stolen wisdom from others begins to look less stolen and more refashioned into the shape we want it to take.  James and Dewey, and even Pirsig, may not exactly recognize their concerns and philosophy in our writings about them--if they were around to comment on them--but that should not dissuade us: we are out for ourselves.  Particularly with James and Dewey--they're dead, they don't have to deal with Bush, we do.  So if our philosophies are slightly different according to the times, well, we can console ourselves that if they were around, their philosophies might be a little different, too.

That's all I had to say.

Matt
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