[MD] The Relativist's journey

[david buchanan]

Is the MOQ a kind of relativism? Can one read Pirsig's books and still reasonably believe that he'd want to claim that label?

Here is why I would say, "no". In fact, I'd say, "hell no, are you crazy?!"

I want to press the fact that the charge of "relativism" plays a crucial role in the ancient struggle between Plato and the Sophists. As Pirsig tells the story, the Sophists were accused of relativism by Plato and Pirsig says this accusation is just mean and vicious slander. Disputing that charge and otherwise taking up the long-lost cause of the Sophists is the main point of this part of the story. Remember when Phaedrus and the other grad students at the University of Chicago were assigned Plato's Gorgias? "Socrates recognizes the potential force of sophistical rhetoric, and he is concerned that if the goal of rhetoric is simply to persuade people about a certain vision of 'the good', it might be used to appeal to the emotions instead of to reason - in a manner that will lead the polis away from 'true knowledge', rather than toward it. The most powerful element in society would then be free to control the way the good is defined and embodied in that society's laws. In short, the sophist's rhetoric could be used to promote the most robust and destructive sort of relativism, one where the good is determined by little more than the accidents of power and convention. Socrates thus finds it necessary to silence Gorgias in short order and, as 'Phaedrus' saw it, turn Gorgias's rhetorical art into an object that he can then cut to pieces with his well-honed analytic knife." (David Granger, "John Dewey, Robert Pirsig and the Art of Living", 46)Please notice how Granger is using the word "relativism" here. He's talking about the kind of relativism with which the Sophists were charged and he describes it as "the most robust and destructive sort of relativism, one where the good is determined by little more than the accidents of power and convention.". Granger is talking about the problem of relativism in ZAMM as it relates to Plato's vicious slander but we also see very similar complaints about 20th century relativism in Lila.In chapter 22 of Lila, Pirsig tells us about "twentieth century relativists" like Franz Boas. "Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values" because "cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism", Pirsig says, "became popular because it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect over society" and because it was a good weapon against Victorian prejudice toward other cultures. The problem, as we all know by now, "is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality.  ...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."Now, obviously, Plato and Boas are separated by a language, an ocean and a couple dozen centuries and yet we find that both of them assert that "the truth" has nothing to do with people's feelings and opinions. True knowledge isn't about emotions or the accidents of power and convention, the ancient dialecticians said. Morals and values have no objective reality, the 20th century scientists said, they're just unique historical patterns that are scientifically meaningless and about which we can make no judgements. These ancients and moderns have very different ideas about truth. They even come from the two main rival schools in philosophy; rationalism and empiricism. And yet they both have this idea that the truth is separate from everyday experience and common sense opinions. They both take the view that reality is distinct from appearance and can only be accessed by specialists like themselves. "Universal law would becomes the order of the day, while the claims of appearance and opinion - issuances from the realm of the Good or the realm of Quality - would now be treated with great suspicion. It must have been here then, concluded 'Phaedrus', that 'the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, 'The Good and the True are not necessarily the same'. This meant that Quality and the commonplace world would no longer be trusted as the primary means of establishing the True. The old mythos was replaced by a new one as the veracity of everyday lived experience was made dubious and the primacy of abstract universals began to take root." (David Granger 47)"It is not hard to understand why Phaedrus had identified so strongly with the plight of the sophists. Their defeat at the hands of the dialecticians was also his own. For they both fought to uphold the idea that truth is a species of the good, "a static intellectual pattern WITHIN a larger entity called Quality', as Pirsig puts it (Lila 364). Additionally, they believed that reason is not 'value free', but rather logically subordinate to the good as a function of the overarching Quality (ZMM 323)." (Granger 48)Fighting to uphold the idea that truth is an intellectual species of the good is to fight AGAINST charges of relativism, against Platonism, against scientific objectivity, against the appearance-reality distinction and against excessive abstractionism of any kind. To say the MOQ supports relativism is to repeat Plato's slander or even to take sides with the kind of value-free objectivity that says morals and values are meaningless expressions of emotion or mere accidents of history. To say the MOQ is a form of relativism is to repeat the Absolutist's slander against James too, who originally said that "truth is a species of the good". Calling Pirsig a relativist is not only philosophically incorrect and inconsistent with the drama of the story, it's also kind of insulting.