Hello everyone.
I have a few broad criticisms to make of the basic tenets of the philosophy
or pseudo-religion of Quality. I'd be interested to know if these points
have been considered before.
First, my basic relationship to this philosophy and its two main texts. On
first reading I thought ZMM was the greatest book I had ever read, and more
or less a religious experience. It single-handedly inspired me to first take
up the study of philosophy. I have to say that in the light of my subsequent
reading in the subject I have had to modify my initial judgement of its
worth, although as a novel I still rate it very highly. I can't extend my
enthusiasm to Lila, which, although often interesting, and containing many
valid insights, for me was unconvincing in its application of the principles
of the first book.
I want to state my criticisms of the philosophy as it is set forth in the
first book to begin with. In the first place, the narrative it sets up of
the history of philosophy, where there is an ideal relationship to immediate
Quality in prehistory, adulterated by Platonic and subsequently Aristotelian
objectification of Quality within a subject-object metaphysical framework,
leading gradually to a total alienation of 'Western' man from the universe,
until the sixties counterculture restores the lost 'Romantic Quality' to the
mainstream, and 'Phaedrus', following a course that "had never been taken
before in the history of Western thought" uses this repressed Quality to
reconcile man and the universe. I think this account overlooks the important
fact that the universe has often been seen as either coextensive with God,
or the expression of the mind of God, within the West. I would say that it
is not until the secularised and formalised metaphysics of Descartes (with
Harold Bloom's "dumbfoundering abyss between the subject and the object"
opening up for the first time), that the subject-object mentality that
Pirisg unvaryingly opposes makes its first genuine appearance. And further
to this I would add that almost from the moment Descartes opened up this
abyss, Western philosophy has tried to close it again, through a number of
systems which bear a close relationship to Pirsig's MOQ, and which, if
fairly examined, are at least as convincing. For every Cartesian theory of
the isolated perceiving subject there has always been an opposing
Malebranchian theory of God as the ground of perception, from which subject
and object are subsequently derived; for every Newtonian clockwork model of
the universe there has always been an opposing Goethian model of the
universe as the organic product of immanent life-energy; for every realist
model of mathematics, there has always been an opposing intuitionist model.
The subject-object hegemony that Pirsig battles, insofar as it exists at
all, is a product of the intensification of technological development and
production in the West's drive to war in the early twentieth century, which
finds its own backlash in the counter culture of the fifties and sixties.
But I think it's very important to realise that this latest opposition is
not some new development but just the latest manifestation of the
enlightenment's traditional classic/romantic divide, and that only a very
few extremists have ever claimed that either the classical or the romantic
were in any way self-sufficient, or that either sphere was either exclusive
or exhaustive. In fact, the rhetorical form of ZMM closely recalls the style
of narrative used in works like Thomas Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus', or, in a
more rarefied fashion, Hegel's 'Phanomenologie', where rather than a
metaphysical system being set up, the protagonist is led through a set of
experiences from which the metaphysical system is grasped, with the
experiential, synthesising movement of the work as a whole inseparable from
its conclusions. The only real distinction ZMM has from philosophical
idealism in general is that it very baldly makes undefinable Quality
synonomous with reality. Pirsig isn't the first person to set Quality above
Truth as a broader term - the aesthetic philosophy of Hardy, for example,
had already made this move - but he might be the first person other than
pantheists and some mystics to make Quality and Reality equivalent.
However, Pirsig is only ever able to assert this equivalence so
uncompromisingly because he doesn't analyse the assertion in more than a
cursory way - "People differ about Quality, not because Quality is
different, but because people are different in terms of experience" is
obviously specious, because this "experience" itself is experience of
reality, reality is Quality, and Quality is supposedly not self-differing.
When, in 'Lila', he does analyse the assertion, for me it loses all
persuasive force and dissipates itself into a semi-formalised idealist
metaphysics with all the cumbersome categories and classes, and none of the
subtle precision of logical reasoning which characterised earlier writers in
this tradition. I can just about accept his idea of the various levels, even
though his references to individual levels seem to me often to reveal an
incoherent welding of heterogeneous ideas- for example, sex and drugs "have
a high biological quality, that is they feel good" (p.145), but elsewhere
biological quality is associated with getting to an "advanced state of
evolution" (p.237). Hence, vomiting after taking a pleasant but poisonous
drug might feel very bad indeed, but it has quality insofar as it preserves
the organism and its potential for evolution. You could say it was
subjectively low quality and objectively high quality if these terms are
allowed - but anyway, I can see that this point just hinges on the
grammatical vagueness of "they feel good" (to the cells, or 'the subject'?)
in the first quotation, so I won't press it. But in any case, the wider
relationship between the levels seems to me highly confused. Anybody could
make the distinction (albeit with difficult borderline cases)
inorganic/organic, and see another potential distinction organic/something
'higher'. But beyond this, all is confusion. Are animals which display
complex social patterns displaying social or merely biological quality? We
are told "Biological man doesn't invent cities or societies any more than
pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them" (p.256). What about an
ant or bee hive? Is that created by the functioning of "Biological" ant or
bee, or has a "superorganism" imposed itself on them? Assuming that "the
Giant"'s imposition upon biological human values takes the form of the
technological progress that allows the fashioning of the city or society
superorganism, does this technological progress itself display any
Intellectual Quality? Apparently not, because in Homer's time, the ancient
world, when great technological advances had been made from, say,
hunter-gatherer society, "evolution had not yet transcended the social level
into the intellectual" (p.301). If the mathematicians, architects, poets and
military strategists of the ancient world had, by definition, no
intellectual quality, how can you possibly hope to define an essential
discontinuity between social and intellectual levels?
The confusion is seen in Pirsig's attempt to apply quality-level analysis to
different moral dilemmas. A scientist killing a germ is "absolutely,
scientifically moral" (p.190), which surely nobody honestly doubted. But in
the question of whether it is permissible for society to execute a criminal,
Pirsig has double-vision, and the criminal is both a biological entity
threatening the social structure and thus deserving of execution, and a
"source of thought" (p.192), a manifestation of intellectual quality who
thus cannot be executed. Could anything better demonstrate that these levels
are not discrete and isolable entities? I find the novel's whole urge to
dogmatise about "a moral pattern of reality as real as H20" (p.190) slightly
worrying, but fully in keeping with what idealist philosophers have usually
claimed for their all-inclusive systems (making morality as precise as
Newton made physical science, being the traditional aim).
Obviously the metaphysics only has any sort of viability because of the
concept of Dynamic Quality bridging the levels. This gives the metaphysician
such great leeway to subvert any of the pseudo-scientific hierarchies that
it makes the rest of the structure of the argument slightly irrelevant. I
would go as far as to say that whereas Dynamic Quality is certainly Dynamic
it isn't really Quality in the sense that any normal person would use the
word; it's simply dynamism itself, process, mutability, as productive of
things which by levels-of-quality analysis would be termed 'bad' as it is of
things that would be termed 'good'. I think it would be more coherent to
equate Dynamic Quality with Biological Quality, an amoral, immanent
Dionysian life-energy, and to see the other 'levels' as "sublimations" (in
the Freudian sense) of this basic force. Surely the fact that 'lila', the
creative activity of God, is imagined as Shiva's dance, a sexual, bodily
movement, should suggest this interpretation? When Pirsig says that "The
Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns just left two
directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality"
(p.354), I think he offers a false antithesis. The plains Indians, Zen
Buddhists, etc., who have achieved enlightenment, have just returned to the
biological energy and learned to live in a dynamic equilibrium with it like
all non-human animals do anyway. This might be more of a contented
existence, but I don't think it's likely to further the imagined universal
moral evolution in the same way that Pirsig sees social and intellectual
quality as having done. Mystics have never been much help to moralists-
Confucius attacked the Taoist mystics as subscribing to an amorality which
was pragmatically the same as immorality; the Japanese Zen monks were widely
criticised for their failure to speak out against the Empire in the second
world war; and so on.
In short, it seems to me that the theoretical edifice Pirsig builds to
support Quality is basically unsound. Whilst he has had many valid insights,
it seems to me that the most productive and influential thing to do with
them might be to try and re-interpret the traditional history of Western
philosophy in their light, particularly since the parallels between his work
and the early idealists are so strong. This kind of approach could
potentially return Quality to the mainstream of Western philosophy rather
than sidelining it as a new age cult.
Lynch
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