Continued
from Aug. 15, 2004:
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
See also the discussion of
subjective and objective
by Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance,
Part III,
followed by this dialogue:
Are We There Yet?
Chris shouts, “When are we
going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet,”
I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky
between the trees. As long as we
can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet.
The light will come through the trees
when we round the top.”
Related material:
The Boys from Uruguay,
Lichtung!,
The Shining of May 29,
A Guiding Philosophy,
Ticket Home.
The philosophy of Heidegger
discussed and illustrated
in the above entries may
be regarded as honoring
today’s 100th anniversary
of the birth of Heidegger’s
girlfriend, Hannah Arendt.
See also
