Category: Pirsig

My Brief History of Zen. It’s barely a year since I first even thought of reading ZMM – seems like a lifetime. Here is my first ever blogged reference, with no link to anything !!!

My thought process in the preceeding weeks was chaos / catastrophe / fuzzy / uncertainty / quanta / quantum-computing / eastern-philosophy-vs-science / Brian-Josephson / physics-of-consciousness / Zen …… and then a wondering why ZMM had been on a reading list on my MBA course 12 years earlier, and the fact that I’d never read it. The rest is history.

And now I find a link between Quantonics and Josephson.
Heres an interesting list on the subject of Cosnciousness.
A very useful Pirsig Timeline [via MOQ Focus]
Also find Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control listed by Dan Glover (MOQite) and Tim Allen’s I’m Not Really Here too, the latter (yes that Tim Allen) also quotes Pirsig as a major influence. (Kevin Kelly’s book recommended earlier by Leon.) What a tangled web.

In Lila, we get a great deal of description of the process Bob Pirsig used to manage his thoughts whilst creating ZAMM, and he gives us an insight into his trunkful of 3000 4″ x 6″ slips (index cards) in his letter of January 5th 1969 to his publisher James Landis. He mentions it again on page 129 of the 25th anniversary edition of ZAMM, and on page 189 he says …

Later, when I developed more confidence in my immunity to [the affliction of seeing every thought as archeological debris of some overall design], I became interested in the debris in a more positive way, and began to jot down the fragments amorphically, that is without regard to form, in the order in which they occurred to me. Many of these amorphic statements have been supplied by friends. There are thousands of them now.

I know how he feels – think I said in my intial review that the main thought to strike me was how much I identified with Bob / Phaedrus. I’ve just finished a third read of ZAMM, and I’m still amazed that I had never read it before the manifesto that started this quest. In fact I’d never read anything approaching philosophy before I read Pirsig either. It deserves some proper analysis because, like it or not, together with Lila, it certainly covers every thread of my blog. I think I shall create an analytical essay simply to capture and make some sense of the thousands of annotations and links I’ve made.

Since early 2002 I’ve had on my blog links to two Pirsig sites, MOQ and Quantonics. I’ve never interacted closely with these communities, despite being convinced Pirsig was onto something very important since the 50’s/60’s. I think the reasons for this were, and are, twofold. Firstly, I baulk at the almost religious zeal with which so many followers, nay disciples, seem to approach Pirsig. Secondly, if your aim is to establish MOQism through discourse ahead of any other “ism” and Pirsig ahead of any other philosopher, then be my guest, you will not be alone. My aim, like Pirsig’s I believe, is much more pragmatic.

Throughout ZAMM, he uses the recurring metaphor of looking and travelling up towards “heights” of one form or another, and on each occasion returning to earth or the ocean. In one of the climactic episodes [ch20 p244] when he decides not to complete the hike to the summit with his son Chris, there are questions and suggestions about his lacking the courage to do so [ch21 p255]. I’m sure achieving the rarefied heights of establishing a philosophy for philosophers to debate was never on his agenda. In fact fixed objectives are almost anathema to his dynamical / process view of reality – how many times does he use the aphorism of being better to travel than to arrive – he always returns to his comfort zone of the craftsman and the job in hand. As he says [Quote ch25 p297] Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value. [Unquote] Fix a motorcycle ? How about help any kind of organisation to create and deliver any kind of product or service. That’ll do me.

Re-reading ZMM It had to happen, after reading Phaedrus, and Dr Willis, and strangely after a dinner conversation alluding to Ahab’s peg leg. (The analogies with Moby Dick are patent – The New Yorker). Pirsig says …

[Quote] [Most] of the time I’m feigning 20th C lunacy …. so as not to draw attention to myself. [Unquote] I wish.
[Quote] Common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of ghosts from the past.[Unquote] Except that
[Quote] The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts [ie common sense] can actually exist.[Unquote] Which just about sums up the whole Catch22.

The Paradox of Progress by Dr James Willis [Quote] Throughout this book, I have used my experience of general practice as an analogy for life in a technological world … I have quoted some of the things they say in order to show the wisdom, love, humanity of ordinary people.[Unquote] A thoroughly recommended read, even if tinged with anger at the Thatcher years.

More [Quotes]
As Jacques Ellul predicted half a century ago in The Technological Society, ?Mankind is to be smoothed out, like a pair of trousers under a steam iron?

But that doesn?t worry the regulators in the least. They have all the certainty that they are right of converts to a new religion. They are absolutely unshakable in their conviction that the representation of everything in rigid rules and formal mathematical models is the very epitome of progress and they present their beliefs with a self-confidence, not to say arrogance, which would be fatuous if it were not so familiar ….. It is the replacement of individual experience, common sense, and responsibility by an external structure of rules which is the key change in the new situation.

When I started work at the Middlesex Hospital my senior medical registrar told me that our job in life was to make sure the patients died with their electrolytes balanced. Once I commented to a local undertaker on a body lying rosy-cheeked in his chapel ? ?He looks surprisingly well, considering he?s dead!?. Joking apart, when doctors work to rule there is a grave danger that the rules will do better than the patients.

Here we are at the crux of the paradox. We want to define clear solutions to the problems we can see in the world. But as we do so we progressively destroy the essence of life itself. It seems to be an unavoidable rule that the precise definition of human affairs has the effect of killing humanity itself …. As Robert M Pirsig said in his wonderful book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “?the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can?t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem.” … And all the time the answer we are seeking is there, not actually under our noses, but an inch or two above and behind our noses.

KEEP ON TAKING THE TABLETS OF STONE – Rules, we all knew, were made to be broken. But now technology is being used to enforce the rules without fail and the detached machinery of law is being used to impose penalties without any understanding of the human reality. Computer systems are par excellence machines for the carrying out of rigid rules.

Although many people now suspect that civilisation is rushing towards the brink of a precipice, they have adopted the short term solution of closing their eyes. ?You worry too much, James, why don?t you have a drink.?
[Unquote]

Magic stuff – just read the whole thing on-line today at two sittings. As passionate and inspiring as Pinker’s Blank Slate. Amongst philosophers, only Popper and Pirsig get quoted in the text, but the reference book list not surprisingly also includes Dawkins and DNA/H2G2. I’ve just ordered his other book Friends in Low Places on-line.

Dr James Willis – Author of “The Paradox of Progress” and “Friends in Low Places”. Writing in a medical / healthcare context, but spot on the main theme of recoiling from hyper-rationalism.

[Quote] Most of all we need to keep technology in its proper place, as the servant of the individual person, not the master. To make use of its enormous potential to enhance life. Whilst protecting ourselves from its enormous potential to diminish and imprison us.[Unquote] Conclusion – The Paradox of Progress – 1998

[Quote] James Willis’ book says something so essential and vital that it needs to be shouted from skyscrapers. It also, however, is about something as simple as the emperor wearing no clothes. This is that a denial that life-as-it-is-lived is wonderfully, hopelessly, chaotic and complex – is not just doomed to failure, but will inevitably cause untold damage. Our society is not only attempting to deny, but to constrain life to become structured, controllable, controlled. There seems to be an insane belief that life can be controlled by ticking boxes, by diligently reading instructions, before doing anything, thinking anything, being anything.[Unquote] Gillie Bolton’s review of “Friends in Low Places” – Medical Humanities, June 2002. WOW!!!

He also says “Rules can never describe life, they can only set limits” Very evocative of the phrasing I used here !!! [Quote] …. scientific truth brings little except a few physical boundary conditions. [Unquote]

Also has a link to David Boyles Guardian article “You Can Count Me Out – The Tyranny of Numbers”. And also to Andrew Marr’s “Painting by Numbers” Both of which I seem to recall blogging earlier ?

Robert Pirsig was a major influence says Willis in the December 2000 issue of Medical Humanities in the series Medicine through the Novel.

Barrett got me thinking. Spotted a reference to him in Manuel Velasquez, then followed the latter into various university philosophy course web-sites and stumbled across this California Baptist Univ course. The first serious academic looking philosophy link to Pirsig and ZAMM that I’ve come across. I suppose it had to be in California.

Subjects, objects, data and values. Sept 2001 (Rev 10 !!) of Robert Pirsig’s original 1995 paper. Although I bogged a link to the Quantonics site many moons ago, I didn’t spot there was so much Pirsig related stuff here and on the MoQ “Metaphysics of Quality” site, both recently added to the side-bar. Spooky to me that Pirsig directly, (and indirectly through a band of followers) has already closed the loop with his static / dynamic quality levels with quantum information et al. Another rich seam of research opens.

This, below, is one of my earliest posts from 2002.

[Here I’ve simply added a couple of links to later (better) posts:
The Meme of Maslow’s Mojo (2011) ,and
Motivation 3.0 – The Pink Way (2013)]

I’ve made countless references to Maslow ever since I noticed that Pirsig’s levels of “value” (absolute quality or goodness) appeared to mirror it and recently since Foucault seemed to reinforce this impression. I always warmed to Maslow since pre-MBA management training days so I thought I’d better check out how good my memory was with a Google search. As usual I have unashamedly rolled several different theories together in my head – better to build and synthesise than to discard one theory in favour of another. Quite frankly IMHO, Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs can be (and often is) re-stated in words and varying levels of granularity that make Hertzberg’s (binary) Motivators and Hygiene Factors, McGregor’s (binary) Theories X and Y, and Ouchi’s Theory Z all just special cases of Maslow’s more general case. Most criticisms of Maslow can similarly be countered by judicious choice of words, and by remembering to treat his pyramid as an analytical framework, rather than some prescriptive methodology. These theories come predominantly from “management science” domains, but Pirsig and Foucault seem to say they represent something pretty fundamental about human social organisation and values – or even, dare I say, of any higher order intelligent beings natural or artificial.

Bearing in mind my original declaration of consciously viewing information and knowledge from a “human intent” perspective, then perhaps it becomes apparent why I see these drivers as one fundamental part of any knowledge model.