Reflections on Quality ZMM #1
I recently read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and took some notes along the way. This is an attempt to make those more coherent. The book is essentially about how we can define Quality, and more importantly how we can move towards producing and aligning with what ensures it. Robert Pirsig starts us out on little hints of what might be unqualitative, and then moves to a broader thesis.
Rhetoric, Letters & Romantic v Classic
Pirsig observes that the education system is geared towards making people mimic instead of think for themselves. Grading is most reliable when the student can just repeat back to the teacher what was said in the classroom. This way there’s less ambiguity and the education system can be standardized and ‘good’ for every student. The problem is, students aren’t enticed to think for themselves and develop their own ideas that way. They don’t learn to observe the world through their own eyes. The result is that when we leave school, we’re not much of anything except professional mimickers.
When we then try to say something about a topic, we often rely upon what interesting facts we’ve heard another human say about it. But so when we encounter something we have no pre-fabricated ideas or phrases on, we get stuck. Pirsig counters this by encouraging us to take a small mundane object and try to describe it fully. Doing so forces us to observe for ourselves, and if we actually sit down for this, we notice we’re quite capable of producing real thought.
That’s then where rhetoric is found. The art of effective communication is found where words and thoughts are perfectly tailored to the objective or topic. When we have to rely on prefabricated phrases, they’ll always mismatch with the real thing. Because the real thing is in the present, there’s no way to say something truly effective about it without actually truly observing it. Rhetoric is therefore the product of observing and engaging with perception. When we write or talk about something we’ve observed ourselves, the words become aligned with what there is.
In practice this can come up for instance when writing letters. It’s very common to get stuck when we try to write a fully finished product on a first try. To just have that flow from your brain. A practical way to do it instead is to write down all the topics you’d like to discuss, and then later pick those that are most important or interesting. It’s a nice way of filtering what needs to be said. When we start with that which is actually present in our mind, not the abstract structure the final result requires, the writing comes naturally.
This distinction between direct experience and analytical understanding appears again in Pirsig’s view of Classic and Romantic thinking. Classic thinking is about seeing underlying structures, understanding how things work and thinking in systems. Romantic thinking is about immediate appearance, the way you experience things and how things feel.
When it comes to technology, these two modes often diverge. Some people have become very detached from technology, don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it, and so become fully romantic in their relation to it. Meanwhile others, of which for instance mechanics, but I think my girlfriend would categorize me in there too, are more inclined towards classic thinking and try to see underlying structure in everything. Note that neither of these thinking mechanisms is good or bad, though, they only appear once we divide the world into a dualistic view. And dualistic views are a very typical thinking form for our modern society. Things are good and bad, classic or romantic, subject and object, and so on.
Quality
The whole point the book makes is that Quality isn’t definable as a concept. The reason for this is because it’s pre-intellectual, it occurs before we analyze or become conscious of it.
How do we then reflect on something like this? There’s no real way of thinking about it because the whole point is that you cannot define it. I suppose the idea would be to remember moments when we’re fully absorbed in something and they just felt right. But the realization of feeling good only comes after, when we add judgment to it.
For instance, last week I helped my parents replace their Velux blinds and put new ones in. It was after I had already read this book, so I was aware of taking care of my gumption (see later) by doing everything in the right order and paying attention to detail. As such, it was a really smooth experience, everything went right. I did things in order, placed the screws in a little bucket in a structured way. Took off the old ones but paid particular attention to the order of assembly. I was truly engaged in it, and had no thoughts during it. Only after did I analyze it as such, though.
Robert Pirsig says “Quality emerges when you’re no longer separate from the work”, so you’re not observing an object nor thinking about what you’re doing. You’re essentially in a flow, where you’re fully immersed in the activity. This comes close to my earlier intuition about Self-Preservation, where at the end I had the realization self-sovereignty is what truly matters but the only way to make that possible is immersion.
The point is also that when we’re as such fully engaged in something, the object and subject disappear. Not because they’re not a thing, but because the experience and the emergence of Quality precludes the division of reality into dualistic thinking. Such thinking only comes after the moment has taken place, or in the moment but then we’re not really engaged with that moment.
Robert Pirsig goes to certain lengths to point out that it precludes judgement. He says the relationship doesn’t create the Quality, instead the relationship is made possible by Quality. It’s not because we enjoy an activity, such as piano, reading or fixing things, that Quality appears. It’s because Quality exists when we do these activities that we respond to them so. We are only made aware of the goodness of things because Quality occurred. If you think about it, and Pirsig also points this out I believe, there’s an incredible amount of information available to us at any time. If I look around I can count at least 100 objects, colors and sounds. We never notice this, though. We only notice what we engage with and only after the engagement do we realize we’ve valued this one filtered out object because of the engagement. And if we truly engage with it, Quality will have emerged.
Coding
That’s the reason so many people find technology ugly. For me personally, I’ve only started learning to code a year or two ago, and because of that, I notice it’s much easier to have AI generate it and then try to understand it. Problem is, the result is that I don’t have any relation with the code and it doesn’t do anything for me, so I don’t continue learning and instead just consult AI for it again. We’re in a loop now. And in light of this book, I realize it’s because I have no caring relationship with this code because it isn’t mine. I didn’t write it nor think it through. The result is also that when I’m going through “my” code, I’m trying to analyze it and understand it, but I still don’t get to experience the code as something I build and can then see a working solution from. I’m in a world of classical thinking only, because the moment I went to AI it became external and I can only interact with a finished product. I cannot truly experience it then in a romantic sense. Yet Quality exists before such a distinction takes place. Now I might also reason that I do care about the project I’m building, and as a result coding isn’t really the focal point of experiencing and owning the work that goes into it. I actually do believe there’s something about that, but all in all the lack of a caring relationship with the code explains my separation from it. In turn, I think the point of the book would be that there must be continuity of immersion throughout the whole process of your work. If you fully engage and become one with the project, so that the work becomes a fully harmonious thing that lives and breathes, Quality will have trouble not emerging. Meanwhile if one part of the project is externalized but the grand picture is your own, it might or might not have appeared, there’s no way of knowing.
When we truly immerse ourselves in an activity, we both feel them and analyze them. You cannot immerse truly if you only feel, or if you only analyze. Most people are inclined towards one or the other, but if we truly engage with something, harmonization of feeling and analyzing naturally appears. For Quality appears when “feeling is guided by understanding”.
“When the owner of a product cannot feel any sense of identity with that product, and neither can the producer of it feel any sense of identity with it, we say that product has no Quality. Technology should be a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. Publicly this happens for instance when man lands on the moon, but we should find this on an individual level.”
“Personal transcendence of the problem of technology can be as simple as sharpening a knife or knitting a dress. In each case there is a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it , both an ability to see what looks good and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that good are needed. Classic and romantic modes of thinking must be combined.”
Education, Jobs and Instruction Manuals
A pretty big insight Robert Pirsig points out is that “instructions only give one understanding of Quality, the classic one”. Instructions only give us steps, rules and an explanation. That is exactly what classical understanding is. We can only be taught via instruction through what can be explicitly stated. Meanwhile Quality goes beyond this.
In practice when we do something, instructions can guide judgement but can never replace direct perception of Quality. We often sense something is good or right before we can explain why. And Quality cannot be defined so it can also not be standardized and given as instruction. You feel it. Instructions tell us how to achieve an end result, but can only be applied well if the person is engaged enough to also feel whether the things they’re doing is right. If the task or project or idea becomes externalized, and someone else is overriding the experiencing of it, it can become really difficult to even want to engage.
Some time ago I read this book by Jonathan Haidt and he was talking about how children should be allowed to go through adversity because we humans are like trees. And trees have this property where if they’ve gone all their life without heavy wind blows, their roots don’t go wide and deep. Then if suddenly when they’re fully grown they get a heavy wind blow, they’ll fall because their roots cannot support them.
I see education in the same light, in order to truly understand topics and achieve a certain skill, we must do robustness checks on our understanding. That way the roots of topics can go wide and deep into our brains. And these roots only take hold when we truly engage into an activity. When we care. Meanwhile the education system as I’ve experienced it is more aligned with how Robert Pirsig described it, you’re rewarded for mimicry and as such don’t observe reality for yourself. It’s just the way the incentive system is set up.
And here is in my opinion the big difference also between American and European universities. I mean I’ve never been to an American one, so take it with a grain of salt perhaps. In The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt as well as what the internet shows, however, the classrooms are much smaller and it’s extremely common to have a personal relationship with the professor. They know you by name, and during lectures you interact with them. They’ll even advise you on life direction and which job to get. This is how you engage with topics. I’ve also only ever studied at KULeuven, so perhaps I shouldn’t claim all of Europe, but in my experience you have a class of fifty people or more, where the teacher comes in and just give a 2-3 hour monologue about the material. You don’t truly engage and experience the topics that way. This inspires mimicry and takes away from the root building in your brain.
Caring
For Robert Pirsig, caring is actually the inverse of Quality. Caring is the feeling of identification with what one is doing. So perhaps instead of thinking about what quality is, we must think in terms of when do we truly care. When we do, problems reveal themselves, because we’re paying attention, and similarly, this paying attention makes us see more detail. Quality then guides the action.
We might then think that in order to produce quality, we must attach our identity to the things we do. Because when we evaluate our identity along with the goodness of what we produce, we’ll be subconsciously more inclined to pay attention. This is a little misguided, though, and creates unnecessary volatility. The idea is instead that Quality emerges when we’re no longer separate from the work. When we attend so fully that the distinction between us and the work fades. It’s not about forced meaning or over-identification. In fact, when we attend completely, there is no identity. There is no distinction between our person (identity - subject) and the activity (object), that’s the whole point.
The idea is then that in order to produce Quality, we must “cultivate a peace of mind that doesn’t separate one’s self from one’s surroundings”.