[MD] Rhetoric and Madness

[Ron Kulp]

All (especially the "true" MOQers of the Lila squad)
I found this paper some years ago, I don't know who
authored it but it's quite a nice paper. They were not
influenced by the MD nor (to my knowledge) were they coerced
into their interpretation by Dave Buchanan, Arlo Bensinger,
Dan Glover or Horse.



Rhetoric and Madness: Robert Pirsig's Inquiry into Values 

Confronting crises of technological annihilation and personal madness, Robert Pirsig finds each to be a manifestation of a deeper crisis of Reason. In response) he suggests an alternative to our current paradigm of rationality, the "art of motorcycle maintenance." By showing that our understanding and performance derive from our emotional and evaluative commitments, he challenges the cultural commonplace which construes "subjective" states as distortions of "objective" reality. In so doing, he asserts that "wholeness" or sanity may be achieved only through "passionate caring," and an awareness and acceptance of how our emotions and values shape our experiences. Further, he shows that technology, a manifestation of our values, may be controlled only through emotional and moral commitment. A restorative rhetoric, on Pirsig's analysis is, then, one in which the passions and values are recognized as the very ground of being in and interpreting the world. 

The crisis of reason 

As he begins his "Chautauqua," Robert Pirsig finds himself in a twofold crisis. He characterizes the public dimension of the crisis as arising in large part from the technological fragmentation of nature and man. Having transformed nature from a field of daffodils into a field for its own potential appropriation, technology, as Marshall McLuhan has noted, now also "shapes and controls the scale of human association and action" (McLuhan 8). Seemingly indifferent to human values and developing under its own logic, technology increasingly isolates us from our natural environment, from one another, and even from ourselves. For though we may be in touch with Belgrade or Tokyo, our lives have lost much temporal and spatial wholeness or sanity. We are often physically and even emotionally closer to fabricated media "personalities" than we are to the person across the breakfast table. Yet whereas we are never left alone by our technology, we are increasingly
lonely, alienated from our deepest selves. For we have lost touch with our own feelings, being educated to ignore them in order to function in a technological world. Like Bergman's "intellectual illiterates," we are so uneducated about our inner feelings that we only learn to talk about them when we "break down," and have to be repaired by the analyst, at the Group, or in the asylum. For, we learn, our feelings distort our "objective" perceptions, and thus prevent us from functioning like our machines. In this vein, Andy Warhol wryly recalls that he had always wanted to be like a machine, for then it was easier to get along with people. We thus find ourselves fragmented, our feelings alienated from our world, our lives as well as our literature being characterizable by T. S. Eliot's phrase, "dissociation of sensibility." 

Parallel to this public, cultural crisis of technologically-induced fragmentation, Pirsig faces his own personal crisis of fragmentation or "madness." Some years earlier he had been declared clinically insane, and underwent electro-shock therapy to annihilate his mad personality. This earlier self, whom he now calls "Phaedrus," had gone mad as a result of a search for Truth which led him ultimately to repudiate Reason itself. [1] Pursuing the "ghost of reason" through Western science, Eastern philosophy, and rhetoric, Phaedrus found Reason to be "emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty" (Pirsig 110). But he had no place to flee; and, without an alternative to Reason, he simply went mad. Pirsig's personal crisis arises when he encounters and is forced to struggle with his earlier self, the haunting figure of Phaedrus who now beckons him back into madness. 

The crisis of technology demands a response; for as in all crises a failure to act itself functions as an action. One response is to flee, as Pirsig's friends John and Sylvia do in trying to escape the "death force" which they see in technology. But being economically dependent on technology, they cannot effectively flee, and are forced to take refuge in a false romanticism which leaves them impotently resentful of technology. But if flight is not a solution, equally dangerous is the failure to see the crisis as a crisis, and to respond as if one were merely encountering another "problem" to be solved with procedures which employ and reinforce the very technology which constitutes the crisis. Such a response is made by those whom he labels "classicists," people who would argue that if we are low on fossil fuel we simply need build nuclear power plants; or if threatened by swifter missiles simply construct a sophisticated missile-defense shield. For
Pirsig, such a failure to perceive the crisis may well ultimately lead to annihilation. Pirsig does not explicitly reject the use of "technological" means to solve technological problems; he encourages, for example, well-tuned motorcycles, precise door latches and non-leaking faucets. His object of attack is not all technologies or even technological capacities; rather it is what he calls a technological "attitude" which fails to perceive the limitations of technique and the values implicit in its use. 

But whereas Pirsig orates eloquently on the failure of both illusory escape and complacent acquiescence, he must struggle intensely to overcome his own tendencies to respond in these ways. As Phaedrus, he had attempted to flee the "ghost of reason" when he found it stifling him, fleeing first from India and admitting having "given up" his search (Pirsig 137); and later, at the University ,of Chicago, seeing all his efforts to be a "fool's mission" (Pirsig 389), fleeing Reason entirely into clinical madness. And now, when he perceives Phaedrus emerging on the Chautauqua, Pirsig is still not quite able to face his earlier self. As Tim Crusius insightfully notes, Pirsig remains ambiguous; he would like to "bury" Phaedrus, but his refusal to allow reality to his ghost "points to a strategy of avoidance rather than confrontation and burial" (Crusius 174). It is only through a difficult and direct struggle with madness that Pirsig is ultimately able to
confront Phaedrus. But just as he can no longer flee, neither can Pirsig accept the "technological" solution to his madness, the shock treatments which attempt to bring deviants within the scope of technological society. 

To respond adequately to his crises, Pirsig finds that he must reject the tendency to act as if he were simply solving another "problem." For in this and in many crises, we do not yet encounter a clear-cut "problem" or well-formulated puzzle to solve with conventional procedures. A crisis is a rip or tear in the fabric of our understanding, a rupture which demonstrates the very inadequacy of our procedures. Further, we must often cut through the current inadequate formulations of "problems" in the crisis in order to reveal its real disjunctions. For the inadequate formulations, with their deceptively adequate procedures, perpetuate both the crisis and our inability to grasp it. As Richard Coe argues, "the decision to perceive whatever you are investigating as a 'problem' is already a bias and contains an implicit decision about the appropriate procedures to follow. Many of our current and recent crises result in some degree from the biases implicit in
'problem-solving' procedures" (Coe 64). To respond adequately to a crisis we must disclose our presuppositions and formulate a new way of perceiving and functioning. 


A new paradigm of rationality 

Pirsig's response to his crisis is to assume that his personal fragmentation and our public, technological fragmentation are two aspects of a general crisis of Reason; that he went mad because he rejected that Reason which shapes our culture and its technologies. His concern is not solely with the public dimension of the crisis, the "relationship between people and technology," as Richard Schuldenfrei argues (Schuldenfrei 100). Nor yet is it only with the achievement of the whole or sane person, as Crusius maintains. Both the public and personal aspects of the crisis are inseparable manifestations of a deeper crisis of Reason. 

Using the fragments left from Phaedrus' search, Pirsig attempts to integrate his present and past selves into a unified whole, to find a new way of being sane or whole in a technological world. And, as Chautauqua orator, he communicates his disclosures, showing how we, like Phaedrus, are also controlled by that same ghost of Reason. To this end, he must reveal the assumptions which we share, preconceptions grounded in our conception of Reason which have led us into our public crisis, and which now prevent us from finding our way out. In so doing, he presents an alternative way of perceiving and functioning in the crisis, one which affords a better mode of behaving. 

In searching for a way out of the crisis of madness and technology, Pirsig turns to that which he cares about and is engaged in, the humble activity of maintaining his motorcycle. In this activity, he finds not only a practical means of maintaining his sanity, but the grounds for an alternative conception of rationality. For "the art of motorcycle maintenance" becomes a new paradigm" of sane behavior, a "miniature study of the art of rationality itself" (Pirsig 90). [2] Like all exemplary models, Pirsig's paradigm has its limits: the art of motorcycle maintenance will not encompass every form of life we would call "rational"; nor, accordingly, will that which is nonrational or insane in Pirsig's model account for all the modes of insanity which people may experience. 

Further, we cannot expect that Pirsig's proposed way out of the public crisis of technology will be directly applicable for everyone. Coe notes that Pirsig fails to "recognize the ways in which his own statements are relative to his own relatively privileged position in this society" (Coe 66), and Schuldenfrei, who argues that "the problems of the world are not simply Pirsig's case multiplied four billion times," finds Pirsig "too quick to generalize from the task of repairing a motorcycle on a leisurely vacation to the daily problems of individuals in a complex society" (Schuldenfrei 102). Perhaps foreseeing such an objection to his enterprise, Pirsig protects himself in an artful rhetorical manner, choosing the form of a Chautauqua rather than the essay to communicate his ideas. Stressing the necessary limitations of his own inquiry and disclosures, Pirsig remarks that essays "always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way
it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstances" (Pirsig 166). 

Albeit a simplification of "rationality," maintaining a motorcycle, Pirsig shows, involves a wide variety of cognitive activities. One must be able to discover and formulate possible reasons for malfunctions, conceptualize the parts and their role in the system, and remember the stages of disassembly and reassembly. One must attend to detail, speculate wisely, and make sound judgments. But these cognitive activities can only be carried out, Pirsig insists, if we have the proper emotional attitude, the "attitude of caring." If we do not care about what we are doing, we will fail to be attentive to our task, unable to become engaged in it. Caring, he states, is "a feeling of identification with what one's doing" (Pirsig 290). A passionate caring is central to understanding and maintaining a motorcycle, because 'cycle maintenance occurs within an emotional context. The emotions are our ways of being attuned to the world and our tasks, the states in which
inquiry and judgment occur. "The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness," he asserts, "are part of nature's order too. The central part" (Pirsig 287). 

Our cognition, then, is grounded in and logically dependent on our emotional states. In Richard M. Weaver's terms, "sentiment is anterior to reason. We do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest . . . the fact of paramount importance about anyone is his attitude toward the world" (Weaver 19). Pirsig here also follows Heidegger, for whom "The possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach. far short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to [emotional] moods" (Heidegger 173). Further, though we may transform one emotional state or mood into another, we can never totally escape our emotions into a neutral "objectivity." In Heidegger's phrase, "when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter mood. We are never free of moods" (Heidegger 175). [3] Our understanding ceases, then, not when we lack technical data, but when, through impatience, boredom, or anxiety, we lose
our enthusiasm or gumption, and no longer care about what we are doing. Enthusiasm, notes Pirsig, derives from the Greek enthousiasmos, "which means literally 'filled with theos, or God, or Quality'" (296). Enthusiasm, or gumption, allows us to become engaged in the world through our tasks, and thereby to better understand the world.

When we are enthusiastically engaged, we may forget our selves, for we identify with what we are doing. This identification Pirsig calls "care," Heidegger's "Sorge." Care leads for Pirsig to a "complete identification with one's circumstances" (288) because "what caring really is, is a feeling of identification which what one's doing" (Pirsig 290). And by caring about what we do, Pirsig continues, we may be able to perform excellently, to create or reveal "quality" in our tasks. Because people care about many things in many different ways, the quality which is created through that caring is correspondingly diverse, and cannot be reduced to any one thing. Quality or excellence in our performances, then, is a product of enthusiastic care. But, correlatively, by caring we become aware of that which has quality, and care and quality become "internal and external aspects of the same thing" (Pirsig 269). 


The commonplace 

Through his use of the paradigm of motorcycle maintenance, Pirsig reveals that emotional engagement, and particularly enthusiastic caring, is the precondition of perception as well as of excellent performance; and that a failure to experience does not facilitate understanding, but rather closes it off. In order to best maintain our motorcycles, then, and in turn to function sanely in our world, we must accept our emotional states and try to understand how each one leads us to perceive in certain ways. Our emotional states, further, are integrally related to our values: that which we care about is that which we value or consider important. And as our emotional states shape what and how we perceive, so all of our perceptions as well as our actions are grounded in our values and commitments. Our knowledge is never value-free, every discrimination and classification occurring within the structure of our values. Thus "value," writes Pirsig, "is the
predecessor of structure" (Pirsig 277). 

By showing that emotions and values inform our perceptions and cognition, Pirsig confronts a basic assumption of our culture. This assumption or prejudice is a ground from which we experience the world, a standing point we assume and from which we adopt our various postures and attitudes. The standing points are fundamental to our ways of seeing, for, like the men in Plato's cave, where we stand strongly influences what we are able to perceive. We may call the various standing points from which we formulate our views "places" from which we think and view the world, the loci which allow us to see certain things and overlook others.  [4] In Michael Polanyi's terms, these places are the points we think from, and from which we think about other things" (Polanyi 9). The places structure what Pirsig calls our "preintellectual awareness." By attending to the places of our perception, Pirsig illustrates his attempt, not to cut any new channels of consciousness
but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted with the debris of thought gone stale and platitudes too often repeated" (Pirsig 8). The places we adopt, like our emotions and values, are "modes of persuasion" of which we are often not aware; and like the men in Plato's cave, we must become aware of our limitations if we are to achieve a new way of seeing. 

Following Aristotle, we may construe the places which organize our emotional commitments as various interrelated terms."' The specific terms we employ, such as "subject" and object," are taken from delimited realms, while the interrelationships between the terms, which may be independent of any specific contexts, include various modes of identification, opposition or inter-relation. Aristotle sketches in the Categories four modes in which terms may be opposed, such as contraries and as correlatives. Contrary terms like "black" and "white" label things for which the existence of one generally precludes the existence of the other; correlative terms, such as "husband" and "wife," label objects for which the existence of one requires the existence of the other (Aristotle, Categories 31-8). Pirsig emphasizes the importance of our choice of terms and our facility in interrelating them, formulating the operation as the use of a "knife" which slices up and
connects our experiences of the world. This knife is "an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don't see it moving. You get the illusion that all these parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves" (Pirsig 72). One of Pirsig's tasks, as Chautauqua orator, is to reveal which terms are fundamental in shaping our way of seeing, disclosing their interrelationships, and then demonstrating that they may be interrelated in another manner. By becoming aware of how our commonplaces have led us into our crisis of Reason, we may begin to see their limitations; and, by altering the places, we may potentially disclose a new way of perceiving and functioning in the crisis. 

The specific terms Pirsig focuses on are those of "subjectivity" and "objectivity." Our culturally ingrained commonplace is that subjects are contrary to objects; that as feeling beings we are necessarily separated from the world of objective things; that, in Lawrence Rosenfield's phrase, "external and internal reality" are distinct" (Rosenfield 69). Our feelings are seen as private and inward, ultimately incommunicable, and effectively distortions of objective perception. This separation lies at the basis of the dualism of our "two cultures," and of our "dissociation of sensibility." All feeling is taken as irrelevant to understanding the world, and only technological, analytic reason is applicable to controlling the environment. Hence reason is narrowed to logical consistency, and technology, the product of that reason, is depleted of all human values. Technological ugliness is thus not the source of personal fragmentation and alienation; it is
correlative with it. 

In order to overcome this destructive "noncoalescence between reason and feeling" (Pirsig 162), Pirsig presents his competing paradigm of motorcycle maintenance as a mode of rationality, showing that the separation of subjects and objects distorts how we rationally function in the world. Emotions, he shows, are not private and inward, but are the ways we become engaged in the world, our openings to the world and to others. Motorcycle maintenance requires enthusiastic caring, a caring which reveals and creates value or quality; emotional engagement is in this respect is "logically prior" to our conception of ourselves as "subjects" or separate entities. We are situational beings, and we must become engaged with others and with things before we become aware of ourselves. "No man is an island unto himself alone" is an epistemological as well as a moral statement. 

Rather than treating subjects as contrary to the "value-free" objects of technology, Pirsig shows that subjects and objects are correlatives, whose very existence requires the existence of the other. Technology is not distinct from us; it is an extension of ourselves, a manifestation of our values. The relationship in the new commonplace becomes one of evaluative engagement or "Quality"; the affirmation of quality or value precedes our awareness of subjects and objects, and is indeed the "cause of subjects and objects" (Pirsig 234). Echoing Protagoras, Pirsig maintains that 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 the relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things" (Pirsig 368). 


Rhetorical wholeness 

Pirsig thus discloses and alters the commonplace or topos of subjects vs. objects, arguing that the two terms are to be interrelated as correlatives, with Quality as the intermediate term. In so doing, he deals with the public crisis of technology by concluding that "the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of subjectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology that produces the evil" (Pirsig 351). This dualism is overcome in the new paradigm of rationality, and the altered commonplace of subjectivity and objectivity. Further, this new way of seeing affords a way out of Pirsig's own crisis of madness. Phaedrus went mad not because he was mentally impotent, but because he was too strong for the culture; he didn't fit. He found that our cultural "mythos," the totality of myths or paradigms which grounds our culture and provides the
framework for our rationality, is one of a "rigid subject-object" dualism (Pirsig 346). Hence it is the culture which is inherently fragmented, without wholeness. The mythos itself, he observes, is "insane" (Pirsig 346). But whereas in Chicago Phaedrus had fled the mythos without an alternative model of reason, Pirsig is now able to offer a cogent, alternative way of seeing. He thus performs his task of "expanding the nature of rationality itself" (Pirsig 163). 

Pirsig is not alone in his attempt to expand our conception of reason to include values and emotions. Thomas Conley points out that Pirsig's analysis "is by no means a novel diagnosis. Wayne Booth has recently reminded us . . . of the results of the dichotomy between 'fact' and 'value.' This dichotomy, in its various guises ... has also touched off what McKeon has called an intellectual revolution in the 20th century which has sought to deal with the noncoalescence of which Pirsig speaks" (Conley 49). And Crusius notes that recently an entire school of rhetorical thought has tried to close the gap between thought and feeling, means and goals, by extending rationality beyond its Cartesian parameters to include value; the rational for thinkers like Wayne Booth and Chaim Perelman is no longer only the empirically verifiable or the consistent according to formal logic, but includes all informal reasoning including those involving values. E. M. Adams cogently
argues that "there is value knowledge as well as factual knowledge and a value structure of the world as well as a factual structure" (Adams 294). And Stanley Deetz demonstrates that recent phenomenological thinking about perception, cognition, and communication parallel Pirsig's argument. For Deetz, the split between subjects and objects is derivative to interpretation, which occurs "prior to the subject/object split making possible the very experience that is then abstracted into subjective and objective components" (Deetz 43). 

The similarities and contrasts between Pirsig's project and those of Booth, Perelman and others would demand lengthier examination than I can provide here. But Pirsig's argument, and his place in the rhetorical tradition, may be located directly by elaborating his dispute with Plato. As Crusius notes, "while Booth and others like him trace our problems to Cartesian logic, Pirsig digs deeper and wider, going back to the sophists and to Plato, and to the subject-object split profoundly embedded in the Western mind" Crusius 170). For having discovered that "analytical, dialectical" reason is inadequate, Pirsig finds that his primary opponent is Socrates. As Richard M. Weaver demonstrates, Socrates was the first major opponent of rhetoric, offering dialectic or abstract reasoning about propositions as "sufficient for all the needs of man" (Weaver 62). Just as Nietzsche earlier found that it was Socrates, "the great exemplar" of theoretical man, the
"mystagogue of science,” who killed Greek tragedy, Pirsig now finds with Weaver that it was Socrates who undermined the earlier rhetorical emphasis on Quality (Nietzsche 92-93). 

For Socrates had battled with the Sophists, the early Greek humanists and teachers of rhetoric. [5]  The Sophists argued that men could achieve excellence or arête by competing in the various contests or agons of their community. Pirsig's kinship to these early Sophists is clear, since he too is concerned with teaching effective communication, and in so doing encouraging his students to attain Quality. Such Quality is created, he believes, through enthusiastic caring, an emotional and moral engagement in the practical cares of daily life. The means to achieving Quality include the use of an intellectual "knife," dividing and combining phenomena; but the primary means are emotional, those of maintaining the proper attitude. What becomes paramount is the wholeness or sanity of the engaged person-- the emotional, moral and rational individual aware of his own biases, limits and capacities. 

Recognizing one's own limitations and biases becomes crucial for Pirsig; an individual always speaks "from one place in time and space and circumstances" (Pirsig 166). An emotionally and morally engaged person is always biased, and always limited. But this does not invalidate what he says; rather, it delineates the extent of its truth, for all truths are relative to place and time. "Objectivity" in any absolute sense becomes illusory, since, as Rosenfield argues, one must usually be passionately interested in something before beginning "to bother discussing it at all"; and one's ensuing understanding of things is better characterized as "appreciation" than "objectivity" (Rosenfield 492). Such was the view of the Sophists, and, writes Pirsig, "what the Sophists sought to teach was not principles but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth but the improvement of men. 

Pirsig's alternative formulation of wholeness and reason affords him a possible way out of his personal crisis. Appropriately, he finds that he needs more than reason to face his insanity; and what he needs is his son Chris's care and love. Through Chris, ultimately, he is able to integrate his present and past selves. "I haven't been carrying [Chris] at all," he finds. "He's been carrying me" (404). "Trials never end, of course," he admits. "Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live" (406). But it is by living and struggling in the world that we may become truly sane. Analogously, the public dimension of the crisis demands more than a new model of reason. It requires that we become engaged in a task, that we begin to struggle with our technological world rather than rejecting it or ignoring our place in it. Each of our situations will differ from Pirsig's, and we cannot simply generalize from his case to our own. But if we can
learn from his example, we may achieve the courage to seek out own wholeness through struggle and growth. 


Works Cited 

E. M. Adams, Philosophy and the Modern Mind (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975). 

Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, trans., J. L. Ackrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 

Richard Coe, "Zen and the Art of Rhetoric," Rhetorical Society Quarterly, 6 (1976). 

Thomas Conley, review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Communication Quarterly, 24 (1976).

Tim Crusius, "In Praise of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Western journal of Speech Communication, 40 (1976).

Stanley Deetz, "Words without Things: Toward a Social Phenomenology of Language," Quarterly Journal of Speech, (1973). 

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet Books, 1964). 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans., Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956). 

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam Books, 1975). 

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
. 
Lawrence Rosenfield, "An Autopsy of the Rhetorical Tradition," In The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971). 

Lawrence Rosenfield, "The Experience of Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 60 (1974), 492. 

Richard Schuldenfrei, rev. of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Harvard Educational Review, 45 (1975).

Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1964). 



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