Robert Pirsig and Buddhism

Baggini asks: But why is the classification of metaphysics into monism, dualism and pluralism arbitrary?

As an exhaustive classification, this leaves out the no-substance, anti-ontological view of Buddhism (anatman, sunyata, ”emptiness”) and Taoism (wu, “Nothing”). According to these views, the ontological attempt to produce an accurate and exhaustive verbal presentation of the categories of being is a vain and harmful one.

Buddhism’s anatman view was developed specifically in opposition to the monist and fully metaphysical view of Hinduism, which held that atman is the one reality. (Hindu metaphysics can be compared to Parmenides’ metaphysics in Western philosophy.) But in Western discussions, Buddhism is usually assimilated to Hinduism as a form of idealistic monism. This Western error is somewhat excusable, since Buddhist philosophers themselves sometimes did slip back into ontology by hypostatizing sunyata or emptiness as a kind of thing or super-thing. But the ontological development of Buddhism loses Buddhism’s most important insight.

The anti-ontological view does not deny the reality of things or of the world, but doubts the value of the attempted verbalization and classification of reality represented by ontology.  To a Buddhist, all ontologies probably have some good in them, but they all miss and misrepresent some things, so the choice of ontologies is a choice of evils.  In the words of Frederick Streng:

“For Nagarjuna the pursuit after final answers regarding the nature of Ultimate Reality was sophistry.... For him, these ‘final answers’ were not to be found because there were no essential self-determined questions. Since there were no ‘one to one’ correlations between concepts and their supposed referents, the inquiry into the nature of things is endless.”  (Emptiness, Abingdon, 1967, p. 87)

Streng’s point really expresses a view about verbalizations of reality more than a view about reality itself. He’s not saying that there’s some mysterious Being or Truth which is unverbalizable, but that the process of verbalization, as it functions, produces statements of various kinds useful for various purposes, but cannot produce a single verbalization, no matter how voluminous and well-articulated, which will answer every question about everything. (By and large Buddhists have no quarrel with the ordinary truths of science and common sense, but only with their ontological elaborations.)

In contemporary philosophy, this strain of Buddhism in some ways resembles the anti-theoretical practical philosophy of Stephen Toulmin (though Buddhists think of practicality differently than Toulmin does). Or for another example,when Rorty says that pragmatism, rather than offering a new theory of truth, offers reasons why we do not need a theory of truth, he approaches a Buddhist view (though again, Rorty’s ideas of practice are non-Buddhist).

However, the contemporary philosopher who comes closest to the Buddhism view as stated by Streng – though he probably doesn’t know it -- is the Swiss philosopher of rhetoric Michel Meyer (Rhetoric, Language, and Reason, Penn State, 1994.) To Meyer, ontology and propositionalism produce closed systems of truth which ignore the reality that all propositions must be regarded first as answers to questions, since all discourse is part of an open questioning process. Any system of ontology is a set of answers to a  certain set of questions, but ontological writing does not express the originary questions, but instead states its answers in absolute form. Were the questions made explicit, readers would understand that a different set of questions would produce a different ontology.

What Pirsig seems to have produced is a philosophy of qualities without substances. This seems tolerably close to the Buddhist or the Taoist view, though I’m not in a position to speak with any confidence.

Readings:

Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Purdue University Press, 1984. (Magliola compares Derrida and Nagarjuna. What he writes about Taoism is useless, however, due to his reliance on a bad translation).

Nishitani, Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, California, 1982. (Nishitani, a Buddhist, was a student of Heidegger but preferred Nietzsche).

Gudmunsen, Chris, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, Macmillan 1977. (Compares the later Wittgenstein’s critical response to Russell’s logical atomism to Nagarjuna’s critical response to the dharma atomism of the Abidharmist Buddhists.)
 

Jayatilleke, K.N., Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, Delhi, 1963/1998. (A student of Wittgenstein. Not a fun read, but shows that early Buddhism was closest to the Skeptical and Materialist schools, and involved the explicit rejection both of Hindu traditionalism and of metaphysics.)

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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