[Part of a series composed to show that after having "done nothing for Quality or for the Tao. Nothing at all" in his first book, Pirsig did not write a second with aim of driving a stake through the heart of Quality.]
In ZMM Pirsig uses the Tao to elucidate the cultural division between the romantic and classic modalities. He shows how experience in the lifeworld gets parsed into these two approaches or default modes of engagement. The romantic emphasizes the affective, analog, heuristic, irrational qualities of experience while the classic relies rational, algorithmic, logical and structured qualities of experience. In Lila he becomes dissatisfied with this division. He says that the Tao works well to shed light on the classic/romantic binary but this particular binary does not shed the proper light on the Tao itself. It was not as though he meant to discredit his first pass at an analysis of the Tao. That is not at all what he says or what he means. He means that he want to pick another way to use the Tao; to examine a different binary that will produce in the analyzing a better understanding of the Tao itself. I hear this when the Pirsig I read says, "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."" The Tao is the ultimate metaphysical tool for uniting binaries. Nowhere does Pirsig suggest otherwise. But in Lila he is seeking a duality that can be united to shed more light on the nature of the Tao itself. For this he selects the static and the dynamic. These terms are so nearly identical in meaning to what the latter day Taoists claimed as the fundamental division of the Tao, it is impossible to believe that Pirsig was unaware of it. Yang is the Tao in its active, dynamic aspect. Yin is the Tao in its passive, static aspect. Nowhere does he suggest that this division as absolute or that its poles are mutually exclusive and do not co-exist. When we characterize anything as dynamic or static we are simply saying that those are the aspect most significant in our present circumstances. Nor does Pirsig suggest that the division he proposes is absolute or points to any absolute. The Tao is undefined not because of some obscure mystical properties it possesses but because every apprehension of the Tao is a condition of ones movement along the Way or the paths we take in our life's journey. We see the Tao in light of where we are thrown into the world and the horizons of possibility that are splayed out around us. This is Nietzsche's perceptivism. We are who we are because we are where we are. Our lifeworld is unconcealed from a particular point of view. The Taoist perspective succeeds not because it is specific and produces precision but because is it vague and hazy. It is poetic and evocative it allows meaning to flow through the apprehension of harmony in our ongoing synthesis of our own rational and irrational modes of being. Opposites complement rather than annihilate each other. In highlighting the dynamic/static binary Pirsig's aims is to enrich our understanding of their essential unity. To make the claim that he has instead replaced the unity with one of its aspects, divorced that aspect from itself and produced a binary that cannot be united is just the complete opposite of his stated intention. In fact his chief complaint against the evils of SOM is that it is illegitimate because it is a division that resists unity. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
