Lawrie Douglas (Lawrie.Douglas@btinternet.com)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 04:43:59 +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.
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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