[MD] Intellectuals will tell you

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to John and Platt:
...It is religion and philosophy that have failed to guide us in what kind of Gods we ought to become. Reactionaries and fundamentalists are the fall-out of that failure. The result is a moral vacuum we fill with money, the true measure of all Value. What money can't buy, it can rent. That is a what has made a husk of the modern soul. Blaming it on science and the classical understanding is just too obvious and too obviously wrong.



dmb says:

It seems wrong to blame science but it seems equally wrong to think we ought to become gods through science. And it's not very helpful to disparage one discipline while praising another because the problem exists at such a basic level that all disciplines are implicated in it. Since the root of the problem is the basic metaphysical assumptions behind philosophy, science and common sense, the diagnosis and treatment will have equally broad effects. I mean, it's important to realize the scope of Pirsig's diagnosis. Ultimately, he traces the problem all the way back to the beginnings of science and philosophy but we'd do pretty well to focus on the last 500 years or so, when the disciplines in question first became distinguishable as separate fields of inquiry, each with their own domains, methods and standards. When we're talking about SOM as a problem and the MOQ as a solution, we're talking about intellectual history and what to make of it.  

As I read it, becoming a disciple of scientism and becoming an anti-intellectual reactionary are among the worst responses. I think both of those positions are extremely objectionable even if you never heard of Pirsig. 


If memory serves, it was Kant who first articulated the idea of the differentiation of art, science and religion. Up until the modern period, these domains were still aspects of a single cultural outlook, a single social structure. In the pre-modern world there was no distinction between church and state. Art and science were servants of religion. Ken Wilber makes use of this idea and calls it the differentiation of the big three. As he paints it, art, religion and science make sense as distinct domains because art is about the "I", about individual expression. Religion is about "we" because it deals with collective behavior, the moral domain and science is about "it". You'll notice that morals and values will play a central role in the domains of "I" and "we" but not so much with the "its". For historical and political reasons, science and religion made a deal. Science said to religion, I'll take the brain and you the heart. And they both laughed at the artist, although for different reasons. 


This separation is not the problem. Each field of inquiry should have its own domain and its methods but the problem is that they have not just become differentiated from each other, they have become hostile to each other. In the United States, for example, it's like the Scopes Monkey trial never ended. There is an anti-intellectual streak that runs through our culture and it is almost exclusively motivated by religion. Just the other day, Glen Beck was on the Mall in Washington re-dedicating this country to God. Just the other day, I saw a Youtube video of a preacher explaining how the pragmatism of William James was the work of the devil. I mean, this clash still goes on as we speak. We're talking about a cultural problem that is centuries old and it's still in your face this election season. We have Senate candidates who think women should be forced to give birth to their rapist's child because God has a plan. It's pretty sick out there.

What's happened is that science doesn't just study the its. Scientific materialism has become the basic worldview of educated people in the West. What's happened is that the methods of science, which are very well suited to studying physical realities, have been exported into other domains, the domains of the "I" and the "we". In all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways, objective science colonizes these other areas. By treating everything as an "it" the methods of physics are used to explain everything in physical terms. The result is scientism and reductionism and nihilism.


"From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery." (Lila, 22)


Pirsig's aim is to show that science is not value-free, not outside the realm of morals or individual expression. Quite the opposite. Physicists are artists and so is the motorcycle mechanic. Truth is a species of the Good, the most moral level of static quality. The idea here is to improve and expand both philosophy and science, to expand our notion of rationality by incorporating Quality or Value as a central feature. And so the attack on SOM is not only a rejection of the Cartesian self, the correspondence theory of truth and a rejection of the old-school empiricism, it is also an attack on our attitudes of objectivity and our basic cultural outlook. It's an attack on scientism and reductionism and the pretense of an objective point of view. James and Pirsig both say, basically, that philosophy is biography and there is no such thing as an objective point of view, an objective reality or a single exclusive truth. Perspective is everything and science and philosophy have never been anything but works of art.