From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 23:23:40 BST
David,
Yeah, I don't think Sartre's psychology was as good as Freud's. Sartre gave a heavy critique of the Freudian unconscious, but I think it misses the point we should take out of Freud. Sartre didn't think we should treat our unconscious as other individual people, on a social model. But Freud meant it as an analogy (at least that's the way we should take him), not as a scientific excavation of the way things really are. People like Dennett and Rorty pick up his point and say that we can make anything we want have "narrative gravity". This narrative gravity is what it means to be human, it means we can tell little stories about the way something is and what it does, with whatever it is as the protagonist. Giving rocks narrative gravity has been considered bad by the scientific community for a long time because it was considered anthropomorphic. Dennett and Rorty and Freud reverse this trend. They say sometimes it is easier for us to cope with things if we give it narrat
ive gravity, if we anthropomorphize it. (Take my example of slavery from another recent post. We didn't used to consider black people human, so it made it easy to enslave them and treat them like animals. But when people began to anthropomorphize them, began to think that they had the same feelings and thoughts as we did, it because easier to include them in our moral ranks, to expand the word "human" to include blacks.)
I'm not sure if Pirsig would agree so much with this point. Part of Dennett and Rorty's point is that nothing naturally has narrative gravity. They de-center narrative gravity as the sole possession of humans and say that it can be applied to anything. Well, I'm not completely sure Pirsig follows this de-centering move. At times it would appear that Pirsig thinks that humans are the only thing that can be Dynamic. On the other hand, part of the move from "things" to "static patterns" is a de-centering action: our designations of "things" are ad hoc distinctions between static patterns. The universe can easily be seen as one big static pattern, completely seamless. But that wouldn't help us cope, so we put seams in, like differentiating tigers from the landscape.
So, I'm not completely sure about Pirsig, but I think the spirit of Quality is that our designations of "things" be they rocks, tigers, or individuals are ad hoc and that DQ can arise from any of them. I think to say otherwise would be to say that evolution has halted outside of humanity, and for humanity, its only cultural evolution that is continuing. I don't think Pirsig wants to say this, and I'm not so sure he means this. This is, however, what Sartre can be seen to be saying with his radical freedom, that an individual is the only locus for DQ. On this count, I think we could give a Sartrean or Freudian reading of Pirsig. I think the Freudian reading is better, so we should think of DQ as being able to arise in any direction from any particular static pattern (whatever we ad hocly call a "particular static pattern"). This means that with Freud's picture of the unconscious, we can see our personality as seamless or as conflicting, whatever suits our purpose. In t
he case of Dynamic Quality arising, I think it can be seen as arising out of some of our static patterns and not out of others.
This actually goes along with my "Allegory of Pirsig" post. If we take Pirsig as our example and use my allegory as a starting point, we can see two parts of Pirsig's psyche in dialogue with each other (ignore the third, the author, Pirsig for the moment). Phaedrus can be seen as the part of Pirsig's personality where Dynamic Quality arose out of and the narrator as that conflicting part that disagrees with Phaedrus (how much disagreement there really is is a separate, though probably more interesting, textual question). The movement from ZMM to Lila is the defeat of the narrator's half of Pirsig's personality. It means that the Dynamic Quality that arose in Phaedrus' half defeated the degenerate static patterns of the narrator half, and the Phaedrus of Lila is the collection of static patterns post-DQ, post Quality insight.
(Ya' know, that's what I mean about play. What I did right there was playing around with Pirsig's text. I was at play and it was a lot of fun for me because I had never thought about it like that.)
At any rate, in my original allegory there were three Pirsigs: two impulses and one judge. This is how Freud analgoized the mind, but Rorty I think rightly gets rid of this image. In the place of there being a locus of judgement (which re-centers the ego, the self), Rorty (and I would argue Pirsig) places competing patterns of judgement. The patterns, which we can analogize and differentiate as different people, each have their own pattern of judgement. So, Phaedrus would choose one thing and the narrator another. This is why we can anthropomorphize the patterns of judgement so well. If we can differentiate competing patterns, it is easy to see them as internally coherent, and an internally coherent set of beliefs and desires is what an ego is. In terms of my allegory, the author-Pirsig, as separate from the narrator-Pirsig and Phaedrus-Pirsig, is simply the future Pirsig who has already almost been completely won over by the Phaedrus patterns and the author-Pirsig do
esn't so much sit in judgement over the two of them, as he does write the history of their struggle. As I've been saying, the winner writes the history, the winner gets to tell you who was good and bad, who was right and who was wrong. I say "almost completely won over" because I think ZMM was another step for the Phaedrus patterns to gain dominance, like rehearsing an argument continues to ingrain it.
So, returing to your thoughts on Sartre, I think we shouldn't associate the lesson from Freud as "the unconscious can exhibit purpose is that human beings do appear to have multiple identities, some of which are not in contact with the articulating self" because that re-centers the self, which I think we should shy away from. Better to say "just different selves" as your disjunct ends.
I hesitate to associate DQ with awareness because I'm not sure what you'd be aware of. I don't think there is an ineffable thing out there waiting for us to be aware of. I think that is a left over from SOM. However, I do think that our unconscious is a huge set of static patterns, along with our conscious selves. The problem of becoming static in behavior I think is a matter of staying self-conscious, conscious of your own behavior and its repeated patterns. But, again, I'm not sure why we should call this Dynamic Quality. I reserve that moniker for good breaks in static patterns, not in simply awareness (of course, I say "simply" because I don't think there is anything "out there" to be aware of, so I've already deflated, evaded, and begged the mystic answer).
Matt
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