A Few Words on The Last Word

In The Last Word (Oxford, 1997) Thomas Nagel defends the objective principles of reason against the idea that "the first person, singular or plural, is hiding at the bottom of everything we say or think." This question touches upon issues raised by Matt concerning foundationalism. I don’t think it’s possible to say, as he does, that "Modern foundationalism is the same as ancient foundationalism," for the reason that ancient philosophy was grounded in solid realism and modern philosophy has ever since Descartes begun with the idealist premise, namely that the real is what is in our minds. The whole tenor or climate of thought is different, although philosophers may have in both cases wanted to ward off skepticism and relativism.

I am not going to spend time recapitulating Nagel’s argument in any detail, for I am already inclined to a certain kind of rationalist tenet, in the sense in which Chesterton defined the realism of Thomas Aquinas: if we do not affirm that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real, we may as well give up, for there can be nothing more to say. He says, "… the essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage. Indeed it is truly a marriage, because it is fruitful… [and] produced practical results, precisely because it is the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact."

We all know that this bracing realism did not survive the succeeding centuries intact, to the extent that some four centuries later it came about that Descartes sought to receive assurance of his own being from his thought. Well, we are placed another four centuries distant from Descartes, and what do we have to show for it? In our time it is thought itself that seems to be tottering about in the ruins of cultural relativism, subjectivism, skepticism, and numerous other ills. Thomas Nagel, in summarizing this landscape of philosophical ruins, basically returns us to the lap of Descartes. He says that there is this about fundamental reason: we cannot get outside of it. Thus he returns to the first, primordial, mysterious and irreducible interiority of our thought. That a modern philosopher recognizes interiority as a principle surely is a sign that serious thought has gotten sick of philosophical promiscuity. For thinking is promiscuous if it does not take account of itself, and it cannot take account of itself unless it accepts itself. I count this as a solid gain.

Yet I am of two minds. The first and most important thing to say is that Nagel’s contention is a grand advance, a true progress, a landmark. But the second, and less important thing to say, is that we should have known that this interiority of thought was already the true significance of Descartes. It was not his geometry, his res cogitans and res extensa, his beneficient God, the support of his being, the tool of science, the subject-object division. None of those things was as important as the sheer act of asserting what he did about the act of thinking. But it took us four hundred years, and now Thomas Nagel, just to point this out. So we made a wide circle with many detours and dead ends only to return to the cogito at last. To have suffered so much and to be dragged along by the tail of so many false hopes only to regain what we should have already realized – this seems to me a sad comment about our real state of affairs. One can only call it a persistent stagnation of modern thought. There is something in Nagel’s return to Descartes that hints of resignation rather than of creative renewal.

It was Descartes’ misfortune – and ours – that the assurance he received from the interiority of his thought did not extend in equal measure to the rest of the world. There was this problem of how disembodied thought connected to embodied reality, as one of his more astute critics, the Princess of Bohemia, put it. So we embarked on a long train of subject-object problems such as Pirsig has written of. The latest edition of this problem concerns how a being, such as ourselves, a product of natural history, can possess capacity for objective thought which penetrates to the true nature of the world. Evolution, in other words, does not explain reason, and it is refreshing of Thomas Nagel to admit as much. For obviously, we must employ reason in discussing evolution (or anything else). With a certain timid hesitation Nagel offers the thought that, despite the fact that we seem to be here as the result of a long sequence of physical and biological accidents, nevertheless, "the basic methods of reasoning we employ are not merely human but belong to a more general category of mind." Like a creature emerging from a cave, blinking in the light, Nagel proffers this startling idea - which is actually quite important if not overwhelming! But he soon scurries back into the darkness because this thought, if taken seriously, might lead to the Land of Anathema… the land at whose borders loom Intelligent Design.

So I would say that Thomas Nagel wants reason without taking account of the fundamental faith of man, which is, that our reason is capable of understanding things about the world because intelligence is embedded in the world. This fundamental faith is greeted by the bien-pensants of modernism with something approaching violent horror, as if those who espoused it were afflicted with a leprous contagion. Nagel is at pains to clarify that he is not that sort of person. He is indeed a very nice kind of non-believer. He says, "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that."

I have thought quite a bit about those last two words, "like that," which arouse all sort of associations all the more sinister for not being explicitly tabulated. Descartes’ "beneficient God" has been turned on his ear after all!

Or perhaps not – for Descartes "beneficient God" was an abstract beneficence just as Nagel’s "like that" is vague, an abstractly malignant presence. The result is that the problem with Nagel’s rationalism is the same problem that Descartes had with his rationalism. Both of them want interiority without intimacy. And when I use the term "intimacy" I do not mean merely physical or emotional closeness. I mean by this term a sense of intellectual coherence, of a destiny that wears an outward face in things and an inward dimension in thought, and that our human thinking, when sufficiently developed, can penetrate to this level of … "Quality."

Let me attempt to spell out what I am saying. First of all, "intimacy" in the sense in which I use it means that there can be Quality. For there can be no Quality in a world haphazardly arranged, whose objects and bodies, and thoughts corresponding to these entities, are mere aggregates of bodies at a simpler level of organization. If haphazard aggregation did characterize the essential nature of things, then pragmatic considerations of mere utility or Matt’s "ad hoc" arrangements would be entirely appropriate.

It is for this reason that I do not see Pirsig’s Quality metaphysics as pragmatist in any sense. Or rather, the only pragmatist element I see in the Metaphysics of Quality is Pirsig’s desire and intention to get to real life – to get to "the stuffy, hot-ground floor of life as soon as possible" as Matt poetically puts it. But the actual tool of thought which the concept of Quality provides is miles away from pragmatism. The problem Pirsig had was there was no rationalist framework in which his magisterial tool could make sense and unfold. For, if you say that Quality presupposes an intelligence in the world in which human reason can share and participate, because this intelligence partakes of a deep structure common to both the world and to human minds, where’s the dynamic element in reason itself? It is at this point that Owen Barfield’s insights bring considerable assistance, for Barfield speaks of an evolution of reason, or rather of an evolution of consciousness. This concept is the missing key, for it enables us to attach the concepts of Static and Dynamic Quality to reason itself.

I urge Matt to read Barfield’s Saving the Appearances for further elucidation of this point – and I will be particularly interested in whatever responses to it he cares to make.

Finally, let me note that the Cartesian cogito was a sort of new Genesis for modernity. The last time something like that (to use Nagel’s phrase!) occurred was in the Garden of Eden. Recall, dear Reader, that it was Woman, Eve, who was hidden in Adam’s "within-ness" – and that the making explicit of what was inward and interior began the world we know today . . . for good or for ill – for history. But what is hidden in the within-ness or interiority of reason today?

Thomas Nagel doesn’t want to go there. It’s an odd modern twist on the fear of God – not the fear of God but the fear that there might be a God. Nagel has shown a rare candor in stating it. It’s the deepest place of all rationalism, the foundational point of irreducible intimacy of intellect and world. And at that threshold a man chooses fear… or love.

Response to M. Kundert - Round II

Response to Matt Kundert's "Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston" Posted Thursday, December 27, 2007, on his website.

Thanks to Matt for his thoughtful reply to my response which, as he is probably right, left a lot to be explicated. It is very challenging to discuss these things in detail and try to articulate just where one’s differences, and agreements, lie. Philosophy at its best is a conversation, I think – a good or a best that somehow got pulled into something we call rational argumentation or dialectic. Or as Matt might say, a professionalization of the conversation. This is the way things are ; nothing I or anyone can do can change this fact. But perhaps just by engaging in it we can remind the professionals of their purpose, which is not to lose sight of the conversation in the argument – that is, conversation affords us the possibility of knowing one another as subjects, and secondly, of getting out of our own heads and maybe even of learning something.

I would agree with Matt that Pirsig is not free of subject-object metaphysics. Nor do I think that Pirsig claimed to be altogether free of it. What is significant in Pirsig is that he provides indications for a route to take outside of the particular cul-de-sac which SOM has led to in post-Enlightenment philosophy. And that particular cul-de-sac is not so much the subject-object distinction in itself (which is an ancient distinction going back to the earliest beginnings of human thought and which may indeed be an inescapable feature of any form of thought) as it is the particular twist it has taken through Cartesian and modern philosophy. For alongside the fundamental "thoughts and things" dualism of the world there arose through Cartesianism a sort of bifurcation. Wolfgang Smith describes it thus:

"One generally perceives this Cartesian dichotomy as nothing more than the mind/body duality, forgetting that Descartes has not only distinguished between matter and mind, but has, at the same time, imposed a very peculiar and indeed problematic conception of the former element. He supposes, namely, that a res extensa is bereft of all sensible qualities, which obviously implies that it is imperceptible. The red apple which we do perceive must consequently be relegated to res cogitans; it has become a private phantasm, a mental as distinguishable from a real entity. This postulate, moreover, demands another: one is now forced – on pain of radical subjectivism – to assume that the red apple, which is unreal, is causally related to a real apple, which however is not perceptible. What from a pre-Cartesian point of view was one object has now become two; as Whitehead puts it: ‘One is the conjecture, and the other is the dream.’" [1]

Now the important thing to remember is that both pragmatism and traditional philosophy or metaphysics (sophia perennis) deny this bifurcationism. The Metaphysics of Quality also denies it by asserting the primacy and reality of the immediate participated experience with the object. To that extent, pragmatism, the Metaphysics of Quality, and traditional metaphysics as represented, say, by St. Thomas Aquinas, all agree.

The paths begin to diverge only after this initial meeting at the road of thought with its object or content. These differences begin to appear in the notions about truth, authority, and the good which characterize the respective philosophies. St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes a sphere of revelation which is protected from the corrosive powers of reason, safeguards the good and makes possible therefore the exercise of legitimate authority. Pragmatism does not recognize such a sphere and instead identifies the good with expediency, offering the criterion of usefulness or utility as test of the true. The particular problem that arises with this viewpoint is that it seems not to be able to make distinctions of value between differing claims of expediency. Even though "expediency" may for James represent a wide range of options, from religious faith to empirical verification, it nevertheless lacks within itself an inner or principled position whereby one may make judgements of value.

James’ biographer notes that James had a certain dislike of principles, which he tended to see as a part of the classical or ossified metaphysics that he was opposing. Yet he recounts several occasions in which James did make a principled objection. James objected to the war in the Phillippines as an instance of imperialism and he objected to the way Americans treated the English-born labor organizer, William McQueen. The biographer notes – "Writing with unusual emphasis in an uncharacteristic defense of general principles, James [wrote] ‘Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature… of our U.S. civilization."

Beyond noting that philosophy has a whiplash and that James apparently didn’t like these demonstration of practical pragmatism, one has to say that there seems to be little in James’s actual philosophy beyond personal liking and disliking that would lead to such condemnations. The historian John Lukacs once commented that it is a perennial American weakness to mistake habits for principles. I think pragmatism, despite its many congenial aspects, was a major engine that got this tendency set and going. Pragmatism has not been able to arrest America’s deadly march into imperialism and insouciant disregard for the structures of international law. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind may indeed involve a philosophy that takes account of principles more than pragmatism has been able to do. The criterion of action or utility is simply inadequate as a philosophy of society.

It is for these reasons that I argue that Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality – though it professes a certain bond with pragmatism in its congenial aspects – nevertheless represents a sharp move out of what we could call this "American dilemma," which could be called an innate distaste for the concept of authority or sphere of principles.

The Metaphysics of Quality enables discernment according to differing levels of value. That is, it enables the enunciation of standards. It is not a complete philosophy. It is only the beginning of one, and I think it is much needed as an indispensable tool to work our way out of the collapse of standards so apparent today in every field. For we Americans have unfortunately confused the collapse of standards with freedom. But such a confusion only leads to – re-barbarization... which is the end of all philosophy.

[1] From his essay, "Sophia Perennis and Modern Science, in The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, Foundation for Traditional Studies, 2003, p. 22.
[2] The rest of the quote: "Instead of expressing outrage at illegal or unconstitutional behavior by the authorities, the ordinary citizen, James says bitterly, ‘begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency.’ Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, p. 483.
[3] Principles: that which refers to the beginning, in principio, or origins; as ‘authority’ refers to the author or point of origination of something.
[4] Ortega y Gasset thought very highly of William James. Yet compare his "Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made," from The Revolt of the Masses.

Bad Dreams

Note: This essay comments on William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson (Boston, 2006) from the perspective of Robert M. Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. [1] I have argued in the Initial Essay and in other posts on this site that I don’t think that the Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation or revival in any sense of James’s radical empiricism or pragmatism and that I think it is a mistake to see it in that light. It is true that both James and Pirsig see the subject-object division as an obstacle, discount it, and do not regard it as fundamental. The difference between James and Pirsig is that in Pirsig’s philosophy the subject-object division is in the rear-view mirror while in James’s philosophy it looms ahead in the glare of headlights announcing the collision with Pure Experience which is just about to take place. The subject-object issue occupies a different position in these respective philosophies because of their different relationship to Modernism and modernist premises. The Metaphysics of Quality values the coherent ordering of experience and may be seen as an important step on the way to this achievement. It is truly post-modernist in this sense, if we see Modernism as the attempt to break down and loosen constraining forms.
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I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. – Hamlet

Character is destiny. Heraclitus

The study of biography is a particular branch of the Metaphysics of Quality. If Quality, as Pirsig says, is the original experience which gives rise to subject and object, we may have a Quality feeling for biography when we see it as the total expression of the thoughts and circumstances of the individual. Sometimes we are able to discern in the events in someone’s life a kind of mirroring of that individual’s inner life of thought, a particular “fittingness” that Keats meant when he said the life of any man of worth is an allegory.

One of the incidents in the life of William James as recounted by his biographer expresses quite clearly this “allegorical” mirroring of thought and event. At least I believe that seeing it this way is warranted from the point of view of the Metaphysics of Quality. To read events in this way is to see them not as mere “happenstance” but more along the lines of traditionalist considerations of character as destiny, as Heraclitus put it. However, this view of happenstance or circumstance challenges the “psychologizing” of experience typical of subject-object metaphysics. Psychologized or subjectivized experience does not really take account of the domain of Quality. It does not see how thought has a structuring or formative influence on individual and social life, and in this sense it denies the objectivity of thought and how thought forms our circumstantial world. [2] Or on the other hand it can objectify too much and fail to see how thoughts are a result of our freedom to choose and how choice plays into the kinds of thoughts we have. Or it may yet take still another tack and exaggerate the factor of will, as if to reduce thought to willpower alone and thus return to Biological Quality (or less flatteringly, re-barbarization).

The point is that there are as many ways of doing philosophy as there are of interpreting the relation between thought and life – and all of them have all been tried! But basically any extreme polarization of thought-will vs. thing-event or subject-object makes it difficult to see why we should think at all, for the extremes are linked only in an external way, i.e. through control or helplessness. “Power over nature” has historically been a strong theme in the development of subject-object metaphysics. The opposite of this view is determinism. But neither of these alternatives expresses a possibility for thinking as Quality. Things happen to us without our control. That is the meaning of circumstances. Yet there must be an intrinsic relation between thought and life which enables us to perceive Quality. Do we think, or do we only think that we think? Events deliver a punch that no amount of rationalization can accomplish. Events reveal our thinking to us. The action in philosophy is not what philosophy does, it is what life does to us through our philosophy. I believe something like this unambiguous message from events came about in the life of William James.

The last ten years in the life of William James were a fruitful and fulfilling period, bringing many of his ideas into public recognition and appreciation. He gave his first set of Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901, at age 59, to much acclaim. These lectures were to form The Varieties of Religious Experience, James’ most popular book and the one about which, he said, he received more letters than all of his other works combined. There must have been something congenial in that late-Edwardian crest of civilized life with James’ favorable (if, as it seems to me at times, superficial) attitude toward religion, conversion, mysticism, healthy-mindedness. It was all very wonderful to hear that religion, after all, was basically a good thing when you get down to it.

I do not really mean to make light of James. For at the very high tide of philosophical materialism here was a most thoughtful and energetic American speaking to the late heirs of the Enlightenment about the mother-lode of mysticism in the soul as the fountainhead of religious experience. Although James might have benefited from a discourse on Dynamic and Static Quality – he didn’t have much use for static-quality manifestations like dogmatic theology and ecclesiastical institutions – still, it was a new opening on something that, for many modernists, is often a sore subject. The capstone of these lectures were the five lectures on saintliness, in which James put forth his view of the significance of Voluntary Poverty.

His biographer writes: “Nothing in William James’ life that we know about prepares us for this emphasis on voluntary poverty. Yet his language, his insistence on that word ‘mystery,’ convinces us that we are seeing as far into the real man as we ever can. His undisguised admiration for the inner strength and self-command of the person who voluntarily accepts poverty brings him back to the subject again at the very end of the five-lecture unit... where he makes a startling proposal: ‘What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war... May not voluntarily accepted poverty be 'the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?’” (p. 411-2)

Following the first of the Gifford Lectures, James was actively engaged in his project of Radical Empiricism, which one can call the attempt to put philosophy on pure Dynamic Quality alone. “All classic, clean, cut and dried, noble, fixed, eternal worldviews seem to me to violate the character which life concretely comes… and novelty and possibility forever leaking in.” Well, yes, but as Pirsig formidably and concisely remarked, it is impossible for life to exist on pure Dynamic Quality alone. The same must be true of philosophy, in which it would even be impossible to perceive such as thing as ‘novelty’ without some background of stability with which to compare it.

Radical Empiricism eventually took second place to pragmatism, but James was still working on it in connection with the idea of “Pure experience” before he took his trip to Stanford in late 1905 to deliver another set of lectures. The problem with Pure Experience as a philosophical doctrine is that it cannot explain how minds can arrive at a world in common. Also, how is experience experienced?– this just dissipates the act of thinking into an indefinite series of experiences, perhaps into a sort of infinite regress. These problems seem to have led to the abandonment of Radical Empiricism, although the biographer comments that Radical Empiricism’s main ideas – consciousness as a process, objects are bundles of relations, and all we have to go on is experience – were accepted as fundamental notions of pragmatism. But Radical Empiricism did not let go of James easily. It clawed its way into his dreams.

Upon his arrival in Stanford, James notes some problems sleeping. In February 12-13, 1906, he is assaulted by a series of strange and frightening dreams – interwoven yet disconnected, which left him thoroughly shaken. He wrote in his journal: “… I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake.” As a testimony of pure experience without mediating structure, James’ description of his bad dreams is as good a definition of what Radical Empiricism actually feels like is as good as we can get. I don’t think James connected the dreams to his philosophy – if he did, his biographer doesn’t note it – and in fact his only way of assimilating the experience was to “psychologize” it. He was much taken with a psychology book that talked about “dissociated conscious states,” and later Erik Erikson speculated that James had had an episode of “acute identity confusion.” In the understanding of that time – and ours – few are likely to see in these bad dreams the symbolized expression of an inadequate metaphysics. But in Quality biography, no experience can be tossed outside the sphere of thought – just as no thought can be utterly divorced from experience.

But more to the point, could pragmatism deliver the goods – that is, do what it claimed to do – which is, understand an experience or an object by means of its effects, fruits, results? If it defines the truth as “what works,” what works as an account of these dreams, what is their pragmatic interpretation? [3] I don’t see that pragmatism is able to satisfy these questions. Bad dreams did not lead James to any radical questioning, second thoughts, deeper insights or new directions. They seem not to have provoked a crisis, and they did not lead to any permanent disability. What some might take as a warning from the gods, James, while admitting to being shook up, seemed to see in them no more than a momentary strangeness, a ripple in the process of consciousness. [4]

My reasons for believing that pragmatism is ultimately unable to win fruitfulness from experience do not lie solely in the area of “the interpretation of dreams.” I was quite struck to read that at age 68, in January, 1910, James published his essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” yet with an argument totally recast from his earlier version of it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Not only did he drop the idea of Voluntary Poverty, this new essay advocated that young people should be universally conscripted to work in coal and iron mines, on roads and tunnel-building. The idea of asceticism or renunciation had wholly disappeared. It’s get with the program, onward and upward, all hands on deck, utopia’s around the corner, time to get down to business. Whatever you want to call it – and it’s not that this program is necessarily or logically bad, it’s just that it represents the complete opposite of his earlier view. Given the biographer’s own amazement at this earlier view and the fact that he felt the “real James” was present in it, how do we understand this turn-around? Is this new view of conscripted optimism the real James too? Where does this enthusiasm for coerced togetherness of youth in the cause of labor and conquest of the continent by will come from? I cannot read his words, especially in light of their complete contrast with his former ones, without a sort of shudder at the technological nightmares soon to be unleashed in the trenches of the First World War. The mania for building, consuming, using up and exploiting was, as it were, baptized by James in this utter betrayal of his earlier views. If the Devil got to him through his dreams, and bent his mind through philosophy, who in his inner pragmatic-empiricist circle or outer circle of acquaintances comprised of séance-sitters and New Thought enthusiasts, would even suggest it, much less take the idea seriously? Martin Luther was the last one to take the Devil seriously and threw his inkpot at him. But James didn’t throw even as much as an inkpot, and even compounded his complacency by taking pride that his Pragmatism was a new kind of protestant revolution.

I don’t know and can’t guess what place James’ bad dreams may have played in this “renunciation of renunciation.” But if, as a famous German proverb has it, “There is no culture without asceticism,”[5] James’s renouncing of his earlier view takes on a larger significance. In essence, apart from whatever it may be in religion, the act of renunciation or the path of asceticism is to leave an opening for Dynamic Quality. It is the refusal to consume experience, it is to make allowance for the future, the give a gift of inexperienced, chaste being, either for oneself or for others.

In any case, quite in contrast to subjectivist or psychologized interpretations, I see in William James’ “bad dreams” a spiritual crisis which he was in some sense unable to meet. Two months after James said No! to the angel of his dreams, the San Francisco region was struck by a powerful earthquake. Any connection? Any meaning? -- of course not! -- not to minds mired in subject-object literalism. Only on the level of parable – or Quality, does the whole series of inner and outer events begin to resemble another poet’s words: “In dreams begin responsibilities…” [6]

Footnotes:
[1] As enunciated in his two books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Lila (1991)
[2] Richard Weaver had to write a whole book reminding us of an idea that Christianity was developing for two thousand years – the idea that Ideas Have Consequences (1930).
[3] “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve – what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects … is for us the whole of our conception of an object.”
Also: A pragmatist turns his back on “abstraction, insufficiency, verbal solutions, bad a priori reasons, fixed principles, closed systems, pretended absolutes and origins – and turns toward concreteness, adequacy, facts, action and power.”
[4] My objection to process philosophy is that it obscures the role of moral decision and action. I was thinking about this in connection with my own life. In 1963 my parents sent me away from Birmingham to attend a boarding school in Massachusetts. There was no particular reason that I should attend a fancy Northern prep school; the girls’ school in Birmingham that I attended was excellent. For the most part I have looked back on this boarding school episode as a mere part of the process of my life. But just through trying to think through some of James’s ideas on pragmatism, I looked back on this episode as a sort of mistake or misfortune. If I had been a little less willing to go along with the process I would have stayed in Birmingham throughout 1963-1965 and would not have missed these critical years in Birmingham's history and in the history of the civil rights era.
[5] Quoted in “Religion and the Environmental Crisis,” in The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Perennial Philosophy Series (World Wisdom) 2007. Nasr is a professor of Islamic philosophy at Georgetown and former Gifford lecturer.
[6] Line of W.B. Yeats.

Incidents from the Biography of William James

A Quality Analysis. Part I: Dynamic Quality in Thinking

Comments on: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson, Boston, 2006.


In 1884 William James published an article in the journal Mind, arguing for a "pluralistic, restless universe" which is not amenable to a single or unified perspective. In the issue that followed, J.S. Haldane, the biologist, offered a modernized version of the idea of entelechy, or design. [1] As Richardson summarized it, "Noting how some creatures can regrow lost limbs and how cut nerves can regenerate, Haldane argued that we should regard the body not as separate parts with separate functions but as a whole [which] operates ‘through and through’ an organism, affecting and directing every part of it." [p. 248]

In the next issue, James attacked this idea from Haldane’s article. In "Absolutism and Empiricism" he defended "irrationalism," or what he called "respect for fact before system." As Richardson puts it, it was "another way to register his opposition to what he saw as neo-scholastic rationalism. ‘Fact,’ he says, ‘sets a limit to the ‘through and though’ character of the world’s rationality."

I believe we can apply Quality analysis in two places here. The first instance deals with Quality in the sense of wholeness, to which Haldane was referring in the case of organisms, and the second analysis discusses the "fitting-ness" or appropriateness (Quality) of James’s response to Haldane.

We do not experience Quality as a ‘part’ of something. Quality implies the Whole in the sense of its characteristic or essential nature. [2] The whole-and-part issue is a long-standing and legitimate question in biology and relates to the question of how a potential life becomes actual and how, or if, there is an overall guiding form or idea. Darwinists imagined that they had put this question forever back in the trash bin of history, but such has not been the case, and entelechy or design has re-emerged with renewed strength in modern microbiology. The staggering complexity of life at the cellular and sub-cellular levels has shown up the simplifications of Darwinism and the Darwinist model is proving to be next to useless. [3]

In any case, the question of the entelechy or guiding form of an organism does not have a direct bearing on issues of consciousness or psychology, and these were James’s primary interests at the time. Only in the sense of the historical development of science would this issue be connected with classical metaphysics, something that James was very much opposed to. In that light he saw the Haldane piece as a threat, saying that "The one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is the repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and esthetic factor in the construction of philosophy."

But what does "the personal or esthetic factor in the construction of philosophy" have to do with Haldane’s article? The "personal factor" is not a concern of a regenerating nerve, although it would be of major concern to a young person deciding upon a career or to a philosopher attempting to enunciate a new view of philosophy. The charge of absolutism is a strong one to make against the idea of the way an organism regenerates, achieves and maintains its integrity.

James was very interested in the relation of consciousness to the nervous system. He once pointed to the fact that consciousness is the means by which an organism that possesses a complex nervous system offsets the tendency of that system towards mechanism. Haldane was apparently discussing only that mechanism, i.e., an important aspect of Biological Quality.
James’s critique of Haldane thus seems to me an imposition of an analogy appropriate to the domain of Intellectual Quality onto the realm of Biological Quality.

By way of contrast, consider what James once said about the Grand Canyon—"it had a unity of design that makes it seem like an individual, an animated being." Why was James able to accept the design premise with the Grand Canyon and not with a biological organism?

This question would lead to a fascinating discourse on the history of Western thinking about Nature. Why was the sense of participating in an "animated being" true of the Grand Canyon but not true for an organism or biological being? Note how for James the Grand Canyon still possessed ‘Dynamic Quality,’ that is, it was participated. But this participated sense for Dynamic Quality once lived in mankind also in respect to the creatures and organisms of Nature. It comprises a large part of myth and folklore, it appears in legends the world over, most normal children even today experience a bit of it, and it existed as late as the Middle Ages in the West, where it was also an important element in philosophical reasoning. [5.] Barfield (see note below) remarks that St. Thomas Aquinas uses the world ‘participation’ on almost every page. It was such a common tool of his philosophical reasoning that he did not even feel the necessity of defining it.

The story of modern science is in many ways the story of the diminishing, dimming-down, or ousting of this participant relation to Nature. This is actually what we mean strictly by the "subject-object metaphysics." In this subject-object metaphysics the living world appears as ‘substance’ and living organisms have been, or are in the process of being, reduced to mere quantities of ‘atomic matter.’

That William James could feel something coherent, living and animated about the Grand Canyon, but not for the living organisms of Haldane’s examples, is a telling instance of just how far this atomization of Nature had become the common assumption in his day. In today’s world, where the integrity of the natural order is threatened on every side, and where the "mix ‘n match" attitude of modern scientists to the genetic inheritances of the earth’s creatures is cause for real alarm, this process of the de-cohering of the natural order is even more advanced. Indeed, the classical metaphysical notion of integral form may offer the only real possibility for restoring a stewardship attitude toward nature instead of the exploitative one that reigns today.

Reviving this way of looking at things will demand a more conscious awareness of human participation in nature. This more conscious participation would mean the cultivation of ‘Dynamic Quality’ in thinking. It would mean learning how to inform thinking with something of the life, coherence, and animated being of the living world . It is a "thinking-with" more than a "thinking-about."

I think William James would have been sympathetic to this, for in many ways his philosophy aims at the restoration of "Life in the form of Mind." [6] That he missed Haldane's point in this instance is a reminder of how often blind spots and personal preoccupations freighted with historical assumptions can cloud and confuse the enterprise of philosophy.

[1] Entelechy – that by which potential becomes actual; the form or perfection of something.
[2] Contrast with the quantitative, where the parts of something are merely external to one another (Aristotle). Living organisms, on the other hand, show a purposeful or coherent (qualitative) arrangement of parts ( Behe).
[3] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (1996); The Edge of Evolution (2007); Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985).
[5] See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (pub. 1959 in Great Britain). See my review, reposted in "From the Catacombs-Archives."
[6] S.T. Coleridge's characterization of the "I."

Quality as Tool of Thought

I can foresee doing a whole series of posts on this topic. Here is a sort of general beginning. Subsequent posts on the topic may not appear sequentially.

The world of philosophy, like the world itself, is such an enormous prospect that to discuss even a tiny part of it is quite a daunting piece of work.

It is not difficult to observe regularities and patterns in the sky – the constellations and seasonal movements – from whence we get astronomy. Nor is it difficult to understand how the earliest movements of human thinking were connected to the observation of the heavens. Actually it is a little difficult to understand – in terms of the worldliness of the modern mind-set, there are so many problems in the here and now, why look to the skies? – but this is not the question I wish to address today. We accept the cosmic tilt of our ancestors without giving it too much thought, though it is indeed an orientation of staggering importance in human destiny. Still, I must leave this interesting question aside for the moment.

It is again a natural step – well, somewhat natural – to move from spotting regularities in the sky to noting them on earth. These regularities we call the "laws of nature" – a phrase which, interestingly, means something quite different from "natural law." Natural law means something like the moral core in the human being, whereas the "laws of nature" are commonly viewed as having nothing to do with morality.

It is another step again to note regularities in history. This phase of the game is still in play, so to speak. The ancients did it to some extent, but it really got going as an intellectual discipline in later times – perhaps beginning with the rise of modern philosophy. We had Vico, and then later Spengler and Toynbee, who may be taken as the peak of this kind of activity. Post-Toynbee, historical commentary is so bound up with every other kind of commentary, from science questions to clashes of civilization and political arguments, that it is a little hard to discern its original impulse.

In historical commentary we see, I think, the incipient beginnings of the movement of intellect to become conscious of its relation to society – a movement that Pirsig has clarified in his distinction between Social and Intellectual Quality. As for spotting regularities in Intellectual Quality – forget it! We have not even begun. Our sense of the inward and intellectual character of the world today is a type of chaos. On the ‘outside’ of our world, that is to say what holds this intellectual chaos in some kind of precarious equilibrium, is a dominating economic system and the political ideologies that serve this ruling power.

The question that occupies me today is how Pirsig’s tool of Quality can be of service to the elucidation of certain intellectual problems. Ultimately and actually it is more than an intellectual problem, if it is true, as I suggested, that Force is the counterweight to Chaos. Force vs. Chaos is a terribly unbalanced system, as we are learning to our dismay in every experience of life. No Quality in nature or the arts of life can make the slightest headway, but gets sucked into the pressurized void formed by this polarization of forces. The unaddressed problem of the subject-object polarization, which is the fundamental source of this Force vs. Chaos paradigm, has created a true "black hole" on earth which threatens to swallow us all.

Thoughts and things, consciousness and phenomena, spirit and matter, subject and object, are in mutual coexistence and correlation. The financial debt of the global money system is spreading throughout the world - this is the outward, phenomenal, or 'thing-aspect' of the polarity. In a more inward sense this globalized modern man lives in a perpetual spiritual indebtedness to the past - to religion, history, law, customs, courtesies, arts and systems of thought which have all been developed by human beings living in previous ages. This past endowment has made possible the development of that modern science which has proven to be such a boon to the exploitation of nature's resources, particularly the extraction of oil. [1]

My point being that the black hole which is at the center of the Force vs. Chaos paradigm has spun off another set of polarizations, namely, debt, comprising both a material and spiritual aspect.

In order to steer society away from falling into the black hole of debt, it may become necessary to reinstate the gold standard - to back up financial credit with something of real and tangible worth. Likewise on the spiritual plane the search for Quality, the desire for Quality, the understanding of Quality as tool of thought. Only this search, desire and understanding can bring us the wherewithal to develop a new paradigm.
________________________
[1] Which William James, for one, saw very clearly: "The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose."

Responding to M. Kundert

Matt Kundert has kindly left a comment on my post, "A Note on the English Admirers of Pirsig." He left several links to articles of his own, which I would like to comment upon in this post.

They are, first, the August 2004 piece on Philosophology, An Inquiry into the Love of Wisdom, http://www.moq.org/forum/Kundert/Philosophologology/Philosophologology.html
and the second, the January 2006 piece, "Pirsig Institutionalized: More Thoughts on Pirsig and Philosophology" http://www.moq.org/forum/Kundert/pirsiginstitutionalized/pirsiginstitutionalized.html

I appreciate Mr. Kundert's links and willingness to dialogue. In attempting to articulate a position very much at odds with his interpretation of Pirsig, I hope he will not consider me ungracious – though he might very well consider me to be a philosophical novice, a characterization I certainly do not deny.

In the introduction to his website, Mr. Kundert introduces himself in this wise: "My name is Matt Kundert and I'm pending to graduate from UW-Madison, pending that is on whether a former History Professor wishes to take pity on me and accept a very late term paper... I'm an "amateur philosopher" and by "amateur" I mean I don't get paid for it…" I would describe myself in very much the same terms, so perhaps two amateurs can have a go at it.

My general sense of Mr. Kundert’s two papers is that he wishes to defend the academic province of philosophy. There is nothing wrong with this. Although I think that the Metaphysics of Quality leads us to ask questions and come to realizations which have been excluded in conventional philosophy since Descartes, and for this reason the academic framework may be part of the problem, this Metaphysics of Quality will nevertheless have to confront the academic establishment by the very nature of the case. What other group of people would be likely to debate such issues? Philosophers discuss philosophy. But this is not quite the full truth, because philosophers have not been altogether willing to discuss the Metaphysics of Quality, which arrived at their door in the guise of novels rather than by means of in-house production, so to speak. Already there is a suspicion of unwillingness on the part of the philosophic community to greet this new visitor with open arms, given its uncertain parentage.

Well, such is the status of the foundling. It is acceptable to defend academic philosophy, or anything else. But let us try to keep our facts straight by consulting, at times, that demanding muse, History. Mr. Kundert maintains that "Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology is between philosophy’s history and its substance, but it is not at all clear that one can separate the two." He may be right about this, but on the other hand, what difference does it make? Pirsig maintains that one should have a passion for a question, and thanks to that passion one can learn what other people have said on the subject. History becomes alive through the passion, thus there can be such a thing as wanting to learn and master the cultural heritage. It is intellect for a purpose, and is not a purpose of this kind the very spark of Quality? And isn't that what we're after?

I do not agree with Mr. Kundert that "…many of the things philosophy struggles with on a day-to-day basis are not things that immediately come to mind for the man on the street." The man on the street may have trouble articulating his thoughts, or he may not be led to believe that the struggle to articulate his thoughts is an important thing to do, or that it would matter to anyone else in the slightest or even to himself. But I affirm the common essence of philosophy and humanity, and insist that "the man on the street" deals with philosophical problems day in and day out – and not only deals with them but has to suffer for them, pay for them, and fight against them or for them. Any other view seems to me to smack of haughtiness. It is the academic attitude, and Pirsig, for one, seems refreshingly free of it.

Part of my disagreements with Mr. Kundert spring from the fact that I simply do not see Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality as having much of anything to do with Pragmatism. Now, I am aware that Pirsig mentions William James favorably, and he wonders if the Metaphysics of Quality might in some way be aligned with James’ radical empiricism. This is one of the few instances in which I find myself disagreeing with Pirsig’s own opinion of himself. Pragmatism is all very well, and William James is a likable and thoughtful American, perhaps the best of our kind. But I see Pragmatism as inherently anti-metaphysical, no matter how dressed up, softened and made serviceable for real life it may be. And softened it is – compared to positivism and reductionism. But it does not affirm the metaphysical task, which is the struggle to clarify what it is we actually think, or rather the struggle to put ourselves in the position of actually being able to think. This struggle is for Logos, and without this struggle on behalf of Logos we only lead confused and self-deceived lives. [1]

I am somewhat at a loss to understand Mr. Kundert’s attribution of "Cartesian anxiety" to Mr. Pirsig, who spent quite a bit of effort in showing how the "objectivity" of Cartesian philosophy cannot be considered to be a truly reliable form of objectivity, because it leaves out so much of importance to real life. It is interesting that Mr. Kundert quotes from a commentator who remarked that Descartes’ final certainty, the reward after his doubt, was owing to his belief in the existence of a "beneficient God." It is true that Descartes does this, and it is a most revealing incident in his Meditations. If Descartes cogito is a sort of "new Genesis" or new creative moment in history, at the very least it is wholly unlike its inspired prototype. For in the old Genesis the world was full of all sorts of Beings, not all of them with a beneficient attitude toward mankind. There was a serpent in the Garden – remember? Descartes’s simplification of the old complex Christian cosmos that contained all kinds of moral perils to a safe and guaranteed world more to his liking was, at the very least, a striking instance of self-deception. This has had deleterious consequences for philosophy. The horse of the subject-object division was already hobbled with respect to values. For having been handicapped from the starting gate with a false notion of the cosmos, why struggle for values if a "beneficient god"was already in charge of the underwriting department? At best this is a blank check to endorse things as they are.

The Christian God was brought down to size - Descartes' size, or rather the scope of his cogito --thus where Christianity was concerned, modern philosophy thus began with a falsehood, and the accumulations of falsehood have reached quite a crescendo today. In his second essay, "Pirsig Institutionalized," Mr. Kundert mainly finds Pirsig to be "anti-authoritarian." He writes:

Antiauthoritarianism is a specifically philosophical thesis that says people are not bound to any non-human authority, be it God, Reality, or Reason. In this sense, for example, Protestantism, in the West, was a step towards anti-authoritarianism because it located the House of God within each person, rather than a relation only attainable through a priest caste that had a special relation to God. .. Antiauthoritarianism
is thus coextensive with the pragmatists’ project of getting rid of the appearances/ reality distinction in philosophic thought…

And:

"Pirsig’s key message top us is his recitation of Socrates’ message to Phaedrus: "And what is good, Phaedrus/ And what is not good---/Need we ask anyone these things?" This passage can strike two chords. First is a kind of antiauthoritarianism that mimics the Protestant move…. I shall argue, however, that there is a second chord…[that is] not only is one caste’s special authority destroyed, but anyone else’s authority is destroyed. "Need we ask anyone these things?" By internalizing our relation to the good – Quality – Pirsig has basically told us that each of us has a special relation to Quality that no one can override …"

Thus Kundert moves from "antiauthoritarian" to a charge of "antiprofessionalism in philosophy," and the argument becomes increasingly torturous. We leave behind the creative movement inherent in the Metaphysics of Quality and enter a longwinded tunnel with no light on the issues Pirsig raised. Kundert seems not to be talking about the Metaphysics of Quality but with the ghost that the Metaphysics of Quality came to exorcise: namely, the Metaphysics of Substance.

The question of "authority" would be an important issue with the Metaphysics of Substance because this view of the world puts all the emphasis on the subjective self as the generator of values. But to see in the Protestant move an anti-authoritarianism seems to me to be a view of history in keeping with the kind of popular and propagandized culture which is often little more than thinly disguised anti-Catholic bias. For certainly Luther and the Protestants substituted the authority of Scripture for the authority of the living Church. One of the unfortunate results of this "subjectivation" of authority was the loss of ecclesiastical counter-weight to the power of the State – and as a consequence a transfer of greater authority to the State. In addition, one ought to ponder deeply the Catholic statements at the Council of Trent asserting the foundational nature of human free will – very much in contrast to Protestant statements on the subject – before launching into a dewy-eyed paean to the Protestant "God Within."

I do not read Pirsig as "anti-authoritarian" in any sense. I think he is probably more liberal than I am in many of his views, but his sense for the importance of Static Quality shows his to be a mature and well-grounded mind. No human being can live without authority, and if it will not be grounded in religion, it will be find its way to some other source – philosophy, science, or their popularizers, or even lower down the scale into mass advertising and the celebrity culture. The question is whether the static value of authority allows for dynamic openings. It is a question – like so many others – of the Quality of the authority.

[1] I picked up Robert Richardson's 2006 biography of William James, feeling that I needed greater familiarity with this remarkable philosopher as an aid to my studies of the Metaphysics of Quality. Richardson describes Pragmatism as "the belief that truth is something that happens to an idea, that the truth of something is the sum of its actual results. It is not, as some cynics would have it, there mere belief that truth is whatever works for you. It must work for you and it must not contravene any known facts. James was interested more in the fruits than in the roots of ideas and feelings..." (p. 5) I find this both very appealing and very non-metaphysical. I would say that the concern with fruits of an idea is a fundamentally Christian concept ("A good tree bringeth forth good fruit;" "Ye shall know them by their fruits," etc.) and that a way to characterize metaphysics would be to say that it is a disciplined inquiry into the fruitfulness of ideas. Therefore, it has to be concerned with the roots of ideas and feelings and with the problem of how differing forms of the good are to be evaluated.

Islam Re: Social and Biological Quality

In a recent comment comparing Islam with Communism, Mr. Lawrence Auster asks: “How does Pirsig's biology/society distinction help us defend ourselves against Islam?”

I don't go along with demonizing Islam. I am more inclined to see how Muslims should want to defend themselves against us, than that we should need to defend ourselves against them. There is a long history of Anglo-American interference in their affairs and it is a very dark story of colonialism, neo-colonialism, racial arrogance, subversion of law and good faith, and betrayal of Western Christian values at every turn.

On the issue of 9/11, I believe it was engineered to make Muslims look bad in much the same way that the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was engineered to make Catholics look bad. I am not satisfied with official explanations for either event.

This much being said, however, in terms of Auster's context (his anti-Islamic views) it's a fair question. Pirsig does have some thoughts about the subject, although he was writing long before the present wave of hysterical hatred being fomented against Islam by dual loyalists and morally corrupt Christians.

Historically Islam provided an enormous taming and civilizing force to the warring tribes of the Arabian peninsula. Pirsig remarks in Lila that some of the Muslim animus against the West is owing to the fact that Muslims perceive the West as aiding and abetting the release of those very biological forces that Islam has striven so hard to contain. [See note below.]

Distinguishing Social from Intellectual Quality might assist in sorting out Mr. Auster’s other comment. Communism was an intellectual ideology brought forward in the very heydey of Western materialism. It is a perfect example of how intellectuals turned against the very society that provided for them. Not only did Marxism deride and disparage static social values like marriage and religion, it also derided the “bourgeois” safeguards for Intellectual Quality – freedom of speech and press, trial by jury, government by consent, human rights. Thus it could not preserve social values from deterioration or prevent society from falling back into biology. Which is exactly what happened -- i.e. the rule of the strong, or re-barbarization.

Pirsig on biology and society, with comment on Islam:

“The central term of confusion between these two levels of codes is ‘society.’ Is society good or is society evil? The question is confused because the term ‘society’ is common to both of these levels, but in one level society is the higher evolutionary pattern and in the other it is the lower. Unless you separate these two levels of moral codes you get a paralyzing confusion as to whether society is moral or immoral. That paralyzing confusion is what dominates all thoughts about morality and society today.

“The idea that ‘man is born free but is everywhere in chains’ was never true. There are no chains more vicious that the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget the fact and turn upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done.

“Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being suppressed by social order."

“Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life. But when it threatens to dominate and destroy society, biological quality becomes evil itself, the ‘Great Satan’ of 20th century Western culture. One reason why fundamentalist Muslim cultures have become so fanatic in their hatred for the West is that it has released the biological forces of evil that Islam fought for centuries to control.”
Pirsig, Lila, p. 353.