From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 09 2002 - 00:02:53 GMT
Dear All,
I thought of something provocative the other day, so I thought I'd let you
all know ;-)
One of my favorite words for a while after reading Lila was
"philosophology." Etymologically, it captured its prey perfectly: "the
study of the love of wisdom." As a beginning philosophy student who's
favorite philosopher was someone I would never study in a class, it was an
important invective. As I matured, however, I began to use the word less,
particularly as I moved into education. And then, as I read and absorbed
more and more Rorty, I had to come to terms with what Pirsig meant. It
looked more and more as though Pirsig would call Rorty a philosophologist,
while retaining the title philosopher for himself. But, because of my
general liking of both Rorty and Pirsig, what did that really mean?
I was reflecting on the term philosophology and its uses when I hit upon an
interesting theme: populist rhetoric. Pirsig styles himself a rhetorician
in ZMM, and an able one at that, and anyone that lasts long on this list
has to be an able rhetorician themself. What struck me is the type of
insulation and defense of his philosophy that Pirsig is preparing for
himself in the opening of Chapter 26. The first three pages are part of a
recurring theme of distrust of the academic establishment that drowns out
the other theme in Chapter 26, a theme that recurs just as much: the
synthesis of other thinkers and texts.
The rhetoric of Ch 26 is that of populism. The rhetorical strategy of
populism is to create a rhetorical community of "plain people," among whom
a large majority of people would include themselves, appeal and speak for
them on their behalf, and rail against the elites who are trying to
subjugate and oppress the community of regular people you are speaking on
behalf of. Pirsig's target is the academic, ivory-tower elites and Pirsig,
in appealing to those who distrust the well-mannered eggheads, will find no
end of allies.
This language tends to simplify things, however. Its a rhetorical strategy
that also resembles the Marxist tactic of identifying whoever disagrees
with them as "bourgeois." Pirsig, and the rhetorical community he
represents, can now relegate his enemies to a lower, unrespected position.
This is a strategy that occurs all the time here, and one I have
participated in propagating and been the object of.
But the question should be, is this a good strategy? The creation of
rhetorical communities is unavoidable, but we should be careful about the
types of communites we create and be aware of the possible co-optation of
those communities. At the bottom of Pirsig's community is an untenable
position of contrasting philosophology to philosophy. And the MoQer is
then given free reign over labeling others as either not thinking
creatively enough for themselves, i.e. being under the spell of the
academic elites who have given our hero Pirsig the short shrift, or not
sticking to Pirsig's message as relayed by his writings, i.e. being under
the spell of the academic elites who have given our hero Pirsig the short
shrift.
The philosophologist, as defined by Pirsig, is a "derivative, secondary
field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its
host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host's behavior." Philosophy,
then, is the opposite of this. Its the substance that philosophology
studies. Pirsig links philosophology with other parasitic fields like art
history, art appreciation, musicology, and literary criticism. This gives
us an insight into what Pirsig is talking about: history and criticism. If
he had wanted to be thorough in his examples, he would've said art history,
art criticism, music history, music criticism, literary history, and
literary criticism. His targets are those who catalog the history of a
discipline and those that theorize about a discipline, rather than actually
participating in a discipline. So his targets are philosophy history and
philosophy criticism. This is where the problems begin.
If we take art and music as our first two examples, the problem will
present itself. The first question is, "Can art and music students do
without art history and music history?" At first one might think, "Sure,
why not? What does it matter if a really good painter knows who Monet and
Picasso are? Why does a singer need to know about Schoenberg and what he
was up to? I'm sure they're not thinking of any of them when they're
singing and painting." At first the demand to know the history of your
discipline seems like a reactionary thing to demand. Made by the old-guard
before the avant-garde changes the rules. If that was all there was to
this, just some left over snobbery from the old establishment, it might
seem well enough to chalk this difference of opinion over philosophology to
a difference in opinion about whether Verdi's La Traviata or Madonna's
"Like a Prayer" is more respectable. Over whether pop singers who are
classically trained (like Mariah Carey) are more respectable then those who
are not (like Brittany Spears). Over whether there is a thing called
<ahem> "bullshit" art.
But after this initial thought, I would have some questions about how a
person, ignoring history and tradition, learns how to sing or paint. If
you ignore everything done in the past, will you turn out to be a great
singer or painter? Will you, indeed, even know who to draw or sing a note?
The answer is, "Yes, possibly." One can train themselves in all sorts of
activities. If a person grew up in the wild and heard no music and talked
to no musicians, had no contact with the outside world, and had a guitar,
it is possible that the person could teach herself how to play like Jimmy
Page without ever having heard of Jimmy Page. Is it statistically likely?
I doubt it.
What I'm driving at is the common empiricist claim that pragmatists hold
with Pirsig: we are born tabula rasa. Despite tacit agreement with Kant on
certain kinds of a priori knowledge, Pirsig would largely agree that humans
do not have innate ideas about anything, they learn them. Take his example
of the baby in Ch 9: "One can imagine how an infant in the womb ACQUIRES
awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at
birth ACQUIRES more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger." (emphasis
mine) The operative word is "acquire." Babies aren't born knowing
anything. They acquire patterns of behavior through time. So my question
would be, "How does a baby grow up to be Jimmy Page or Monet or Verdi? Or
even Brittany Spears?" They have to emulate them. If our little baby
doesn't want to be any of these people, let's say she just wants to sing or
paint, how is she usually taught? By belting out notes? By taking a brush
and spilling paint everywhere? If a baby spilled paint all over a table,
would we say she was painting? The answer: depends.
You can see that I'm being extremely evasive so far. The problem is that
all of these questions depend on contingent circumstances. They depend on
a community of people saying, "Yes, the baby is painting," or "No, she was
just reaching for her bottle of milk." This kind of answer, of course,
shows my true spots, but someone who believed in an objectively true way of
painting would have to agree that the answer does depend on some people
saying yes or no (though, they would follow that with a, "And one group
happens to right and the other wrong"). Either way, the answer depends on
a tradition of answering the question in a certain way. What I'm driving
at is that when a person learns how to paint or sing, they are learning how
to paint or sing like other people have sung or painted. They are
inadvertantly taking part in a tradition, a tradition that has history, a
history that is inadvertantly being learned.
When we turn back to literature and philosophy, we can see what problems
we're going to run into if we keep up with our distinction between
philosophology and philosophy. In literature, the problem of doing
creative writing without learning a little history of writing is pretty
obvious. When a person _literally_ not knowing how to write writes,
"OJDLF(#)(Uoijwfj03jdkpdsijoler," because they _literally_ don't know how
to write (which goes along with reading), we are hesitant to say that they
are adding a valuable brick to our cultural wall (even when our daughters
at a young age write it). If a fourth grader writes a book that starts
with, "And I have a cat. He smells like: Toast, and stuff; eveytime," and
this book is slammed by every literary critic in the US, the kid can reply
with the same rhetorical-community generating response that Pirsig gave:
"Ya' know what, you lame-o' egg-heads? You guys are just jealous that you
can't write. You're just a derivative field that lives and dies off the
stuff I write. You're just pissed because I'm writing literature and
you're writing about literature."
In philosophy, distinguishing between a discipline's history and its
substance becomes untenable. How would we even know we were doing
philosophy unless Socrates told us we were? There are many different
definitions of what philosophy is and isn't, but let me forward this
Rortyan one: you are doing philosophy when you fit in a tradition of other
people who are identified as philosophers. Pirsig's a philosopher because
he's reflecting on questions that Socrates asked BECAUSE HE READ SOCRATES
(or, rather, Plato). Pirsig's reacting wildly against the whole academic
establishment of philosophy, but I'm not sure he's hit his mark with his
distinction between people who read philosophy and people who do
philosophy. Going back to the two subsets of philosophology, philosophy
history and philosophy criticism, its difficult to seperate where people
are doing philosophy and where they're criticizing other people's
philosophy. Socrates' position is defined in part by its criticism of the
Sophists, the Sophists' position by its opposition to the Cosmologists, the
Cosmologists position by its opposition to Homer, and on and on, ad
infinitum. If we drive what Pirsig's saying to its natural consequences,
it would apear that Pirsig's asking us to ignore whatever the philosophical
community has to say about him because they are just bitter about being
unable to do real philosophy. Under this guise, though, it would appear we
could say any damn thing and call it philosophy. Afterall, in a bout of
overkill he says, "philosophers ... are a null-class. They don't exist.
Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are about all there
are." Well, if the list of contemporary philosophers is so small, I wish
Pirsig could have provided us with that list so we know who we can trust.
Pirsig goes on to say in Ch 26 that, "the best way to examine the contents
of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe
and then to see what great philosophers agree with you." This quote
punches up two points I want to make. First, taking an empiricist, tabula
rasa image of learning, I don't know what a person could end up believing
if they never read anything. Pirsig seems to be saying that we will
naturally begin to think like Socrates even if we never read him. I find
this a bit incoherent with the tabula rasa image that it would appear
Pirsig also holds. Secondly, if we suspend the way Pirsig appears to want
us to generate beliefs (out of thin air) and go with a more traditional
picture of belief generation (read some stuff, think about it, generate
some beliefs; read some more stuff, think about it, generate and revise
some more beliefs), then Pirsig is saying a very Rortyan, syncretist thing:
look at intellectual history as the task of finding heroes and villians.
Take your belief structure and fit it on top of what they are saying. In
other words, Pirsig's endorsing the Bloomian idea of "strong misreadings"
and (or, at the least) the Rortyan idea of narrative construction.
The point on Harold Bloom is also important because Bloom offers, in The
Anxiety of Influence, a portrait of how great writers are created. Taking
off from the phrase, "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,"
Bloom says that great writers are great because they understand what's come
before them and they desperately want to be greater than that. Because of
this, they are always anxious about being influenced because they
desperately want to say something new. Pirsig reflects this anxiety in his
distinction between philosophology and philosophy (including the quote Wim
just recently pointed out to DMB in the "Symbolically or actually?" thread)
and when he says (in response to the question, "Are there any books that
you feel inspired you in your writing of ZMM?"), "there's an adage to
remember, 'Reading is the enemy of writing.' ... Any time I did read a book
during the years of writing ZMM and Lila it would stop the writing for as
much as a week while memories of what I just read or heard gradually
faded." This would explain why Pirsig's such a poor scholar, but it also
shows him desperately wanting to say something new without being influenced.
The quote on how to read philosophological carts also elaborates on the
rhetorical strategey taken by some here. For instance, Bo took a purist
line when he said to me (after my first post on the connections between
Pirsig and Rorty), "Everybody seem [sic] to read books and then return to
the forum insisting that the MOQ is to be seen through the eyes of the last
read author. I know that tendency from before...." ("Re: Confessions of a
Fallen Priest," Tue Aug 06 2002 - 13:19:40 BST) This line is also taken
(or, at least, implied) by Sam when he said recently, "sometimes we get
distracted by our own preconceptions." It seems that if we follow Pirsig,
without any distracting preconceptions, we'd have to go isolate ourselves
up on a mountain to generate some preconceptions to be distracted by.
Against this, I read Pirsig as 1) being misguided in his distinction
between philosophology and philosophy (even though there is something to
rail against in contemporary, academic philosophy) and 2) tacitly endorsing
a Rortyan/Bloomian conception of reading.
Somehow, I hope against all hopes that Pirsig doesn't believe any of the
stuff I've driven his position to say. For, against the grain of his wish
to meditate alone on a mountain, he takes the time to read his history of
philosophy to co-opt a few allies and disparage a few enemies. The
Sophists, Poincare, and James and Plato, Aristotle, and Boas, respectively,
just to name a few. Pirsig is a synthesizer at heart. He wants to say all
things to all people. Why else would he co-opt American pragmatism and
Eastern mysticism? Why else would he take the time to see if Quality fits
in the Daodejing in place of Dao? These aren't things someone who wants to
be new does. These are things a syncretist does. At root, I think ZMM and
Lila oscillate between Pirsig's desire to say something new and his desire
to colligate formerly opposed ideas and traditions.
Matt
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