14. Between Two Insanities
(Updated May 2021)
I recently came across an online critique of Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and his follow-up book "Lila" (1991) by Professor Herman J Pietersen of South Africa. Professor Pietersen's response is a mix of commendation and condemnation. The books, he says, are stimulating reading but they fail to establish Pirsig's case:
Despite Pirsig's erudition, wide-ranging intellect and highly entertaining novels, in the end the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) could not escape the subjectivist-objectivist cage that Pirsig so dearly (almost desperately) wanted to transcend.For Pietersen, the second book ("Lila") in a sense "betrays" the first by setting out to define what the latter claimed was beyond definition. He can appreciate Pirsig's dilemma:
The Quality that can be defined is not the real Quality (as in the Buddhistic tradition), yet the Quality that cannot be defined cannot be communicated (in the Western tradition) as a possibly useful intellectual construct...The problem is that if 'Quality' cannot be firmly defined one sooner or later has to conclude that the idea is beyond intelligent discourse, and therefore demands a Wittgensteinian silence.So, the more Pirsig charts the unfathomable seas of Quality, the more he loses his bearings, until, dismayingly, this latter-day Homeric hero finds himself back where he began, trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of the mind:
Placed within ancient Greek philosophical context: in a classic Platonic manner, Pirsig left the many behind in a supreme effort to identify (and become identified, in an almost spiritual sense) with the one [the Good or 'Quality' that is, for him, beyond even the Form of forms]. However, it is to be doubted whether humankind can ever escape the dialectic of the one and the many. Neither Plato and Aristotle and the whole of Western philosophy thereafter, could — hence the ongoing battle between rationalists and relativists; Platonists against Sophists; Materialists/ Empiricists against Idealists, particularists against universalists, and so on.I find Pietersen's short critique persuasive enough, though in my case he was pushing on an open door. From a Calvinist point of view Pirsig's terminal flaw was fairly apparent at an early stage of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". The great bell tolled the moment Pirsig posited a cerebral abstraction ("Quality") as his transcendent starting-point, thereby making a reified absolute of that which is necessarily derivative and relative. Dooyeweerd has taught us that such an idolatrous absolute inevitably summons forth, sooner or later, its counter-absolute. In the end, the very real value of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is (to my mind) not that the proposed destination is conclusively reached, but that so much engaging, elevating, exhilarating wisdom is surveyed and explored en route.
At root all our thinking is locked in an eternal struggle between the One and the Many — even the dyed-in-the-wool 'Pluralist' (and Pirsig's philosophical guru) William James, regarded this most basic of philosophical distinctions with an attitude approaching reverence, as that philosophical concept which is 'most pregnant with meaning'. To escape the one (for the many) would mean mental anarchy (the tyranny of the many, ex-plosion and disintegration, thus: insanity); to escape the many (for the one) would mean mental atrophy (the tyranny of the one, im-plosion and everlasting silence, thus: insanity).
(The Philosophy of Robert M Pirsig by Herman J Pietersen, Department of Industrial Psychology, Vista University, South Africa.)
http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_118.html
One thing I find intriguing about the above quote from Pietersen is its seemingly nonchalant acceptance of the "one and the many" dichotomy as a "given" of Western philosophy. Partisans of both polarities of the dichotomy are duly listed for us ("rationalists and relativists; Platonists against Sophists; Materialists/ Empiricists against Idealists, particularists against universalists, and so on"), but we are disarmingly informed that "it is to be doubted whether humankind can ever escape the dialectic of the one and the many" and "At root all our thinking is locked in an eternal struggle between the One and the Many". It strikes me anew here that, despite the smoke and mirrors of rationalist starting-points, paradox is actually as much at the heart of Western secular philosophy as it is of Zen philosophy and of Calvinist philosophy. Pietersen, at any rate, seems to invite that conclusion. So we do have an interesting epistemological consonance here - namely, that the starting-point of thought defies (transcends) logic.
Which brings me to what principally caught my attention when first I glanced at Pietersen's article - a brief and unexpected allusion to Herman Dooyeweerd. Pirsig and Dooyeweerd are economically and elegantly roped together to be summarily dispatched with the selfsame bullet. Or so Pietersen would have it:
Pirsig's metaphysical system reflects an error that, for instance, also occurs in the elaborate cosmological system of the distinguished Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, namely, of mixing ontological and intellectual categories into one supposedly foolproof cosmology. But, 'Intellectual' (as with the 'logical' in Dooyeweerd's system of fifteen interrelated modalities of reality) does not fit into the system — it is the source and instrument by which the cosmological system is created in the first place, not a cosmological entity in itself!
Well, I guess Dooyeweerd ain't gonna be slain by no paintball one-liner from Pietersen. So mercifully there's no need for me to launch my sorry flab into the path of the projectile. That would be impertinent anyway. The stuff of farce, even. Yet, while Dooyeweerd needs me not, the co-ordinates of Pietersen's attack give me an opportunity to specify why I have found Dooyeweerd's thinking helpful. And indeed, perhaps even why I have found Zen helpful.
There is no doubt that Dooyeweerd would reject Pietersen's criticism here. In fact, ironically, Pietersen's words echo a criticism Dooyeweerd himself levelled at another critic -
There is no doubt that Dooyeweerd would reject Pietersen's criticism here. In fact, ironically, Pietersen's words echo a criticism Dooyeweerd himself levelled at another critic -
"...we also find in [D.F.M.] Strauss a continual confusion between the 'ontical' and the epistemological states of affairs. In the Prolegomena of the transcendental critique of the theoretical attitude of thought and experience, I have remarked that in the subject-object relations of naive attitude of thought and experience, empirical reality is understood as it gives itself, that is to say in the continuous systatic coherence and relatedness of its modal aspects within cosmic time. But in the Gegenstand-relation, these modal aspects are epistemologically (not 'ontically') split apart and set over against each other, with the intention of bringing them into view in their general modality, and thereby making them available for theoretical concepts."Quoted by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen at:
https://jgfriesen.wordpress.com/glossary/intentional/
Dr J. Glenn Friesen himself summarizes the matter as follows:
Dr J. Glenn Friesen himself summarizes the matter as follows:
"Strauss regards abstraction as occurring intra-modally within the logical subject-object relation. But for Dooyeweerd, theoretical thought is an act, which functions in all of the aspects. The splitting apart of the aspects, the dis-stasis from the systasis or continuity of cosmic time, is such an act. It is not based on the logical function alone. So although the Gegenstand-relation sets the logical function of thought over against other aspects, this opposition is not itself of a logical nature. This is something that Dooyeweerd also says in the Encyclopedia. And if we distinguish in this way between the functions of an act of thought, opposing to itself an abstracted aspect, then there is no reason why the act of thought cannot investigate the logical aspect itself.***
The important issue is, how do we get from the enstatic relation of naïve thought, with its continuous, ontic, systatic experience of cosmic time to the epistemological relation that is merely intentional? How do we get from the religious over-against relation, which is ontical but not theoretical, to that initial Gegenstand Level 1, which is not ontical but purely intentional? This is the issue that Strauss is struggling with in his article 'Discussion', although he comes to a very different conclusion than Dooyeweerd."
Quoted from (pp 5,6 and 39 pdf file): "Dooyeweerd versus Strauss: Objections to immanence philosophy within reformational thought" by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen
It must be said that it takes a fair bit of reading of Dooyeweerd to get your head round his terminology and to begin to grasp something of the astounding enormity of his contribution. As a non-academic in these matters, I have frequently felt over the years while reading first Van Til and then (even more so) Dooyeweerd, that the experience is not unlike a particularly challenging hill-trek entailing long stretches of near vertical climbing, punctuated by grassy vantage points with breathtaking vistas. The prominence I have given Dooyeweerd in this article "Zen and the Art of Calvinist Epistemology" is a measure of my personal indebtedness to him, and is despite the fact (as previously mentioned) that Dooyeweerd eventually preferred the simple designation "Christian" to "Calvinist". He felt that the latter term over-elevates one man. It should also be noted that Dooyeweerd's program is in no wise short of detractors within the Calvinist camp itself. Very far from it. Further, it is as well to be aware that there are high-profile pro-Dooyeweerdians who reject or undervalue key elements of Dooyeweerd's thought, in particular his notion of the "supratemporal heart", i.e. that you and I in our innermost self or ego transcend time. In support of the latter, Dooyeweerd was fond of quoting the following words in bold from Ecclesiastes (and it is with some sense of elegant symmetry that I note that these words happened to be contained in the passage from Ecclesiastes which we read at the outset):
"I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts..." (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
As highlighted elsewhere in this article, Dooyeweerd puts immense emphasis on what he calls "naive" experience, i.e. everyday holistic involvement with the business of living. (You may notice that the "Zen" light has just flashed on the dashboard). You and I are concrete selfs. When we engage in abstract thinking, we patently do not become abstract. That would be a metaphysical variant of the Indian rope trick. The thinker is concrete. Moreover, the act of thought is concrete. The activity of thought is actual. It is an event. And my thoughts as concrete acts function within (ie can be viewed from the perspective of) not only the logical aspect, but also the aesthetic aspect, the ethical aspect, the pistical (faith) aspect, and so on.
Pietersen's charge (quoted above) against Dooyeweerd is that the "logical" (F/B) cannot be one of Dooyeweerd's "modalities" because his whole suite of modalities must necessarily derive from the "logical". While this accusation is at first sight plausible, it betrays a logicism whereby the concrete thinking self behind the logic is lost sight of. Moreover it fails to appreciate Dooyeweerd's profound insight that the modalities (aspects) are irreducible to each other. Thus, for instance, the non-logical modalities refuse to be absorbed by the logical modality, as Pietersen's view would require. Dooyeweerd would have it that the irreducible, ungraspable kernel of each modality (that of the logical modality included) is "supratemporal". The source of each kernel's meaning is found, as the source of your meaning and mine is found, in God via Christ as Root of Mankind and Mediator of the cosmos.
So while Professor Pietersen surely puts his finger on the correct anatomical locale as he checks for Dooyeweerd's "vital signs", I would venture that the patient is considerably healthier than the good Professor's head-shaking diagnosis suggests.
OK. So this brings me close to what for me is homebase. Dooyeweerd has brought to my life a nascent grasp of how our thought-world ought to articulate with the real world, and of where the balance of priorities should lie. To me, his championing of concrete reality is both heroic and momentous. His insistence that theorization, however important and desirable it is, should not distract us from but confirm us in the concrete world, has been for me a profoundly existential healthcheck. A deliverance from the Hellenistic dichotomous vaunting of the cerebral over the material, of the conceptual over the actual. And in the light of the foregoing you can no doubt see why that strand of Zen which defends immediate concrete reality against speculative reverie might attract me.
What then is the bridge which Dooyeweerd identifies as the structural link between our inner theoretical landscape and the concrete world upon which we stand? The answer is our intuition, which Dooyeweerd locates as the "bottom layer" of our thought:
Pietersen's charge (quoted above) against Dooyeweerd is that the "logical" (F/B) cannot be one of Dooyeweerd's "modalities" because his whole suite of modalities must necessarily derive from the "logical". While this accusation is at first sight plausible, it betrays a logicism whereby the concrete thinking self behind the logic is lost sight of. Moreover it fails to appreciate Dooyeweerd's profound insight that the modalities (aspects) are irreducible to each other. Thus, for instance, the non-logical modalities refuse to be absorbed by the logical modality, as Pietersen's view would require. Dooyeweerd would have it that the irreducible, ungraspable kernel of each modality (that of the logical modality included) is "supratemporal". The source of each kernel's meaning is found, as the source of your meaning and mine is found, in God via Christ as Root of Mankind and Mediator of the cosmos.
So while Professor Pietersen surely puts his finger on the correct anatomical locale as he checks for Dooyeweerd's "vital signs", I would venture that the patient is considerably healthier than the good Professor's head-shaking diagnosis suggests.
OK. So this brings me close to what for me is homebase. Dooyeweerd has brought to my life a nascent grasp of how our thought-world ought to articulate with the real world, and of where the balance of priorities should lie. To me, his championing of concrete reality is both heroic and momentous. His insistence that theorization, however important and desirable it is, should not distract us from but confirm us in the concrete world, has been for me a profoundly existential healthcheck. A deliverance from the Hellenistic dichotomous vaunting of the cerebral over the material, of the conceptual over the actual. And in the light of the foregoing you can no doubt see why that strand of Zen which defends immediate concrete reality against speculative reverie might attract me.
What then is the bridge which Dooyeweerd identifies as the structural link between our inner theoretical landscape and the concrete world upon which we stand? The answer is our intuition, which Dooyeweerd locates as the "bottom layer" of our thought:
It is that temporal bottom layer of the latter [the analytical modus] by means of which our analytical function of thought is embedded [ingesteld] in cosmic time itself. Through this bottom layer our thought is in continuous temporal contact with all the other modal functions which our selfhood can claim in time as its own. This temporal bottom layer of actual analysis is our intuition. (NC II, 473).This might be an appropriate point at which to add that I am very much beholden to the fresh analysis of Dooyeweerd provided by Dr J Glenn Friesen. This has significantly enhanced my understanding of Herman Dooyeweerd's writings. Indeed I would go so far as to say that it has precipitated a breakthrough in my life as I seek to engage with the concrete reality into which Christ redeems us and which He graciously floods with meaning on our behalf. To put the matter in more philosophical terms, Friesen has helped me gain a far deeper insight into the manner in which Dooyeweerd's thought articulates the crucial interface between the ontical and the epistemological. Friesen's home page is now HERE.
Only in our intuition is our logical subject-function in actual temporal contact with the other aspects of reality. (NC II, 478).
Now the question arises in my mind as to whether in practice Zen at its best does not also manifest a profoundly central engagement with intuition. And I note with interest that no less than Daisetz T. Suzuki confirms that it does:
"[T]here is no Zen without satori, which is indeed the Alpha and Omega of Zen Buddhism. . . . Satori may be defined as an intuitive looking into the nature of things in contradistinction to the analytical or logical understanding of it." D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (London: Rider and Co., 1950, reprint, 1985), pp. 229-230The above is quoted by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith in his online article "Zen: A Trinitarian Critique". Smith goes on to discuss Suzuki's distinction between Buddhism's "prajna" and "vijnana" knowledge - the former being intuitive and relating to "Oneness", the latter logic-based and relating to "Multiplicity". For Smith, "Zen epistemology is clearly and emphatically monistic". He observes that prajna subsumes vijnana. He quotes Suzuki to this effect, while noting Suzuki's prevarications. Smith says:
Suzuki, thus, makes a distinction between a rational approach to knowledge based upon logic, an approach to knowledge that operates with words and distinctions between things, and an irrational approach to knowledge that is based upon an experience. Prajna-intuition takes us directly to the One by means of a transrational experience. This is the only way the One can be known because any approach involving logic or words would also inescapably depend upon making distinctions and thus never really lead to the One. The world of the Many, on the other hand, is known by logic and verbal reasoning. Vijnana may be used to describe types of knowledge as different as common sense, philosophy, or physics, but in any case it is immersed in the manyness of things...
Suzuki believes these two types of knowledge are related and underneath the apparent differences there is a more basic unity...
The significance of this for Zen metaphysics is clear. The One is ultimate, and only the knowledge of the One is, in the final analysis, true knowledge. But, of course, if Zen Buddhists stopped with assertions like those above, they would have in effect granted the multiplicity of things for they seem to be accepting the distinction between the One and the Many. Suzuki, therefore, also says:
To speak more logically, if this is allowable with prajna-intuition, everything connected with vijnana also belongs to prajna; prajna is there in its wholeness; it is never divided even when it reveals itself in each assertion or negation made by vijnana. To be itself vijnana polarizes itself, but prajna never loses its unitive totality. . . . [W]e may say this: not unity in multiplicity, nor multiplicity in unity; but unity is multiplicity and multiplicity is unity. In other words prajna is vijnana, and vijnana is prajna; only, this is to be "immediately" apprehended and not after a tedious and elaborate and complicated process of dialectic. [Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, "Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy" in Charles A. Moore, ed., The Japanese Mind, Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967, pp. 74-75]
Not merely the ultimacy of the One -- which leaves the distinction between the One and the Many intact -- but the identity of the One and the Many is the way of a truly consistent monism. ("Zen: A Trinitarian Critique" by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith)Smith goes on to quote Suzuki denying that Zen is a monistic pantheism:
In pantheism there is still an antithesis of subject and object, and the idea of an all-permeating God in the world of plurality is the work of postulation. Prajna-intuition precludes this. No distinction is allowed here between the one and the many, the whole and the parts. When a blade of grass is lifted the whole universe is revealed there; in every pore of the skin there pulsates the life of the triple world, and this is intuited by prajna, not by way of reasoning but "immediately." The characteristic of prajna is this "immediacy." If we have reasoning to do here, it comes too late; as the Zen masters would say, "a speck of white cloud ten thousand miles away." [Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, "Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy" in Charles A. Moore, ed., The Japanese Mind, Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967), p. 74]Smith responds to the above with the following:
While Suzuki disallows that Zen is pantheistic, the justification that he offers is nothing if not pantheistic. What he is saying, in effect, is that when pantheism is taken seriously it cannot be called pantheism because "pantheism" is an academic label for a philosophy that can be defined by words. To allow that Zen is pantheism would be admitting that it can be categorized accurately by human language. This involves an acceptance of the Many (words) as a legitimate approach to the One and may even imply that the Many are more ultimate. At any rate, it reduces the One to the level of the Many and to the realm of human logic.As I have drafted and redrafted this essay, my indebtedness to Dooyeweerd has continued to deepen very markedly. Nonetheless, there is an area of Dooyeweerd's thought over which I confess I continue to ponder particularly deeply. That is his view of the status and function of the text of Scripture. Curiously, some resonance or other in the last quotations above from Suzuki and Smith have brought this back to mind.
Zen cannot tolerate academic labels and definitions because it claims to transcend words and offer an absolute and direct experience of the ultimate One. Suzuki's denial of pantheism, then, amounts to a statement that a truly consistent pantheism must reject any label that would place it within a specific logical framework. When scholars define Zen as pantheism, they make Zen just another philosophy among the Many, whereas it claims to be the road to freedom from all dualism. Thus, in accordance with its pantheistic logic, the label pantheism must be denied by Zen. ("Zen: A Trinitarian Critique" by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith)
For one pro-Dooyeweerd perspective on this matter listen to particularly the latter half of this late 1960's audio of a lecture by Dr Arnold De Graaff, entitled "Distinction Between Naive Experience and Theoretical Thought of Dooyeweerd". This brings us close to one of the historical divides between Dooyeweerdians and Van Tillians. Sides have been taken. Blows exchanged. Not many aikidoists in evidence. "Protect your opponent" not really a marked feature of these engagements. For a moment's diversion, you may care to peruse my short spoof entitled "The Dastardly Slaying of Dewey the Weird".
The import of this discussion for Christian thinking is of course huge. I have attempted a summary of Dooyeweerd's view of Scripture here:
Van Til voiced concern that on this matter Dooyeweerd veers dangerously towards irrationalism:
"If this idea of dunamis is not to lead us into a Kantian sort of noumenal, then it must be based upon the spoken Word, full of thought-content....".
I have addressed that accusation here:
Conundrum: how to critique, without being accused of "rationalism", that of which nothing can be said. A new Zen koan for you, grasshopper!
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