Zen & the Art of Robert Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig is well known for his book 'Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. He is much less known for his second book: 'Lila'. I think I want to compare them both to better understand the author's intellectual evolution.

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a philosophical novel where the author relates of an intellectual odyssey: the question of the Source of All Things. He comes to a metaphysics, wherein he puts Quality before matter, as the originator of all. Quality, he explains, cannot be defined since there is no higher abstraction that can be used for that. But it exists, he pleads, because you can imagine how our world, when quality is subtracted from it - when nobody would be able de distinguish quality from trash - would be total chaos.
He then speaks of a Romantic Quality, a 'before-thinking' quality and a Classic or 'after-thinking quality'. (It reminds me of Korzybski's structural differential where there is a level of perception before any abstract thoughts are formed.) Classic quality, says Pirsig, then leads to the whole system of Aristotelian dichotomies with which we have been educated: mind and matter, truth and falsehood, etc...
The story is told via a motorcycle road trip of the author, his son and two friends. The friends hate motorcycle maintenance but the author thinks it's very important and nice to do. The difference between the two seems to be that the author practices motorcycle maintenance in a Zen kind of way: with a sensitivity to what is going on that is impossible to put in words. His companions can't seem to get this 'feel'. Either way both he and his companions seem to enjoy the trip and that's what gets the author to think that both ways have Quality, but that it must be a different kind of quality. Classic and Romantic Quality. (I myself can subscribe to the feeling of Romantic Quality. I often repair stuff and afterwards I can't really tell how I did it. I can say what I did, but I can't somehow explain my approach other than 'I felt like trying this'.)

Phaedrus - an important character from the book - is Greek for (lone) wolf. Phaedrus is also a key dialogue by Socrates. Phaedrus is the name given to the other schizophrenic self of the author. The realization that Quality is the source of everything and that everything is not 'matter' or 'mind' drives the author insane and schizophrenic, because everyone around him is acting like mind or matter are the prime essences. He feels like a lone wolf with his ideas.

In the end the author seems to have gotten over it - after a controversial shock therapy - and wrote his book. It became a cult classic.

In his second book, 'Lila", he contemplates on this success and elaborates more on this 'Quality'. He dismisses the idea of classic and romantic quality but rather opts for the division into Static and Dynamic Quality. Static quality is in established value patterns (e.g. constitutional laws, social rules, physical laws...) and dynamic quality is some kind of 'changing force'. When someone is in touch with dynamic quality and discovers an improvement over his current situation, such discovery is subsequently 'latched' into static quality. (I've also written about this in my article Life with Assholes.)

Static quality - or the value patterns - is to be found on four distinct levels: physical/chemical, biological, social and intellectual. Physical value patterns are for example the law of gravity. For two bodies with a certain mass it has more value to move closer to each other. Biological value patterns, is a higher level of value patterns because it is organized to go beyond the patterns of the inferior level. So birds (biological) defy gravity (physical) when flying. With chemical/physical 'patterns', biology would not be possible. But biology is organized in such way that it uses the previous level to break free from it's laws. Biology is based on chemistry much like a word processor needs a CPU and some memory banks. But when you know how a memory chip functions you cannot use that knowledge to account for the existence of a word processor. The word processor is dependent on the previous level but it is separate since it cannot be explained by the previous level.
It's small wonder, Pirsig goes on, that life is carbon based. Carbon is very versatile element in group IV that can bind with many other elements and itself. It is a fragile reactive balance and 'quality' tipped that balance in favor of the development of biological patterns, cells, DNA,...
And so it goes on to social levels (A well organized society of people can achieve more than a club of loners) and intellectual levels of value patterns.

Pirsig shows that these separate levels of value patterns lead to a logic system of ethics and morals. For instance on the biological level the greatest good is the continuation of life, reproduction. But on the social level the greatest good is the continuation of the group coherence. It then follows that on a society level having sexual intercourse without the mate's consent (rape) is immoral. With animals that have not formed any kind of society sexual reproduction is unconstrained.

So anything threatening the cohesion of society is found 'evil' by this society. It is important to note that this works two ways: upwards to the intellectual level and downwards to the biological level. Galileo Galilei could show a zillion observations to anyone proving that earth had to revolve around the sun, but this would threaten the earth-centered society Galileo lived in. So he was at first expunged as a heretic. Although from a 'metaphysics of quality' point of view this was an immoral act: intellectual patterns ought to be better balanced with social patterns, not choked by social patterns.

Robert Pirsig illustrates all this: The 20th and 21st century are marked by the growing strength of the intellectual quality over social quality. Communism, intellectual control of the nation vs. Fascism, dominance of single society. The exploding scientific advancements. The ever increasing pluralism and individualism, people moving away from big social dinosaurs like the catholic church. (Although I've met very progressive Catholics with a very intellectual mindset!) The democrats vs. the conservatives in the US. Like a strong society needs healthy biological bodies to function, a strong intellect needs a stable and enabling society to function, so social patterns and institutions aren't bad or inferior. They're just another level.


Maybe fundamentalism is a social pattern and globalism is an intellectual pattern and they will have to be balanced sometime, somehow...
All in all these are two strange books. Maybe there is a flaw in there somewhere, but I couldn't put my finger on it. If you are intrigued by this, I think you should read them both to fully understand Robert Pirsig's point.

Subject-Predicate

I've read two books recently, explaining how human perception is distorted by the subject-predicate structure of Indo-European languages - like English, German, French, Dutch, Italian,... Now what is subject-predicate and how does it influence our percepetion? And how can you avoid errors induced by the underlying assumptions of that language structure?

If you talk about subjects and objects you tend to talk about actors and the object acted upon. So you assume, often too quickly, a one-way transaction. The actor acts upon the object and voila, that's it. But in many situations, this transaction is two-way! Very often the effects of the object acting on the actor are not negligible. Examples are in quantum physics, where it is impossible to know both the position and the velocity vector of an electron. Examples are in consumer research and questionnaires: often the people filling in a questionnaire think different about their answers after having answered the questions. Your survey is outdated right away!
- For reasons explained above, when thinking in well separated objects and subjects, you get the false impression that objectivity is always achievable. You can be relatively objective when evaluating other people's math problems. But problems arise when for instance you've written a long essay on a scientific problem. Because you've been working on it for so long, you've become attached to your work, you defend it. You're not really objective anymore, your world view is already skewed by the work you've done. Your own personal problem solving toolbox, accumulated trough the years dictates how you perceive puzzling situations. It's like Maslow's hammer: "When you have a hammer, all problems seem like nails." In the same way it is also difficult to tackle problems involving people. How can you be objective about a group of people that you interact with? How can fish in a tank be objective about the tank they're in?
- If you talk in objects and subjects you tend to single out individual cause and effect relations, or maybe you build chains of cause and effect relations. In contrast to this, the most fascinating phenomena are better described as open dynamic systems: systems with a multitude of interdependent variables of which the borders are ill defined. Chaos theory is a way of describing these open dynamic systems. Examples are: atmosphere, the solar system, plate tectonics, turbulent fluids, economies, and population growth.

[Side note: I've come to think that the nonexistence of pure subject-object relations is what Buddhists mean with the term 'karma': every action, even just watching, or thinking, has a multitude of effects that rebound sooner or later, much like in a dynamic system. I once read a Buddhist saying: "Karma means: there is no escape."]