Many spoilers ahead.
Robert Pirsig’s first book tells of the author’s cross-country motorcycle journey with his son Chris in the 70s. Their companions are a couple of technophobes who maintain their motorcycle despire their intense dislike of technological society. They’re the kind who just want to get away from “it all.”
This “it all” fuels modern malaise. It’s behind the record-high levels of depression we feel in cities despite being in closer physical proximity to record-high numbers of people. Community should be easy enough in these circumstances, but we appear to be looking in the wrong place.
Pirsig identifies the lack of the quest for Quality in technological society as the chief source of modern dread. He traces this back to the ancient Greeks who took the Sophist concept of arete, or “virtue,” only we’re talking about “virtue” outside of any rational sense. This “virtue” is simply Quality as understood by pre-Homeric Greeks, repackaged into a bland, teachable form by Plato and Aristotle so that “Quality” could be commodified in the market economy. The emergent 2 thought types Pirsig calls the Classical which sees the world through its underlying forms, and the Romantic which sees the world of immediate appearance. Pirsig is a Classical thinker who treats motorcycle maintenance as a necessary and enjoyable ritual in life, while his compatriot is a Romantic who can’t stand when his motorcycle stops doing what it’s supposed to do, is intolerant of ad hoc fixes that don’t look stock, and just finds the whole maintenance thing annoying.
We get a glimpse into the dark side when Pirsig experiences a flashback during a lightning storm, when he remembers his location from a separate lifetime. He identifies this other person as “Phaedrus,” and we come to learn that the author had once lived another life, went “insane,” was given involuntary electroshock therapy, and left the hospital with these old memories erased. Now he’s piecing his old life together, partially to reckon with these flashbacks, but mostly because his son Chris misses his old dad.
Pirsig’s winding, cross-country motorcycle journey is ghosted by his memory dive in pursuit Phaedrus’s search for Quality. He had taught at a university, followed the Sophists, conceived that Quality births both Classical and Romantic thought, that it preceded the very notion of subject and object before Greek Grammar had been noted in any classroom, and that finding it could possibly resolve the malaise of tech society.
There are notes of Jacques Ellul’s works in Pirsig’s writing. In Technological Society Ellul pointed to similar phenomena: technology and industrialization had taken on its own life, and we lack the means to put the brakes on it. Ellul offers ethics and Biblical stories. Pirsig offers motorcycle maintenance.
The 60s were a more interesting era when it came to these issues, far more interesting than my erea. People appeared to be struggling with this in real ways. The 80s were all Apollonian aesthetics, and the crime wave instilled a need to just get things back in order.
I don’t know if we’re really looking for answers now, because nobody sits and contemplates. How can they? Why would they? For context, a “distraction free” writing device that only types costs $600. A Samsung tablet that puts you in touch with 8 billion people costs $75. YouTube with ads is free. YouTube without ads is $20/month. Contemplation is expensive now.
This contemplation is what Pirsig and many in the 70s called for, hence the big Zen movement, meditation, etc. It was framed as an alternative to Christian prayer. It’s an unfortunate contrast, as Christian prayer can be just as contemplative, and Zen Buddhism can be just as destructive. But myth distills murky reality to produce only the best narrative. And this best narrative is what stuck. Merge has established this Parsing scheme as “history” and Pirsig passed the Merge test. He calls this Kulturbarer. You won’t know that Merge has Parsed your narrative until 15 years have passed. Meanwhile everyone else has mysteriously dissolved into obscurity.
Pirsig’s concept of Quality frames reality as we know it. This is not a Sophist concept. This is likely a concept shared by all stone-age thinking. I think back to learning about the 10 Commandments, the ‘Aseret haDibrot in Hebrew. Dibrot is plural for davar which has 2 meanings: “thing” and “word.” The definition is bewildering to modern eyes:
In other words, in ancient thinking, the “word” and the “thing” are the same. “Rock” is the word “rock” and the thing “rock.” Referent and referred are one. In Greek and Latin thought, they are differentiated. In modern linguistics they remain so. Modern Hebraic thought differentiates them. To unite them would be disastrous to modern thinking.
And yet sometimes we need to remember that word and thing, referent and referred, were once united. This was the original way of thinking that split and became today’s thinking. That’s why the Torah is read in Hebrew. Greek is a later reading of the Torah, and Latin an even later reading. King James English is what they speak in Star Trek. It’s fine to know these languages, but the original language far from inadequate. It was more originary.
Pirsig’s hunt for the original “way”, to him “Zen”, brings a crisis to his career, his family, and his health. He is institutionalized and gets fixed by the system to become a proper modern. One can apply this same thinking within Yahwism – the thing and the word are one. When John said, “In the beginning was the word,” if he said logos for “word”, then I’m sorry but this doesn’t make much sense unless you’re trained in Greek philosophy.
But John was a Levite, and he would’ve spoken Hebrew to his congregation, and so he would’ve actually said, “In the beginning was ha davar,” which means “In the beginning was the word/thing [which later split into ‘word’ and ‘referent.’]” Originary thinking is more sensical when trying to understand ancient ideas. And since nothing is really new…
In my ongoing project The Art of Violence I hypothesize that the unique nature of human combat is that it uses objects for aggression, which produces a wildcard: neither antagonist knows what the weapon is going to be. This is a far cry from animal combat, where the stakes immediately known, and clashes can take place without any deaths. The recursive loop between human antagonists creates something akin to a field, which I call the Merge state, where signals are utilized and evaluated to determine if their meanings are shared. Signal and meaning, sign and referent, word and thing, are Parsed by the Merge field in order to defer violence. It’s the strategy we use for our Unoptimized Combat loop. It’s the only way out of violence.
Pirsig’s Quality struck me as the same thing as the Merge state, only he never identifies its origin. If Pirsig’s idea of The Buddha is eternal then he might have denied there was even an origin to Quality. The Yahwist doctrine of the word as referent itself, illustrated by Gans’ interpretation of the Burning Bush scene in Science and Faith, might imply eternal truth as well. But if the Merge state is instantiated because the life force as we know it was reaching for a way to contemplate and Parse itself and the world, then maybe it really was there in the beginning.
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