[MD] Rorty, Pirsig and the Sophists

[david buchanan]

All interested MOQers:

Several threads are combined here. I think they were converging on their own anyway, so hopefully there is something in it for just about everybody. 


Arlo said:

The intellectual patterns emerging from the Sophists were not SOM. They were clearly something better. And it is HERE that the SOM infestation of Western culture began. And it is HERE that Pirsig begins his treatise on correcting this.


dmb says:

I agree with Arlo. There is always room for interpretation, of course, but it's really quite clear from the text. On page 377, it says that the Sophist were teaching excellence in general or Quality, not ethical relativism or pristine virtue.

"Before substance. Before form.[Aristotle] Before mind and matter.[Descartes] Before dialectic itself. [Plato] Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along."

Not only does he identify with the Sophists because they were teaching Quality, he also identifies with medium they used to teach it. We see this instantiated not only in the classroom scenes where Phadreus experimented with composition students, we also see this in Pirsig's choice to teach it through a philosophical novel rather than some exclusively rational medium. He is taking sides AGAINST things like Plato's dialectic, after all.

But even more importantly, I think, we ought not take the Sophists are subjectivists or teachers of static social level quality. It becomes very clear that Pirsig is talking about Dynamic Quality in these passages. That doesn't mean they went around in a perpetual state of Nirvana. It just means they knew how to teach it without turning it into something static, without saying in advance exactly what constitutes excellence. In the classroom in Bozeman he tells his students that the rules of rhetoric are post hoc, after the fact. You recognize the quality of the piece and then try to make a rule out of whatever it was they did that made it good. They too said you can't define it but you can teach it anyway and that's why Plato saw them as relativists and condemned them for it. 

"Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any sort of fixed, rigid way." (ZAMM:379)

it seems that Plato treated just about everyone this way. One semester I took philosophy of religion and philosophy of art at the same time and both classes opened with a reading of Plato's attack on Ion the rhapsode. He was a kind priest and a kind of poet at the same time so Plato's condemnation of him was relevant to both fields. In both cases, we see art and religion transformed by the Socratic demand for intelligibility. Since this poet cannot "give an account", he is deemed as having no real knowledge of anything. In other words, he is condemned because he can't turn it into a fixed and rigid thing, because he cannot pin down what he does in terms of verbal descriptions or definitions. He is denigrated because he can't put his art in a bucket.

Like Pirsig, James traces our philosophical problems back to this point in history and he identifies the same problem. As James puts it: "I saw that philosophy had been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come" (Intro to PU, xxiv)

As Frederick Burkhardt says in the introduction to "A Pluralistic Universe": "James wants to turn us upside down. He wants us to see that what is ontologically primary is a genuinely continuous, active reality... The depth of James's criticism of the intellectualist tendency in philosophy should not be underestimated. It is nothing less than critique of Western philosophic thought." As James saw it, he says, "we are on the very brink of misunderstanding if we think that our only access to reality is through conceptual understanding. In addition to conceptual understanding there is also direct acquaintance and experience. ...Conceptual thought, despite its practical or theoretical efficacy, stays only on the surface of things. It is knowledge ABOUT things; it does not penetrate the inner life of things and reality's continuously changing character." (Editor's intro to PU, p.xxiii)


This is very much related to Barry Allen's case against Rorty. You may recall that he makes a distinction between "propositional knowledge" and "operational knowledge". (knowing-how and knowing-that) His beef with Rorty is based on what Allen sees as Rorty's "discursive bias". Rorty, he explains, retains the old bias of epistemology because he sees...


"Knowing as CLAIMS, as linguistic, discursive, dialogical expressions of belief; as statements, appropriate objects for dialectical challenge and defense. The best knowledge is consequently logical, rational, discursively articulated, it value realized in rational discourse. There may be no privileged representations, but Rorty blatantly privileges discourse in the wide sense that includes discussion, demonstration, dialectic, and dialogue or conversation." (Barry Allen in Brandom, 2000:227)

"...discursive articulation and verbal justification are less central to knowledge than logocentric philosophers from Parmenides to Rorty assume.   The reduction of knowledge to a discursive value may only be a scholar's implicit assumption that words are the most important things in the world. Yet ther eis more to SAPIENS than LOGOS. Lots of knowledge is never discursively articulated, not translated into sentences, or defended with reasons, and it is usually doubtful that it could be. No amount of true sentential knowledge enables one to use a tool well, and trying to translate such know-how into sentences is largely pointless. The knowledge itself is the capacity to preform well with some range of (mostly non-linguistic) artifacts. Sentences with which somebody might describe the action or its upshot do not take us closer to the essence of knowledge." (Barrry Allen in Brandom, 2000:229) 

"...Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality,.."


This is roughly what happens when Rortyism is imported into the MOQ. Pirsig is making a case that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language and that this realization has been missing since the Sophists were defeated. The discursive bias of Rortyism is opposed to the Quality of Sophists in the same way. Obviously they have their differences, Plato and Rorty. Rorty wanted to be the most anti-Platonic words slinger in town, not realizing that word-slinging was so very Platonic.



Thanks,


dmb




 		 	   		  
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