Mark and all MOQers:
Mark said to dmb:
I wouldn't take Marsha too seriously. ...Yes, Relativism is akin to Nihilism
the way it is used by some in this forum. It is indeed the antithesis of
Quality. As Marsha implies in her cat and mouse game, Quality must come from
relativism. That is, something must be better than something else. ...To say
that "the Good" is relative creates an absolute truth which must be used to
measure it. Quality itself is not an absolute truth, but an analogy for a
divine ground (no religiosity intended). ...It is hard to escape from the
"linear" relativistic view of the world since our education is based on such a
notion. If one submits Quality to the Western equations of reality, everything
must be compared.
dmb says:
I don't think there's any danger of taking Marsha too seriously but I do take
the problem of relativism seriously. It's hard to tell what she means by it,
especially since she seems to ascribe it to anyone who uses the word "relative"
or "relatively". Apparently, she thinks relativism is anything that involves
comparisons or relations or any truth that isn't eternally fixed. It's not
clear what she thinks she's defending. It's definitely weird to treat
"relativism" as if it were a good thing or a label to be worn proudly.
I want to press the fact that the charge of "relativism" plays a crucial role
in the ancient struggle between Plato and the Sophists. As Pirsig tells the
story, the Sophists were accused of relativism by Plato and Pirsig says this
accusation is just mean and vicious slander. Disputing that charge and
otherwise taking up the long-lost cause of the Sophists is the main point of
this part of the story. Remember when Phaedrus and the other grad students at
the University of Chicago were assigned Plato's Gorgias?
"Socrates recognizes the potential force of sophistical rhetoric, and he is
concerned that if the goal of rhetoric is simply to persuade people about a
certain vision of 'the good', it might be used to appeal to the emotions
instead of to reason - in a manner that will lead the polis away from 'true
knowledge', rather than toward it. The most powerful element in society would
then be free to control the way the good is defined and embodied in that
society's laws. In short, the sophist's rhetoric could be used to promote the
most robust and destructive sort of relativism, one where the good is
determined by little more than the accidents of power and convention. Socrates
thus finds it necessary to silence Gorgias in short order and, as 'Phaedrus'
saw it, turn Gorgias's rhetorical art into an object that he can then cut to
pieces with his well-honed analytic knife." (David Granger, "John Dewey, Robert
Pirsig and the Art of Living", 46)
Please notice how Granger is using the word "relativism" here. He's talking
about the kind of relativism with which the Sophists were charged and he
describes it as "the most robust and destructive sort of relativism, one where
the good is determined by little more than the accidents of power and
convention.". Granger is talking about the problem of relativism in ZAMM as it
relates to Plato's vicious slander but we also see very similar complaints
about 20th century relativism in Lila.
In chapter 22 of Lila, Pirsig tells us about "twentieth century relativists"
like Franz Boas. "Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to
interpret values" because "cultures are unique historical patterns which
contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other
cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific
empiricism", Pirsig says, "became popular because it was a ferocious instrument
for the dominance of intellect over society" and because it was a good weapon
against Victorian prejudice toward other cultures. The problem, as we all know
by now, "is that subject-object science has no provision for morals.
Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective
reality. ...From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a
completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing
is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery
."
Now, obviously, Plato and Boas are separated by a language, an ocean and a
couple dozen centuries and yet we find that both of them assert that "the
truth" has nothing to do with people's feelings and opinions. True knowledge
isn't about emotions or the accidents of power and convention, the ancient
dialecticians said. Morals and values have no objective reality, the 20th
century scientists said, they're just unique historical patterns that are
scientifically meaningless and about which we can make no judgements. These
ancients and moderns have very different ideas about truth. They even come from
the two main rival schools in philosophy; rationalism and empiricism. And yet
they both have this idea that the truth is separate from everyday experience
and common sense opinions. They both take the view that reality is distinct
from appearance and can only be accessed by specialists like themselves.
"Universal law would becomes the order of the day, while the claims of
appearance and opinion - issuances from the realm of the Good or the realm of
Quality - would now be treated with great suspicion. It must have been here
then, concluded 'Phaedrus', that 'the classic mind, for the first time, took
leave of its romantic origins and said, 'The Good and the True are not
necessarily the same'. This meant that Quality and the commonplace world would
no longer be trusted as the primary means of establishing the True. The old
mythos was replaced by a new one as the veracity of everyday lived experience
was made dubious and the primacy of abstract universals began to take root."
(David Granger 47)
"It is not hard to understand why Phaedrus had identified so strongly with the
plight of the sophists. Their defeat at the hands of the dialecticians was also
his own. For they both fought to uphold the idea that truth is a species of the
good, "a static intellectual pattern WITHIN a larger entity called Quality', as
Pirsig puts it (Lila 364). Additionally, they believed that reason is not
'value free', but rather logically subordinate to the good as a function of the
overarching Quality (ZMM 323)." (Granger 48)
Fighting to uphold the idea that truth is an intellectual species of the good
is to fight AGAINST charges of relativism, against Platonism, against
scientific objectivity, against the appearance-reality distinction and against
excessive abstractionism of any kind. To say the MOQ supports relativism is to
repeat Plato's slander or even to take sides with the kind of value-free
objectivity that says morals and values are meaningless expressions of emotion
or mere accidents of history. To say the MOQ is a form of relativism is to
repeat the Absolutist's slander against James too, who originally said that
"truth is a species of the good". Calling Pirsig a relativist is not only
philosophically incorrect and inconsistent with the drama of the story, it's
also kind of insulting.
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