On Quality

An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings

Robert M. Pirsig, Wendy K. Pirsig

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063084667
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Featuring long-awaited selections from Robert M. Pirsig's unpublished writings, from before and after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection illuminating the central theme of Pirsig's thought: "Quality"

"The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment." —Robert M. Pirsig, 1962

More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Robert M. Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "Quality, " a concept loosely likened to "excellence, " "rightness, " or "fitness" that Pirsig saw as kindred to the Buddhist ideas of "dharma" or the "Tao." As he later wrote in Zen, "Quality is the Buddha."

Though he was revered by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig published only two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances in later decades. Yet he wrote and thought almost continually, refining his "Metaphysics of Quality" until his death in 2017.

Now, for the first time, readers will be granted access to five decades of Pirsig's personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree. Skillfully edited and introduced by Wendy K. Pirsig, Robert's wife of four decades, the collection includes previously unpublished texts, speeches, letters, interviews, and private notes, as well as key excerpts from Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance and his second book, Lila.

Since its publication in 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has established itself as a modern classic of popular philosophy; selling millions of copies and inspiring a generation, while serving as a perennial touchstone for the generations that follow. On Quality is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our time.

Part 1

Quality

One day I asked the Master: “How can the shot be loosed if ‘I’ do not do it?”

“‘It’ shoots,” he replied.

“I have heard you say that several times before, so let me put it another way: How can I wait self-obliviously for the shot if ‘I’ am no longer there?”

“‘It’ waits at the highest tension.”

“And who or what is this ‘It’?”

“Once you have understood that, you will have no further need of me. And if I tried to give you a clue at the cost of your own experience, I should be the worst of teachers and should deserve to be sacked! So let’s stop talking about it and go on practicing.”

—ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY, BY EUGEN HERRIGEL, 1948

LETTER, APRIL 2, 1961, BOZEMAN, MONTANA, WHERE PIRSIG WAS AN INSTRUCTOR AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE

An instructor often gets the feeling that he could spend the rest of his life telling the student what he wanted and never get anywhere precisely because the student is trying to produce what the instructor wants rather than what is good.

One also notices that on many of these occasions, the particular student is as frustrated and angered as the instructor. The student keeps trying to figure out how to please the instructor, and to his way of thinking, the instructor doesn’t seem to know himself. The student turns in a rambling paper. He is told he needs better organization and should make an outline. He goes to work, makes an outline, and writes a new story that follows the outline but is told the story is too dull. He goes to work, tries to brighten it with choice bits of liveliness, and brings it in. He is then told the story sounds too artificial. . . .

The solution lies in a common word that on first analysis seems as simple as the word “time” and that, on further inspection, turns out to be fully as complex as that word “time.” The word is quality. When a student asks what is wanted in English composition, he should be told that what is wanted is quality.

This seems ridiculously simple at first, but it is an often overlooked and primitive concept that is absolutely necessary to put across before a student can learn to write. And it is astounding how many students arrive at the college level with no understanding that there is such a thing as quality in writing—students who honestly and conscientiously believe that good writing is a matter of pleasing different instructors, students who believe it is a matter of being flowery, being grammatical, being profound, being obedient—being anything except just plain good.

“APHORISMS,” 1962, DOWNEY VETERAN ADMINISTRATION HOSPITAL, ILLINOIS, WHERE PIRSIG WAS ADMITTED AS PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT

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.

Five blind men approached an elephant. One thought it was like a rope, another like a wall, another like a tree, another like a snake. All were speaking the truth. Similarly, five different people trying to describe the nature of quality may give five different answers. All may be telling the truth. There are no eternal verbal truths that tell us what does or does not have quality. The recognition of quality varies from object to object, person to person, culture to culture, and moment to moment.

There are qualities that exist in the object. . . . There is the quality that exists in the subject or the mind as excellence. But the belief that quality exists in the mind or the object is due to the basic dualistic illusion that the observer and observed are separate. 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.

A discipline of quality is learned when one succeeds in a pure response to one’s instantaneous situation uncluttered by divisive thought or past conditioning, when this response is sensitive to subtle as well as gross differences, and perhaps when one realizes that existence itself is simply this continuing response.

Of course, what one judges to have or not to have quality results largely from one’s cultural conditioning. What doesn’t? Of greater importance is that the growth of the culture is a response to a drive toward high or positive quality. Quality is the teleological cause of social growth.

As yet our cultural drives toward quality have been on the whole crude and primitive. The great engines of social change have not had much time to rise above simple demands for more food, clothing, and shelter, aimed at a satisfaction of the most basic desires. As these desires are satisfied by technology for huge masses of people, however, a new problem arises: What next? Our society must shift from one having developed highly complex means toward simple goals to one less focused on the means and more on the goals themselves. We will be less concerned with the national quantity of food, for example, and more concerned with the variety and quality of food produced.

The spiderlike process of analytical reasoning that is the chief characteristic of what we call civilization does not have to be abandoned permanently for an understanding and continuous appreciation of quality. Reasoning is also a part of the aesthetic universe that surrounds us. There is high-quality reasoning and low-quality reasoning. The selection of a particular line or method of reason is guided by quality choices.

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.

Normally one’s ability to see what is good marches far ahead of one’s ability to produce it.

Experience does not begin with facts. It begins with monistic quality, then dualistic qualities, then pluralistic assigned symbols.

What is the difference between quality and Dewey’s “experience?” “Experience” is dualistically desired. It presumes an eternal (possible) separation between source of experience and recipient of experience. A person who experiences something is separate and external to the situation he experiences, an observer. “Quality” is monistically derived. It presumes that the source and recipient of quality are not separate at all. Quality is neither apart from the world or from the self. Nor are the world and the self apart when pure quality is recognized, as they are when experience is recognized. By following a discipline of quality one eventually comes to recognize that the world and the self are not separate.

The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. After that there are no goals, for one realizes emotionally as well as intellectually that all experience is of equal quality.

Truth is high-quality statement, quality being the determinant of reality.

The term “quality” cannot be intellectually transcended because it is both indefinable and infinitely definable (which amounts to the same thing). If it is summed up, the intellectual summary will not be superior to the term because the antithesis of the summary will be as true as the summary itself.

Quality itself is the same for everyone everywhere.

LILA: AN INQUIRY INTO MORALS, 1991

Long ago when he first explored the idea of Quality he’d reasoned that if Quality were the primordial source of all our understanding then it followed that the place to get the best view of it would be at the beginning of history when it would have been less cluttered by the present deluge of static intellectual patterns of knowledge. He’d traced Quality back into its origins in Greek philosophy and thought he’d gone as far as he could go. Then he found he was able to go back to a time before the Greek philosophers, to the rhetoricians.

Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from “nature” or sometimes from “God,” but Phædrus thought neither of these was completely accurate. 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. Most of this old religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the parent of our modern scientific talk. This “mythos over logos” thesis agreed with the Metaphysics of Quality’s assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of social static patterns of quality.

Digging back into ancient Greek history, to the time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking place, Phædrus noted that the ancient rhetoricians of Greece, the Sophists, had taught what they called aretê, which was a synonym for Quality. Victorians had translated aretê as “virtue,” but Victorian “virtue” connoted sexual abstinence, prissiness, and a holier-than-thou snobbery. This was a long way from what the ancient Greeks meant. The early Greek literature, particularly the poetry of Homer, showed that aretê had been a central and vital term.

With Homer Phædrus was certain he’d gone back as far as anyone could go, but one day he came across some information that startled him. It said that by following linguistic analysis you could go even farther back into the mythos than Homer. Ancient Greek was not an original language. It was descended from a much earlier one, now called the Proto-Indo-European language. This language has left no fragments but has been derived by scholars from similarities between such languages as Sanskrit, Greek and English which have indicated that these languages were fallouts from a common prehistoric tongue. After thousands of years of separation from Greek and English the Hindi word for “mother” is still “Ma.” Yoga both looks like and is translated as “yoke.” The reason an Indian rajah’s title sounds like “regent” is because both terms are fallouts from Proto-Indo-European. Today a Proto-Indo-European dictionary contains more than a thousand entries with derivations extending into more than one hundred languages.

Just for curiosity’s sake Phædrus decided to see if aretê was in it. He looked under the “a” words and was disappointed to find it was not. Then he noted a statement that said that the Greeks were not the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European spelling. Among other sins, the Greeks added the prefix “a” to many of the Proto-Indo-European roots. He checked this out by looking for aretê under “r.” This time a door opened.

The Proto-Indo-European root of aretê was the morpheme rt. There, beside aretê, was a treasure room of other derived “rt” words: “arithmetic,” “aristocrat,” “art,” “rhetoric,” “worth,” “rite,” “ritual,” “wright,” “right (handed)” and “right (correct).” All of these words except “arithmetic” seemed to have a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Bob’s Quest
• Introduction: “The Right Way”
• Part 1: Quality
• Part 2: Values
• Part 3: The Metaphysics of Quality
• Part 4: Dharma
• Part 5: Attitude
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Editor
• Also by Robert M. Pirsig
• Copyright
• About the Publisher