Robert Pirsig, Emotions,
and Radical Feminism
Fluid-essentialism, being a "two-way street" approach to understanding
causation processes that link individuals and society, seeks to explain
the nature and origins of the particular social context (patriarchy) and
the types of constraint that it imposes upon interaction, while also attempting
to unravel the processes by which individuals interact with reality (including
social reality, i.e., each other) in such a way as to arrive at individual
and socially shared understandings. By the nature of the questions and in
keeping with the integrated and unified nature of the fluid model, the answers
to these questions are largely inseparable; that is, they tend to imply
each other.
Of the two explanatory tasks, the existing body of radical feminist theory
compares favorably with other macrosocial theories in the extent to which
it describes and explains the social context (patriarchy). In developing
models for depicting the interactive processes by which meaning is established,
radical feminism is comparatively underdeveloped, with other microsocial
theories providing more succinct, more crisply defined (though not necessarily
more accurate) models for addressing these questions.
Emotions are the key to knowledge: this is the
essence of radical feminist epistemological theory. Since emotions are usually
considered to be subjective, and to base knowledge on entirely subjective
criteria would seem to make it difficult to argue for the accuracy of a
critical consciousness of society over a more conservative one held by someone
else, the process by which feminists claim that people can transcend the
immediate social environment of patriarchy and its ideologies and see things
as they actually are is a process that could use further explanation.
Epistemologies in general tend to be connected to metaphysical theories,
which define reality and meaning. A coherent, integrated metaphysical system
would seem at first glance to require that ultimate meaning be located somewhere,
and if meaning does not lie in material things themselves, it tends to be
located outside of them, in the socially constructed systems of interconnected
signifiers such as language, or, more broadly, in some combination of individual
and collective subjectivity that generates meaning and projects it onto
the otherwise formless world. Thus, social theories tend to fall prey either
to the weaknesses of materialist realism (which has trouble explaining anything
other than the unproblematic apprehension of reality as it self-evidently
exists) or the radical subjectivist accounts such as poststructuralism (which
has trouble making claims for the accuracy of any one apprehension of reality
over any other).
As I said, an emotion-based epistemological system is unorthodox. Most students
of philosophy are far more likely to be exposed to epistemological accounts
of how we perceive, attach meaning, come to know things, etc., which would,
if they were accurate formulations, discredit radical feminist theory because
of its way of knowing.
For example, theories of phenomenology (Kockelmas
1967; Wolff 1978) represent a serious
challenge to feminist epistemology. Utilizing the philosophical metaphysical
and epistemological formulations of Edmund Husserl to answer questions of
meaning and knowing, the phenomenological school seeks to derive the microdynamic
processes of social interaction. Objects in the physical sense are thought
to have intrinsic meaning which can be perceived by bracketing off the socially
shared associations and valuations, but the process of doing so is rare
because we tend to accept conventional interpretations and complex social
constructs as unproblematically self-evident. Given the impetus to do so,
however, individuals have the ability to go "back to the things",
as Husserl advised (Wolff 1978, p. 501)-to
suspend those everyday "natural attitude" conceptualizations (Kockelmas 1967, p. 27) and rely only
on the self-evidently irreducible objective elements of reality, inside
of which no ideological distortions can exist. This irreducible meaning
of "things", or eidetic meaning, is said to derive from
intuition (Kockelmas 1967, p. 29),
and pursuit of intuition is thus asserted to result in knowledge of truth
which otherwise remains concealed in layers of social illusion. The challenge
to phenomenologists would be to study the processes by which edifices of
understanding and meaning are (or are not) properly built up from the eidetic
meaning of things themselves.
What this means, despite the attentive focus on the processes by which people
come to see situations as having a certain meaning (a process also known
as ethnomethodology), is that phenomenology is ultimately rooted in an attempt
to ground a kind of objective criticism of social form in an objective material
reality. The intuitive process described by Husserl and adopted by the phenomenological
school is basically a radical empiricism asserting the existence of absolute
objectivity and intrinsic meaning in the world, and that when reduced to
the non-abstract sensory input level "there is no consciousness except
consciousness of something (Wolff
1978, p. 503), the eidetic meaning of which is immediate and self-evident.
This type of radical empiricism, in which sensory impression is asserted
to provide one directly with the understanding of meaning in the absence
of illusory distractions, has its supporters but is far from being considered
unassailable. The irreducible location of meaning in things and the direct
sensory impressions that they provide, which depends on the notion that
a person can "bracket" the conceptual structures of categories
and labels and meanings and directly experience "things" and know
them for what they are, has been criticized as indefensible by skeptics
who believe in the social-construction-of-reality models (discussed in Wolff, 1978, p. 507). Meanwhile, for those
seeking a way out of the socialized-puppet models, which tend to
deny the individual any capacity to discern independently or see through
ideologies to which she or he is socialized, phenomenology has its attractions.
This "intuition" of phenomenological interactionist theory is
not, however, the same as the intuition to which radical feminists refer.
This conceptualization of the relationship between perception and meaning
is entirely incompatible with radical feminism insofar as there is no place
for emotions and emotionally-driven intuitive processes here except for
the discard pile of "everyday" (illusory) meanings which, insofar
as they cannot be clearly seen to stem from direct sensory input, are being
bracketed out of the way. In fact, a closer consideration of the tight dependency
of accurate knowledge upon sensory observation of which one is conscious
makes phenomenology's "intuition" start to look a lot like that
old sacred icon of positivist science, concrete empirical data. It also
looks weak in light of common-sense considerations of how people arrive
at meaning-certainly, it would seem that if objects have compelling eidetic
meanings which are apparent when social constructs are bracketed and pulled
back out of the way, then infants should be immediately cognizant of their
environments, and very young children fully acquainted with the ultimate
meaning of things. As with rational choice and exchange theories, it becomes
difficult to understand how to explain the success of the social illusions
of ideology.
The shortcomings of epistemological theories which challenge feminist theory,
or are at best incompatible with it, do not negate the need for a more convincing
model with which to replace them. I have always felt (intuited) that the
radical feminists were right about intuition, emotion, and cognition, but
the explanation of how the process works was incomplete and therefore hard
to explain, defend, or propose as a counter-argument (though there may be
good feminist accounts I haven't been exposed to).
Charles Taylor (1971) delineates the
parameters of a theory which seems to point in a useful direction. Hermeneutics,
the science of interpretation, describes the relationship of meaning
and knowledge in such a way that the object (text) being interpreted has
authentic meaning which can be clear and apparent or vague and unclear,
and which can be construed or misconstrued by the subject to whom it has
these meanings. Hermeneutics seeks to clarify through interpretation, in
such a way that the meaning of the object becomes more apparent to the subject.
The meaning does not lie objectively in the objects, though, for the meaning
that the objects have is meaning to a subject. In other words, the
reader of a text (or "experiencer" of a situation or reality)
has a relationship to that text such that the text has meaning to her or
him whether he/she understands that meaning fully or not. In cases where
understanding is missing or incomplete, hermeneutic interpretation translates
the meaning of the original text into another form that expresses that meaning
so as to make the original text understandable. Meaning is for a subject
but not located in the subject either, so much as in the relationship
of subject and object. Meaning is distinguished from understanding, allowing
us to speak of accurate or false consciousness of a situation. Understanding
and meaning are also distinguished from forms of expression, particularly
the embodiment of meaning in language, since by definition if one's text's
meaning is to be clarified through the writing of another text that interprets
it, the same meaning must be said to exist (for the subject) in two different
texts. A relative, elastic relationship between meaning and expression is
understood to exist rather than a tight, rigid correspondence.
The hermeneutic process only begins to take on full meaning when plural
subjects are considered, since the occasions for a single observer to engage
in an act of interpretation and re-expression for his or her own clarification
are more limited and the importance of the process is less apparent. In
the social setting, when an object (text) becomes a topic of debate or consideration
due to ambiguities of meaning or different readings of its meaning (including
different opinions as to its clarity and the extent to which it makes sense
at all), those who perceive the meaning that it has for them render their
understanding into new words through which to convey that meaning. Similarly,
when the object serving as text is the social setting itself, the meaningful
activities of what Taylor refers to (in prefeminist terminology) as "the
sciences of man" revolve around that same process of translating the
meaning of the social context into another text of interpretation for the
purposes of clarifying, for other subjects involved, the meaning that the
social context has for them.
Taylor's version of hermeneutics has troublesome implications for academia
which would be mirrored by the implications of radical feminist theory were
it to receive more serious consideration. Hermeneutic social science can
only exist outside of the conventional realm of scientific standards of
certainty. There are no exterior standards from which to judge the accuracy
of a given act of interpretation.
What if someone does not "see" the adequacy of our interpretation,
does not accept our reading? We try to show him [sic] how it makes sense
of the original non- or partial sense. But for him to follow us he must
read the original language as we do, he must recognize these expressions
as puzzling in a certain way, and hence be looking for a solution to our
problem. If he does not, what can we do? The answer, it would see, can only
be more of the sameWe cannot escape an ultimate appeal to a common understanding
of the expressions, of the "language" involved. This is one way
of trying to express what has been called the "hermeneutical circle."
(p. 6)
On the basis of this state of relative and self-referential certainty, I'm
inclined to consider hermeneutics an "art" process rather than
a "science" process, and in accordance with Taylor's assertion
that the social sciences should proceed hermeneutically, to assert that
there is no valid social science, but rather good social art.
Although this approach does not claim that the "knowledge" that
any one of us possess is merely a set of beliefs and ideas that have been
instilled within us through social construction, it will probably be unappealing
to sociologists of a more positivist inclination; and it should be noted
that even the proponents of social construction tend implicitly to exclude
themselves and other social scientists when they advance their theories
of meaning and knowledge, as evidenced by their tendency to behave as if
there really were a difference in accuracy and quality between their "knowledge"
and that of their undergraduate students.
Nevertheless, the hermeneutic model seems to accurately describe the process
of trying to convey sociological understanding, both within the classroom
and through the process of writing social theory-
Today's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being
self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to.
We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles
and mysterious behavior. Why?
Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call
for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe
them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility,
and by doing so they change the way we look at themSo valuing invades description,
moral judgment confounds analysis.
The most illuminating reaction occurs when a statement is made which runs
counter to the customary attitudes of any given audience. Sometimes it is
directly upsetting; that is, the audience takes in its significance and
disagrees. But more often the meaning is separated from the fact of the
statement. Then people say, "Oh, I suppose this absurd and disgusting
thing you tell me is true enough, but it doesn't matter because it's just
an aberration." It may be true, that is, in the particular instance
cited, but it isn't true importantly, because it doesn't link up with the
overall pattern. It can, and should, be ignored
Clearly, even apparently scientific and objective data do not operate in
the social world in the same way that they operate in the physical world.
A "fact" can't be pinned down simply by being correct in the sense
that, Yes, it did happen. In the physical world, hypotheses that don't work
have to be abandoned. In the social world, hypotheses will swallow up "facts"
that challenge them over and over again. As long as the emotion invested
in them can keep them plausible, they will "work" well enough
to get by.
(Janeway 1971, pp. 135-6, 143-4)
In the classroom, one presents content to one's students, which must be
integrated into the preexisting background of what they already know or
believe, and if comprehension does not take place, it is necessary to move
back to more general subject matter until one reaches common ground, a mutual
agreement as to what is so. From there, one introduces interpretations and
explanations that purport to clarify some aspects of social life, perhaps
by providing new information about other human experience within the overall
social context (data), but always and necessarily by describing matters
according to a schematic pattern that attempts to make sense of things (theory).
Unless one can offer up that which clarifies life as one's students know
and experience it, they may take notes and remember the "right answers"
long enough to write them down on a test paper, but this will have little
if any effect on what they understand and know about life, and, therefore,
on their behavior, political or otherwise.
Taylor's perspective integrates agency into a social framework in which
people share (and expect each other to share) a conceptual framework of
social (and, for that matter, physical) reality. While avoiding the deterministic
sense of individuals as "programmed" by the surrounding culture,
Taylor places them each in an idea-context of intersubjectively shared beliefs
which provides them with the tools for interpreting experience--what he
calls "proto-'interpretation'" (p. 16). But whereas a social constructionist
would see individuals as entirely constrained by an inability to experience
anything except in those terms, there is nothing in Taylor's schema that
limits individuals' understandings to the confines of those beliefs and
concepts.
What we are left with is the question of what this understanding consists
of, and what its characteristics are. In separating understanding from language,
Taylor implicitly theorizes a class of meaningful thought that does not
depend on processing signifiers as terms. This would certainly tend to eliminate
rationality from consideration, since rational thinking is dependent upon
terminologies in order to set temporary axioms for consideration and so
forth. It sets the stage for revalorizing emotional processes. Taylor, however,
does not develop this sense of unlanguaged cognition, and therefore now
his model needs elaboration.
I have found, in the theory-laden fiction of Robert
Pirsig, an excellent and detailed explication of epistemological processes
that pick up where Taylor leaves off, and which fits the radical feminist
paradigm like the proverbial glove.
Like Husserl, Pirsig grants that when the measure of an object is reduced
to the sensory impression of it, socially maintained concepts (and possible
ideological distortions) do not play a role, and there is a sense in which
one is making a clean, new "back to the things" assessment. Unlike
Husserl, Pirsig does not claim that a deliberate and rare process of "bracketing"
is necessary; instead, one is inevitably "back to the things"
on a constant basis. Using the example of seeing a tree, Pirsig notes that
At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there
must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, called awareness of Quality.
You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree,
and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be
a time lag...Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes
and forms is to intellectualize.
(Pirsig 1974, pp. 221, 224)
In contrast with the Husserl model, Pirsig is saying there is nothing compellingly
meaningful about those visual sensory impressions that automatically tells
the person that its source is a tree. If you have seen trees before, you
have past experiences with similar visual sensory impressions which are
cross-indexed with other experiences, sensory impressions, concepts, social
attitudes, and so forth, all of which taken together represent "treeness"
to you. But before these sensory impressions can be cross-referenced and
interpreted, they have to be felt. This experience, which is nonverbal,
nonanalytical, nonconceptual, is entirely located in the present moment,
and consciousness consists of "feelings" in both senses of the
word-sensation (in this case, visual sensations) and emotion. Pirsig refers
to this mode of knowing as the "romantic" mode. McMillan
(1982) notes that rationalists who try to put a wedge between reason
and emotions and assign validity only to the former "fail to see that
what makes bodily states and sensations emotional is the presence of evaluations
or cognitions. Although feelings involve bodily processes, they are nevertheless
distinguishable from them" (p. 28). This experiencing of self-in-relation-to-tree,
which is the romantic mode of knowing as opposed to the classical mode,
is also preverbal and preanalytical. A classical analytical
response, in its simplest form, is necessary to distinguish between self
and tree. Analytical categorization identifies the tree as a tree and assigns
objectivity to it, identifies the emotional-preverbal impressions as subjective
reactions to the tree, makes separate observations about the appearance
of the bark and the length of the branches and color of the leaves or needles,
and given sufficient familiarity with trees perhaps makes the determination
that the tree is a pine tree; or, for that matter, that it is a seventeen-to-
eighteen-year-old Ponderosa pine with a mild case of tree blight.
The newborn infant would not only be incapable of identifying the object
in her field of visions as a tree, she would be incapable of knowing immediately
that these strange new sensory sensations have something to do with an object
that she could touch if she could move in the direction her head is pointed,
or even that visual impressions of a certain sort imply the existence of
an object in her line of vision.
It seems compellingly obvious to anyone who has been around a baby for a
couple of months that an infant's mind is filing sensations and emotions
and noticing patterns with startling rapidity. The patterns formed, which
allow for the infant to predict occurrences based on previously connected
patterns and so forth, constitute what Pirsig calls "analogues of reality".
Prior to language acquisition (which itself depends on a preverbal ability
to notice patterns), the process of recognition and the fitting of feelings
into existing patterns is a limited one, and the patterns are limited patterns.
The process at this point is entirely intuitive. Intuition, therefore, is
the simplest, most basic form of comparative analysis, a feeling for and
recognition of pattern that forms a bridge between the totally nonanalytical
split-second here-and-now "romantic" experience and the classical
analysis which uses language-based categorical systems.
Actually, the process of analysis always requires a level of emotional involvement.
The process of fitting a new experience into preexisting analogues of reality
involves a consideration for the elegance and beauty of its fit, a consideration
that is made manifest through feeling:
[Jules Henrí Poincaré used to say that]...Mathematics isn't
merely a question of applying rules, any more than science. It doesn't merely
make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The
combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersomethe
subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions
to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness.
Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis
of "mathematical beauty", of the harmony of numbers and forms,
of geometrical elegance...Poincaré made it clear that he was not
speaking of romantic beauty, the beauty of appearances which strikes the
senses. He means classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of
the partsIt is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony
of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute
to this harmony...It is this harmony, this quality, if you will, that is
the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know.
(Pirsig 1974, pp. 240-241)
Once our hypothetical infant becomes verbal, language makes complex communication
and comparison of analogues with those of other people possible. The analogues
of reality which are formed and modified by this process become extremely
complex, as do her mind's analytical processes themselves. Analogues rendered
in words are shared and are expected to be shared with other people
experiencing the same world (Newcomb,
Turner and Converse 1965), and we depend on consultation with other
people to double-check our comprehension of the universe we live in:
What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that
this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications
that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings.
(Pirsig 1974, p. 241)
The complex patterns of verbally coded analogues of reality are social analogues,
and now we are speaking of a level of interaction that includes the elements
of individual, external reality, cognition, and society and socialization.
Now it is possible of conceptualize a discrepancy between reality perceptions
of the individual and social analogues of reality utilized by the surrounding
culture, and to account for both awareness and lack of awareness of oppression,
if it were to exist, is an easy matter.
Pirsig mentions in his introduction of the concepts of classical and romantic
esthetic that the classical mode of understanding (analytical and reductionistic)
tends to be associated with masculinity and the romantic esthetic (intuitive
and holistic) with femininity. Although he deemphasizes the gender connection,
the thesis of his book concerns the degree to which Quality has been disregarded,
both in the romantic and the classical mode, and that the world has for
a long time operated on the erroneous premise that analysis and rationality
can be detached from subjectivity and emotion, that science can be separated
from art.
Radical feminist Robin Morgan makes a similar point:
Unfortunately, technology as we have come to express and experience it
exists in quite a different context, one split off from [art and poetry]and
often posed as actively antagonistic to art.
(Morgan 1982, p. 270)
A central part of what patriarchy means to interaction is that feeling has
been surgically separated from thinking, and such a separation not only
neglects and maligns the validity of feeling, it also destroys the validity
of thought. The interactive nature of all meaning, and the role of
feelings in arriving at objective as well as subjective meaning, are denied
as part and parcel of the process of separating feeling from meaning, which
constrains cognition. In a context of interaction comparatively free of
such constraints, the fact that we all share the ability to recognize patterns
and make sense of reality would mean, more often than not, that the social
check of communication would reveal compatibility between our individual
images of reality and the images that other people have. Individuals would
not be exposed to a constant denial of the validity of their personal reality-assessing
processes. Knowledge would not be viewed so exclusively as something that
one learns from people who know better. Thus, the radical feminist indictment
of the patriarchal myth of value-free emotionless rationality is an identification
of distinctively central political characteristics.
I began by considering cognitive social analogues of simple physical realities
such as trees in my examples because simple models are easier to present
and discuss, but as Newcomb et. al.
(1965) pointed out, evaluative norms concerning social reality work
according to the same principle. The sharing of a perception constitutes
a cognitive norm, an element of the social analogue of reality. Values,
ethics, and moral priorities-those cognitive norms that most consciously
determine behavior-are among these. Behavior-indicative systems take the
form "You (I, he, we,) ought to do such-and-such", which
is a perception of what a person ought to do, and why;
these form the social-context version of a cognitive norm; that is,
they are cognitive norms that are shared and expected to be shared which
address the subject matter of which behaviors are desirable. Social reality,
whether it be a n administrative procedure or a moral code, may seem far
more abstract (and more arbitrary) than physical reality such as trees.
Nevertheless, under conditions of relatively unconstrained interaction,
what individuals are doing, when they socially interact, is not constructing
social reality in the same sense that a potter constructs vases out of clay,
but rather comparing their analogue-models of human social needs in a physically
natural context, and individual needs in a physical and social natural context.
Therefore, within abstractions about how things ought to be is an
assertion that should not be considered to be arbitrary. The essence of
social reality is not arbitrary, to be shaped as compromise and chance
circumstance determine, but is rather geared towards the "discovery"
of objectivity.
In relatively unconstrained interaction, as a result of the elasticity of
language and perspective differences, there would be a relative, rather
than absolute, certainty that the rest of the people in one's world were
seeing the same world. This elasticity, this fluid rather than rigid condition
of interconnectedness, would probably soften the "edges" of objectivity
to permit a sense of individuality, although it would be an individuality
not so dramatic in its separateness as the individuality we know. Newcomb et. al. (1965) cite a study by
Kitt and Gleicher demonstrating what they call "pulling"--the
tendency for people to skew their estimation of other people's behavior
in the direction of their own. We can extend this understanding to include
estimates of all of the cognitive processes of other people as well as those
most directly responsible for behavior, and this would be what I'd expect
to find in a relatively constraint-free interactive world as the normative
and functional adaptation to the elasticity of different individual experiences.
In contrast to relative elasticity and the assumption of shared reality,
oppression correlates with a pattern, qualitatively different from those
little discontinuities, in which an individual feels (and
perhaps, but not necessarily, comprehends and analyzes) a rigid and ongoing
tension between his or her experience of reality and the social definition
thereof.
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