From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 00:42:36 BST
DMB said somewhere recently that he'd like to see more focus on the literary elements of Pirsig and I can only agree.
So, without further ado, I offer this reading of Pirsig's ZMM that I developed for a person who asked me about the connection between Freud, Plato, and Pirsig:
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The Freud connection I thought of when I wrote to you the first time was the relation between Freud's superego and Pirsig in how we perceive Quality. Since "how do we perceive Quality" is your driving question, the answer I believe Pirsig gives, very simply, is that we perceive Quality in the things we like. Very tautological. I can't remember how explicitly he moves past this first answer, but I know where he's heading. Based retrospectively from my reading of his second book, Lila, I believe Pirsig's answer is that we perceive Quality based on our past perceptions of Quality, but not exclusively to it. I'm getting this reading from his "Everthing is an analogy" section in his battle with the Chairman. Here's how it goes: if everything is an analogy, that means everything is based on metaphor. A well worn metaphor is a literal word. When you use an analogy long enough, it eventually stops being an analogy. The metaphor dies and becomes literal: everyone knows what
it means. Well, Pirsig says our culture is the building up of these analogies. Metaphors only gain their resonance from the base of dead metaphors that came before them. We inherit our dead metaphors, that's what culture is. This is analogous to how we perceive Quality. We inherit our vision of Quality from our culture. Different cultures and different times will percieve different things as being of high Quality.
Freud, I think, points in the same general direction with the superego because the superego was created by society: we inherit it. This makes the things we perceive as bad and good a contingent event, contingent on where we were born.
You mentioned the connection between Freud and Phaedrus. The conncetion is between Freud's id/ego/superego structure and Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer from the Phaedrus. The relation is simple: In Freud, the id represents our animalistic desires and impluses, our desire for pleasure. The superego represents our moralism. The ego tries to broker peace between the two, steering a path between the two poles. In the Allegory of the Charioteer, Plato imagined a black horse, a white horse, and a charioteer. The black horse is constantly pulling the charioteer towards pleasure, the white horse is constantly pulling the charioteer towards temperance, and the charioteer is trying to maintain a middle course. This is a well documented connection between Freud and Plato.
What isn't well documented is its relation to ZMM. And I do now think it has a relation. If you buy into my argument in my "Confessions" essay that there are two interpretations of Pirsig, one as a pragmatist and one as a Kantian, then the this next step is a short one. ZMM is moved narratively by two characters who are at once the same person: Phaedrus and the narrator. But there is also a third, implicit persona: that of Pirsig the author, the one documenting the struggle between Phaedrus and the narrator. This sets up two poles and a judge, just as in Freud and Plato. But, I think Freud was being descriptive while Plato was being prescriptive. Plato quite clearly favored the white horse, though he didn't think it possible to jettison the black. The dicy interpretive problem is deciding which horse persona represents black and which white. On the face, it would appear that the narrator is the white horse. This is how Bruce Charlton interpreted ZMM in his essay (w
hich is also posted at MOQ.org) and many others, also. But at the end of the book, it is Phaedrus who wins the psychic struggle. Phaedrus, who represents what I would call the Platonic impulse, is the winner over the narrator, who represents what I would call the pragmatic impluse.
What does this mean for perceiving Quality? Nothing directly, only in a metaphilosophical sense, I think. This sense is that the pragmatic impulse tells us that there are many different ways to perceive Quality, all contingent upon where and when we were born, and that, though some are better than others, there is no one correct way to perceive Quality: only better and worse. The Platonic impulse tells us that there is a Correct Way to Perceive Quality.
In this allegorical interpretation of ZMM, we find that Pirsig the author ends up favoring a Platonic version of perception: there is a Correct Way. This seems commensurate with at least one other piece of evidence I can marshall off the cuff. When Pirsig attempts to answer his English department collegues' question, "Where does Quality reside?" he goes through the two standard dialectical answers, describes several rhetorical, evasionary options, and then ends with a third dialectical option. This is the important point that Pirsig, in the voice of the narrator, points out. He says that DeWeese consueled Phaedrus at the time to choose one of the rhetorical options, but he declined because he thought of himself as a pretty good dialectician. The narrator then says that he retrospectively thinks that Phaedrus should have taken DeWeese's advice. But this is coming from the narrator, and since the narrator loses in the end, we can expect the general message of ZMM to be t
hat we should listen to our Platonic impulse. Indeed, I think Pirsig did listen to his Platonic impulse because he then wrote Lila, a book about metaphysics (metaphysics being the product of the dialectic) and where the only character is Phaedrus.
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That's really brief and not fleshed out at all. I only submit because all I really had to do was copy and paste it. I hope to develop this reading further, and I was wondering what everyone else thought.
Matt
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