My old friend Derek, who spends his days repairing a
couple of aging Moulton bicycles, reminded me by email of a scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
in which the motorcycle maintaining narrator alienates his friend John by
offering to repair the latter’s expensive BMW with a beer can shim [Pirsig
2009]. John, we are told, prizes the appearance of things, or ‘romantic quality’
and thus cannot see the ‘classical’ quality that attaches to underlying form,
to a properly functioning motorcycle with non-wobbly handlebars.
Not being able to recall the point of the scene, I
glanced back at the book over an Armagnac late last night. This was one of my
favourite books in my teens and must have been an influence on me becoming
interested in philosophy. I had forgotten that it contains an account of Hume
and Kant and a discussion of the philosophy of science. But its central
metaphysics of quality was something that I never thought to find in academic
philosophy and so, weirdly, I have rather forgotten about it for thirty odd
years.
So ignoring all the present tense adventure on a
motorbike, the following themes struck me on a quick review.
There is an appeal to a general cultural difference –
between what is hip or groovy and what is square – illustrated by the shim
story. Some people are alienated from technology and cannot see its underlying
formal beauty. Immediately after the shim scene, Pirsig/the narrator remarks:
What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper
outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of
intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the
metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively,
grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at
it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant.
He was seeing what the shim was. [ibid: 59]
This leads to the following key early distinction between
romantic and classical.
I want to divide human understanding into two
kinds—classical understanding and romantic understanding. In terms of ultimate
truth a dichotomy of this sort has little meaning but it is quite legitimate
when one is operating within the classic mode used to discover or create a
world of underlying form. The terms classic and romantic, as
Phaedrus used them, mean the following: A classical understanding sees the
world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it
primarily in terms of immediate appearance. ... The romantic mode is primarily
inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts
predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by
reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and
behavior. [ibid: 73-4]
There is a second general, pre-philosophical theme. The
narrator’s alter-ego, Phaedrus, teaches English composition. He has a chance conversation with a Greek teacher which runs as follows.
She came trotting by with her watering pot between those
two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, “I hope you are
teaching Quality to your students.” This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a
lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was
the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal. [ibid: 180]
This leads him to set as an essay for his class the
title: What is a 350-word
essay answering the question, What is quality in
thought and statement? There follows a description of a kind of teaching experiment
in which he argues that the students know what quality is even though none can
define it. As part of the experiment, he withholds marks (though not comments)
and refuses to deploy principles of rhetoric until after the students have
grasped an inchoate understanding of quality for which the principles are
useful guides rather than constitutive of it.
The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to
rebel against, not ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for
producing what really counted and stood independently of the
techniques—Quality. [ibid: 208]
This leads to a manifesto:
“(1) Every instructor of English composition knows what
quality is. (Any instructor who does not should keep this fact carefully
concealed, for this would certainly constitute proof of incompetence.) (2) Any
instructor who thinks quality of writing can and should be defined before
teaching it can and should go ahead and define it. (3) All those who feel that
quality of writing does exist but cannot be defined, but that quality should be
taught anyway, can benefit by the following method of teaching pure quality in
writing without defining it.” [ibid: 213]
That seems to me the main setup for the metaphysical
exposition of quality which takes about 30 pages. I am not sure that the
descriptions of Hume and Kant and of the scientific method adds a great deal to
this. So plunging ahead, the narrator reports that Phaedrus was challenged by colleagues:
[T]he second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical
one… was brought about in response to Phaedrus’ wild meanderings about Quality
when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their squareness, presented
him with a reasonable question: “Does this undefined ‘quality’ of yours exist
in the things we observe?” they asked. “Or is it subjective, existing only in
the observer?” It was a simple, normal enough question, and there was no hurry
for an answer. Hah. There was no need for hurry. It was a finisher-offer, a
knockdown question, a haymaker, a Saturday-night special—the kind you don’t
recover from. Because if Quality exists in the object, then you must explain
just why scientific instruments are unable to detect it. You must suggest
instruments that will detect it, or live with the explanation that
instruments don’t detect it because your whole Quality concept, to put it
politely, is a large pile of nonsense. On the other hand, if Quality is
subjective, existing only in the observer, then this Quality that you make so
much of is just a fancy name for whatever you like. [ibid: 228]
The narrator then describes Phaedrus’ response to the
dilemma. First, unlike contemporary philosophers such as John McDowell, he rejects any attempt to locate quality in
the world as an observer-dependent property like colour. So the bulk of the
response is to the second, subjective, horn.
Here a first diagnostic move is to realise that there is
something illicit in the way it is characterised: “Or is it subjective,
existing only in the observer?”.
Why should Quality be just what you like? Why
should “what you like” be “just”? What did “just” mean in this case?
When separated out like this for independent examination it became apparent
that “just” in this case really didn’t mean a damn thing. It was a purely
pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentence was nil. Now, with
that word removed, the sentence became “Quality is what you like,” and its
meaning was entirely changed. It had become an innocuous truism. [ibid: 232]
Despite this, however, he does not manage to dismiss this
either. There are two sub-moves concerning the implicit perjorative
characterisation. One might think that the subjective was just what one likes because of a contrast with a view of
objectivity supplied by either a scientific materialism or a classic formalism.
Against the former, Phaedrus argues that aspects of its world view depends on
subjective elements. (the examples given are the number zero and the status of
laws of nature.) Against the latter, Phaedrus gives way realising that at best
he will have to subdivide quality into two.
What the classical formalists meant by the objection “Quality
is just what you like” was that this subjective, undefined “quality” he was
teaching was just romantic surface appeal. Classroom popularity contests could
determine whether a composition had immediate appeal, all right, but was this Quality?
Was Quality something that you “just see” or might it be something more subtle
than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a
long period of time?...
Instead of one single, uniform Quality now there appeared
to be two qualities; a romantic one, just seeing, which the students
had; and a classic one, overall understanding, which the teachers had. A hip
one and a square one. Squareness was not the absence of Quality; it was classic
Quality. Hipness was not just presence of Quality; it was mere romantic Quality.
The hip-square cleavage he’d discovered was still there, but Quality didn’t now
seem to fall entirely on one side of the cleavage, as he’d previously supposed.
Instead, Quality itself cleaved into two kinds, one on each side of the
cleavage line. His simple, neat, beautiful, undefined Quality was starting to
get complex. [ibid: 235-6]
In fact, a little later, just such a distinction returns
in Pirsig’s account as the first subdivision after the primal quality. Still a failure to respond by neutralising one or other
horn forces the narrator to describe Phaedrus’ conclusions as follows:
And so: he rejected the left horn. Quality is not
objective, he said. It doesn’t reside in the material world. Then: he rejected
the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn’t reside merely in
the mind. And finally: Phaedrus, following a path that to his knowledge had
never been taken before in the history of Western thought, went straight
between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is
neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity
which is independent of the two…
Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject—because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself—Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Hot. Now he knew it was coming. This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality! [ibid: 234-9]
Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject—because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself—Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Hot. Now he knew it was coming. This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality! [ibid: 234-9]
So that seems to be the heart of the metaphysics of
quality. The philosophy backstory continues with Phaedrus going in search of
the inversion which made quality as a whole, or as such, not an undefinable pre-rational
origin of the relation of subject and object but a mere element within a larger
rational structure. His aim is to make sure ‘Aristotle got his’ [ibid: 345].
I am struck now that there is something in all this a
little reminiscent of my very basic understanding of Kant’s problem of the
schematism. What guides the application of concepts to the world if one cannot
simply presuppose the choice of the appropriate concept? The Critique of Judgment can be read as attempting to answer this general
question. In its solution, reflective judgment plays a central role and is
defined by contrast to determinate judgment as follows:
If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given,
then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinate... But if only the particular is given and judgment has
to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective. [Kant 1987: 18]
The task which reflective judgment has to undertake is to
ascend from the particular in nature to the universal. A necessary
presupposition of this activity is that nature can be brought under concepts.
This principle, which is not constitutive of nature but is a subjective
principle governing judgment, is that we think of nature as purposive: we think
of it, roughly, as art. The claim, roughly that we must think of the world as
teleological, is one part of the solution. The other is that aesthetic judgment sheds light on how
judgment generally is possible. The key element of aesthetic judgment, Kant
suggests, is the ‘ability to judge an object in reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination’ in
which there is ‘a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding
without an objective harmony’ [ibid: 91-92]. It is the harmony of the faculties
of imagination and understanding in judgment which is both the source of
pleasure that grounds aesthetic judgment and which solves the problem.
Given that Pirsig/the narrator describes classical
understanding of the world as involving the analysis of phenomena into parts
and sub-parts - he calls this ‘classical rational analysis’ [Pirsig 2009: 76] –
a similar question can be asked in the context of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How is it that such a
form of analysis can be brought to bear on the world? The answer is that it
stems from a pre-rational encounter: the quality event which makes the relation
of subject and object possible. Pirsig’s quality plays a role akin to Kant’s
aesthetic understanding in being a half way house to conceptual judgement. As
the narrator stresses, Phaedrus’ English teaching relied on the idea that
quality could be recognised and identified and known even if it could not be formally
analysed.
Still, it doesn’t seem very satisfactory. One problem is
very familiar: trying to balance an ineffability claim with the identification
of something. Pirsig/the narrator/Phaedrus tells us that the ‘Quality event’
causes the division of subject and object but makes it entirely unclear how he
earns the right to say this since it – I assume – requires a prior division of
quality, on the one hand, and the emergence of a subject-object split, on the
other. But such a meta-division presupposes classical understanding.
‘Event’ is also tricky as that usually presupposes a series of distinguishable worldly happenings which again presupposes a subject-object split.
The metaphysical account is partly motivated by the prephilosophical distinction between romantic and classical quality judgements but such judgements don’t seem to characterise the ineffable quality he wants. Classical quality is downstream of the primal event as it is articulable. Romantic quality is an instantaneous judgement of the appearance of things. But that idea now looks to fall prey to the dilemma of being ‘just what one likes’. If it is, then it lies on the subject side of the subject-object split and thus presupposes just that division. If it isn’t, if, say, pictorial aesthetics are susceptible to some sort of placing in the space of reasons, then romantic quality will end up a variant of classical understanding in somewhat different terms. But again that presupposes the subject-object split behind which primal quality was supposed to lie as its cause. (Phaedrus’ reintroduction of rhetorical principles suggests a view in which English composition aesthetics cannot be given context-independent general rules. But that does not rule out context-dependent articulations, or reasons, of what is good and bad in an essay.) In neither case will it be the origin of the subject-object split.
‘Event’ is also tricky as that usually presupposes a series of distinguishable worldly happenings which again presupposes a subject-object split.
The metaphysical account is partly motivated by the prephilosophical distinction between romantic and classical quality judgements but such judgements don’t seem to characterise the ineffable quality he wants. Classical quality is downstream of the primal event as it is articulable. Romantic quality is an instantaneous judgement of the appearance of things. But that idea now looks to fall prey to the dilemma of being ‘just what one likes’. If it is, then it lies on the subject side of the subject-object split and thus presupposes just that division. If it isn’t, if, say, pictorial aesthetics are susceptible to some sort of placing in the space of reasons, then romantic quality will end up a variant of classical understanding in somewhat different terms. But again that presupposes the subject-object split behind which primal quality was supposed to lie as its cause. (Phaedrus’ reintroduction of rhetorical principles suggests a view in which English composition aesthetics cannot be given context-independent general rules. But that does not rule out context-dependent articulations, or reasons, of what is good and bad in an essay.) In neither case will it be the origin of the subject-object split.
Despite this, the main problem is much more recognisable
than I would have expected. My hunch is that it could have been addressed more
plausibly by rejecting the idea that rationality is codifiable in
context-independent, general terms than by rejecting rationality as such.
Quality isn’t outside the space of reasons.
Kant, I. (1987) Critique of judgment Indianapolis: Hackett
Pirsig, R. (2009) Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values, Harper
Collins e-book
