From: sh7656@albnyvms.bitnet (renfield)
Subject: A paper on Pirsig
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 94 17:47:25 GMT

Mea culpas for overflaming. Here is a paper I wrote mixing mostly _Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ with some over stuff.


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     The central importance of entering worlds other than our own
lies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that
our world is also a cultural construct.  By experiencing other
worlds, then, we see our own for what it is and are thereby
enabled also to see fleetingly what the real world, the one
between our own cultural construct and those other worlds, must
in fact be like.
     -Walter Goldscmidt, Foreward to The Teachings of Don Juan


     I posted the above quote onto a computer Bulletin Board
System (BBS) just before spring break.  One person thought that
the quote referred to space travel and how much we could learn
from aliens. Another person felt that you didn't even have to go
off the planet to learn about the different methods of perceiving
reality from the numerous and varied cultures we have here. 
Still another had the idea that the passage was referring to
books, as each one contained a world of its own, a frozen
fragment, yes, but one that could evolve and expand, as we see in
a book's sequel.
     They are all correct.  It is the intention of this essay to
show how our reality is in fact a cultural construct and to
reveal ways on how to go about changing it.  The paper is to show
the difference between static and dynamic reality and how the
world is a flux of both.  Much of Pirsig's Quality theory will be
discussed and explained.  To cap, it will reveal the "war" of
old, white men against all other permutations for the dominance
of reality through definition.


The Rift Between Subjects and Objects

     The traditional Western view is that objects are separate
from the subject viewing them. This viewpoint has its orgins with
the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.  Plato was the first to
separate the definitions of "true" and "good" from each other,
placing them both into a heirarchy where the truth was the
highest ideal and the good just underneath it.  He did this to
promote the diadectic arguement over the rhetoric.  Plato did
this because he felt that humanity should become objective and
logical in its way of thinking and that we should distance
ourselves (though not too much) from frivilous, emotional(perhaps
feminine associated traits) modes of thinking.
     Next, Aristotle transformed the system again.  He took good
from Plato's role and moved it into another branch of learning
altogther called Ethics.  Now the pursuit of what is good was
just one of the many branches dedicated to the learning of the
truth.  Aristotle next proceeded to proclaim that the truth could
only be understood by dividing it into smaller and smaller
components of knowledge.  Poetics, which was read in class, was
his application of this type of learning to Greek drama. 
Aristotle is the father of Science and how science is perceived
today.
     The Polish astronomer Copernicus in 1584, brought
Aristotle's learning to its ultimate conclusion by removing the
Earth from the center of the universe.  We were now totally
objectified, spinning silently in the void.  Modern day humanity
takes Copernicus for granted and does not realize the
implications of this switch.  What were the damages wrought? 
First, we have to understand the viewpoint of the people that
Aristotle and Plato were arguing against, that of the Sophists.

Who Those Loveable Sophists Were

     The Sophists were a diverse lot, they were not a school of
philosophers per se, but they all held one background in common: 
They all were members of a dying belief that humanity was
inseparable from her world, a belief held in common by
Amerindians, Buddhists, many African tribes, and many other
people considered "primitive".  Because of this, they believed
that preconception comes before actualization.
How does this work?  What does this mean?  The answer is tricky,
but only because we are accustomed to overlooking it.  Immanuel
Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason distinguishes our concepts
from our sensual perceptions, which is important in understanding
this arguement.  Kant was responding to David Hume, another
philosopher, who had an entirely subjective view about reality.
     Hume argued that all of reality could be considered
subjective.  If we had a person who, from birth, was in a coma
and grew into adulthood without seeing any of this world and then
suddenly awakened, she would not be able to make any sense out of
anything.  A cacophany of images and strange sounds would assail
her, all of which would be meaningless.  Hume used this example
to show how reality's pattern is a jumble which we have purely
subjectively made sense out of in our heads and no knowledge
could be certain.  It is a world without signs.
     Kant disagreed.  He pointed out that there were two
different types of information which we received, if not more. 
What we have to help us make sense of this mishmash of noise are
a priori ideas.
A priori ideas go into affect as we assimilate our data from our
senses.  Here are a few a priori ideas:

Closure:  We assume that everything we don't perceive is still
there.  A tree in the forest with no one to observe it makes a
noise as it falls. This is usually taught to us in youth with
games like "Peek-a-boo".  Even when she does not see you, the
infant bets that you are there.  I've gotten the strangest look
from a walking non-talker when I covered the phone with a
dishrag.  I had vanished it.
Three months later he was able to take the dishrag off.

Three Dimensional Spatiality:  Height, length, and depth are all
learned, otherwise everything you see could be perceived as
separate two-dimensional figures.  We assume that small things
are far away and large things are near.  An African Bushman, on
his first trip on a British jeep cried out when approaching their
camp on a savannah, "Everything is getting bigger!".  He had
lived in the dense jungle all his life and had no sense of
size/distance.

Time:  A second is always a second for everyone.  Even if you
have perceived a moment of time to be quicker or shorter than
what the clock says.  I have found that the same set of time
passes differently for different people.  Is time a matter of
perception then?

     These a priori ideas are ideas that we all agree upon. They
are the cultural luggage which we bring with us wherever we go. 
So much so that we cannot ever truly leave them behind.  They
seem so startingly natural that we forget that they were ever
learned, much like a person speaking her native language.

Models of Reality

     Think of our culture as a train moving along a track with
humanity in the engine, right upon the edge.  The train plows
into the future, the great unknown with us at the Now point. 
Since we cannot face the future, we are positioned backwards and
the landscape rushes past us.  Inside the boxcars of the train is
our signifiers and our icons, that which define reality for us.
     It's a nice model, but by itself it can't do much.  Mankind
can also be seen as standing on a beach.  A wide beach, with an
infinite amount of sand.  We cannot perceive all of the beach, so
a handful is picked up and carefully studied.  As time passes,
some sand is lost and new sand comes in, but it more the less
remains unchanged.  What we forget, is that it is us who decides
what to accept into our hands.  It is us at the head of the
train, shaping the direction of the track, deciding what to keep
and what to reject.

We forget that we are the observers of the sand.

We forget that we stand on a beach of infinity.
We forget that we are the ones who drive the train.

When sand is moving, it is called dynamic reality.  When it is
still, static reality.  Both are needed for a harmonious flux. 
When dynamism is too strong, destruction and chaos set in.  When
stasis is unbalanced, the world becomes dull and qualityless.  It
depends more and more on its cultural baggage and less and less
upon shaping new baggage.  It is a culture enamoured of its
icons.

An icon is a symbol for a more complex idea.  It is a cultural
shorthand.  A Star of David is not Judaism.  The United States
flag is not the United States.  Many people commit the error of
substituting a symbol to represent many icons and then substitute
that icon for the idea.  For example, every flag of every nation
to its people substitutes "Good for the People" in its semiology.
     Icon-worshipping is a common phenonemon.  It harkens back to
the days of polytheisim, for what are gods but personifications
of icons?  The icon acts as a short circut for understanding. 
Instead of examining what freedom is, you can look at the United
States flag, which everyone agrees is a bastion of freedom.  
Arguements degenerate from debates into religions.  Here are some
rules that icons follow (You can substitute 'icon' for 'god' or
for 'political party', which is also a collection of icons).
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This is my icon.  I am proud of my icon.  I do not know my icon
intimately, but one day, with enough faith and understanding, I
hope to.

My icon is better than your icon.  Any slander against my icon is
blasphemy.  Even if my icon appears to be doing wrong, he is
doing good in the long run.

Your icon is wrong.  All your ideas about your icon are just
wrong.  My icon will save humanity.  There is no limit to the
potential that my icon can do.

I have no idea what the problem is or how to fix it.  But I have
faith that my icon does.

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     America follows an interesting problem.  It tries to "play
fair" and incorporates that into its ideology.  However, it
traditionally has not been sharing those ideals with those not
male, white, nor wealthy.  Those who point this out are usually
met by rabid, icon-worshipping, fanatics who short circut the
problem with blind devotion.  If it was ever fully revealed that
America was not fufilling its fairness principle, America would
be transformed into something radically different.

How to Start Fixing the Problem
     Icons by themselves are neither bad nor good, just
overbalanced in a static society.  Once again, humanity forgets
that she is the one who gave power to the icons originally and
that they are not separate from her.  Politicians try to fix
problems with mass movements designed to correct the situation. 
However, this is ineffective because the movement has not changed
our way of thinking.  In order to solve the problem, we have to
understand what Quality and art is.

     Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, defines art
as anything not having to do with either survival or
reproduction.  Art, he argues, is not an either/or situation, any
way we choose to express ourselves in a way not 100% efficient to
the two is art.  Art appears in many places, from the style
someone drives to the extra quip given by a co-worker.  It's all
a decision on how to personally express ourselves.  Also, because
an infinite amount of styles can be created, they all have the
same value.  Which could be anywhere on a range from
meaninglessness to pricelessness.
     To sum, Reality is not a fixed creature, all of us are
responsible for affecting how we create it, from the most
brilliant scientist to the most reclusive hermit. We are all
important people. We all have something to do or say or write or
feel that shapes the reality that we live in.  By shifting the
positions of the earth and sun, we create a universe we have no
hand in.  We become unimportant because now everything is
supposed to exist independently and objectively from us.  Perhaps
with another invention, we can bring everything back to us.  

SH7656@rachel.albany.edu