Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (30 page)

We still have a lot of climbing to do, but on the trail we discover it's easier than yesterday. We're getting to the rounded upper portion of the ridge and the slope isn't as steep. It looks as though the pines have never been cut here. All direct light is shut out from the forest floor and there's no underbrush at all. Just a springy floor of needles that's open and spacious and easy hiking -- .

Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical one.

This was brought about in response to Phædrus' wild meanderings about Quality when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their squareness, presented him with a reasonable question: ``Does this undefined `quality' of yours exist in the things we observe?'' they asked. ``Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer?'' It was a simple, normal enough question, and there was no hurry for an answer.

Hah. There was no need for hurry. It was a finisher-offer, a knockdown question, a haymaker, a Saturday-night special...the kind you don't recover from.

Because if Quality exists in the object, then you must explain just why scientific instruments are unable to detect it. You must suggest instruments that will detect it, or live with the explanation that instruments don't detect it because your whole Quality concept, to put it politely, is a large pile of nonsense.

On the other hand, if Quality is subjective, existing only in the observer, then this Quality that you make so much of is just a fancy name for whatever you like.

What Phædrus had been presented with by the faculty of the English department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma,which is Greek for ``two premises,'' has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.

If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.

He noticed that from a number of faculty members he was receiving some good-natured smiles.

Phædrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren't so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies ``anything you like.'' Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three.

In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, ``rhetorical'' ones. Phædrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.

One may throw sand in the bull's eyes. He had already done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence. It's an old rule of logic that the competence of a speaker has no relevance to the truth of what he says, and so talk of incompetence was pure sand. The world's biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out. Socrates, that ancient enemy of rhetorical argument, would have sent Phædrus flying for this one, saying, ``Yes, I accept your premise that I'm incompetent on the matter of Quality. Now please show an incompetent old man what Quality is. Otherwise, how am I to improve?'' Phædrus would have been allowed to stew around for a few minutes, and then been flattened with questions that proved he didn't know what Quality was either and was, by his own standards, incompetent.

One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phædrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this dilemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn't find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn't be found. Wouldn't they, with their broader experience, try to help him find this answer? But it was way too late for lullabies like that. They could simply have replied, ``No, we're way too square. And until you do come up with an answer, stick to the syllabus so that we don't have to flunk out your mixed-up students when we get them next quarter.''

A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phædrus could simply have said, ``The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable ,'' and left it at that. I believe DeWeese actually counseled him to do this at the time.

Why he chose to disregard this advice and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism, I don't know. But I can guess. I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever. Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. It's the basis of Zen practice. But it's not an academic subject. The academy, the Church of Reason, is concerned exclusively with those things that can be defined, and if one wants to be a mystic, his place is in a monastery, not a University. Universities are places where things should be spelled out.

I think a second reason for his decision to enter the arena was an egoistic one. He knew himself to be a pretty sharp logician and dialectician, took pride in this and looked upon this present dilemma as a challenge to his skill. I think now that trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles.

I see a deer move about two hundred yards ahead and above us through the pines. I try to point it out to Chris, but by the time he looks it's gone.

The first horn of Phædrus' dilemma was, If Quality exists in the object, why can't scientific instruments detect it?

This horn was the mean one. From the start he saw how deadly it was. If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both. In today's world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don't get off the ground.

He remembered Locke's statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. The ``object'' is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities. This answer, if valid, certainly smashed the first horn of the dilemma, and for a while excited him greatly.

But it turned out to be false. The Quality that he and the students had been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. His Quality...``excellence,'' ``worth,'' ``goodness''...was not a physical property and was not measurable. He had been thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality.He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it aside. The horn of the dilemma was still there.

He turned his attention to the other horn of the dilemma, which showed more promise of refutation. He thought, So Quality is whatever you like? It angered him. The great artists of history...Raphael, Beethoven, Michelangelo...they were all just putting out what people liked. They had no goal other than to titillate the senses in a big way. Was that it? It was angering, and what was most angering about it was that he couldn't see any immediate way to cut it up logically. So he studied the statement carefully, in the same reflective way he always studied things before attacking them.

Then he saw it. He brought out the knife and excised the one word that created the entire angering effect of that sentence. The word was ``just.'' Why should Quality be just what you like? Why should ``what you like'' be ``just''? What did ``just'' mean in this case? When separated out like this for independent examination it became apparent that ``just'' in this case really didn't mean a damn thing. It was a purely pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentence was nil. Now, with that word removed, the sentence became ``Quality is what you like,'' and its meaning was entirely changed. It had become an innocuous truism.

He wondered why that statement had angered him so much in the first place. It had seemed so natural. Why had it taken so long to see that what it really said was ``What you like is bad, or at least inconsequential.'' What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad, or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? It seemed the quintessence of the squareness he was fighting. Little children were trained not to do ``just what they liked'' but -- but what? -- Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise ``just what you like'' then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others...a good slave. When you learn not to do ``just what you like'' then the System loves you.

But suppose you do just what you like? Does that mean you're going to go out and shoot heroin, rob banks and rape old ladies? The person who is counseling you not to do ``just as you like'' is making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable. He seems unaware that people may not rob banks because they have considered the consequences and decided they don't like to. He doesn't see that banks exist in the first place because they're ``just what people like,'' namely, providers of loans. Phædrus began to wonder how all this condemnation of ``what you like'' ever seemed such a natural objection in the first place.

Soon he saw there was much more to this than he had been aware of. When people said, Don't do just what you like, they didn't just mean, Obey authority. They also meant something else.

This ``something else'' opened up into a huge area of classic scientific belief which stated that ``what you like'' is unimportant because it's all composed of irrational emotions within yourself. He studied this argument for a long time,then knifed it into two smaller groups which he called scientific materialism and classic formalism. He said the two are often found associated in the same person but logically are separate.

Scientific materialism, which is commoner among lay followers of science than among scientists themselves, holds that what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable by the instruments of science is real. Anything else is unreal, or at least of no importance. ``What you like'' is unmeasurable, and therefore unreal. ``What you like'' can be a fact or it can be a hallucination. Liking does not distinguish between the two. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true, picture of reality. When he said Quality was subjective, to them he was just saying Quality is imaginary and could therefore be disregarded in any serious consideration of reality.

On the other hand is classic formalism, which insists that what isn't understood intellectually isn't understood at all. Quality in this case is unimportant because it's an emotional understanding unaccompanied by the intellectual elements of reason.

Of these two main sources of that epithet ``just,'' Phædrus felt that the first, scientific materialism, was by far the easiest to cut to ribbons. This, he knew from his earlier education, was nave science. He went after it first, using the reductio ad absurdum. This form of argument rests on the truth that if the inevitable conclusions from a set of premises are absurd then it follows logically that at least one of the premises that produced them is absurd. Let's examine, he said, what follows from the premise that anything not composed of mass...energy is unreal or unimportant.

He used the number zero as a starter. Zero, originally a Hindu number, was introduced to the West by the Arabs during the Middle Ages and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. How was that? he wondered. Had nature so subtly hidden zero that all the Greeks and all the Romans...millions of them...couldn't find it? One would normally think that zero is right out there in the open for everyone to see. He showed the absurdity of trying to derive zero from any form of mass-energy, and then asked, rhetorically, if that meant the number zero was ``unscientific.'' If so, did that mean that digital computers, which function exclusively in terms of ones and zeros, should be limited to just ones for scientific work? No trouble finding the absurdity here.

He then went on with other scientific concepts, one by one, showing how they could not possibly exist independently of subjective considerations. He ended up with the law of gravity, in the example I gave John and Sylvia and Chris on the first night of our trip. If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.

This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in ``common sense'' language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid. The argument that the world was all mind might be a sound logical position but it was certainly not a sound rhetorical one. It was way too tedious and difficult for a course in freshman composition. Too ``far-fetched.''

At this point the whole subjective horn of the dilemma looked almost as uninspiring as the objective one. And the arguments of classical formalism, when he started to examine them, made it even worse. These were the extremely forceful arguments that you shouldn't respond to your immediate emotional impulses without considering the big rational picture.

Kids are told, ``Don't spend your whole allowance for bubble gum [immediate emotional impulse] because you're going to want to spend it for something else later [big picture].'' Adults are told, ``This paper mill may smell awful even with the best controls [immediate emotions], but without it the economy of the whole town will collapse [big picture].'' In terms of our old dichotomy, what's being said is, ``Don't base your decisions on romantic surface appeal without considering classical underlying form.'' This was something he kind of agreed with.