Matt, Steve, and all MOQers:
I'll be getting to some unanswered posts later, but for now I'll let Jim and
Bob explain it in their terms. Their ideas are so simpatico that the mix of
quotes only paints a clearer picture of one thing; radical empiricism. Please
notice that Pirsig's radically empirical remarks come from ZAMM, where radical
empiricism is not mentioned but their simpatico is on display all the same.
‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows,
may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which
is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of
oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points,
either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Pure experience in this
state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no
sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient
parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows
as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.
Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of
unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. (William James in THE THING AND
ITS RELATIONS, p. 40)
In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those
120-boxcar jobs… In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge, the knowledge
taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. …Romantic
Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn't any ``part'' of the train. It's the
leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance
unless you understand that the train isn't a static entity at all. …The real
train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided.
It's always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. …Romantic reality is
the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge
that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the
collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge
there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you
have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then
the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure
reason...you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the
action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the
future. It contains all the history of the past… The cutting edge of this
instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of
everything there is. (ZAMM, pp. 282-83)
Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of
structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual
awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the
basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an
understanding of the value source from which it's derived. …Reality isn't
static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign
yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you
grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central
undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic.
And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has
forms but the forms are capable of change. To put it in more concrete terms: If
you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without
getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge,
although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality
of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you
forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are
born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just ``intuition,''
not just unexplainable ``skill'' or ``talent.'' It's the direct result of
contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past
tended to conceal. (ZAMM pp 284)
The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims
that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about
what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge
gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical
reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics
as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the
values of art, morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that
in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical
reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that
all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be
classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. (LILA, p. 99)
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any
element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element
that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect
experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation
experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.
Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting
corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced,
whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (A WORLD OF
PURE EXPERIENCE, p. 24)
The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will
save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known.
Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been
treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the
latter to the former, or the ‘apprehension’ by the former of the latter, has
assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented
to overcome. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every
conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. (A
WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE, p. 27)
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’
experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as
yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a
simple that. In this naïf immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act
upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a
reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. (William James in DOES
‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ EXIST, p. 16)
Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even
perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no
object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of
subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are
identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also
reflected in modern street argot. ``Getting with it,'' ``digging it,''
``grooving on it'' are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this
identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it
is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. (ZAMM
pp. 290-91)
This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world
could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be
mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object
can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which
he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree
until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant
of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as
unimportant, But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is
unimportant...none whatsoever. The past exists only in our memories, the future
only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware
of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and
therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in
the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before
the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This
preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as
Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this
preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and
objects. (ZAMM p. 247)
That one moment of it [experience] proliferates into the next by transitions
which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue,
can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the
terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if
our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were
like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the
farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as
retrospectively. It is ‘of’ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the
past’s continuation; it is ‘of’ the future in so far as the future, when it
comes, will have continued it. (William James in A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE, P.
37)
I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional
rationality's insistence upon ``objectivity,'' a doctrine that there is a
divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these
must be rigidly separate from each other. ``You are the mechanic. There is the
motorcycle. You are forever apart from one another. You do this to it. You do
that to it. These will be the results.''
This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle
sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always
been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been
reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided
relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for
the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into
subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's
Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.
(ZAMM, p. 282)
In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping,
rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been
necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's
order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of
nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled
from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness,
are a part of nature's order too. The central part. (ZAMM p. 294)
“Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I
somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians.
…The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy …seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered
and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious
Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.…Their persistence in
telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure
matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. …To speak more
seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over
this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the
construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels
quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory as anything else we
have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But
what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will
hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are
hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical help us,
and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in
possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best diving power?
(William James in ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)
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