[Note: This article has been updated post-discussion; I didn't want to create a new post when we've had all this great discussion on this one that I want people to continue. The episode itself should be up w/in the next day or two.]

Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest David Buchanan have recorded a conversation on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,a book that’s not about Zen and only a little bit about motorcycle maintenance.

It’s an autobiographical novel describing (in part) Pirsig’s encounters with the idea of “Quality.” In trying to teach this to freshman composition students, he decided that it’s a fundamental, immediate, and undefinable part of our experience. We don’t, on his account, first consciously analyze things, and then decide based on that analysis what’s better than what. Quality (or more precisely, “dynamic quality,” a term he comes up with in his 1991 book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals)phenomenologically primary: even distinguishing a foreground object from the background, i.e. perception itself, relies on a quality judgment, namely that this aspect of the perceptual field is of interest. Once we establish habits like this (e.g. object recognition, which can be generalized into a metaphysics of objects in space), they get ossified, codified, and passed on, so they seem natural, but we can’t forget that all the systems of classification, of conceptualization, of making sense of things at all are human inventions. This should sound very much like William James’s pragmatism.

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