Reconciliation and the Art of Knowing from Within

I have been hit by a train of mind-blowing reformations to knowledge and understanding, and must shape my thoughts into coherent speech? Well, we will see how this goes.

Using Phaedrus and Pirsig as a reference of understanding, our mission is to reconcile the reasonable and the good. No easy feat, to attempt what philosophers have struggled around for thousands of years, but perhaps I can come a few steps closer. After all, “You can sort of tell these things.” (p. 418) That is, we can perceive the unifying answers deep within ourselves, but replicating them in language? That is the real struggle.

These golden sentences put us on track:

“The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things” (p. 374.) And,

“Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency – or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself” (p. 377.)

What should appear bold in these statements is the role of experience in determining quality. Reason and logic has demoted experience to subjective emotion, and labeled it as invalidating the higher search for answers and knowledge. Guards are put in place to resist “bias” (i.e., seeing an invisible conclusion and searching for it) so that research can be published respectively. “Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme” (p. 358.) The problem with making quality subservient to reason lies in the nature of reason itself, which is determined by experience.  Once cannot say that reason simply existed, hanging out in a coffee shop waiting to be found like a prodigious musical star. We have fashioned reason as a way of knowing, but the full sum of our interactions with reason are bound by experience.  Reason is a tool growing out of organic Quality.  Experience is how we know—it is the perspective to which we are bound, and the way in which we interact with what "is."

This photo lies on the back flap of the book;
faces to humanize the conversations.

 Asking an individual to reason with the subtraction of subjective experience is akin to asking them to describe the flavor of a dish without tasting it.

Unity then, may be found not by placing the “Good” and the “Truth” on a level playing field, but by reversing the structure of supremacy. What if we place reason beneath quality? It would stop the parsing and slicing and terming that squelches creativity, and enable a perspective of oneness that looks at the world not to decide a single truth, but to find knowledge in interactions. Although Chris’s death (spoiler if you skipped the afterword) occurred after Pirsig wrote his story, the author demonstrates through death, how ubiquitous this Quality is. He explains Chris’s soul, if you choose to see it that way, as a “pattern” that resurfaces— starting in Nell.  This pattern is a fragment of the larger cohesive Quality, a single manifestation of experiences and interactions that enabled understanding.

The reconciliation between the reasonable and the good may be here—in perspective.  If each individual carries an element, an imperfect reproduction, a fragmented version of the omnipotent Quality, then do we not all add an irreplaceable piece to the process of understanding? Some of our patterns may be more “rational” and bound to observation, and some may be more “romantic” and bound to emotional experience.  Neither can be qualitatively defined as better, but each can be used to see.  We cannot fundamentally oppose to this world in which we live, as if its sole purpose was to deceive and confuse us, but through our experiences, our “response to Quality” come to know what we are and how we are “a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.” (pages 351, 378.)  Reason becomes a method at which to arrive at Quality, and rhetoric becomes not a means to persuade, but a means to consider different patterns of Quality, and arrive at a bettered understanding of our relation to the world and place within it.

Often it seems we perceive on the right, but can only express
with the left.  I believe spatial reasoning occurs in the right
 hemisphere and language on the left, so that makes sense.
There's a mind-bender, right there.

A final note on creativity. Pirsig makes the point that, “Dualistic excellence is achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not” (p. 345.)  That the Aristotelian perspectives “killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things” (p. 360.) Terms can work well; I am quite glad I have a name.  It makes getting my attention much easier.  But it is when we allow our definitions to constitute the entirely of a subject we encounter trouble. To recognize that our understandings and the names by which we know objects are limited and based on a particular perspective opens the door for multiple understandings. When we see things in multiple dimensions, we shake off the dualistic subject-object mindset, and recognize that we play a role in creating meaning.  And if we can recognize that, we can blaze new trails of creativity, each one of us approaching elements with our specific quality pattern. Each an active member in creating and recreating knowledge, revealing not only our universe but ourselves.