From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2004 - 01:00:11 GMT
Dear Anthony,
>From one priest to another:
Though we have separate gods, I find it an honor and pleasure to defend my choice in deity against the greatest hope for Pirsigian institutionalization thus far seen (or at least to have written to this website).
My response will be long and split into parts because Anthony has tapped into and articulated (for better or for worse) a general feeling that many of the participants in the MD share. Because of Anthony's unique status at the website, to not respond at length would be to court total rhetorical annihilation. For Anthony is (rightly) the foremost authority on Pirsig's philosophy. As such, to treat Rorty and myself dismissively is to give free licence to everyone and anyone to treat the philosophy contained in
my posts dismissively. As Anthony tacitly acknowledges through his use of Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's use of Foucault, all knowledge and discourse are defined by power relations, and in mine and Anthony's case, the power relation is slanted towards Anthony. Anthony can get away with being dismissive of me, but I cannot afford to repay the favor. So, my responses will attempt at some meager measure of thoroughness, but they will be more of the two kinds of def
enses I have written in the past: either an explication (or "rehash" as Anthony politely terms it) of Rorty's position (which is moreorless me shaking my head and going, "No, you missed the point") or a mitigation of the criticism leveled (moreorless me grasping the nettle offered and going, "Actually, it doesn't hurt all that much"). I cannot offer anything new because no new critique was offered me.
Anthony said:
I read Rorty as avoiding the reconciliation of art and science as seen in his division of the self into private/artist/ironist, on the one hand, and public/rational/liberal, on the other. This is quite clearly stated in Rorty’s CON. Meanwhile, Pirsig uses a value framework to combine the arts and sciences so seemingly rational, scientific procedures such as motorcycle maintenance are best perceived as also being artistic endeavours. As such, it is difficult to understand how you find the two philosophers “to
be almost indistinguishable”. The two philosophers may start from C.P. Snow’s 1958 dichotomy but, in their different philosophical strategies, they arrive at diametrically opposed points.
Matt:
Its true, from a narrow, squint-eyed point of view, Rorty appears to be no better than Kant, just as Pirsig appears to be no better than Hegel. However, that's not the point of view that pragmatists like myself prefer, and it really doesn't do justice to ironism's parasitic reaction to metaphysics. When I see Pirsig say that Quality underlies everything, that values are in everything (are, in fact, everything), I see him as making the same antimetaphysical blurring motion that Rorty makes when he disputes the
notion that science or any other discipline is a natural kind, that Kant or Dilthey cut Reality at its joints when they dichotomized Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften.
The distinction between art and science (which is only "kind of" related to his public/private distinction, which I will attend to separately) is that of two different kinds of vocabularies, with two different kinds of purposes and techniques implicit in those vocabularies. What does Pirsig's move really mean if it doesn't simply mean what Rorty means? In other words, how do you paint scientifically? How do you test for electrons artistically? Would you want to do either? The point I take Pirsig and Rorty
to be making is not about how the respective disciplines _perform_, what they actually _do_, but how they conceive of themselves, their own self-image. Are they getting at Truth or are they coping with rocks/inner demons? Is it simply your job, or is it something that is central to your identity? As Rorty says, "We [should] see the social sciences not as awkward and unsuccessful attempts to imitate the physicists' elegance, certainty, and freedom from concern with '
value,' but as suggestions for ways of making human lives into works of art. We would see modern physics as Snow sees it--as the greatest human accomplishment of the century--and as Kuhn sees it, as one more episode in a series of crises and intervening calms, a series that will never terminate in 'the discovery of truth,' the finally accurate representation of reality." (CP, 87) He says, "I am happy to agree with C. P. Snow that modern physics is one of the most beautiful achievements of the human mind."
(PSH, 188) I would take the point of viewing motorcycle maintenance as artistic to be that we can see beauty in it, that we can view it as an act of self-creation if we so choose.
Anthony said:
I think the term “post-Nietzschean tradition” is vague here as Pirsig could be placed in such a tradition but I am assuming you mean Rorty’s pet philosophers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
Matt:
I never meant to exclude Pirsig, for I certainly see Pirsig as part of the post-Nietzschean tradition. I agree with David M that Pirsig has a lot in common with Heidegger. And I agree with Christopher Norris' reading of ZMM in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. In it he says that ZMM's "line of philosophical argument is everywhere prompted by a Nietzschean spirit of critique. The crucial question Phaedrus poses--whence the authority of Socratic reason?--is posed and answered by Nietzsche in strikingly
similar terms. It is rhetoric, not dialectic, which takes us back furthest toward the origin of thought in man's encounter with experience." (DTP, 65)
Anthony said:
Anyway, to return to your (Rorty’s?) point that thinking of philosophy as poetry will improve real life.
Couldn’t this be a retrograde step by conflating disciplines which are best kept largely distinct?
...
It seems to me that though the poet is driven by a passion to express artistic truth (in words), this type of truth is different from the rationalist type of truth that is the usual concern for philosophy.
Matt:
First, it seems strange to me that someone who sees Rorty as keeping art and science distinct in a degenerate manner would level a "conflating disciplines" charge without explaining how Pirsig escapes such a charge.
Second, I'm not sure what the difference is between artistic truth and rationalist truth. Pragmatists don't see Truth as something to be expressed by alternative modes because they don't think it is an object "out there." I would take the difference between an artistic mode of expression and a rationalist mode of expression to be the difference between proliferation and commensuration, between the increase of candidates for belief and the narrowing of the field.
When Anthony says that philosophy is concerned with the "rationalist type of truth," he is trying to define philosophy in a narrow sense, which pragmatists don't really see the point in. There are just too many people with too large, diverse, and varied tastes who we would like to call philosophers. How do we claim that Plato, Aquinas, Lessing, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Frege, Emerson, Buber, Dewey, Heidegger, Russell, Foucault, Davidson, Derrida, and Pirsig are all doing the same thing? Only by
using an exceedingly wide and boring definition like Wilfrid Sellars': the attempt to see how things, in the widest possible sense, hang together, in the widest possible sense. Within this sector of people, we can then distinguish different groups according to their tastes and desires and even stylistic differences. Rorty suggests a lot of ways and he doesn't take any of them as being the real, true differentiation because he takes distinctions to be parasitic on purpo
se. One that he suggests is the one I already partly coopted from him: philosophy that conceives itself as art, as politics, or as science. (EHO, 9) I mentioned the first two, but Anthony's reply, I think, reflects the third. Anthony's exclusivity, evidenced by his strange thought that I contradicted myself in describing two different ways of being a philosopher, is one that I don't think Pirsig even adheres to, as evidenced by his nomination of Lincoln as a philosopher.
Anthony said:
I think the main problem with the above is that the division between public issues and private issues is not always clear cut. In fact, the more I think of this division, the more problematic I think it is.
For instance, let’s examine the first sentence of Matt’s after the above paragraph:
“The point I was making with my original comments was that this discussion group is something we do on the weekends, something we do for fun, i.e. its part of our private lives.”
OK this is true to a certain extent. But “this discussion group is something we do” also for edifying purposes and debating skills i.e. it’s also part of our public lives.
The same principle applies to art and the sciences as they are both private and public endeavours. Moreover, I can’t see how the private ironist side of a person won’t affect their public liberal side and vice versa.
Matt:
Never did I or Rorty say that the division between public and private issues is clear cut. This is a common criticism that I think simply reflects the criticizer's refusal to be charitable in interpretation. The issue will always be one that is decided by a case by case basis. When Anthony says that my comment about this website is "true to a certain extent," my reply is that is the only extent I need or want. That we can turn things we learn here, points of edification or debating skills, towards public
things is of course true, and never would I deny that. But to think that there is some _requirement_ that to take part in this dicussion group means that we must also make political protests for/against the American war in Iraq, I think, is misguided. If some people want to, that's fine. But some of us just want to discuss Pirsig and philosophy.
Rorty says, "It is one thing to say that religious beliefs, or the lack of them, will influence political convictions. Of course they will." (PSH, 172) Rorty's point is that, of course our private side will effect our public side, and vice versa. That's not what's at issue. The issue is creating a private sphere that is protected from public encroachment, a sphere of action in which we can pray to and read whom ever we want. If you want to conduct particle acceleration experiments in your spare time, go
ahead. If you want to paint pictures that have a political message, be my guest. But do not think that anybody else has to do so. Its their lives, let them lead it. As Rorty says, "An ideal Jamesian democracy would have a place for all the vibrant self-creating activities that anybody would ever want to engage in, but would not insist that anybody be self-creative if they don't feel like it." (ABAO, 64)
Anthony said:
In fact, Rorty’s assertion that there should be such a dichotomy sounds just like the type of dualism which Dewey would frown on.
Matt:
The kind of dichotomies that Dewey didn't like are those that were hypostatized. I agree with Rorty that "it is not clear that thought is possible without using such [binary] oppositions." (PSH, 47) Binaries, however, only last as long as they are useful. The Deweyan approach to a sharp dichotomy was always to describe it as a continuum. In response to the question "What do you say to the person whose sense of poetic self-creation requires other people and the opportunity for public transformation?" Rorty
said, "I would tell her to go into politics. I didn't say everybody had a public/private split, but some people do. There is a spectrum here. ... My public/private split wasn't an explanation of what every human life is like. I was, instead, urging that there was nothing wrong with letting people divide their lives along the private/public line. We don't have a moral responsibility to bring the two together. It was a negative point, not a positive recommendation ab
out how everyone should behave." (ABAO, 62)
My interpretation of Rorty is that he's saying two things: 1) we don't have to get all of our vocabularies together. We can have science and religion. We can have religion and politics. The notion that everything _had_ to fit together in one vocabulary was the notion of metaphysics. 2) for a functioning liberal society, there must be things that are left up to individual choice. This is the private sphere. If you want to make your whole life revolve around public things, you can. If you want to make your
whole life revolve around private things, you can. The idea of a liberal society is that there would be such a proliferation of desires that everything that needed to get done would get done. As yet, this remains to be seen. In all honesty I have my doubts. I happen to think that totally ignoring politics in a democracy is a bad thing. But this doesn't contradict the idea of a liberal society or the public/private distinction. It simply moves where I think the lo
west common denominator of society needs to be further away from the total private pole and closer to the middle. This is an empirical and political claim. It is not a claim about the validity of the creation of a private sphere.
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