From: Elizaphanian (Elizaphanian@members.v21.co.uk)
Date: Sat Oct 05 2002 - 15:23:42 BST
Hi Platt, Matt, others.
[This is my response to the question I posed to the two of you in the Rorty
thread, when I promised to go away and re-read ZMM and Lila and see what I
could come up with.]
In ZMM the Narrator describes his rediscovery of Phaedrus' intellectual
explorations. The climax of this movement comes when Phaedrus realises that
Socrates is, in fact, one of the bad guys:
"Socrates had been one of Phaedrus' childhood heroes and it shocked and
angered him to see this dialogue taking place.. Socrates is not using
dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it.Phaedrus'
mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil
thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try to
understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but who real purpose is
never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and
enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu,
muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain and control it.
Evil."
He goes on to describe what Plato does with regard to arete (excellence):
"Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer
came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsulated it;
made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid,
immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the
highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis
of all that has gone before."
This is a rejection of traditional metaphysics, the history of western
thought. As such it has direct continuities with Rorty's (and others)
rejections of the same. When Rorty is criticising 'Redemptive Truth' he is
precisely criticising the tradition which Pirsig is rejecting in ZMM, the
idea that an *understanding* of the world can provide a complete answer to
all our existential questions (and therefore save or redeem us). In Pirsig's
terms what is wrong is for reason (dialectic) to 'contain and control'
quality. Hence in what is one of the conclusions of ZMM he writes "any
attempt to develop an organised reason around an undefined quality defeats
its own purpose." Or, in the central theme that provokes both the original
paper on rhetoric and the epigraph to ZMM, he writes 'By reversing a basic
rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined he had
found a way out of all this' - hence, "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is
not good? Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" Quality can be
perceived directly, and does not depend upon a rational, definitional
metaphysics to be purveyed.
Now, it would appear that, in writing Lila, and developing the metaphysics
of Quality, Pirsig is himself succumbing to the 'metaphysical temptation'.
One clue to this is the changing status of Socrates - in Zen he is the
totalitarian rationalist, using dialectic as a rhetorical device to reject
the Sophists. Whereas in Lila Socrates 'paved the way for the fundamental
principle behind science: that truth stands independently of social
opinion'. Suddenly Socrates is one of the good guys again. Is the Pirsig of
Lila actually a dialectician that the Pirsig of ZMM would condemn?
The conclusion that I have come to is that he is not. In Lila Pirsig is very
careful to say what his metaphysics can and cannot do. To begin with he
insists that any metaphysics must be provisional: "Unlike subject-object
metaphysics [the Platonic tradition] the Metaphysics of Quality does not
insist on a single exclusive truth.one doesn't seek the absolute 'Truth'.
One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things
with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this
explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better
comes along". This, by itself, precludes the idea that the metaphysics of
quality can function as Redemptive Truth. Furthermore, Pirsig agrees with
William James that 'Truth is a species of good' and states: "Truth is a
static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality." Pirsig
is quite clearly maintaining the ZMM stance which is disassociated from the
mainstream of Western/Platonic thought: he is not offering the metaphysics
of quality to the world as a contender for Redemptive Truth.
This is reinforced by his repeated contentions that metaphysics is a
degenerate activity, which he is indulging in because a) it's fun, and it's
his nature to do it, and b) it is potentially useful - it can't be avoided
if we are to engage with the world at all. He is maintaining the value
structure from ZMM, where he writes "I think metaphysics is good if it
improves everyday life; otherwise forget it". The good thing about Lila is
that it *does* improve our thinking about everyday life. What I have found
most valuable is the ability to discriminate between different types of
value conflict, so that biology v society is not seen in the same way as
society v intellect, and, most importantly, that the intellectual level
depends upon a flourishing social level to survive.
Two reactions to the Rorty thread, one to Platt, one to Matt.
Platt objects to Rorty's perspective, writing "I think his basic idea about
truth being infinitely malleable depending on time and place and whatever
pressure group happens to hold power at the moment to be extremely dangerous
to individual liberty" and then later
"If the criteria for and meaning of truth is what groups develop
contingently over time, then truth is determined by the group that has the
most power, or "mastery" over other groups." In other words, Platt objects
to an understanding of truth which makes it subject to social controls. In
that, I am completely on his side. However, it is important to keep our
understanding of truth embedded within the wider context of the MoQ, whereby
truth is seen as one species of the good. Ultimately, the objection to the
Nazis or other potential torturers is not that they are saying something
untrue, but that what they are saying or doing is not good - that is, that
they are enacting evil. The idea that there is one form of 'absolute Truth'
is actually something which *fosters* a totalitarian ideology - and this is
what ZMM deconstructs. So, to sum up this point, I think that Platt is being
a little Procrustean when he places Pirsig in the 'absolute Truth' camp,
even though I sympathise strongly with why he does so.
Matt writes: "The one thing I want everyone to understand is that I don't
think that my
"historicized" Pirsig is the "true" Pirsig. To search for a "true" Pirsig
is to misunderstand the purpose of reading. There isn't a "true" Pirsig
hidden in the pages of his books." And in another place: "I think the
penchant for acting as the voice of Pirsig that many conversants in the MD
display is a reflection of their belief that there is a True reading of
Pirsig that can and will be someday explicated. I, however, don't believe
this." I think Matt is confusing a notion of 'absolute Truth' (which is
Redemptive, and which all of Pirsig, Rorty, Wittgenstein and many others
reject) with the idea of an accurate articulation of the authorial
viewpoint. It seems to me that Pirsig wished to communicate certain ideas in
his writings, and that it is therefore possible to have more or less
accurate accounts of those ideas (and thereby to talk as if there IS a true
account of what Pirsig is saying). To deny this is ultimately to deny any
possibility of communication between different individuals, and is an
argument that stands in close relation to the 'private language' argument
that Wittgenstein deconstructs in his Investigations. In contrast to the
post-modernists I do think there is such a thing as an authorial voice, and
that it can be - more or less adequately - recovered.
However, what I think the underlying point Matt is getting at is valid -
that there is a tendency in the forum to treat Pirsig as a writer of gospel
truth, so that if we can recover what he actually said, argument is at an
end. If we recover what Pirsig meant, then we then have to make a judgement
as to its value; our thinking doesn't end there.
On which point, I would like to come to a conclusion with a question, that
has been troubling me a little. At the end of Lila, Phaedrus is pondering
the degeneracy of his metaphysical musings and is distracted by Lila's doll,
and so the book then ends with musings on the Indians and on good as a noun.
It seems clear to me on a re-reading of the book that we must distinguish
Pirsig the author from Phaedrus the character, and where Phaedrus is clearly
an isolated, asocial, possibly amoral metaphysician, Pirsig the author, in
his presentation of Phaedrus, is distancing himself from those very things.
But my question is this: What is Lila for? That is, Lila the character
and/or symbol, not "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals" the book. Clearly she
represents both biological and dynamic qualities, and she serves as a good
vehicle for the story of the book. But I don't think that's a full
explanation for what is going on. Two themes: one the continuing treatment
of mental illness, sustained from ZMM into Lila, and the second (related) of
her doll/child/idol. What is going on with these? I'd love to hear views on
this question. I won't feel I've properly got on top of Lila (the book)
until I have reached satisfactory answers.
Sam
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