[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
...There is, indeed, nothing wrong with just grooving on Pirsig's text. But grooving does not an interpretation make, not in the sense that is linked directly to knowing, and showing that one knows, "what Pirsig means."  We don't all have to have that as our goal in life.  It is, centrally, a goal in life for that lebensform called "academia," but amateurs set their own agendas, and grooving is a perfectly responsible way of discharging that responsibility, though _not_ if one also claims to static-pattern-know "what Pirsig means."  .., if there is to be any truth to the idea that _Pirsig's cage_ does open up beautiful pastures, then we indeed need to understand what that cage entails and does not entail.  Otherwise, there's no sense in saying that these are beautiful pastures made possible to us _by Pirsig_.


dmb says:

Abstract thought is a prism from which we must escapade. Like a hook on a worm, I straggle to be free, to flea these earthy blondes in favor of spiritual puerility. 

Just having a little fun there. But seriously,..

I'm thinking about the artful mechanic as a miniature study in the art of rationality, about the mechanic who returns to engineering school for the sake of knowledge, rather than grades and credentials. I'm thinking about the composition students who learned to write by ignoring the rules until AFTER they realized that Quality is real. Once they had a sense of the point, purpose and goal of writing - Quality -  the rules became handy tools instead of meaningless abstractions or a rote procedure. I mean, it seems that Pirsig's overall goal is to fuse grooviness and intellectual rigor, if you will. Most of his examples are very down-to-earth but the same ideas can also be applied to science and philosophy. I mean, we don't want this soulful, artful quality in our ways of thinking but we don't want that move to result in the glorification of ignorance or sloppiness or laziness. On this view, astering the static patterns isn't supposed to knock the groovy out of you. It's nearly a pre-requisite to artful thinking. That's how you get a feel for the work. It's the launch pad for creative intelligence. 


Matt said:
I think the joy gained out of Pirsig's epithet "philosophology" almost always comes from a reverse-snobbery that is as bad as the snobbery of the academics that preceded it in one's personal history. In the last few years, I've tried to exemplify through my behavior how one can have "philosophological knowlege" without the snobbery (at least, that was the idea); can both laud and uphold the standards of academic behavior and procedures without illegitimately overstepping and claiming that amateur philosophy is bunk and its practitioners merely bad academics.  I think we in the MD should think more about what we each consider to be good amateur philosophy, because I think that one _does_ need to have a _separate_ sense of what that is alongside what professional philosophy is to make sure that one _isn't_ merely doing bad academics.


dmb says:

I suspect most of the reverse snobbery is due to the slack-jawed, right wing anti-intellectualism. It sort of floats into the MD from the political culture, where it's always in the air. In fact, it seems to me that almost everyone has the wrong idea about "the church of reason". Pirsig has his complaints and the academic tendency to conflate philosophology with philosophy is one of them but I think he complains precisely because he cares and because he thinks it really matters whether or not the church of reason preforms its sacred secular duty, which is to produce free thinkers, creative thinkers, real thinkers. We can't have mules pulling the cart of civilization, he says. To the extent that our colleges and universities produce painters who paint-by-numbers, we're sunk as a civilization. Artless mules are fine if you just want burger flippers or assembly line workers. And if you have no knowledge, skill, discipline or technique, and do what you like at the moment you want to do it, you are not groovy. You're just a dog. You know? There is such a thing as spontaneous action and something like instincts and feelings really should play a role but you can't just think with your gut. The static stuff is just as necessary as the dynamic. Leaning on DQ all by itself will only result in degeneracy or chaos. And the static all by itself will only result in brittle, stuffy, lifelessness and fossilization. And these are not two separate compartments of reality. They go hand in hand and work together. James and Pirsig both say there must always be a discrepancy between concepts (sq) and reality (DQ), and yet they both say that concepts are true only to the extent that they can be put to use in this immediate flux of life. Concepts are good and true only to the extent that they work in experience, in the concrete particulars of life.

Anyway, I take "amateur" to be a description of one's motives. The word can be used as a polite term for incompetence or a lack of professional standards, but it also refers to those who do something for the sheer love of it, for its own sake. That's admirable, usually. And it seems to me that an amateur philosophers would naturally, almost inevitably, want to know more and more about philosophy. This is a different kind of education with its own advantages and disadvantages, but you're definitely going to learn and grow as a thinker by following your interests outward from the thing you love. Following that vague scent doesn't mean you're thinking carelessly. Quite the opposite. Its probably not going to be systematic or in historical order or anything like that and that's a big part of what makes it all so delicious and easy, but if you then go up against those who've learned under a more formal and systematic approach, it's going to be a bit rough. There will be knowledge gaps even in the most elementary places. But you're not a mule and so you can see the systematic approach as a helpful tool, one you wouldn't mind having in your kit. It doesn't have to be taken as suffocating or oppressive. The church of reason has a noble mission even if you also have to work a bureaucracy while you're there. 


Matt said:
... we should be fully able, as intellectuals, to supply a systematic representation of Pirsig's philosophy, and that this is in fact the necessary possibility presupposed by the use of the phrase "what Pirsig means."  If one wants to defend the idea that they know "what Pirsig means," then it is on the basis of having a sense of a consistent line of reasoning in Pirsig's texts and words.  This is a consistency that can be made explicit if one so chooses.  However, this systematic consistency that undergirds the possibility of him having a coherent, non-contradictory philosophy that "means something," does not in any way cut against any of his insights about DQ or irrationality or madness.  I think it is wrong to infer from the "ineffability of DQ," as Ian termed it, to the perniciousness of systematic thinking or scholarship and academia.


dmb says:

I think that's exactly right. The MOQ as such is a system of thought and it is offered up to academic professionals. (That's my central reason for rejecting the idea that "love" should have played a central role in the MOQ.) This objectionable inference, I suspect, is predicated on the wrong sort of anti-intellectualism. The kind that James and Pirsig subscribe to is aimed at the whole history of philosophy since Plato. Using that criticism to condemn contemporary colleges and universities is a very selective application of a an idea that extends to our entire civilization. In Pirsig's terms, the idea is not to condemn or reject the intellectual level. He's just saying that concepts have to be subordinate to reality and not the other way around. That's what went wrong back in ancient Greece. 

Granger (page 11) has a great quote from Mark Edmundson's bool "Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida":

"Literary criticism in the West begins with the wish that literature disappear. Plato's chief objection to Homer is that he exists. For to Plato poetry is a deception: it proffers imitations of imitations when life's purpose is to seek eternal truth; poetry stirs up refractory emotions, challenges reason's rule, making men womanish; it induces us to manipulate language for effect rather than strives for accuracy. The poets deliver many fine speeches, but when you question them about what they've said, their answer are puerile; they don't know what they're talking about. Though Plato can be eloquent about the appeal of literary art, to him poetry has no real place in creating the well-balanced soul or just state. When he conceives his Utopia, Plato banishes the poets outside its walls."

Pirsig not only attacks Plato on this very point, criticizing his pursuit of fixed and eternal truths, he does so in the form of literature. In this case, the literary medium is the philosophical message. 

"Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians. 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 fro 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 kind of fixed, rigid way." (ZAMM 379)

There must always be a discrepancy between concepts (sq) and reality (DQ). All concepts are secondary and static and are derived from reality. If they are subordinated to reality in this way, they're awesome and we love them. The problem is that abstractionism had already become vicious by Plato's time. Vicious abstractionism is the cause and target of James and Pirsig's complaints. Vicious abstractionism denigrates and de-realizes the empirical reality from which our concepts were abstracted in the first place. It subordinates life to the intellect, whereas James and Pirsig are saying that intellect is the servant of life. 



There are many legitimate ways to get at the meaning of Pirsig's work, to find out "what Pirsig means". And one of the best ways is going to be precluded by that slack-jawed form of anti-intellectualism. I mean, you'd be cutting yourself off at the knees to dismiss the dissertations produced by McWatt, Granger and Sneddon. I think it's safe to say they have a pretty good grasp of what Pirsig means. And since Pirsig identifies what he means with pragmatism in general and James's radical empiricism in particular, your goal will be furthered by exploring James and other pragmatists. Why not? Why wouldn't you, if you aim is to understand what Pirsig means.

 Because conceptual thought is a cage that can only be unlocked by the triumph of the gut-thinkers? I don't think so.