This is a MoQ post from October 2001.

“The first step is to define the term.” I interpret one of the main messages of ZMM (especially part IV) as being a refutation of the need to define things in every circumstance, that in fact the desire to define can in important cases be radically counterproductive – that is how I understand the ‘victory’ of rhetoric over dialectic. Now I may be biassed in my interpretation of this as a result of my studies of Wittgenstein (my principal philosophical interest), who I think says very much the same thing, but because the constructive part of this post depends on understanding Wittgenstein’s view of language, I’ll spell out his view in a bit more detail. I promise to bring the discussion back to love and the MOQ eventually, and I also promise to try my hardest to avoid jargon. Wittgenstein’s underlying idea is actually astonishingly simple, it just runs completely counter to standard (including SOM) thinking, so people who are steeped in the standard models don’t really ‘get it’. One last bit of preamble – Pirsig says different things to Wittgenstein, they are not the same and there are places where they disagree. The relationship between them reminds me of what Phaedrus says about – I think – Poincare, as someone who was climbing the same mountain, but from a completely different starting point, and stops at just the other side of where he had stopped. But on with the show:

Wittgenstein once said ‘It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want.’ Wittgenstein had in mind a passage such as this one, from Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus: ‘in every discussion there is only one way of beginning if one is to come to a sound conclusion, and that is to know what one is discussing… Let us then begin by agreeing upon a definition’. In the conclusion of the Phaedrus Socrates restates this: ‘a man must know the truth about any subject that he deals with; he must be able to define it.’ For Wittgenstein it is this emphasis upon definability in words which is the source of all our metaphysical illusions, illusions which ‘lie as deep in us as the forms of our language’. Wittgenstein’s view, in contrast, is that “in most cases, but not in all, the meaning of a word lies in its use in the language game”.

Wittgenstein’s positive philosophical achievement lies in an understanding of language which is not predicated on this Socratic perspective. The easiest way to get a quick grasp of Wittgenstein’s view of language is to talk about the difference between what he calls surface grammar and depth grammar. Surface grammar is the explicit content and form of a sentence: the division into nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. It is what we normally think of as grammar. Depth grammar is the function that a sentence plays within the life of the person speaking the sentence. In other words, an investigation of the depth grammar of a word will indicate the use that the
words have. Think of the expression ‘I need some water’. This seems quite straightforward, but depending upon the context and the emphasis placed upon different words, it could have all sorts of different senses. For example, it could be a straightforward description of thirst, or an expression of the need for an ingredient in making bread, or preparing water colours. So far, so straightforward. But think of something more interesting. Perhaps it is an insult: I am a mechanic, and I am working on fixing a car radiator. My assistant knows that I need some fluid, but passes me some left over orange squash: ‘I need some water’ – where the expression also means: why are you being so stupid? In other words, the surface grammar of a comment may be the same, but the depth grammar is radically different dependent on the situation at hand. For Wittgenstein, true understanding came not from the search for definitions but from grammatical investigation – ie, looking at
real situations and seeing what is being discussed.

Now, for Wittgenstein, the point of this grammatical investigation was that you achieved clarity about any questions that are at issue. If there is a philosophical discussion, then the way to proceed is to conduct a grammatical investigation of the words and concepts that are in dispute, to look at how different words are used in their normal context. For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are the result of conceptual confusion and to meet these problems what is needed is conceptual clarification. The task of the philosopher is carefully to depict the relationships between different concepts, in other words, to investigate their grammar. The concepts are the ones used in our everyday language, and it is the fact that the concepts *are* used in our language that gives them their importance. A grammatical investigation in the Wittgensteinian sense is one that looks at how words are used within a lived context. Hence there is the need to investigate the nature of “language games” and “forms of life”, which are the usual phrases which you hear when people talk about Wittgenstein. This is a method, and it is with this method that Wittgenstein’s true genius lies. In contrast to almost all philosophers within the Western tradition Wittgenstein was not concerned with providing answers to particular
questions. Rather, he wished to gain clarity about the question at issue, in order therefore to dissolve the controversy. He wrote: ‘Philosophy can in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.’

An example might help to make his view clearer. A traditional metaphysical question might be ‘What is time’? We want to know what the word means, and because the word is a noun we look to see what it is that is referred to. Yet there is nothing to which we can point and say ‘That is time’. Thus philosophers are puzzled, and trying to answer questions such as this is the classic job of a philosopher, or more precisely, a metaphysician. For Wittgenstein, though, the question is without sense. Wittgenstein would say, why do we assume that there must be something to which the word refers? Look at how the word is actually used in our language, and see if that enlightens your consideration. Thus, when we look at the contexts in which we use the
sentence ‘Time flew by’ they would tend to describe moments when we are particularly absorbed in a piece of work, or where we are with friends having an enjoyable evening. The phrase derives its meaning from that context. To then ask, ‘What is time?’ would be absurd. What we must always have at the forefront of our minds is the organic basis of the language that we use. Language has evolved for particular purposes, it has various distinct uses, and there is no necessity that there is a clear and logical basis for it. One of Wittgenstein’s best images is to suggest looking at language as like a tool box, with different tools to perform different functions. Why should there be something which all tools have in common? And why are you so concerned to find it? Wittgenstein is very concerned to ease the philosophical mind away from its tendency for abstract theorising, and to focus it on everyday details, to see what language is actually doing in a given situation. (To come down from the mountain of abstract reasoning, into the valley of life, to misquote Pirsig’s image)

To me, the question of love is is the ‘important case’ par excellence, and if we start down the path of trying to define love, then we are already on the wrong path. I would suggest that, following Pirsig as much as Wittgenstein, we look instead at what is going on when people use the language of love, ideally by taking the best exemplars of what are commonly accepted as loving people, and seeing what they do with it – hence my profound agreement with Platt pointing towards the New Testament as a place to start.

Now, having said what I wanted to say about Wittgenstein, it’s time for something constructive about the nature of religious belief. For me (speaking as a fully paid up member of a religious sect 😉 ) Christian doctrine *is* the philosophy of love. But that requires more explanation.

I think most of the participants in this forum would have sympathy with the argument that Pirsig makes, first in Zen and then in Lila more systematically, that there is something wrong with present-day Western scientific and technological culture. Scientific culture claims to be value-free; and Pirsig offers a beautiful route out of the problems which that dominant view has created. Science was born out of a political and religious context – principally what are traditionally called the ‘wars of religion’ of seventeenth century Europe. One of the consequences of those historical events was that ‘enthusiasm’ was greeted with great suspicion. It was believed that those who were so caught up with their religious views that they ‘enthused’ about them were dangerous fanatics, who had to be opposed. The cardinal virtues were now tolerance and rationality. (Any of this ringing some bells, by the way, given present day events?) This came through most in the work of John Locke. Locke’s principal innovation was his argument that, in order to resolve these disagreements we should resort to the light of Reason. He wrote:

‘since traditions vary so much the world over and men’s opinions are so obviously oposed to one another and mutually destructive, and that not only among different nations but in one and the same state – for each single opinion we learn from others becomes a tradition – and finally since everybody contends so fiercely for his own opinion and demands that he be believed, it would plainly be impossible – supposing tradition alone lays down the ground of our duty – to find out what that tradition is, or to pick out truth from among such a variety, because no ground can be assigned why one man of the old generation, rather than another maintaining quite the opposite, should be credited with the authority of tradition or be more worthy of trust; except it be that reason discovers a difference in the things themselves that are transmitted, and embraces one opinion while rejecting another, just because it detects more evidence recognizable by the light of nature for the one than for the other. Such a procedure, surely, is not the same as to believe in tradition, but is an attempt to form a considered opinion about things themselves; and this brings all the authority of tradition to naught’

Locke fleshed out a practical programme for how our beliefs should be guided. The following aspects are the most crucial:

1. we have a moral responsibility for what we believe,
2. we should apportion our beliefs according to the evidence available to us, and
3. in all things we should let reason be our guide.

Put positively, the beliefs that we can hold should be those which can be rationally demonstrated, either by appeal to self-evident first principles, or to empirical evidence. Beliefs must, in either case, be shown to have a rational foundation. Where a rational foundation is lacking then we are subject to unreason – to the excesses of enthusiasm that had led to the cultural crisis of the 17th Century.

Now I want to pick out two aspects of this project for criticism. The first relates to the nature of religion, the second to the flaw in the scientific world view.

What is religious belief? (I’ll talk here only about Christianity – it’s the only one that I understand from the ‘inside’, but I’m confident that my points would be accepted by people in other faiths, even if not by all.) The secular world has a clear view of what it considers religious belief to be. One of the most outspoken critics of Christianity in the West is Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene and other works about the theory of evolution, and someone who (possibly not consciously) is clearly following Locke. He writes:

‘Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.’

And in a footnote to this passage he expands:

‘But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn’t matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed.’

According to the Dawkins conception, then, faith is ‘blind’, and not open to rational debate. The distinguishing characteristic of a Christian (or other religious believer) is their belief in certain things, for example that Jesus is the Son of God. This belief is something that is held independently of any grounds that can be rationally demonstrated (at least to Dawkins’ satisfaction). For Dawkins the debate between an atheist and a religious believer is therefore about what can or cannot be believed by an intelligent and aware person. He would argue that there are no credible grounds for believing in the Christian religion and that therefore one should not be a Christian believer (or, at least, the justification for such a belief would not lie in the truth of the matter, but rather in something like social utility or personal psychological need). The secular world therefore sees religious belief as being primarily about certain propositions, certain claims about the nature of the world.

It seems to me that this is the voice of SOM thinking, which Pirsig and Wittgenstein both dismantle, albeit from different directions. To condense quite a long argument, religious belief is NOT a matter of accepting propositions. Let’s go back to Wittgenstein’s view of language – words don’t necessarily refer to something (they aren’t in need of being defined)because we understand the meaning of the word from its use in the language; in other words, what are we doing when we use certain words. In this context, ‘The way you use the word “God” does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean.’ For Wittgenstein (and for me) ‘Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.’ In other words, when religious believers use religious language (eg doctrines) they are actually *doing* something with them – they are not offering descriptions of an outer reality. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless, that you have to change your life (or the direction of your life)…the point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you, you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction’, or, in another place, ‘Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe through thick and thin, which you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.’ To come to the crunch – a religious statement (eg God made the heavens and the earth) does not function in the same way that a scientific statement does (eg the universe started with a big bang).

As a summary (and my favourite quotation from Wittgenstein): ‘A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer…It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.’

So: the western scientific outlook systematically misunderstands the nature of religious belief. Onto the second of the flaws (again, something which Pirsig deals with). The scientific outlook completely devalues what might be called the emotional realm. I’m sure you’re familiar with what Pirsig says, so I’ll put it in my own words:

Scientific method is built upon the exclusion of the individual viewpoint, and in particular, upon the exclusion of the individual’s emotional reactions. Science is concerned with providing knowledge that is ‘objective’ and ‘value free’. The ideal is that of disengaged reason (following Locke) which alone can provide a lucid analysis of the way that things really are. Of course, this is impossible, as scientists have now discovered. If you exclude the observer from consideration then you are rigging the experiment. More fundamentally, the act of excluding emotions means that the possibility of finding value in something is intrinsically excluded. The idea that pure reason is a path to truth is an old one, but it is no longer credible. In particular, we now know that our emotions are linked to our reason in a much more fundamental way than hitherto suspected (see Damasio). We are embodied intelligences, and we cannot function without the body and the emotions which reside therein. The
emotions actually play a role in our reasoning capacity. (Which is why the search for artificial intelligence is in one sense deeply misguided; intelligence as a reasoning capacity might be duplicated, but intelligence as something which might provide something separate to our own is tied up with the importance of emotions and our bodily life. AI will therefore depend on the prospects for artifical life). It is the difference between meaning and knowledge (knowledge is meaningless as it stands, it requires emotional engagement to become meaning, and as science excludes the emotions, all it can produce is meaningless knowledge). If, as I believe, religious language is primarily concerned with value, then there is no surprise that the dominance of science has resulted in undermining the structures of religious belief, for the method of science rules the subject matter of religion out of court from the beginning.

In saying this, I do not mean to argue that the intellectual stance is without value. At the heart of science, and also wider academic endeavour, is the conception that any claims might prove to be wrong. It is therefore ultimately a holy activity, because (in theory) there can never be an idol constructed by science. Of course, scientist themselves fall short of this ideal, and therefore promote certain iewpoints as definitive (eg Dennett and Dawkins on Darwinism). There is a necessity for a reengagement of emotion and reason, and the recognition that that is a higher form of intellectual activity than mere science itself (which is what Pirisig has
done with the MOQ). Furthermore, it is the only ‘science’ that has the potential to be religious, for it does not exclude the spiritual – the shaping of the emotional response in accordance with the wider values of the community, ultimately derived from God (or Quality!). The intellectual stance has value because it does produce knowledge, but knowledge as such is unimportant. What is important is the weaving of that knowledge into the fabric of a whole life. Or, put in a different way, the highest academic virtues relate to the discovery of truth, to honest intellectual endeavour. That value, however, is only one value of many, and (even speaking purely
cognitively) that value is subordinate to the values of beauty and the good. Truth is in itself beautiful, but is only one aspect of beauty, and beauty is only one aspect of what is good. What we need is the largeness of spirit to integrate the value of academic truth within a wider sense of the truth, which includes the beautiful and the good. The truth which is provided by reason is ultimately only that of consistency. This is important, but it is limited. A consistency which inspires by its beauty and humanity, which provokes us to fall in love with it, is rather more truthful than one which doesn’t, and, in practise, a consistency which does not embrace these values, even if only in part, will not succeed (Kuhn).

Of course, it is not simply science that suffers from this, it is actually the stance of disengaged intellectual endeavour, ie the academic mind (SOM!). The root of the church’s problems lie in the 11th and 12th centuries, when academic theology became separated from the monastic practice of devotional reading. There was a shift from the quest for knowledge in order to help belief, to the quest for knowledge for its own sake. The disengaged stance required for academic endeavour is incompatible with spirituality, for the latter is concerned with shaping the emotional response, and the former is predicated on the exclusion of emotion from consideration.

Which brings me (at last! Hallelujah!) to what I want to say about the philosophy of love and the MOQ. The principal function of religion (Christianity) is, for me, to educate us in love. The apparatus of doctrine and worship – developed as static latching mechanisms attempting to safeguard the dynamic breakthroughs made by Jesus – are things which are primarily functional, not definitional or descriptive. The traditions of prayer and spirituality are a highly sophisticated means of raising our
emotional awareness – and therefore our cognitive capacity – in a qualitatively superior direction. In other words, if we really want to describe and understand a philosophy of love, we have to live it, not just talk about it.

~~~~~~~

If you’ve made it this far – thanks, and congratulations. A summary of the above might be handy:
1. Definitions are worse than useless in some contexts. Talk of love is one such.
2. If Wittgenstein is right, then we understand what a word means by seeing what is done with it.
3. The West systematically misunderstands the nature of religious belief.
4. Religious belief is not essentially propositional language, but functional language (it shapes our lives in a certain way).
5. The scientific outlook is emotionally defective (and the MOQ removes the defect).
6. If we want to understand the philosophy of love, the religious traditions are a very good place to start.