Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Objective/Subjective Dualism

[image error]I just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig in which the main character pretty much goes insane due to his belief that ‘quality’ is the source of both the subjective and objective world because, by the example he gives, quality is determined by a consensus, therefore it must exist outside of the mind. This conclusion left me frustrated and the rest of the book contains mostly philosophy that attempts to justify this claim and elaborate its meaning when simple evolutionary psychology could have easily put his mind at ease.

Here’s a complete outline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_metaphysics_of_Quality

The problem is that he was attempting to use this ‘quality’ idea to bridge the divisive structure of subjective/objective or mind/matter dualism. I never thought the idea of subjective/objective as a dichotomy was ever very convincing but one doesn’t need an end-all and be-all term to solve the issue. All one has to do to understand this is to reconcile these ideas that the mind is the result of matter, simply via the brain and sensory organs.

The issues Persig thought contradicted the dualism and justified his idea of quality being its predecessor was that consensus existed that justified quality being more than subjective. Even at a passing glance, this seems nonsense. If the brain is the source of subjective quality then a consensus just means that enough brains are similar enough to share this subjective value. Because we evolved to favor things that would help us survive and reproduce, it’s not too hard to come to the conclusion of why this similar views and values might exist.

Simply sit a human being down in a room and fill it with flies. Because they are agitating, loud and we have no value for them, the mass-subjective consensus if you asked them how the room was would be that it was a bad room because of all the flies. Now sit a fly eating reptile in that room and suddenly there will a different consensus because the reptiles values have evolved differently than ours. This brings me to the final point. Most of the philosophy he uses to pack up his points are the same backward ideas that arrogantly separate humans from the animal kingdom, completely ignoring the physical implications of why this consensus exists or how it came to be.

The fact that this line of thinking led to a nervous breakdown shows that the foundation of this philosophy is outdated in consideration to the implication of scientific discoveries and the cost of this. If the protagonist had figured this out instead of going down the 2deep4u rabbit whole of Aristotelian philosophy, maybe the book would have kept my interest. If anything, he is a testament of the consequences of scientific ignorance.