Lawrie Douglas (Lawrie.Douglas@btinternet.com)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 09:47:05 +0100
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.
PS. I say Lee-la.
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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