LS Re: Pirsig and Plato


Doug Renselle (renselle@on-net.net)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 14:17:28 +0100


Richard,

Your chapter, "The Myth of Reason," is excellent. Where can we get the
book?

Doug Renselle.

Lawrie Douglas wrote:
>
> Hello Folks,
>
> I've been quiet a long while; I have too much to say, it puts me off
> saying
> anything. Now the conversation seems to be moving towards fitting
> Pirsig
> into the history of philosophy, I thought I might lift a section from
> the
> book I have recently finished writing. My starting points are the
> philosophies of Pirsig and Heraclitus. I have much more to say on
> Heraclitus, but for the time being, I'll just submit this section on
> Plato,
> and the founding of the Church of Reason.
>
> Speak to you again soon,
>
> Richard McNeill Douglas.
>
> The myth of Reason
>
> With such glaring faults, it is a wonder Plato occupies such an
> exalted
> place in the
> pantheon of philosophers. Whatever his shortcomings, he is the most
> influential of
> all thinkers, Whitehead's statement about all subsequent philosophy
> being
> merely
> footnotes to Plato essentially ringing true. So what is it that makes
> him so
> important?
>
> It is not so much his specific pronouncements but rather the
> overall
> tone, the
> ideological content of his work, that has proved so influential. Where
> the
> theory of
> Ideas enjoyed a lasting life was in Christian theology; but here, in
> watered
> down
> form, it was appreciated not as much for its philosophic as for its
> aesthetic merits.
> Aristotle rejected it, and it was he who was the more influential
> philosopher.
>
> Plato's influence has been mainly one of intellectual prejudices,
> as
> befits a
> thinker in whom sentiment so overrode reason, whose need to combat the
> doctrine
> of radical flux was so great it led him to ignore the manifest
> absurdities
> in his own
> ideas. These prejudices certainly do show up in Aristotle, as in
> almost
> every other
> philosopher who has followed in his wake. Plato's vision of a higher
> world
> of Truth
> has been the basis for all mainstream ideas in the Western Tradition.
> It can
> be seen
> most prominently nowadays in the scientific reverence for 'objective'
> fact.
> Plato is a
> thinker's thinker, an intellectual's intellectual. He fetishises the
> world
> of ideas, raising
> up intellectual work into something of the highest importance in its
> own
> right. He is
> the founder of a cult, the worshippers of Truth and Reason. He created
> intellectual
> inquiry as we know it now. He is important not so much because he is a
> great
> thinker, but because he framed the sole terms by which people have
> subsequently
> been recognised as great thinkers.
>
> With Plato, something corrupt was introduced into the idea of
> reason.
> The
> Platonic world-view is in spirit unreasonable, given that the thinking
> behind the idea
> of reason is that everything is accountable, all forming a single
> intelligible system. By
> fetishising reason, holding that it belonged on a higher plane, Plato
> undermined
> philosophy, in that this meant introducing the concomitant idea that
> what
> did not
> exist on that plane was utterly unreasonable. As the light by which he
> consulted his
> map of existence was intensified, so some areas were left in complete
> shadow.
>
> As previously stated, the word 'logos' has many meanings.
> Sometimes it
> is
> used to refer to the entirety of rational thought, and contrasted with
> a
> companion
> term, mythos, which refers to the mythological way of viewing the
> world
> which
> preceded it. In this sense, 'logos' stands for reason, in a specific,
> prejudicial sense,
> as a purely human activity, and one carried out by only the most
> intellectual among
> men at that. We have mythos over there and logos over here, with a
> clean
> break in
> the middle. Silly old myths, and silly old people for believing in
> them, not
> like us now,
> with our rationality and our logic. Of course, this view, although
> superficially
> comforting to us, on the right side of the divide, is on second
> thought
> rather
> disquieting. The logos comes after the mythos; does that mean it
> derives
> from it? In
> which case, the logos would not be a self-contained thing; its
> foundations
> would lie
> in the mythos, it would be attached to the mythos, contaminated by the
> mythos,
> comprehended by the mythos . . . There would be no such thing as the
> logos,
> then,
> given that our idea of it is that it is absolute rationality,
> absolutely
> separate from the
> mythos; reason would simply be another species of myth, Truth another
> variety of
> Zeus.
>
> The thinking behind the division of mythos and logos is that some
> things
> are
> True and some things are False, and if your belief is not one, it must
> be
> the other.
> These have been the terms out of which our official belief in reason
> has
> been
> fashioned, the terms which have created the Western mentality - and
> they are
> not
> themselves rational. They are not rational because they offer no
> explanation
> for that
> which is False. The logic of this view dictates that what is False can
> have
> no rational
> grounds for its existence - thus this, supposedly ultra-rational, map
> is
> covered with
> holes. Neither, ultimately, can it account for that which is True;
> given
> that a higher
> realm of Truth would not be part of a closed system, one which
> generated and
> hence explained itself, its own origins would be mysterious. To say
> that
> there were a
> dimension of existence detached from the rest would be to leave it, as
> it
> were,
> hanging in mid-air. What might surround it? What could come before and
> what
> after? Why should it exist at all? Plato has to resort to a God to
> fashion
> it all, as does
> Aristotle, albeit in an indirect sense; but, for a philosopher, of
> course,
> this is
> cheating, just as it is for the playwrights Plato complained about,
> who
> employed dei
> ex machina as the simplest device to tie up the loose ends of their
> plots.
> To take
> God out of the equation, meanwhile, is to maroon Truth in a sea of
> Untruth.
> This is
> effectively what modern science has done, yielding us a world-view
> which
> says that
> there is a rigid order to the universe but absolutely no reason for
> this
> order.
>
> There are two main senses to 'logos', then, inasmuch as it means
> 'reason'.
> There is the parent concept which refers to the inescapable
> connectedness of
> things, and the specialised use by which it means an ideal of absolute
> rationality as
> displayed by human beings. One refers to what reason actually is, we
> might
> like to
> put it, while the other refers to the officially recognised ways by
> which
> one pursues
> Truth, and by extension, the official establishment which embodies
> this
> design; we
> could differentiate the two by calling the first, 'logos', and the
> second,
> 'Logos'. This
> secondary view is inevitably corrupt because it is not what it says it
> is.
> The
> intellectual establishment is seen as being Reason incarnate; this is
> a
> contradiction.
> Reason can only be impersonal. The Heraclitean logos is not a thing
> but a
> principle,
> the structuring of life by which information is passed around and
> added to;
> being
> impersonal, this information is intelligible. You can't point to it.
> It
> doesn't do anything,
> since there is no it. It is simply the way things are. To ask it to be
> more
> than this, to
> raise it up, to fetishise reason, taking its outward form to be its
> essence,
> is to lose
> sight of what it really is.
>
> The greatest weakness of the Logos is the matter of its origins.
> If the
> logos is
> utterly separate and superior to the mythos which preceded it, how did
> it
> ever start?
> Its beginnings are mysterious. To say that it simply popped into being
> one
> day, like
> Athena springing fully-grown from Zeus's head, is to treat it as a
> legend.
> It is not
> merely poetic to say that the logos sprang from the mythos; our idea
> of
> rationality, of
> Truth, that which has formed the spine of philosophy, academy, and
> science
> for the
> past two-and-a-half thousand years, is itself a myth. Of course it is!
> The
> idea that to
> be 'rational' is to be liberated from one's existence as a biological
> member
> of a
> natural world, to transcend one's transient life, to exist as an
> utterly
> disinterested
> oracle of Truth - this is a fantasy. And it is a fantasy which has
> gripped
> and
> continues to grip the minds of most of the cleverest in society. Of
> course
> to these
> people themselves it is anything but. The signifier of this ideology
> is
> marked:
> Absolute Rationality. How could one possibly be in any way irrational
> if one
>
> subscribed to this creed? The answer? Because 'absolute rationality'
> is
> impossible, a
> ridiculous idea. What does it mean? Reason merely meaning the
> necessary
> connectedness of things, how could this be made more absolute?
> 'Absolute
> rationality' is a fantastical concept, a piece of mythology; it ought
> to be
> called
> Superrationality. That gets it. Those who subscribe to this creed want
> to be
> Supermen, gods of intelligence and civilisation. Which is, of course,
> by
> their own
> terms, irrational. The signifier might be marked 'Absolute
> Rationality' but
> the signified
> is anything but.
>
> In creating the Logos, Plato was creating a religion. The
> difference
> between
> myth and religion is that a religion is a myth that people still
> believe in.
> What makes
> the Logos such a powerful religion is its being defined as the
> opposite of a
> myth; to
> its believers there is no way it could be anything but the Truth.
> Plato's
> idea of reason
> produces in all those who subscribe to it a blind spot: they can't
> subject
> their own
> prejudices to 'objective' scrutiny because, as far as they're
> concerned,
> they haven't
> got any.
>
> There is a section in Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of
> Motorcycle
> Maintenance in which the central character recalls his time as a
> student at
> the
> University of Chicago, attending a class on Plato's Phaedrus. The
> presiding
> Professor reads out a section of the dialogue, a speech by Socrates,
> in
> which Plato
> contrasts the 'pure reason' of the intellect with the base and
> unreliable
> evidence of
> the senses; Plato does this by use of a metaphor in which reason is
> represented by
> a proud white steed which aims to bear one upwards towards Truth,
> while the
> senses are a surly black horse which tries to yank one downwards
> towards
> Untruth.
> The Professor is going to use this dialogue to establish the case that
> there
> is such a
> thing as Truth and that we must solely employ pure reason, or absolute
> rationality, in
> order to obtain it. The hero, not being a subscriber to this myth,
> sees
> through it. "All
> this is just an analogy," he says. "What?" the Professor responds. "It
> is
> the truth!
> Socrates has sworn to the Gods that it is the truth!" The student
> refers him
> to a
> passage in which Socrates, before swearing to the Gods, says that what
> he is
> going
> to say will be an analogy. "Of course it's an analogy," Pirsig writes.
> "Everything is an
> analogy. But [the followers of Plato] don't know that."
>
> Everything we say is metaphorical. How could we ever speak the
> Truth
> itself?
> Language proceeds by metaphor, one thing standing for another, and so
> on and
> so
> on; thus information is passed on down a chain. The followers of the
> Logos
> want to
> cut short this progression, to get straight to the answer at the end
> of the
> chain, to do
> away with language itself. They are worried that the Truth will
> somehow leak
> out
> along the way, during the succession of translations of one's meaning.
> Those
> who
> understand rationality know they can trust metaphor, trust language,
> since
> information is always conserved; this means one can always get one's
> point
> across,
> and it will remain as good or as bad as the thinking which lay behind
> it.
>
> The very same people who prize themselves on their 'objective
> detachment'
> and 'ice cold reasoning' are the most naive and gullible. They gull
> themselves for the
> exact same reason as Plato blinded himself to the colossal faults in
> his
> philosophical
> system: they need to believe. Being cleverer than most, their minds
> are
> further
> entangled in the abstract than most; against the seemingly immutable
> standards of
> perfection one finds there, the real world seems fleeting, chaotic and
> meaningless.
> The myth of Reason is what they cling on to as a defence against the
> idea of
> infinite
> flux one finds after delving too deep in the abstract.
>
> --
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>
>

-- 
"Now, we daily see what science is doing for us.  This could not be
unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not
things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but
the relations between things; outside those relations there is no
reality knowable."

By Henri Poincaré, in 'Science and Hypothesis,' p. xxiv, translated from French in 1905 by J. Larmor, published 1952 by Dover Publications.

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