I finally succumbed to an intense advertising bombardment from The Teaching Company. Well — a brochure in the mail once a year isn’t all that intense, but this year they kicked it up a notch by including a CD with samples of their recorded academic lectures. I’m getting a little more of a tax return from the State than I had figured, so I decided to blow it all on “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition“, a set of 84 half-hour lectures on major philosophers from the earliest Greeks to Heidegger and Derrida and other modern dudes.

I don’t want to become a shill for The Teaching Company, but it is nice to see a profit-making venture that enchants potential customers with statements like this: “Imagine all that you could learn if you listened to one half-hour lecture every day for a year”. Obviously, The Teaching Company must think that there are enough Eternal Students out there to make a buck off of! I’d like to think I’m not the only one crazy enough to want to keep on hearing college professors talking long after graduation.

So far, I’ve gotten through the Greek pre-Socratics and Sophists and am starting on the Plato lectures. I will say something for those Sophists: they were politically cynical, cynical enough to have made it in 21st Century America. They could have appeared on CNN any day. While Socrates and Plato were seeking out theories of natural morality and learnable goodness, the Sophists were saying that humans are naturally driven by the will of power, that might makes right (Callicles), and that what we define as “justice” is the viewpoint of the side that happened to have won and is in charge (Thrasymachus).

This taste of Sophistic wisdom made me dig up my old yellowing copy of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance once more. I’ve talked about Robert Pirsig quite a lot on this blog. His story kind-of haunts me, not just the motorcycle journey in “Zen”, but in what happened to him after that book make him a temporary star. You may recall that he published a second book called Lila that was quickly forgotten by the public because of its strangeness. Pirsig tried to posit a new intellectual / philosophical system in that book called the “method of quality” or MOQ, but the reading public took a pass on it, along with most academicians in the philosophy field. However, a small contingent of bright people continue struggling with his ideas to this day via an “MOQ” web site, despite the fact that Pirsig himself went into seclusion and turned silent many years ago.

I re-read the “denouement” of the Phradeus story toward the end of the Zen book last night, the part where Pirsig re-tells the story of his days at the University of Chicago just prior to his mental breakdown and institutional commitment. Throughout most of the book, Pirsig seems to deny the importance of that episode; he hints at it, but seems to say that he’s moved on, he’s now just a regular family guy with a motorcycle, it’s all just a ghost that he was about to bury. But toward the end, you can see that he hasn’t buried the old intellectual quandaries that pushed him over the edge as a young man, that he still thinks he was right. (And thus he wrote Lila, to prove in a more formal manner that his thoughts on “quality” are the ultimate way of seeing and understanding reality).

In sum, Pirsig says that back at Chicago, he finally discovered the ultimate theme that ties together all of the great Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic Cosmologists through the Sophists through to Aristotle, despite their many disagreements: QUALITY. Well, maybe they called it “arete” or “excellence”, but don’t worry, it’s all the same he assures us. However, Mr. Pirsig discovered this in the midst of an academic brouhaha with some bigwigs that were unfairly trying to chuck him from the University, despite his self-admitted brilliance. He details the efforts of the bad guys who tried to force him out of his graduate study program, and who finally succeeded by unintentionally sending him off the deep end (and not as intended by embarrassing him academically).

Back in the 1980s, the book reviewers couldn’t say enough good things about Robert Pirsig and his Zen-ish ideas on Quality. So no one much ever stopped to ask, hey, what was the real story out in Chicago? Did it really go down as he said? Or were the circumstances a little more complicated than Mr. Pirsig made them out to be? Unfortunately, I never saw anything published that presented the point of view from the professors and administrators who were involved with Pirsig in Chicago. I would have liked to have heard the other side of the story.

And as to Zen . . . the cool reference to eastern wisdom quickly gets left in the dust raised by Pirsig’s great armchair struggle for the truest philosophical paradigms, carried out by the most brilliant minds (such as his own). Cough, cough . . .

Next, and perhaps relatedly: what about Mr. Pirsig’s great revelation that the ancient Greeks were really all about QUALITY (as Pirsig interprets it)? Obviously, I can’t answer so profound a question after just hearing a couple of lectures from Teaching Company CD’s. I do know that Robert Pirsig does not appear to be mentioned anywhere on the materials that came with the CDs. And his idea that the works and disagreements of the classic Greek philosophers were all based around their common, deep understanding of quality as Pirsig would have it is also not mentioned.

If the Sophists that Pirsig defended were ultimately concerned with Quality as the biggest theme in life and the universe, they sure weren’t very cheery about it. Again, those guys were darn cynical. But then again, Pirsig’s tone about social trends also became quite cynical in Lila, sometimes gratingly so. (Pirsig as social critic — arg!) Perhaps Pirsig and the Sophists were saying many profound and valuable things; but if the medium is the message, then both of their quests for “Quality” ultimately fell quite short.