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January 29 - February 7, 2024
“And what is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” No, Bob was saying, we don’t need anyone to tell us. It surrounds us, constantly guides us, and actually is us. And we know it.
Developing the Metaphysics of Quality, Bob took a new angle, placing Quality at the center of existence, where science typically places substance.
Think of that: Quality is self-evident to everybody.
In Zen, and in Buddhism generally, Quality/Buddha is not approached as a concept. Instead, practitioners explore such centuries-old methods as meditation, mantras, and visualizations to bring about the realization of non-duality, nirvana, and awareness of “Buddha,” “dharma,” “ṛta,” or many other characterizations. Concepts are actually barriers to this understanding, in which the separation of subjects and objects is dissolved.
“Things become enormously more coherent—fabulously more coherent—when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world.”
static quality, covering “any pattern of one-sided fixed values.” The term Dynamic Quality represented “the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality.”
After being rejected by 121 publishers, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance found a supportive editor, James Landis, at William Morrow and Company. Published in 1974, the book struck unexpected success, earning acclaim and readers the world over.
It is a kind of process which I think is important to go through at one time or another. The great effort which produces nothing. The great stymie.
These options for Quality that we feel sometimes are exclusive to the arts, I feel also exist in technology.
I want to emphasize that when that idea came, there was no preparation for it. It arrived out of my own circumstances, rather than out of a deliberate desire on my part to sit down and write. I wasn’t being separate from what I was doing; this was arising out of what I was doing.
“Write about what you know. If you write about what you know, and know personally, and know deeply, and know better than anyone else, that’s going to be plenty exotic to everybody else.”
So I started to get up at two o’clock in the morning and go down to a little place above Robert’s Shoe Store on Chicago and Lake Streets and write, mostly filling notes at first, sometimes doing sketches, and discovering my way as I went along.
Where pirsig wrote
The second time I wasn’t being a writer, I was just responding to a real need, and I was going to write that book whether I was a writer or not. This was a very important thing to learn. Let it come out of you, don’t be apart from it. Sometimes I could watch my hand move. It was almost like automatic writing or spirit writing. That way of doing things is the right way, and the way that produces things of real value, where there’s no separateness between the doer and the done. When that happens, you know it. You just feel it. It’s just, wow. It’s a whole other thing. But it takes a long
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Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking or intuitive process. Because definitions are a product of rigid reasoning, quality can never be rigidly defined. But everyone knows what it is.
At the instant quality is observed, observer and observed are not separate.
Thought of the sort used in definitions uses symbols of past experience to account for new experience. Quality is the experience before it is symbolized.
The number of “facts” that can be recorded from any finite period of observation is infinite. Classes, writing about one side of a coin, have turned in thousands of “facts.” It is the relative quality of the facts that causes us to choose some and discard others, for remembering.
Quality itself is the same for everyone everywhere.
The logical order of things which the philosophers study is derived from the “mythos.” The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible.
The Proto-Indo-European root of aretê was the morpheme rt
Rt referred to the “first, created, beautiful repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness.”
Phædrus discovered that even though the Hebrews were from “across the river” and not part of the Proto-Indo-European group, they had a similar term, arhetton, which meant “the One” and which was considered so sacred it was not allowed to be spoken.
Rt meant “quality” all right but the quality it meant was static, not Dynamic.
“Ṛta, which etymologically stands for ‘course,’ originally meant ‘cosmic order,’ the maintenance of which was the purpose of all the gods; and later it also came to mean ‘right,’ so that the gods were conceived as preserving the world not merely from physical disorder but also from moral chaos. The one idea is implicit in the other: and there is order in the universe because its control is in righteous hands.
The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. Ṛta is both. This was exactly what the Metaphysics of Quality was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man.
Dynamic Quality is here all the time, engulfing both subject and object, and people become more or less sensitive to it as they become detached from existing static patterns.
Obviously some things are better than others . . . but what’s the “betterness”?
“A thing exists,” he said, “if a world without it can’t function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.”
The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.
Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
You never have to decide whether you “believe” in Quality. How can you ignore it?
Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and on forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories, customs, and patterns of nature. The reason there is a difference between individual evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are different for everyone because each person has a different static pattern of life history.
Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. . . . Static quality . . . emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a component of memory.
Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.
The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own.
Quality is not a thing. It is an event. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.
All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality.
all of a sudden we have a world in which reason dominates what’s good rather than what’s good dominates reason. And that I think is what I’m getting at.
Zen is, of course, a continuation of the old dhyana yoga, in which one just sits silently and allows one’s thoughts to go away by their own dead weight. Others are hatha yoga, which is the physical exercise I believe; bhakti yoga, which is devotional; jnana yoga, I believe, is intellectual.
The best answer to the question, “What is Dynamic Quality?” is the ancient Vedic one—“Not this, not that.”
Quality is the water that supports us all. It is the source of both subjects and objects, both mind and matter. It is everything.
Everyone has a personal dharma, which could be defined as “duty to Quality.”
The drive for Quality is a natural drive. Everybody wants to do things better; everybody wants to have things better. Nobody wants anything worse than it was before. . . .
The best way of investigating Quality that I know of is the brilliant Oriental technique of zazen, which defines Dynamic Quality very precisely by forcing a subtraction of static intellectual patterns for it rather than adding new ones.
care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.
What is it at the very center of boredom that you’re not seeing?
Quality-love is both undefinable and infinitely definable. It doesn’t need a definition, but it can have as many as you want.
