Comments on Confessions of a Fallen Priest

The notion of intellectual synthesis as a method for the improvement of any given theory has become increasingly questionable to me since leaving institutional education. Whilst shifting between contexts and ideas to understand and explain experience is something I engage in and support, the continual exercise of intellectual synthesis seems a little academic and generally unnecessary. I realise this places me outside of general philosophical discourse.

In defence of the method, the positive consequences of intellectual synthesis are the creative insights which may occur and the harmonious bringing together of ideas. There is surely evidence of this in Matt's essay. However, the major negative consequences of intellectual synthesis are that the blending process seems to dilute the meaning of each idea and sometimes results in the triumph of the familiar over the new. This may result in a changing of understanding to fit new ideas with old. It is in this latter context that I wrote the comments on Matt's essay.

As you might be able to tell from the title, I am, with heavy heart, relinquishing my place in the sanctuary. I am not sure who first compared the Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) to religion and, though I am sure it was meant despairingly, I find the analogy fitting and use it as an apt description, rather than an off-hand denunciation. Though certainly not as shocking as, say, Bodvar Skutvik or Platt Holden leaving the fold, it is a tad shocking for myself, having been there for all the thoughts and essays and misfired essays I’ve had over the past three years. Though not as vocal in the MoQ Discussion Group (MD) as the two aforementioned "priests," I was a staunch advocate and was in the process of carving out my own little place in the Forum. In fact, my silence for about a year in the MD is part of why I am writing now.

When I got sucked into Richard Rorty’s "philosophy," it was, honestly, quite by accident. Nine months after my first reading of Lila and subsequent conversion to Pirsig’s MoQ, I found myself in a Chicago bookstore on my way out to San Francisco to visit my sister. It was my winter break and my parents and I were traveling by train, so I needed some reading material (at the time I had yet to accumulate the library of books-I’ve-never-read-yet-should-be-reading that I seem to be cursed with now). At the time, I was currently in the phase of Pirsig-acceptance where I was looking to "shore up" Pirsig’s defenses towards mainstream philosophy. That meant, on Pirsig’s own recommendation, reading James in particular and pragmatism in general.

The map of contemporary philosophy was still largely unsketched for me. I kinda’ knew that there were two traditions, loosely identified as Analytic (or Anglo-American) and Continental. I knew Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein were Analytic and the Existentialists were Continental, but that was about all I knew. I assumed pragmatism fit on the Anglo-American side and what little reading I did seemed to confirm that fact, but that didn’t make any sense to me. My first two essays on Pirsig were on the similarities between Pirsig and Continental philosophy. I was very confused on where to turn to.

It was with all that confusion that I found myself in that Chicago bookstore and that is when I stumbled into a book entitled Consequences of Pragmatism. I thought, "Hmm, pragmatism. I need to know more about that and this is about its consequences. Perfect!" And it was by a guy I had heard mentioned in my Contemporary Philosophy class (though it was never exactly explained who he was or what he stood for). So, I naively bought it and got on the train.

I started to read the introduction. It purportedly would explain to me what pragmatism was. Well, I slogged through for about 15 pages and gave up. The author kept using a lot of Greek, Latin, and German and kept referring to people I’d never heard of and things like "technical realism" and "intuitive realism" and "verificationism" and "psychological nominalism." All in all, I didn’t understand a damn word he was saying. I was reminded of Pirsig’s warning in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) about technicians. Rorty certainly appeared to be one.

So, I skipped to one of his essays at the end of the book, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope." This was a lot easier to read and it looked a lot like Pirsig. It referred to people I’d heard of like Plato and Aristotle and Galileo and Kuhn. I was quite happy. Unfortunately, as soon as it started talking about stuff I didn’t understand, I tuned out again. But the seed had been planted: Rorty is a place of at least semi-agreement.

Fast-forward one year. The landscape of contemporary philosophy now looks a lot less fuzzy. I can pick up on where to place new names and terms in the philosophical landscape much easier. I decided to pick up Consequences, again. My library was quite large by this point, but of all the books Consequences was the one that my eyes kept falling to. I just knew there was something important to be discovered in it. So I started reading. And reading. Essay after essay seemed to be pure gold. I found myself turning into a Rortyan.

But the question that always drove me through the essays was, "How does this affect Pirsig?" In some places it was bad, others, not so much. It was difficult to get a handle on exactly how Rorty would view Pirsig, but a clear picture was forming: Rorty himself wouldn’t like Pirsig much at all. Another picture was forming, though. I don’t exactly feel as though Rorty has all the answers. This may seem an innocuous statement. "Of course, Rorty doesn’t have all the answers. Neither does Pirsig." But I once acted like Pirsig did, or at least I thought I could find how Pirsig would formulate all the answers.

As you say, Pirsig doesn’t claim to have all the answers despite the fact that we may sometimes wish he did. He provides a framework in which we can find underlying assumptions in any explanation of reality. He also urges readers to rely on experience to ‘validate’ assumptions empirically.

I think most people go through that stage early in their lives. They have a hero of some sort, maybe God, and then, as a person matures, the hero gets replaced or told to move over and make room. I had never been satisfied with God, but I was never satisfied with Reason alone, either. Then in walked Pirsig with the answer to my prayers. Going through a stage of Godlike figures isn’t bad as long as it’s temporary. Soon Pirsig’s answers were beginning to chafe. Something wasn’t quite right for me.

As I read more and more of Rorty, I came to a realization: Pirsig was doing to me what Plato did to Pirsig. For Pirsig, Plato created the Western philosophical nightmare called "Professional Philosophy," amongst other things. But through Rorty’s eyes, I began to see that Pirsig is attempting the same thing, rather than really fundamentally changing anything.

In the MOQ, philosophy is a species of intellectual patterns of value. As such all philosophy, including the MOQ, can be used as an explanation of experience within limits and when valuable to do so.

Pirsig is not attempting to create a ‘professional philosophy’. By assuming that experience is the starting point of all understanding and that selection based on value is a fundamental element of experience, he makes categories of value (which can be empirically verified) into a system of thought to explain experience. He further states that an understanding of ultimate reality cannot be achieved intellectually - or inorganically, biologically, or socially.

Plato believed that, not only can the ultimate nature of reality be understood, but that understanding it intellectually is the only way to do it.

Therefore, to say that he is attempting what Plato attempted is to seriously misunderstand the MOQ

To turn Pirsig’s eloquent phrase back on him, the halo is gone from Pirsig’s head. This is not to say that I’m still not an avid Pirsig supporter. But I’m finding that the better parts of Pirsig are to be found in ZMM, not Lila. What Rorty has given me are the tools necessary to see and to enunciate what I’ve disliked about Pirsig, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In ZMM, Pirsig introduces an entity called "Quality" to drive his discussion of common cultural problems.

In ZMM, "Quality" is used to point to the pre-intellectual source of experience, experience is reality, not an entity.

He uses it as a point of entry into very illuminating discussions of practical, down-to-earth problems such as technology and mental "stuckness." Pirsig introduces helpful redescriptions of old words like "gumption" and "care." And all along the way of Pirsig’s Chautauqua is a general description of what he calls "secondary America." His discourse on these subjects are very interesting and always with an eye towards everyday life.

The transition from ZMM to Lila is the transition from insights about Quality to the Metaphysics of Quality, from edifying, post-metaphysical philosophy to systematic, metaphysico-epistemological philosophy (not that he didn’t show tendencies of both in both books). Pirsig created some very helpful tools in ZMM including "Quality," the "romantic/classic" division, and the "Church of Reason," among others. In Lila, however, Pirsig moves from trying to dissolve the Kantian value spheres (Art, Science, and Morality) to trying to re-systematize them. Pirsig, in Lila, attempts to further his repudiation of the Kantian system of philosophy all the while continuing the Kantian project of systematizing and, like Kant, enthrones his own system as ultimate arbiter between the spheres.

Again, the MOQ is an intellectual pattern of value, and as such postulates an explanation of experience. In the MOQ, intellectual patterns change in response to Quality so there is nothing ultimate about it.

In fact, Pirsig's ambivalent relation to Kant is possibly one of the most interesting facets about Pirsig's thought.

I would suggest that we read Kant as Pirsig’s greatest teacher and primary influence, a man that Pirsig wanted so desperately to overcome, yet ends up ambivalently reinforcing.

Kant postulated the prior existence of an objective ‘thing in itself’ and the necessity of ‘a priori’ concepts innate in all humans. Neither of these postulates are reinforced in the MOQ.

We find Pirsig openly borrowing some of Kant's tools and making some of the same fundamental moves as the master chess player.And yet, at least in ZMM, Pirsig's project is almost entirely anti-Kantian. What I want to suggest is that Pirsig is being a good philosopher when he is edifying and recontextualizing, not when he's systematic and logically arguing. Pirsig the Rhetorician and Cultural Critic, not Pirsig the Platonic Dialectician.

As described above, the fundamental reality of the MOQ and that of Plato are very different. Also, both rhetoric and dialectic are useful methods within limits, there is no need to reject one in favour of the other.

It is important, however, for the MoQ to shirk Kant as soon as possible because the usual interpretation of Kant is that he’s the key modern representative of the evil of Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM). Kant was the first great Professional Philosopher, finally living Plato's dream. He set the intellectual world into separate spheres (Art, Science, and Morality) and set Philosophy as their adjudicator. Philosophy was the judge that was looked to when an interdisciplinary problem arose. Is it ethical to clone babies? Well, Philosophy, step in and tell us, since Morals and Science are eternally separate spheres.

Philosophers since Kant have either tried to reinforce these separate value spheres (like Hegel and Habermas) or they have tried to dissolve them (like Nietzsche and Rorty). And here comes Pirsig. Pirsig admires Kant's formidable defense of Philosophy, but smells something fishy. Pirsig initially, in ZMM, seems to dissolve the Kantian value spheres. This is where the original Quality insight comes in. But then in Lila, Pirsig, overcome by what Richard Bernstein calls "Cartesian Anxiety" (the inexplicable fear one experiences if your a foundationalist without a foundation), erects a new hierarchy that, once again, enthrones Philosophy. Science, Art, and Morality are all connected now, but they still must be adjudicated between.

Philosophy is not enthroned by the MOQ, static intellectual patterns are simply the most highly evolved patterns of value. Philosophy is a set of those patterns, so is science, and postmodernism.

In the MOQ, value is the fundamental empirical reality. As such, science, art and morality are patterns of value and empirically verifiable. There is no need to adjudicate.

And the Philosophical interpretation of the MoQ is what does the adjudication. But even in ZMM, Pirsig compromises his attempt to dissolve the value spheres by calling his project a "Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world." He’s here echoing Kant when Kant suggested that he was performing a Copernican inversion.

The problem as Rorty sees it is that an inversion, be it Pirsig’s inversion of SOM, Kant’s inversion of Cartesian epistemology, Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism, or de Man’s inversion of the "metaphysics of presence," still plays by the same rules as what was inverted. It would represent "merely one more inversion of a traditional philosophical position - one more ‘transvaluation of all values’ that nevertheless remains within the range of alternatives specified by ‘the discourse of philosophy.’" (italics Rorty’s)

I suggest that we get rid of this continuity between Pirsig and Kant. I think this continuity comes from two sources: the desire for a foundation and the distinction between appearance and reality. Rorty points the finger of blame for both at Plato. Plato, reacting against the supposed "relativism" of the Sophists, tries to find absolute certainty for our knowledge by putting our backs up against something hard. He suggests that when we apprehend the Realm of the Forms we have knowledge of what’s really real. When we deal with the Realm of the Senses, we only have opinions of what appears to be real. Pirsig follows Rorty in fingering Plato for causing many of the apparent problems of philosophy. However, as soon as he finishes condemning Plato for creating SOM, he suggests that what’s really real is Quality.

The MOQ says that what is "really real" is experience, from which everything else is deduced. The deductions all begin with a sense of value. The valuations are real, and the deductions are real, patterns of value are real.

SOM appears to be the Truth, but really its Quality. Pirsig seems to want to get rid of the distinction between objective and subjective, but in trying Pirsig revives the distinction between appearance and reality, the distinction that, according to Rorty, has given us the entire misconceived tradition of Western metaphysics. The appearance/reality distinction is the distinction that allows us to say that what is objective is real and what is subjective is whatever you like. This is what Pirsig rails against for large parts of ZMM, but when Pirsig creates Quality as a third entity, and situates it back behind subjects and objects, he creates what’s real (Quality) as opposed to what’s apparent (subjects and objects). The seeds are sown for Pirsig’s systematic metaphysics in ZMM.

The MOQ says appearance is static reality, the source of which is undifferentiated experience, Dynamic Quality. Neither is more ‘real’ than the other, they are complementary. If you want to harbour the idea that there is a reality outside of experience which could be the ‘real’ source of appearances, feel free, but the MOQ does not support that.

What I suggest is that we read this out of Pirsig, that we follow through on Pirsig’s pragmatist arc and fully pragmatize him. I suggest that Pirsig take DeWeese’s advice and refuse to enter the arena. Pirsig would then follow the pragmatists’ suggestion that we need to abjure our search for ahistorical Truth, stop using Reason as a surrogate for God, and stop thinking of Moral Obligation as ahistorical like Kant thought of it.

The MOQ does not support ahistorical truth. Truth is an explanation of experience, the quality of which is known by the intellectual harmony it produces. As such, intellectual harmony changes with history, if history is taken to be as a word for personal or collective experience.

Reason in the MOQ is a species of intellectual patterns of value. God is a concept within static intellectual quality referring to many different aspects of experience. One is not surrogated for another in the MOQ.

In the MOQ, moral obligation has its basis in evolution, as such moral obligation evolves and is not ahistorical.

Doing this would mean making him look a lot more like Rorty, particularly Rorty’s antiessentialism and postmodernism. As an antiessentialist, we wouldn’t be able to say that there is anything like an ahistorical essence to Quality. I think this is what Pirsig’s driving at when he leaves Quality undefined. If it’s undefined, how can it have an essence? If we take Quality to be the opposite of an essence, we won’t be tempted say things like,

"It is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient. This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures. It’s true for all people at all times, now and forever....

The MOQ is based on experience. Experience has yet to demand the explanation that germs are more highly evolved than humans. I think the statement is intended to refute the claim that experience is entirely relative to culture. Culture in the MOQ is social patterns of value plus intellectual patterns of value. Germs and humans are biological patterns of value. Within the level of biological patterns of value, experience shows that humans are more highly evolved organisms than germs. If it is ever of higher intellectual quality to say otherwise, the "now and forever" statement will be incorrect, that is to say, it will have low intellectual quality.

If we are tempted, we can simply respond with Pirsig’s discourse on Western ghosts. This means that we interpret the static levels of patterns, with all the accompanying moral codes, as contingent, evolving out of history in a Hegelian, dialectical fashion.

In fact, I take the main point of Pirsig's discourse on Western ghosts to be his exchanging of "discovery" metaphors of truth for "making" metaphors. Pirsig says that what’s asinine is that, "We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words." He continues, "Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention." This last statement is a bit funny sounding. If "the whole blessed thing is a human invention," then not only is the idea that we didn’t invent the laws of nature or logic an invention, so is the idea that we did invent "the whole blessed thing." This leads me to believe that Pirsig would follow along when Rorty suggests,

"it is important that we who are accused of relativism stop using the distinction between finding and making, discovery and invention, objective and subjective. We should not let ourselves be described as subjectivists.... For we cannot formulate our point in terms of a distinction between what is outside us and what is inside us. We must repudiate the vocabulary our opponents use, and not let them impose it on us. To say that we must repudiate this vocabulary is to say, once again, that we must avoid Platonism and metaphysics, in that wide sense of metaphysics in which Heidegger said that metaphysics is Platonism."

The MOQ is not a Platonic metaphysics. Metaphysics in the restricted sense that Rorty is using it does not apply to the MOQ, or any other metaphysics which contains within it the ability to evolve with experience.

If we treat Pirsig as an antiessentialist, we will also want to treat him as a postmodern. Following Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition is an "incredulity toward metanarratives." Rorty suggests that we eschew metanarratives, those narratives which are behind all other narratives, the One, True narrative which all things should be contextualized, in favor of local narratives that last only as long as they are useful. If we read Pirsig this way, we will see the MoQ, not as a metaphysics "true for all time and all people, now and forever," but as one possible narrative to contextualize things, such as doctor/patient relations.

I think that fits exactly with the place intellectual patterns of value have in the MOQ.

What I’m suggesting is that we ignore the parts where Pirsig says things like, "[Quality] is more real than the stove," and emphasize the parts were he says things like, "the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive truth." We cheer Pirsig on when he heroizes the Sophists, Poincaré, and James and villianizes Aristotle, Plato, and Boas and we politely cough when he argues that "the Metaphysics of Quality not only passes the logical positivists’ tests for meaningfulness, it passes them with the highest marks." Pirsig is at his best when he’s recontextualizing the past and commenting on such disparate topics as insanity, gumption, and the Hippies. He’s at his worst when he’s creating a metaphysics and arguing with his enemies, thus giving validity to their objections by accepting some of their premises.

The MOQ sees all premises as intellectual deductions from experience. Deductions are made by a sense of value, and as such have use within limits. Therefore, the MOQ says that one doesn’t need to reject all deductions, premises and assumptions, one simply needs to be aware that they are deductions, premises and assumptions. If you fail to see this as a fundamental position of Pirsig, it may explain why you find issues with the MOQ.

I tend to think that Pirsig wouldn’t mind this misreading. Compare Rorty’s "philosophical narrativism" with Pirsig on how to read philosophy:

"...finding a description of all the things characteristic of your time of which you most approve, with which you unflinchingly identify...."

"...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."

Pirsig would seem to agree with Rorty when Rorty says, "We need to tell ourselves detailed stories about the mighty dead in order to make our hopes of surpassing them concrete." This is what Pirsig is doing when he describes Plato’s synthesis of the Sophists and Cosmologists in ZMM and Boas’ role in the genesis of American cultural anthropology in Lila. He’s making concrete what we need to surpass.

"Paradigms of imagination are the new, metaphorical use of old words (e.g., gravitas), the invention of neologisms (e.g., "gene"), and the colligation of hitherto unrelated texts (e.g., Hegel and Genet {Derrida}, Donne and Laforgue {Eliot}, Aristotle and the Scriptures {the Schoolmen}, Emerson and the Gnostics {Bloom}, Emerson and the skeptics {Cavell}, cockfights and Northrop Frye {Geertz}, Nietzsche and Proust {Nehamas})."

"Successful colligation of this sort is an example of rapid and unconscious reweaving: one lays one set of beliefs on top of another and finds that, magically, they have interpenetrated and become warp and woof of a new, vividly polychrome, fabric. I take this as analogous to what happens in dreams, and that analogy as the point of Davidson's remark that ‘Metaphor is the dreamwork of language.’"

This is his suggestion for strong misreadings: the laying of a framework or vocabulary on another's vocabulary and seeing what pops out. The use of strong misreadings is part of an attempt to heroize and villianize certain thinkers or groups in the construction of your own narrative of what’s going on. Pirsig heroizes Poincaré and the Sophists in ZMM and James and Sidis in Lila. He villianizes Plato and Aristotle in ZMM and Boas and the Victorians in Lila. He also breathes new, metaphorical life into old words all the time (e.g., Quality, morality, gumption, mu, Church of Reason).

There is a further reason the Pirsig of ZMM might favor my interpretation. Rorty describes a picture of argumentation that Pirsig would seem to agree with:

"The trouble with arguments against the use of a familiar and time-honored vocabulary is that they are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary. They are expected to show that central elements in that vocabulary are ‘inconsistent in their own terms’ or that they ‘deconstruct themselves.’ But that can never be shown. Any argument to the effect that our familiar use of a familiar term is incoherent, or empty, or confused, or vague, or ‘merely metaphorical’ is bound to be inconclusive and question-begging

As an illustration of the circular, self-justifying nature of alternative modes of thought, I would illustrate two positions: the Platonic dialectical-foundation position and the Rortyan recontextualization position. These two positions are on the nature of intellectual engagement and so receive special notice. The Platonic tradition argues that for intellectual discourse to occur, we must agree on terms and then argue various positions and platforms according to these terms. At the end of an engagement, some sort of consensus will have occurred given the singular use of terms and the rigorousness and thoroughness of argumentation. If consensus has not occurred, it is only because of equivocation in terminology, sloppy reasoning, or plain old stubbornness. The Platonic dialectic is the basis for logical argumentation. The Rortyan position holds that beliefs are changed causally, not through "rational" argumentation. The proper "method" for intellectual engagement is recontextualization. The private position of a person is recontextualized within a narrative of history by which the private position is shown to have an inadequate understanding of the patterns of the past and the needs of the present. Positions are not so much engaged as they are circumvented by shifting the grounds of debate into one’s own private vocabulary. Consensus is reached if you can persuade the other person that their understanding is not as useful as yours.

Recontextualisation as a method of intellectual engagement is completely in agreement with the MOQ. ‘Truth’ is a species of good. In Lila's Child, Pirsig refers to the hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant as an analogy of the argument between idealists and materialists. The MOQ says that the context for the ‘physical’ sciences is different to the context of the ‘social’ sciences. It is useful in chemistry to consider reality to be objective. It is useful to an anthropologist to consider reality to be subjective. Problems occur when you try to reduce one to the other. If you collapse them both into Quality, both positions can be contained within a larger structure with no contradiction. This is clearly pointed out by Pirsig in Lila.

The "engagement" of these two positions is, obviously, quite problematical. The Platonic tradition demands agreement of terms and dialectical argumentation, while the Rortyan position demurs and asks for circumvention of opposing terms and persuasiveness of narrative. So how do these two positions engage? If you’re a Platonist, they engage like normal: logical dialectic. If you’re a Rortyan, they don’t like normal: the arguments are circumvented and then recontextualized. The Platonist would dialectically engage the Rortyan by showing that dialectical reason is supreme and/or needed for rational discourse to take place. The Rortyan would shift the terms and show that dialectical reason has given us the entire misconceived tradition of Western metaphysics. The two positions cannot do anything but find recourse in their own methods. If either one were to alternate to another method to enshrine the original method, then that undermines the entire effort by showing that there is another method at work behind the original. Both "methods" are necessarily self-justifying.

Arguments can be seen as tending to "force" one static pattern upon everyone else. The purpose of an argument is to align everyone along the same static pattern, to force them down the same dialectical path. Pirsig makes this same discovery when the Professor asks his personal opinion about cookery:

"His mind races on and on, through the permutations of the dialectic, on and on, hitting things, finding new branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger at each new discovery of the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this ‘art’ called dialectic. ... Phædrus’ mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try and understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it."

This is why Pirsig favors rhetoric over Platonic dialectic, why he constructs narratives of history, and why he should have taken DeWeese’s advice.

As stated above, in the MOQ, both rhetoric and dialectic are useful intellectual patterns of value within limits. There is no need to reject one in favour of the other. Pirsig’s point was that rhetoric is the parent of dialectic, the dialecticians didn’t see that.

One of my favorite instances of Pirsig recontextualizing is when he talks about the Sophists in ZMM. We first get Plato's story on what the Sophists are up to (no good), and then Pirsig recontextualizes the situation by pointing out that the Sophists were sometimes named as ambassadors and that Socrates and Plato were called Sophists at times.³¹ In this way, Pirsig recontextualizes the narrative from the way Plato had it (the Sophists were spinners of lies and Socrates came and showed everyone the Truth) into something else: "Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future of man."

That's an example of Pirsig recontextualizing, but I chose this example for another reason: it shows Pirsig favoring recontextualization over the dialectic. Pirsig recontextualizes the Sophists to show the flaw in Plato and the dialecticians project, but notice that he is not involved in dialectic. Recontextualization would be better called "rhetoric." Pirsig doesn't engage Plato and dialectically and argumentatively show that Plato's cooptation of the Sophists and use of "dialectic - the usurper" was in the end flawed. Pirsig, rather, recontextualizes the situation to show this, thereby failing to engage Plato in a way he would have found acceptable (by Plato's own dialectical lights). That's why Pirsig describes his battle with the Chairman as a battle between rhetoric and dialectic (even though Pirsig, at the time, seems to be involved in a dialectical argument). The only way to show that Pirsig's suggested narrative is lacking is to beat Pirsig at his own game: go into intellectual history, where we get the raw materials for our narratives, and draw us a narrative that shows that Pirsig is missing something, shows that Pirsig has not understood the past, nor the needs of the present. In particular, Pirsig’s use of recontextualization over dialectic not only suggests his preference for it, but that he considers it the preferred tool. As he says, "Dialectic ... came itself from rhetoric." I suggest that when Pirsig engages in dialectical argumentation, we read him as reaching for that tool (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly), rather than as buying into the Platonic notion of an ahistorical Truth that only dialectical argumentation can get at.

What I want to suggest is that Pirsig would sympathize with my (mis)reading of him. I think he would approve of my colligation of himself and Rorty. I think his crucial mistake was buying into the Aristotelian idea that metaphysics is the First Philosophy. What makes me think this is the ease to which I think you can dispense with metaphysics and still talk about Quality, still have all the freshness of air, the fragrant smell of new, Dynamic directions and metaphors. I think that we can do without metaphysics and still hold onto his crucial insights about Quality.

To think that you can do without metaphysics is to mistake the content of metaphysics for its function. It may be possible to do without explicit and sustained contemplation of metaphysics but if the function of metaphysics is defined as ‘the conceptual organisation of experience based on underlying assumptions’ then it is something you only do without in a state of enlightenment. The MOQ recognises the assumptions for what they are, which is why it keeps Dynamic Quality as the pre-intellectual reality which is prior to all assumptions. If you deny its function but accept its content you are blindly accepting the metaphysics implicit in the mythos, this is okay, most people do.

Yes, but remember that Quality is the undifferentiated experience from which ‘we’ are deduced, differentiation is later conceived of as a judgement.

The various static patterns we’ve experienced is the context from which we make our choices. They are the base set of values we have. Discussion of how the MoQ helps moral judgments has faced problems because people see Quality in different things. I think this is exactly the point. Our contingent circumstances (read: our static patterns) are going to condition us to see Quality in different places. The chief contribution Pirsig had in Lila to overcome this so-called, seeming "relativism" was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the striving for excellence that cannot be named, because as soon as you do, you’ve condemned it to staticness, as an ahistorical truth. Dynamic Quality is the new metaphor over the horizon, it’s the invention of a new context that helps us see the low Quality of our old context. Dynamic Quality is not absolute, objective Truth. That would be naming it. That would be making the same mistake that Plato made, which may have been a good idea at the time, but one we now need to overcome.

Pirsig’s thought, in this way, is inherently Oedipal. The goal of excellence is to overcome the past, the low Quality of those that have preceded you. It is a constant dialectical, dialogical interplay that yields up new insights and allows you to move forward, up and beyond the contingent past. There is no endpoint, no solid footing. There are only new contexts that can, nay must, be overcome. This is why I want to get rid of metaphysics. The goal of metaphysics, the onto-theological tradition (to use Heidegger’s term), the tradition handed down to us by Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Kant, is to enshrine and hypostatize Dynamic Quality (in the guise of the Good, Truth, God, Reason, Science, etc.), and that is exactly what we must resist.

Exactly, but the MOQ term of Dynamic Quality refers to that which cannot be intellectually understood or defined. Yet it remains a metaphysics nonetheless.

When Whitehead said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, Rorty says that Whitehead’s point "was that we do not call an inquiry ‘philosophical’ unless it revolves around some of the distinctions which Plato drew." Pirsig agrees with this assessment when he says, "Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it." Dewey called this stamp "that whole nest and brood of Greek dualisms." We must repudiate the Platonic tradition, rid ourselves of metaphysics, which brokers on the Platonic distinction between appearance and reality, and forge ahead with Dynamic Quality. When Pirsig said, "It was time Aristotle got his," I read Pirsig as saying that its time that the entire Platonic tradition got its Oedipal comeuppance.

As described above, I believe that you cannot get rid of metaphysics. Humans live in a universe of assumptions whether you contemplate that or not, whether that universe is explicitly defined or not. One may choose to follow a mystic path to transform this universe through periods of "insanity" or enlightenment but, in MOQ terms, you cannot survive on Dynamic Quality alone, static intellectual patterns will always emerge to organise experience. Those static patterns are the basis for all intellectual distinctions. It is those first assumptions that, I believe, constitute a metaphysics.

3. Defense of the Pragmatized Pirsig (Nihilism, Relativism, and Irrationality)

If we think of Pirsig’s thought as continuous with Rorty’s, as Pirsig’s dissolution of the subject/object distinction as continuous with Rorty’s dissolution of the appearance/reality distinction, Davidson’s scheme/content distinction, Quine’s analytic/synthetic and fact/language distinction, as continuous with Dewey’s attack on that "whole nest and brood of Greek dualisms," Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given, Kuhn’s attack on scientific positivism, Hegel’s historicization of Kant, Wittgenstein’s mocking of "conceptual analysis," "explication of meanings," and "the logic of language," Nietzsche’s proclamation of the "Death of God," Heidegger’s attack on the "metaphysics of presence" and the onto-theological tradition, Habermas’ attack on the "philosophy of subjectivity," Foucault’s attack on the truth/power distinction, Lyotard’s attack on metanarratives, and Derrida’s attack on logocentrism and the "discourse of philosophy," then we will cease to think of Pirsig as constructing a metaphysics that gives us the Truth, as providing a foundation upon which we can construct irrefutable resolutions to all moral dilemmas.

The MOQ does not claim to provide such a foundation. It provides an explanation of experience based on assumptions that are consistent with empirical evidence. The evolutionary morality is based on these assumptions and can be used to support the argument of any moral dilemma. If cosmological evolution does not exist then the hierarchy in the MOQ would not be a viable basis for a moral framework. But if we reject the evolutionary morality and fail to replace it with an alternative we are left with social customs and traditional definitions of what is moral.

Making Pirsig commensurate with Kuhn’s reading of the history of science and Derrida’s reading of the history of philosophy will expose those places where Pirsig falls short. This does not take away from what they did, it merely means we have to improve and move past them.

Yes, improving and moving past is what is meant by evolution, the good they provide in the meantime is static latching.

But making Pirsig continuous with these post-Analytic and post-Nietzschean philosophers, these post-modern philosophers, will take away what many sought in the MoQ: what Nietzsche called "metaphysical comfort."

If we emphasize the "many truths" parts over the "now and forever" parts, some people will begin to suffer from "Cartesian Anxiety."

Perhaps the "now and forever" statement is not supposed to provide metaphysical comfort? You could say it is a statement employing rhetorical language to make a point about biology and society.

"After Nietzsche knocks down any outside interference from God, the attack would be that morals and values are given by society. What's wrong with that, you say? They're completely arbitrary, of course! Enter relativism, the intellectual scourge that has laid waste to our society's foundations for, well, whatever foundation ya' got."

If one thinks that we need a foundation for our morals and knowledge, then one will think that nihilism and relativism is a menace. Rorty however shows us that nihilism and relativism do not really exist.

Or does he show us that if you assume they don’t exist you come up with a better explanation of experience?

One of the first protests that is usually incurred by the call of postmodernism is something like "moral nihilism." The point of this objection is that, with the eschewment of metanarratives, we have no context from which to construct judgments. Another way to put this objection is to say that, if there is nothing intrinsically good about anything, how are we to say that there is any good? This has been the effect of looking at the world in an increasingly mechanistic fashion. Whereas before, Plato asked if there was anything intrinsically good about justice and Aristotle claimed that all things had an inner telos, after Newton and Darwin we are having a harder and harder time thinking these things. But this objection is met simply by the fact that, even though we may get rid of metanarratives and intrinsic values, we do not need to get rid of narratives and relational values.

The MOQ started with the question of whether something has intrinsic value. The objection is met with the explanation that things don’t have value, value is the source of the things.

The call for antiessentialism is the desire for us to think of things as numbers. Following Rorty, meditating on the number 42 will not reveal an essence. The only thing it could reveal is its relations to other numbers. To describe 42 is to say things like: 20 plus 22, 84 divided by 2, 21 times 2, greater than 40 but less than 42.6, etc. But none of these descriptions seems any more deserving of the title "essence" then any of the others. Whatever numbers are, they seem to be relational and Rorty suggests we look at everything else as being relational. Nihilism implies that no contexts, narratives, or relations exist. It’s not that none exist, it’s just that we have to choose which ones we use. After this response, the anxious Cartesian might ask how we can tell which context, which narrative, which relation, is the right one. The reply is that we argue from our inhierited traditions and context i.e. our ethnos. This leads to an attack on Rorty’s avowed ethnocentrism, which I will return to after dealing with relativism.

To begin again, following Rorty and the pragmatists (who range from Dewey and James to (early) Wittgenstein and Nietzsche), the notion that there is Truth or that there is a Reality that must have Truth correspond to it is not a profitable topic of discussion. There are things as truth and knowledge, but truth is simply a property of sentences and knowledge is something gained by praxis, not by determining the boundaries of it, or simply meditating on what it might be. The pragmatist believes that the truth of our assertions is gained by our relation to a community i.e. by solidarity.

"Common sense" is gained by our relation to a community. Truth is a high quality explanation of experience gained by an aesthetic arrangement of symbols of experience which is known by the intellectual harmony it produces.

The ant-pragmatist believes that truth has an intrinsic, antecedent nature that we must be brought into relation with, that we must correspond to it. As Rorty says, "as a partisan of solidarity, his [the pragmatist’s] account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one."

"‘Relativism is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called "relativists" are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought."

This conclusion is arrived at by assuming that a person and not value is the starting point of all experience. If one assumes that, along with the assumption that nothing is intrinsically good, then the only place to go for a notion of what is good is to someone else. If enough people think something is good, then it must be!

Rorty goes on to say that "if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute." A common refutation of relativism is the claim that if you really believed it, you wouldn't be able to do anything because you'd never be able to make a choice between A and B because there is no difference that makes a difference between them. For instance, say you’re standing at the refrigerator trying to choose between beer A and beer B. If there is absolutely no difference between the two, then your choosing of which beer to drink is impaired. Further, because you are a true relativist, you can’t even see the difference in value between drinking a beer or not drinking a beer. This continues on for all conceivable choices, such as leaving the fridge or not. However, I and most other people can make the choice between beer A and beer B and drinking or not drinking beer. A culture decides on matters of morals and values according to its inherited traditions, a culture's final vocabulary. From this we are able to say that the Greeks use of slavery was bad, the Nazis’ extermination of Jews was evil, and Nietzsche's bashing of democracy was pig-headed.

This brings us to ethnocentrism and Rorty whole-heartedly agrees that he is and we all are. However, we in the West (particularly America) are a particular kind of ethnocentrist: we are ethnocentrists who despise ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is a closed shop, reactionary-type mentality. Change is despised. Rorty says, however, that our culture is better described as "anti-anti-ethnocentrism." He says, "We would rather die than be ethnocentric, but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that one would rather die than share certain beliefs." So anti-ethnocentrism is part of our tradition, but we're caught in the mudhole of thinking that this itself is ethnocentric, so we swing back to being anti-anti-ethnocentric, which poses the problem of becoming little cultural, windowless monads that merely condescends the rest of the world.

Rorty argues, I think persuasively, that some cultures might be like this, but that ours is not. We have a tradition of pluralism, a tradition of openness. Our anti-anti-ethnocentrism "does not say that we are trapped within our monad or our language, but merely that the well-windowed monad we live in is no more closely linked to the nature of humanity or the demands of rationality than the relatively windowless monads which surround us."

So, when Pirsig says, "Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life," pragmatists can only cheer him on, but not because one culture is closer to the Moral Truth then another.

The MOQ simply states that a culture that allows and supports freedom of thought is superior to one that does not.

It is only because we can compare various cultures with ours and see if theirs seem self-destructive. Over the course of history, the West has found some traditions to be useful and others not. Many traditions historically in the American culture have helped in the evolution of life (liberalism, republicanism) and some have not (slavery, supremacies of various types). Americans have been in the process of removing these undesirable traditions. The removal process hinges on democracy, which leads us to believe that democracy is fairly integral to the evolution of life. Hence, we should feel pretty solid about the desire for democracies in all nations. Some might respond that, without real, foundational solid footing, we are simply arbitrarily privileging our own view. But to privilege any view, be it ours, another cultures, or some supposed ahistorical position is to beg the question against everybody else. As Rorty says, "Nobody is being any more arbitrary than anybody else. But that is to say that nobody is being arbitrary at all. Everybody is just insisting that the beliefs and desires they hold most dear should come first in the order of discussion. That is not

So, to ask whether the pragmatist is right to treat truth as a property, to pull off the Platonic goal of trying to correspond with some antecedent Reality, to ask, as Rorty says, "whether the pragmatist view of truth ... is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for." A post-Philosophical culture is one in which we no longer care about whether we are corresponding to Reality, whether we are impinging on someone's natural God-given rights, or whether we are following our ahistorical, true-for-all-time duty to humankind. What is cared about is the liberal goal of the minimization of cruelty, the proliferation of vocabularies to find new tools to cope with reality.

The liberal goal of the minimisation of cruelty is derived from the philosophical principles of liberalism e.g. the natural goodness of humans. You cannot escape fundamental assumptions, although you can pretend they aren’t made.

Following aesthetic pluralists like Jonathon Edwards, Emerson, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Whitehead, Rorty desires a poetized culture, a culture whose vocabulary "revolves around the notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation." Specifically, philosophy (rather than capital "P" Philosophy, which we have the Platonic tradition to thank for) wouldn't think of itself as a distinct Fach, a distinct discipline with distinct methods and problems, but rather as Sellars thought of it: "an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term." Philosophers would, rather, be "all-purpose intellectuals who were ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else."

As one strawman is burned, another one takes its place. Perhaps it is the attempted synthesis of every explanation one values into "one truth, one perspective, one answer" that is the problem, not Philosophy or Philosophers.

I think Pirsig, with his suggestions about Quality, is urging us in the direction of this post-Philosophical, post-SOM culture. His emphasis on how SOM has no provision for Dynamic Quality and that a post-SOM culture would is the suggestion that a post-SOM culture would be a culture whose vocabulary "revolves around the notion of metaphor." Dynamic Quality is a metaphor for the call for new metaphors. It is the suggestion that we should allow ourselves to think in new ways. But the eschewment of discussions of Reason, Truth, Knowledge, Realty, etc., lead some to believe that what postmoderns want is irrationality. By saying that there’s nothing philosophically interesting about truth outside of statements about a post-Philosophical, literary culture is to say that if a pragmatic view of truth is true, it simply points out that the only way I (or anyone else) can justify their views is with their own final vocabulary.

In other words, post-Philosophical culture will duck questions into the essential nature of Truth and Falsity; it will discharge the Platonic tradition as leading to a dead-end. This typically brings the charge of irrationality. The charge of irrationality is usually leveled at historicists who do not bow down to an ahistorical, universal Reason. As Rorty says,

"The real and passionate opposition is over the question of whether loyalty to our fellow-humans presupposes that there is something permanent and unhistorical which explains why we should continue to converse in the manner of Socrates, something which guarantees convergence to agreement."

The Platonic tradition, with its call for universal Reason, aims at stopping the conversation. The aim is to solve a problem by finding its universal Truth, thereby ending discourse as all opinions have converged (at, presumably, the Truth). The historicist, however, notices that the conversation the Platonic tradition is involved in has been going on for quite some time and has given no signs of letting up. She recognizes that all conversations are contingent and the pragmatic historicist then decides that this conversation is probably best avoided so more profitable topics can be discussed.

It is unclear how this issue can be resolved, however. After the historicist refuses to argue about universal Reason, she gets branded as a relativist or irrationalist. The historicist, on the other hand, adds this dispute on top of the pile as another example of the futility of arguing over universal Reason. As Rorty says, "I think that the decision has to be made simply by reading the history of philosophy and drawing a moral."

On irrationality, I think Pirsig would feel comfortable with the defense the pragmatists give. The static/Dynamic division of Quality gives reality (i.e. history), as I noted earlier, a distinctly Oedipal flavor. The progress of the MoQ (and history) is from static to Dynamic. As Pirsig notes in ZMM, "To go outside the mythos is to become insane...." In Lila translation, it means to go outside the static patterns of your culture i.e. to be Dynamic. Indeed, Pirsig says in Lila,

"When an insane person - or a hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture - advances some explanation of the universe that is completely at odds with current scientific reality, we do not have to believe he has jumped off the end of the empirical world. He is just a person who is valuing intellectual patterns that, because they are outside the range of our own culture, we perceive to have very low quality."

Metaphors, as breaking the literal meaning of static cultural patterns, on this account, would be a form of insanity. Irrationality, on this account, would thus be a charge leveled at those who are following Dynamic Quality. Following Davidson and Rorty, on this conception the "irrational" would be "essential to intellectual progress." The post-Philosophical culture is a culture that attempts to foster Dynamic Quality, a culture that is ironic towards its final vocabulary, a culture that tries to proliferate many different ways of speaking and describing things.

Rorty, however, suggests that, rather than call Quality and a post-Philosophical culture irrational, we adopt another meaning for what counts as rational, one that happens to be available:

"It names a set of moral virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force. These are the virtues which members of a civilized society must possess if the society is to endure. ... On this construction, to be rational is simply to discuss any topic - religious, literary, or scientific - in a way which eschews dogmatism, defensiveness, and righteous indignation."

In this sense, rationality is simply contextualized. A post-Philosophical culture doesn't discard standards or criteria, which is what people would describe as "irrationality." It simply acknowledges the fact that when we appeal to reason, we are not appealing to some ahistorical, universal Reason, but rather to a contingent tradition of reasonable discourse.

Yes, reason is an intellectual pattern of value which, within limits, can improve the quality of other intellectual patterns. However, by restating the aesthetic nature of "reason", the MOQ provides a more compelling and edifying motivation to continue man's pursuit for "truth" than "because it's good for winning arguments".

When a culture appreciates this fact it will stop looking for the Truth as something to be matched up with and will instead forge forward itself, playing off its past traditions and fixing them as need be. In a literary, poeticized, Dynamic culture we will still have truthfulness, reasonableness, and moral conduct to our fellow human beings, but all of these things will be based on an intersubjective agreement, on solidarity, not objectivity, on our relations with ourselves, not our relation with something nonhuman.

I translate intersubjective agreement as "common sense". That is, ideas that have a lot of social approval. I think it is better to allow intellectual patterns of value to be valued by the intellectual harmony which they produce rather than popularity. Of course, to really transform culture, it is the "common sense" that has to be transformed, but I maintain that the initial valuation can be made outside of a social context. For example, the MOQ Forum is an example of a wide ranging group of people in many different cultures who have found intellectual harmony in the MOQ. In this case it is experience, Dynamic Quality, that has provided the basis for a valuation, not our social patterns.

The most telling fear about the lack of metaphysical comfort awaiting them in a post-Philosophical culture is the fear that we are alone, on our own. Rorty says this:

"The urge to make philosophy into Philosophy is to make it the search for some final vocabulary, which can somehow be known in advance to be the common core, the truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be advanced in its place. This is the urge which the pragmatist thinks should be repressed, and which a post-Philosophical culture would have succeeded in repressing.

"The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form ‘There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.’ This is a hard thought to live with....

"This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together - the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions."

This is hard to live with at first, but it is something that Rorty thinks we have been in the process of doing and something we can follow through on. A post-Philosophical culture will give up the groundless desire for something to condemn the evil acts of tyrants; that even when they win, something will prove them wrong. In this striking passage I think something wonderful appears: in repudiating this nonhuman condemnation, Rorty is forcing us to take responsibility for condemning the tyrants and torturers. The fact is, if any of the horrific dystopias existed, like Orwell's 1984 or Zamyatin's We, we would be pretty powerless. If anything was constructed that had such enormous power and control over everyone, it would be the end of humanity as we know it today, whether something "out there" condemned it or not. But Rorty's message is not one of despair, its one of liberation. He's telling us that we must be watchful over ourselves; no one else is going to do it for us. We must take control of our lives and make what we can. There's a reason Rorty was a Trotskyite supporter of the Cold War. He feared the Communist realization of 1984 just as much as the next guy. What Rorty makes us realize is that we must hope for a better future. We must take the existing institutions we have and make them better, more liberating and less cruel. We must take the image of 1984 and always remind ourselves of how we do not want to be. And then we must create utopic visions of what we can hope to be and that we can then take strides to become.

Yes, when the good replaces truth as a metaphor for reality, people ask, how will we know what is good? The MOQ should go some way to answering that.

"I shall use the term ‘redemptive truth’ for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist in theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfill the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything - every thing, person, event, idea and poem - into a single context, a context which will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique. It would be the only context that would matter for purposes of shaping our lives, because it would be the only one in which those lives appear as they truly are. To believe in redemptive truth is to believe that there is something that stands to human life as elementary physical particles stand to the four elements - something that is the reality behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret".

Rorty goes on to describe three different phases in human culture: religious, philosophical, and literary. In a religious culture, redemption is sought from some non-human person. In a philosophical culture, redemption is sought by finding out the way things really are, typically described as objectivity. In a literary culture, redemption is sought by exploring the variety of types of human beings. Redemption is sought successively from God, Reality, and other human beings. The thing to see about redemption is that in the first two places, redemption is gained in relation to something non-human, by finding some objective Truth. In a literary culture, redemption is gained by our relations to other human beings.

What my pragmatized Pirsig suggests is that we need to move towards a literary culture. But this is not what the conflicted-Pirsig-from-the-sum-total-of-his-pages might suggest. The interpretation of Pirsig as an essentialist, a Platonic pursuer of Truth, is to suggest that we need a philosophical culture.

Again, I suggest that this is one interpretation which may not be as common as you may think. Fixed truth is replaced by Dynamic Quality as an analogy of reality, this has major implications on any system of thought, including the MOQ.

But Pirsig also links the MoQ with religious mysticism, specifically from the East. Pirsig equates reality to Quality. He identifies us as immediately being in touch with Quality from experience. He then says, "the Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality." Dynamic Quality is pure experience and Dynamic Quality is the telos of Pirsig’s system, it is the desired end point, the carrot pulling us forward.

From a static point of view Dynamic Quality is the goal; from a Dynamic point of view, it is the source. As such, there is no "end point".

What Pirsig is saying is that to intellectualize our position in reality is to come up with a philosophical platform like the MoQ. But all this philosophical platform does for us is point out that we need to sink ourselves into religious mysticism. Pirsig’s suggestion for a culture is a philosophical/religious hybrid.

The MOQ recognises that we cannot escape the intellect, whether we recognise the contingency in our assumptions or not, they are there. They shape the world so deeply, one needs to be ‘insane’ or enlightened to leave them behind. But we can use different assumptions to explain our experience, we can change contexts to resolve seeming paradoxes.

The defender of Pirsig’s hybrid vision might argue that because Pirsig seems to oscillate between retaining redemptive truth and eschewing it, he has conceived of some third, dialectically superior position. As far as I can see, however, no third alternative readily presents itself. Put the Kantian, Philosophical, Redemptive Truth-seeking Pirsig next to my historicized, pragmatic Pirsig and, rather than getting some kind of alternative that has hitherto been unimaginable, we get a kind of incoherent literary/philosophical/religious culture.

An MOQ culture would use intellectual patterns of value to support society in its dominance over biology and use society to support the evolution of intellectual patterns of value.

Pirsig’s cooptation of pragmatism just does not fit with his retainment of a Reality that must be corresponded to.

He quite clearly uses the Enlightenment’s philosophical language in his call for foundations. When Pirsig uses this Enlightenment, Kantian vocabulary, his main goal is to switch us from a materialist metaphysics to a value-centered metaphysics. But when Pirsig talks like a pragmatist, his goal is to get rid of metaphysics, any centering at all. Rather than affirm our solidarity with other human beings, in the end Pirsig reverts to a religious answer to what redemptive truth is by saying that the highest form of Being is our relation to this ineffable, undefined "pureness," to Dynamic Quality. The incoherency comes when Pirsig wants us to correspond to this ineffable other, to somehow know what the good is, now and forever.

Dynamic Quality is knowable only in the sense that there is no knower or known, there is no ‘knowledge’ that lasts. It is not religious, religion is a static pattern of intellectual quality with a lot of social approval. Dynamic Quality is opposed to static quality of any kind.

I think it is best to eschew this part of Pirsig’s vision. In doing this, though, I am not necessarily getting rid of religion. Pirsig’s colligations of the West with the East are some of the more interesting ones. But in a literary culture, these insights would not be privileged in any way. In a literary culture, we would have the freedom to pick and choose are ways and forms of redemption from the entire range of choices. It leaves it up to us. We would no longer believe in redemptive truth, but redemption would instead have to be found in the arms of our fellow human beings, in solidarity rather than objectivity.

We can, however, make Pirsig’s tripartite hybrid coherent with Rortyan pragmatism. From Pirsig’s perspective, religion will appear as existing on the social level. It is a social institution and the explanations it gives are based primarily on authority. However, it is different then other social institutions because it offers redemptive truth. It does this by putting us in relation to a non-human other. The authority that religion claims is gained because of this relation; the authority is ultimately from the non-human other.

This is a good observation, the authority is actually a static social pattern, but it is claimed as emanating from a divine source. However, the differences between e.g. Christianity and Zen Buddhism are significant, the ‘truth’ offered is of a very different nature, as is the nature of the 'divine source'. Consequently, I think "religion" is a very broad term to use in the context of your argument.

The movement from a religious culture to a philosophical culture, for Pirsig, would be the movement to SOM.

Not necessarily, this occurs in Greek derived cultures only. In Lila, Pirsig goes back further into the mythos and finds the common root of intellectual patterns prior to the Greeks.

The moment of the turn would be the Socratic moment. Pirsig says that this is primarily a good thing. However, there is a defect in SOM and that is that it does not acknowledge Quality, values, i.e. the non-human other. Pirsig wants to rehabilitate the non-human other that religion saw as its true master.

No, Pirsig wants to point us back to experience, Dynamic Quality is not a religious entity or definable as non-human or anything else, it is just experience. Religion and philosophy, science and art and pragmatism and any other pattern of value are a response to experience.

He puts the two together by making Quality, the ineffable object of religion, reality, the object of philosophy. The turn towards irony is when we realize that, if the object of philosophy is also the object of religion, then the goal of philosophy can never be attained. This leads to a turn towards the literary culture, finding solidarity with our fellow human beings. This move is alluded to by Pirsig’s identification of reality with values. Values would normally be thought as the province of humans and only about the relations of humans, but in Pirsig’s vision, values are everything. In Pirsig’s vision, the turn to a literary culture would be the turn towards values, and to search for redemption, after realizing the irony of mixing religion with philosophy, would be to experience a variety of values.

To sum up what I have been saying, I think a pragmatized Pirsig is true to parts of the image that Pirsig set out for us, particularly in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This is the Pirsig that spins edifying narratives, rehabilitates old words for practical use, and creates new metaphors. This Pirsig comes to us from ZMM but is undercut to a large extent by his progression to Lila. In Lila Pirsig attempts to save both religious redemption and philosophical redemption.

Pragmatism would like only to save religious redemption. When religious redemption is seen as people like Lessing and Tillich saw it, as solidarity with our fellow humans, then this type of redemption is perfectly commensurate with a literary culture. When the search for religious redemption is kept as self-perfection, rather than hypostatized into the True Relation to Perfection as Pirsig attempts in Lila, then a truly pragmatic and humanistic account is given. It is this coherent Pirsig that I think is worth keeping, rather than the coherent Kantian Pirsig. I think this is the Pirsig that most readers who read ZMM come away with. Most laypeople who read ZMM for the first time come away feeling edified. I suggest trusting this initial reading.

True relation to perfection implies static perfection and has no part in the MOQ. "Redemption" is perhaps found in the tension between Dynamic Quality and static quality which may bring about coherent experience.

To see the MOQ as Kantian is, I believe, to misunderstand the fundamental aspects of it as an explanation of experience.

In conclusion, I suggest that the source of your disagreements with the MOQ can be found mainly in your misunderstanding of Lila and Pirsig’s subsequent clarifications. I conclude this because of your belief that the MOQ retains a notion of redemptive truth through a true relation to perfection, your description of the MOQ as a Kantian metaphysics and your belief that the MOQ revives the appearance/reality problem.

It seems from the comments in your essay that reading a number of western philosophers, particularly Kant, has provided a context for you to express what you dislike about the MOQ, but I think that in doing so your understanding may have been clouded. I would further suggest that whilst Kant can be understood in the context of the MOQ, the MOQ can not be understood in the context of Kant.

I will attempt to briefly explain why this is so. The MOQ reduces all aspects of differentiated experience to an undifferentiated ineffable source. Any differentiated experience is necessarily less than undifferentiated experience. Any description of experience is necessarily limited to describing differentiated experience. The MOQ calls the differentiated experience static quality and the undifferentiated experience Dynamic Quality. Thus the only way of reducing static quality to anything that is fundamental to all patterns is to reduce it into Dynamic Quality, which is ineffable. So the MOQ doesn't provide a correct or final definition of fundamental reality, only limited definitions of static reality. I think people get into a quandary with the MOQ because they look for the final answer in the definitions of static reality, or look for which static level comes first. That is really missing the point because depending on which level you think comes first you make an assumption that leads you into one major philosophy or another. The simple answer is that, on static reality, all philosophies are right within limits, the major limit being that they cannot ever provide a correct or final definition of fundamental reality, just contexts for explaining experience. The fundamental reality is never the explanation but is more closely associated to the pre-intellectual evaluation of various explanations on aesthetic grounds, but I have said too much already. My favourite Pirsig answer on "final explanations" is the Vedic "not this, not that".

In attempting to provide a correct or final explanation of all reality, western philosophy has always taken differentiated experience as a starting point and tried to reduce one aspect fundamentally to another. If you start with static intellectual patterns and reduce everything to them, you are a philosophic idealist. If you start with inorganic patterns and reduce everything to them, you are a materialist. If you start with biological patterns and reduce everything to them, you are a philosophic empiricist. If you start with social patterns and reduce everything to them, I don't know what you are, a pragmatist? If you start with biological and intellectual patterns and reduce everything to them, you are a transcendental idealist, like Kant. Because Kant had no "Dynamic Quality" in his system, he had to describe inorganic patterns as pre-existing things-in-themselves known through biological sensation and a priori ideas like "space" and "time" as innate in all humans, he had to say that, where else in static reality would they come from? It seems close to the MOQ, but actually it is very far away. This is why I suggest that whilst Kant can be understood in the context of the MOQ, the MOQ can not be understood in the context of Kant.

In terms of your exposition of pragmatism, it is insightful and eloquent and I can see a lot of value in it as an intellectual pattern of value. Pragmatism’s refusal to hold rigidly to beliefs is a sign of a willingness to change for the better. This is certainly something people should see in the MOQ, and that we shouldn’t be afraid to act on ideas just because they no longer offer the ‘truth’.

The negative side of pragmatism for me is that it sees no value in intellectual patterns outside of a social context, or at least it reduces the value to that of ‘self-perfection’. This implies an unchallenged acceptance of the mythos that one’s culture has invented. In MOQ terms, this is immoral.

A final thought would be that I think pragmatism stands beside the MOQ as a high quality intellectual pattern pretty much as it is, it’s a shame that you feel the MOQ has to be synthesised to fit in with its views.