32 : The First Division

What we’re really doing when we’re building ourselves a Ship of SEJNES is building ourselves a hierarchy of truths, an architecture of insights into the anatomy of the subliminal constitution of consciousness. The next few posts are from ‘Lila’ by Robert Pirsig and will continue to lay out the Metaphysics of Quality, the most powerful tool for understanding reality that I’ve found yet. In ‘Lila‘ Pirsig evolves his understanding of Quality as he described it in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and it’s beautiful, and this train of thought is how he arrives there. Welcome back to the High Country of the Mind. Soak it in.

In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything beneath it. If this first division is bad there is no way you can ever build a really good system of classification around it.

In his book Phædrus had tried to save Quality from metaphysics by refusing to define it, by placing it outside the dialectical chess board. Anything that is undefined is outside metaphysics, since metaphysics can only function with defined terms. If you can't define it you can't argue about it. He had demonstrated that even though you can't define Quality you still must agree that it exists, since a world from which value is subtracted becomes unrecognizable.

But he realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change. Sooner or later he was going to have to come up with a way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and objects. He would have to do that or get out of metaphysics entirely. It's all right to condemn somebody else's bad metaphysics but you can't replace it with a metaphysics that consists of just one word.

By even using the term 'Quality' he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term 'Quality' sets up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unanswered. Even the name, 'Quality,' was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were 'Quality' meats, weren't they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phædrus had no answers.

. . . That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phædrus had no answers. If you're going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phaedrus didn't have a Catechism of Quality and that's why he got hit.

Actually the issue before him was not whether there should be a metaphysics of Quality or not. There already is a metaphysics of quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in fact a metaphysics in which the first division of Quality - the first slice of undivided experience - is into subjects and objects. Once you have made that slice, all of human experience is supposed to fit into one of these two boxes. The trouble is, it doesn't. What he had seen is that there is a metaphysical box that sits above these two boxes, Quality itself. And once he'd seen this he also saw a huge number of ways in which Quality can be divided. Subjects and objects are just one of the ways.

The question was, which way was best?

Different metaphysical ways of dividing up reality have, over the centuries, tended to fan out into a structure that resembles a book on chess openings. If you say that the world is 'one,' then somebody can ask, 'Then why does it look like more than one?' And if you answer that it is due to faulty perception, he can ask, 'How do you know which perception is faulty and which is real?' Then you have to answer that, and so on.

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can't do it. It's out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start masking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon.

Phaedrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic and romantic aspects of the universe he'd emphasized in his first book. In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two. But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true - that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn't. For example, American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world's classic intellectual form. It is something else.

Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phædrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the Metaphysics of Quality. The division he finally settled on was one he didn't really choose in any deliberative way. It was more as if it chose him. He'd been reading Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn't get it out of his mind…

- from Lila by Robert Pirsig

…Continued tomorrow.