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--

Sorting the Sand


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