[MD] Overcoming the System

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Ian,

Ian said:
OK, "ism" is a name I can see applying to "a philosophy" 
(a school of thought, a "system", a metaphysics, etc.)
But "isms" sounds like a collection of such systems, that 
make up the whole tapestry of philsophy and 
philosophical actvity.
So to clarify what I though I had agreed / understood. 
I'm happy with (I see value in) a system metaphor for 
a philosphy (an ism). I don't see value in a system 
metaphor for a philsophy itself (a collection of isms).

Matt:
Fair enough.  Now--I'm _specifically_ making a distinction 
between the rhetorical use of isms and that of system.  
So--in my terms--I'm unsystematic (in the way I'm 
specifying).  The easiest way being, I don't have a 
"catechism," as Pirsig put it in Lila, to throw at people, I 
just have a set of fairly routine reactions I have to 
familiar situations.  I'm not going to say that there's a 
huge difference here (do I not consult Rorty--or really, a 
growing pile of others--as others consult Pirsig?).  But I 
do want to say there's a difference in orientation.

A few more distinctions:
_A_ metaphysics--that's a system.  _Metaphysics_--that's 
a genre of writing within philosophy that one can be 
systematic about (by creating a metaphysical system) or 
unsystematic (by kibitzing about odds and ends--like 
Rorty being anti-metaphysical).

"A school of thought" is more like what I mean by the 
unsystematic ism, though I take ism to be sloppier and 
more ad hoc than a "school"--there are many examples 
of such "schools" through-out history (Plato's Academy, 
Thomism, Oxford Philosophy), some of which are literally 
schools, but also in the figurative sense I'm using it--there 
is a research program that has fairly well-defined 
characteristics of committments, problems, solutions, and 
methods.  (And don't let names fool you: the "Yale School" 
of literary criticism--Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, 
Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and sometimes Derrida--is 
notorious for being an oxymoron.  They taught in the 
same department for a while, and they had similar 
anti-New Criticism attitudes, but the similarities quickly 
begin to erode after that.)

Classical pragmatism, for instance, is a notable example 
for why it _doesn't_ count: this was clearly a group of 
people that appreciated each other, but were doing their 
own thing--they clung together occasionally because they 
sensed similarity, but all three classicals were very 
different.  Peirce was more systematic, and hated that 
James had even included him as a pragmatist.  James 
wrote brilliant essays on various topics, including solidarity 
essays between himself, Peirce, Dewey, and the 
Englishman Schiller, but his "method" was an attitude.  
Dewey was more systematic than James, less than Peirce, 
but also much more interested in historical change, and 
he also wrote solidarity essays, but his also had a greater 
sense of _historical_ solidarity, and the twists and turns 
of history that supply us with conceptual resources and 
tales of danger and caution.

It is the Dewey that I refer to when I say that an "ism" 
is an ad hoc label made up (like Robert Brandom when 
he calls his philosophy of language "inferentialism") or 
appropriated (like when someone calls themself an 
"empiricist") by a person for their own purposes, for 
reasons to do with historical solidarity.  In empiricism's 
case, one would identify as an empiricist to establish 
continuity with Locke and Hume, though one could 
certainly extend backwards to Aristotle.  And it doesn't 
mean you agree with everything said by these other 
people--nobody thinks an empiricist believes, with Locke, 
that God undergirds real essences or human rights.  
They _might_, but each empiricist selects highlights of 
his forebears.

Take a made up ism, like inferentialism or radical 
empiricism--doesn't that seem to more be like the 
contention that an ism is a system?  Sure, but look at 
how, e.g., DMB uses radical empricism--he uses it to 
historically sort predecessors, whether they used the 
term (like James) or not (like, if I'm not mistaken, 
Dewey).  It's a rhetorical technique for historical 
solidarity, a mode of creating a _tradition_, the term I 
oppose to "system."  I say an ism is diachronic, 
because it is a technique for creating links through 
history.  I say a system is synchronic, because it is a 
technique for creating links throughout a single person's 
web of beliefs.

Ian said:
(BTW whilst I'm doing that, talking of closing down d
iscussion - which I'm clearly not - have you read Hilary 
Lawson on "Closure" ? Any apparent closure is always 
temporary, for an immediate pragmatic purpose.)

Matt:
I absolutely agree about closure.  That's the kind of thing 
Derrida was punting around in the 70s, and Rorty wrote 
about a bit in Consequences of Pragmatism, I think.  I 
tend to think that people need to indulge in a little more 
ad hoc closure, going off into their own corners to think, 
lick their wounds, heal their feelings, and sort out what 
they actually _think_ rather than things they spouted off 
in the moment.  The spouting is certainly dynamic, but 
there's not enough static latching work (so I think).

Ian said:
In fact (as you know from other channels) I very much 
see the evolution - from tradition - in anything useful - 
think MacIntyre ? That's why I like (sorry to mention it) 
the MoQ - that is precisely the kind of system / ism it is. 
In fact it is more than that - it "contains" its own history, 
as well as the processes for evolving ongoing history. 
MoQism. It has a narrative traditional coherence as well 
as systematic coherence (to me).

Matt:
Uh hunh, I know.  And the thing that got this whole thing 
rolling was the pat on the back people give the MoQ for 
it "containing" its own history--I think that's a pretty 
lame pat.  Because the fact of the matter is that a prior, 
primary point of agreement between all Pirsigians is the 
fundamental individuality of each philosopher--and as 
individual philosophers, as _individuals who live their own 
lives_, we already know quite well that we "contain" our 
own history and are an ongoing process evolving through 
history.

Being explicit about the matter is great--that was 
historicism that began with Hegel.  But my point about 
the "weird monster" is that as we became more 
self-conscious about historicism, and what it meant, 
shouldn't we also see that, for instance, it was just the 
idea of system inherent in Plato and explicit in Kant, that 
obscured all these years a proper appreciation of history, 
of narrative?  That all this focus on synchronic _theory_ 
and logos was obscuring the equally fundamental 
conditions of diachronic _narrative_ and mythos?  One 
might say that _narrative_ is primary--without the 
narrative of life in ZMM, there would have been no theory 
to arise and help.

With narrative, it seems an easy thing to include theory.  
With theory, it seems easy, too, until you use the system 
metaphor to organize your theory as an all-embracing 
totality that includes _everything_: you get a 
self-transcendent system, a system that includes itself 
and it's death, itself and its progeny and its parents, a 
no-boundary boundary.  It's the paradoxical nature of 
saying that your system includes itself and its not-itselfs, 
but that this isn't totalizing though it does include 
_everything_, that produces what I called a "weird 
monster."

It's a rhetorical position that seems silly and needless--if 
I was starting to feel pushed in that direction, I'd head 
them off at the pass by saying with Steve that, "well, 
let's understand here that by 'Metaphysics of Quality' I 
mean a cavalcade of philosophical positions develped 
first by Robert Pirsig, as finite and contingent a being as 
the rest of us, and that I've chosen to pick up and develop 
further--I'm not talking about a hypostatized, static Form, 
just a series of assertions to be tested and refined."

Which I take to be Pirsig's response when Baggini 
pressured him on just this point:

BAGGINI: 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. I 
think this tension was heightened by a
tendency to 
present the MOQ as a complete system that you had 
totally
worked out. 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 and once you had it you could simply read
off 
what it has to say about whatever philosophical problem 
confronts
you.

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

PIRSIG: 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. If the term, “static” 
is being
used here as it is used by the Metaphysics of 
Quality itself, then the answer is, “All metaphysical 
systems are static intellectual patterns.
There isn't any 
other kind of metaphysics.” This is so because the MOQ

describes intellect itself as a set of static patterns.

Matt:
I'm not _objecting_ to the Metaphysics of Quality 
because of Pirsig's choice in rhetorical presentation, but 
notice how Pirsig himself seems to obfuscate the 
fundamental point of ZMM, that rhetoric precedes 
dialectic-the-truth-grinder.  All I perceive myself as 
doing is reapplying the point of ZMM to Lila, to reassert 
rhetoric, and then to assess the rhetoric of Lila.  It seems 
to me that the point of ZMM was that synchronic 
Truth/logos was secondary to diachronic Rhetoric/mythos.  
Assuming that's the case, one can read me as clarifying 
Pirsig's above answer by eliminating his eristical misstep: 
"in philosophy rhetorical styles are supposed to be 
irrelevant to the truth."  Wasn't the Good supposed to be 
_primary_ to Truth?  I would further assert that it is the 
metaphor of _system_ that may in part play a role in his 
misstep: reading his answer, one might get the 
impression that from within the MoQ, intellect itself is a 
metaphysical system (by the properties of transference 
appropriate to "are" and "as" in the two separate 
statements).  But why would we want to say that?

I don't think Pirsig thinks that, but why all this mucking 
about with systems anyways?

You, Ian, see a gain--I don't.  I see missteps by Pirsig, 
by other Pirsigians, by pragmatists, and I see a reading 
of the history of philosophy as a story about the 
thrusting off of system in favor of tradition.

I'm not objecting to the Metaphysics of Quality, I'm 
objecting to Pirsig's presentation, which as Pirsig notes, 
is a different thing altogether.  However, I am trying to 
show its relevance to Pirsig's philosophy.

Ian said:
Are you simply saying that the "ism" words emphasizes 
the historical - evolved from tradition - nature of a 
philosophy (however "systematic" that philosphy is ?).

Matt:
Yeah, sure, that's "simply" what I'm saying.

I know you like brevity, Ian, and tease me about how 
much I write, but I prefer to read philosophy that says 
stuff to digest, so I typically try and write that way, too.  
And you're extraordinary brevity, I might add, can be 
something of hindrance occasionally, too--there's little 
evidence for the reader to latch onto when they're 
attempting to suss out what you're saying.  I will 
without a doubt admit that my style isn't always the 
most appropriate communication model, but I hope I 
say a lot more than your summary summations often 
suggest, because otherwise I'd think I spend a lot of 
time on nothing.

Matt

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