[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Dan said to dmb:

..And now I feel we need to grow the discussion into the idealistic side... the ghosts of reason:

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.'' [ZMM]

Dan comments:

The MOQ states these ghosts are social and intellectual patterns that make up the  mythos of our 21st century culture. These were the patterns (I think) that the discussion Matt and I were having was focusing upon... the philosophic idealism side of the MOQ and how one defends it against the critics who say: the MOQ is solipsistic. If there is a better way to do that, I would love to hear it. So far, all I've heard is we're supposed to suspend disbelief and assume the patterns of value we discuss like dog dishes and trees falling in forests are real just because someone says so. I don't think that's right.


dmb says:

There are different kinds of idealism but I suppose the kind most likely to result in solipsism would be subjective idealism. If one is skeptical enough to doubt the existence of everything except for one's own doubting mind, as Descartes did before he was rescued by God's benevolence, then solipsism is going to be a very tempting conclusion. But Pirsig points out that Descartes could think and doubt because he was part of the French language and culture, only because he could hear the voices of thousands of ghosts from the past. To say we are suspended in language or to say that the culture hands us a pair of glasses with which we interpret experience or to say we can't escape from the mythos are different ways of saying the whole blessed world is run by ghosts. The kind of subjective idealism that would lead to solipsism (wherein there is nothing real outside of the individual's subjective experience) is not going to be consistent with the historic and public nature of thought and language. 

Objective idealism and absolute idealism, as represented by Plato and Hegel, both get rejected as something that could be confused with what Pirsig is saying. Plato's Good was taken from the Sophists and converted into an eternal fixed Form or Idea. That's why they seemed to be saying the same thing up to a certain point. In ZAMM Pirsig tells us that Hegel's Absolute Mind was thoroughly rational but Quality isn't like that. In Lila, as he is identifying the MOQ as a form of pragmatism, he tells us that Quality is not some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. Thanks to McWatt, we also see Pirsig's (mostly negative) reaction to Bradley's brand of Idealism in the Copleston annotations. It's also worth pointing out that pragmatism was largely a reaction against that kind of Idealism. James's radical empiricism more or less ruled it out and Dewey did a pretty good job of naturalizing everything on a Darwinian model, including rationality. 

But if we take "idealism" in the broadest sense then I think it just means a view that consciousness in the broadest sense is a fundamental feature of reality. This fits with the MOQ's assertion that even atoms can express preferences, that value goes all the way down from chemistry professors to quantum events. This picture produces a kind of panpsychism wherein, as James puts it, "mind" and "matter are co-eternal features of the same reality. On this view, consciousness didn't emerge at some point in the evolutionary development of the physical universe. Instead, consciousness was never entirely absent and has always been involved in the evolutionary process. I think the MOQ is a form of idealism in this sense.

As I see it, the following quote strikes a blow against subjective idealism, the kind that can so easily lead to relativism and solipsism.

"What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is COMMON to us with other thinking beings. Through the COMMUNications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings [the mythos]. ..And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations [the primary empirical reality], we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this HARMONY, this QUALITY if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know."

We find an explicit rejection of both subjective and objective idealism, and an assertion of Quality instead, in chapter 29 of ZAMM:

"Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things..."  That's what I mean by invoking James's slogan that "we carve out everything".

"...We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.  ...The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train."

The collective nature of the analogues stands out pretty clearly in each of these passages. We see "the objectivity of the world" construed as a harmony between our own sensations and the ready-made reasonings inherited from the past and we see reality as we know it as a pile of invented analogues, as the voice of thousands of ghosts but those inventions were produced in response to Quality, were guided on the track of the primary empirical reality. That's what I mean by invoking James's view that ideas are supposed to be "married" to empirical reality, which is to say they are derived from experience and their purpose is to operate within experience.

Like Pirsig, he also make a pretty big deal out of the fact that we've inherited a big pile of harmonious reasonings. Despite the fact that they are human inventions, we can't treat them arbitrarily or dismiss them with caprice. If you think that you can think outside of the mythos, Pirsig tells us, then you don't understand with the mythos is. I mean, for an idea to be true in the pragmatic sense it has to operate successfully in experience and that success is going to depend in large part on its harmonious fit with the inherited order of the mythos (even if it has been transformed into logos). In other words, ideas that can't be understand by others within the mythos are going to be very bad and very unsuccessful ideas. The pragmatic truth, James said, is wedged between and controlled by those two factors, the experiential flux and the conceptual order, which is like the track of Quality and the box cars full of concepts.

It would be interesting to see somebody make a case that the MOQ results in solipsism. I think it would be fun and edifying to argue against such a case in detail. What I've done here is paint with broad strokes against a vague suggestion that the MOQ could or might be taken that way by critics. I imagine that any such critic would have to be misreading the MOQ to draw such a conclusion. At this point, the charge seems very implausible. I mean, I wonder if there is a legitimate case to be made, one that's not leveled by hoaxters, cranks or air-heads. I suppose it's possible but I'm very skeptical.