Hey,
DMB said:
Gravity is usually understood as one of those pre-existing facts of the
universe, a law of reality that has always operated regardless of whether of
not anyone was aware of the fact. And so we naturally (SOM) think that it was
discovered by Newton. No so, says Pirsig. Instead, he says, Newton invented
gravity. I forget the source, probably Lila's Child, but there is an account of
somebody trying to wrap their heads around the idea and asking him something
like, "You mean before Issac Newton came along apples didn't obey the law of
gravity". Pirsig replied, "No, they didn't. Apples just fell."
...
The world is built of analogies upon analogies going back too far back to see
but always growing out of lived experience.
Matt:
I believe you're thinking of what I like to call Pirsig's "discourse on Western
ghosts," which is pages 32-36 (Ch. 3) of ZMM. This passage always sounds like
pure idealism, but there is definitely a straight line between this at the
beginning of ZMM and the other passage you're alluding to, which occurs towards
the end of the book, in the mythos-over-logos argument passage: "The mythos is
a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues." (360, Ch. 28)
I think this line is fundamental to how Pirsig shunts Plato and to why we
should see Pirsig as embedded in the tradition of American pragmatism. To riff
off of what DMB said, I would draw a line that begins with the discourse on
Western ghosts and continues to these:
"The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason
itself." (148, Ch. 13)
"We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous
experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in
terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these
analogues." (253, Ch. 20)
"Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians
don't know that." (399, Ch. 30)
Normally I'd digress about the Hegelian and Nietzschean patterns in this, but
the only thing I want to focus on is the connection between "the continuing
body of reason" and "our whole culture [is built] in terms of these analogues."
What I want to suggest is the reason Pirsig escapes subjectivism and solipsism
is because for Pirsig ideas are not tiny little things hanging around our mind
(the S) that have to be matched up to reality (the O). For Pirsig, ideas are
more like tools, public items that we all use to make our way through the
stream of experience. The better an idea works, like gravity and matter, the
more we use it and the more likely we pass it on to our children (through a
process Pirsig grinningly calls in the discourse on Western ghosts, "Mass
hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as 'education.'" (36, Ch. 3)
The link I see is that we are educated to a certain set of tools/ideas, but
this isn't an arbitrary practice, as if we do things the way we happen to do
them _just_ because they relate to our "previous experiences." Rather, culture
is something like a massive experiment, where each person embedded in a stream
of experience picks up and uses, or rejects and fashions new, tools for
particular reasons--basically all fitting the mold, "this works better than
that."
Pirsig's trope of Analogy is used to counter Plato's trope of Reason,
"Dialectic--the usurper." (380, Ch. 29) For once we make the rhetorical turn,
of course Plato's use of dialectic and reason is just one more trope. The
difference between the rhetorician and the dialectician is that the
dialectician cannot admit that he is using tropes, analogies, the rhetorical
art. (Indeed, this is why Socrates, and even Plato, was far savvier than the
Western tradition stemming from them has been able to admit.)
I see in Pirsig's simple trope a sophisticated staging point for the
amelioration of all the traditional, Platonic dangers, for all the particular
attacks on Platonism that are represented by American pragmatism. When DMB
says that our analogues grow out of "lived experience," he's emphasizing that
an analogue lives and dies at the hands of its value in a particular
experience. For the most part, most of our tools, most of our culture, is a
stabilized body of experience that we all dip into and participate in with no
problem (what we call "common sense"). What Pirsig and the pragmatists are
calling for is not a tearing down of our culture or tools, but a sea change in
_attitude towards_ the stable body of reason that has proven itself useful in
the course of historical experience, e.g. science.
So when we come to the idea of idealism and "do ideas actually come before
matter?", the first thing to realize is that idealism and scientific
realism/materialism are only options for those still living under the
dichotomous poles of Subject and Object. Which is what everybody says. But
what does that mean? I think it means is that 1) it is difficult to stop
sounding like you're swinging between the two poles, but 2) it's a paradigm
shift in thinking where you just stop seeing the problem of swinging back and
forth. One way is to ask yourself what the practical consequences of a pure
idealism are given successful communication between people. What are they, are
there any rammifications towards how we live our lives if you think that its
all in our minds? No. The theatrical effects of The Matrix are attained only
by positing that there _is_ a reality that exists beyond that which our mind
conceives. But a pure idealism doesn't do that--it just says that the only
thing we can be sure of is not an independent realty, but that stuffs going on
in our head. But if that's the case, then one of the ways stuff functions in
our head is that you can't move rocks or tigers with your mind. The pure
idealism of a Berkeley has no bearing on our practical lives, it is only a
thought experiment.
And the same goes for scientific realism. Even if you are a hard-core, Ayerian
logical positivist who thinks that ought-statements are neither true nor false
and are simply emotive assertions, that still doesn't sidestep the huge public
fight for the triumph of your assertions in the court of public opinion.
Emotivism doesn't make us feel more or less attached to our feelings about
abortion, poor people, affirmative action, God, the Pope, Iraq, Blake, Yeats,
Hollander, Pirsig, Rorty or DMB. It is an idle philosophical theses. The
pragmatism of Pirsig desires a retiring of idle philosophical theses in the
hopes of relaxing our minds of idle anxieties that mean quite little to
problems that matter.
Matt
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