In the paper on Feminism and Sociology, I picked and chose my way among
several epistemological and metaphysical theories and quoted from the theorists,
knitting them together with my own assertions. Here, for comparison, is
a parallel development of most of the same points, rendered almost exclusively
through quotes from Robert Pirsig--
Borrowing from the explanatory wizardry of Robert Pirsig again --
. . .There is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual
scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don't see it moving. You get
the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as
they exist. But they can be named quite differently depending on how the
knife moves. . .
It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into
thinking that. . . anything. . .[is the way it is to us]. . . just because
the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate
on the knife itself. . .
[From our pre- or sub-conscious awareness of the entirety of the world around
us], we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never
the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We
take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us
and call that handful of sand the world.
Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a
process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide
the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now
and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into
parts.
The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it
the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two
are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way,
and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity
and dissimilarity. . .
Classical [i.e., western analytic] understanding is concerned with the piles
and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding
is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are
valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that
does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites
them into one. . .
To understand what he [the author, referred to throughout the book in the
third person as a character in a narrative story] was trying to do it's
necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which
must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles.
To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape
at all. To rejectthat part of the Buddha that attends to. . .analysis. .
.is to miss the Buddha entirely.
. . . About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic thought
much has been said-some would say too much, and would question any attempt
to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought,
and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been
said. . .
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is
always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in
the arts. . . But what is less noticed in the arts-something is always created
too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important to see
what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity
that is neither good nor bad, but just is.
(pp. 65-71)
That Pirsig would speak of the Buddha (and, in other sections, interchangeably,
of the Tao, or of Quality with a capital "Q") is entirely reminiscent
of and corresponds to the spiritual aspects of radical feminism and the
relationship of the spiritual to knowledge and meaning. Poststructuralist
thought in general has been referred to by its proponents within earshot
of me as intrinsically atheistic. The poststructuralist would nod in agreement
when Pirsig speaks of the little pile of sand that the consciousness calls
world, or the way that divisions and categories are products of the knife
of intellectual distinction rather than being intrinsically there in the
sand itself, but would part company when Pirsig infers that something deeply
meaningful and of inherent Quality operates in conjunction with what is
selected for consciousness and how the knife is moved; the poststructuralist
would make a cause-and-effect argumentin which the external world of social
context, including ideology, language, history, and so forth construct the
knife-weilder's "Quality", and would offer to deconstruct it for
us, or at least suggest the necessity of doing so.
The external world does not, however, construct the individual's sense of
"quality", though. Experience is not socially constructed. Society,
as well as self, language as much as all that it can ever refer to, is experientially
constructed for each person. Welcome to a different epistemology-
He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and
matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that
event which gives birth to mind and matter. 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. . .
The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time
lag, is always in the past. . .This preintellectual reality is what [the
author] 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. . .
Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is
to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms.
The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the
Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated
in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues
toour previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build
up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture
in terms of these analogues. . .
In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth
and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality.
And they are reality. . .But that which causes us to invent the analogues
is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts
upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit
of it. . .
Hegel had talked like this, with his Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind was independent,
too, both of objectivity and subjectivity.
However, Hegel had said the Absolute Mind was the source of everything,
but then excluded romantic experience from the "everything" it
was the source of. Hegel's Absolute was completely classical, completely
rational and completely orderly.
Quality was not like that. . .
(pp. 221-226)
Pirsig's Quality, located in the preverbal, invoking the organic self in
response to the entire environment in all of its concrete materialism, is
felt; it conjoins sensation with emotion, intuitively recognizes patterns,
and, given sufficient familiarity with those patterns, recognizes them in
terms of how they must fit in against or alter the larger backdrop of patterns
called the analogue of reality.
"Fit", in this sense, is esthetically appreciated for its elegance,
the ways in which the pattern takes on Quality in the classical sense, i.e.,
the harmonious order of the parts. Not only is this ability to recognize
andappreciate Quality innate to consciousness itself rather than being caused
by culture and its shared notions thereof, this ability is entirely necessary
in order for each individual to make personal sense out of that very culture,
its languages, its other patterns.
Pirsig Web Site