I recently picked up works of one of my old heroes of philosophy, Robert Pirsig, primarily known for Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published 50 years ago this year.
I’ve visited Pirsig’s ideas on several occasions since that book first came out. He was enthralled by the concept of “quality.” Not in the sense that something has a quality, like its color, length or scent, but quality as the relationship between us and what we experience, perhaps the experience itself.
Stay with me for another minute.
What caught my eye decades ago was Pirsig’s statement that quality could not be defined. We know it when we see it, we are drawn to it but can not define it without a bit of circularity: Quality is “better.” What is better? That which has higher quality.
Seemingly gibberish, but Pirsig points out the definition tracked Aristotle’s “Good is what the good man does.” Ultimately, Pirsig pushed the concept as far as he could, maybe farther, saying that all of existence/experience is derived from “dynamic quality.”
Perhaps he pushed too far. By trying to describe what he acknowledged was impossible to define, he was forced to leave words behind. Since words are how our rational minds make sense of the world, he left rationality behind, and at one point, spent time in a “sanitarium.”
If Pirsig came to believe that words were static approximations of what he was experiencing, and that which the rest of us were living was not “real,” then he would have had great difficulty living in the world as we know it. I’m guessing (approximating in my own way), but it may be that he nibbled at the edge of “enlightenment” as much as psychosis.
But that’s a thought for another day. Or not, if I run out of words, unlikely as that is. (smile). But there’s danger there, in thinking about thinking. Eventually an eye may think it sees itself, and not just the word “I,” or a reflection in the mirror of mind.
Quality exists. We know it. We recognize it in music we’ve never heard before that evokes in us feelings of love or wonder. We see it in machines we tinker with and tune, tools that feel “just right” in our hands, in art that speaks silently yet communicates what the artist intended us to feel.
Inhabitants below the surface of the Salish Sea evolved whispers that traveled miles, that are now drowned out by ferries and ships and dinghies and jets overhead. Perhaps our own whispers are snuffed by noises of a different sort, every bit as debilitating.