A list is perhaps the most fundamental method to record or document an inquiry into values.
Origins/Etymology
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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References & Notes
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What is an Inquiry Into Values?
Origins/Etymology
The word “list” is most commonly used to refer to a catalog, inventory or written collection of items or things. Usually, when we think of a list, we think of a written (vertical) column of words. This column format of a list suggests its origins.
The contemporary English word appears to derive from an Old-French version of the word “liste” which referred to a border, edge or strip. There’s also an Old-Italian, Old-Norse and Old-Germanic versions of the word. All of these suggest a Proto-Indo-European root-word such as “leizd”, which meant a border or band.
A secondary meaning of the word list is to “to tilt, lean, incline to one side.” This sense of the word is most frequently observed via depictions of boats or ships. This sense of the word appears to derive from the idea of leaning toward something; if this leaning toward were to be something of desire – the related word is lust. A Middle-English version of the word was lysten (lustjan) and meant to “please, desire, wish or like”. The Old-English “y” in lysten is pronounced as the “u” bury , blush or church. So perhaps it should be spelled as lusten…and reveal that connection to the word lust.
It seems inevitable that there is a relationship between lysten (lustjan) and our modern word listen – which is to attend or focus one’s (auditory) attention. When we listen to someone, we are inclining our attention to them. This too, seems to have a Proto-Indo-Eurpoean root (las -to be eager or wanton).
Hlystan and hlysnan were Old-English variants of listen where “kleu” seems to have been the Proto-Indo-European root-word – meaning to hear.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Today I want to talk about what a list is and the role that it plays in our lives.
In the previous Zensylvania Episode (Ghosts and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), we reviewed a few features of Chapters Three and Five of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. During that episode, we skipped over Chapter Four as it really didn’t have much to offer for that episode. But this time, we’ll be able to explore the chapter to see what it may offer.
As always, I will do my best to provide a reasonable quantity of information from the chapter to support exploration of the ideas without resorting to reading the entire chapter…and also without revealing too much about future chapters in the book. Also as usual, you may wish to review other episodes of the podcast (or the original essays on the website) for further explorations of what I call motorcycle zen.
Chapter Four of ZAMM opens with the narrator waking up early in the morning on the second day of the family and friends motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to California. The first day of the trip had started fine and included a number of the narrator’s memories and thoughts. Eventually a storm caught up with the riders and the day’s ride ended at a motel in an un-named town somewhere between Breckinridge, Minnesota and Ellendale, North Dakota. The riders ended the day sitting in metal courtyard chairs and drinking down a pint of whiskey over conversation about ghosts and the Pirsig family’s current mental health concerns.
After such a gloomy and disconcerting chapter, Pirsig has inserted a chapter which seems like much more homely and familiar territory. The narrator is the first of the group to rise and before waking the others, shares his list of items use for motorcycle trips like this.
Before we go too much further, I have to admit that I am not camper. There have been time when I thought that I ought to take-up camping. Certainly I have known lots of people who love the exploration and adventure that it provides them. But it has never really been my thing. As an adult, I’ve only camped once – it was a summer weekend trip to Mont Tremblant National Park. Kelly and I had rented a little white Pontiac LeMans in Ottawa and puttered over to Mont Tremblant with a pup-tent and woefully little else and spent the night. To paraphrase Pirsig’s comments from an earlier chapter, we were overloaded with enthusiasm and underloaded with the gear to properly enjoy the trip. I suppose the point is that we could probably have benefitted from a better list.
A list is perhaps the most fundamental method to record or document an inquiry into values. A list is a statement of what is important or even considerable in a given situation or context. The list presented at the beginning of Chapter Four is the narrator’s statement of what is important or considerable for a motorcycle trip across a vast territory of the United States of America.
Pirsig’s list may stand in for any list you may wish to consider. We humans readily fall into the habit of making lists, whether written out or merely in our thoughts. Lists probably make up one of the most common features of our daily conversation and yet we rarely talk about these lists. Grocery store lists…is there anything we need or would like to have from the store? In our employment we may be responsible for product inventory, enumerating the features of a product or organizing the dollar spent in the annual budget. Perhaps we evaluate the quality of products or services or we write (or follow) technical procedures for something to be done. Maybe we list of our “top ten” favorite…….whatever…..These are lists…they are statements of value, preference and priority.
In the Zensylvania episode title Footnotes to Minimalism: A Grey and Colourless Philosophy, we examined minimalism and I observed that many people will create a minimalism inventory list as a tool to guide the scaling-down of their personal stuff to some arbitrary and magical quantity. Pirsig’s camping trip list is akin to the minimalist’s inventory as it attempt to establish the barest priorities for (in Pirsig’s case) a specified period of camping life or for the minimalist, a commitment to an idealized life. You may wish to review that episode for some exploration of that, particularly as it relates to minimalism driven by need and minimalism driven by aesthetics – which it seems to me are potentially quite different.
Pirsig’s camping trip list is an interesting mix of necessity and aesthetics. Pirsig is not, as far as I can tell, the member of a nomadic tribe. A motorcycle trip is a form of luxury. His bodily survival does not depend upon it the way a nomadic or impoverished person’s might. Emotionally and spiritually, there may be a slightly different matter.
The mundane and boring items on Pirsig’s list seem to address bodily survival. Clothing, bedding, tools, and other so-called gear. Most, though not all, of these kinds of items receive very little commentary. It is the second category of gear – or said differently, the category of gear which Pirsig imbues with more emotional, spiritual and intellectual weight which receive extra commentary in the book.
Within the list, Pirsig is fulfilling the subtitle of the book. It is an Inquiry Into Values. Items that do not fulfill an immediate bodily survival need seem to require explanation…or where an item fulfills both a bodily survival and a secondary level of meaning carry a higher value.
The narrator extols the virtues of his motorcycle gloves but not (for example) his boots, scarf or long underwear. Which does seem to have been something of a missed opportunity considering how cold the second-days rides begins and how much value is placed on warmth and long underwear in particular by John and Sylvia, the narrator’s co-riders.
There is also an extended justification and explanation of the value that the narrator places on carrying three books: Thoreau’s Walden along with two motorcycle maintenance books.
As you might expect, I am especially interested in the comments about Thoreau’s Walden.
First, I have to admit that at least two decades and perhaps three have passed since I read Walden: Life in the Woods (to call the book by it’s full name). When I purchased the book, I had expected to be impressed by unexpected insights and profound observations. After all, it is a book which has always been regaled as a fundamental American (and on this occasion, I am not omitting Canada from the term) book of philosophy. At the time, I was somewhat underwhelmed and more than a little bored by the book. While there may be a variety of reasons for my reaction at that time, today my estimation is that I had been reading the book out of context on several fronts.
First, I read the Walden without any consideration of the times that Thoreau lived. The concerns and conundrums of a nineteenth-century New Englander were not on my radar at the latter moments of the twentieth-century. For the same reason, I was not deeply impressed when I read Susanna’s Moodie’s 1852 Roughing it in the Bush – despite Moodie (and her sister, Catherine Parr Traill) having lived in the city of my birth almost a hundred years earlier. I’ve already admitted that camping, Life in the Woods and Roughing It In the Bush are not ideals that I have lived by.
That is not to suggest that I have not had a significant relationship to nature and forests. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a considerable time, I lived with my wife and daughter in boreal forest communities of Northern Ontario. Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Elliott Lake. And even later, when living in the Ottawa Valley or here in the Carolinian forest communities of SW Ontario, hiking among the trees remains one of our favorite activities. But, living in smaller cities and communities, I’ve never felt the special drive to sleep among the trees when a comfortable bed and home was close at hand.
While very little of all my opinion of camping in the woods provides insight into ZAMM – what it does is to shed light on the way that Pirsig invites us to engage with the topics he addresses. Pirsig invites us to bring our individual and subjective experience to bear on the matters he addresses. In fact, when explaining why he brought Thoreau’s Walden along for the ride, he is recommending a way to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycles..and perhaps how to read the events of our own lives. The passage goes like this.
Pirsig emphasized that shoelaces are not on his list to differentiate (and defend) his list as a value-set from the kind of list (or perhaps the absence of a list) of his companions. Narratively, this emphasis may seem like a snarky put-down but I don’t think it is intended this way. I think it is merely a way to emphasize to the reader that the list of values and priorities is or can be a necessary thing to be prepared and self reliant.
Waking everyone to get riding before they’re ready – the narrator says ” I talked about caring. I care about these moldy old riding gloves.” This is a statement of values. It is also rather revealing that he got all of this companions up and moving much earlier than they were prepared for on a cold morning and then wrote off their annoyance as “small differences in temperament” rather than having been a kind of root cause of discomfort for his travel companions. The narrator obviously didn’t care much about these people concurrent to loving a pair of moldy gloves.
I think that I am not being gratuitously or un-necessarily critical of the narrator. This bit of insensitivity isn’t the worst of the narrator that is displayed. And perhaps it isn’t the worst of all of us. In our own way, from time to time, we do care more about our own equivalent of a pair of musty gloves than we do about the people in our lives.
Since his riding companions are clearly irritated with the narrator and have made it plain that they do not intend to head back onto the motorcycles in the frigid morning air, the narrator decides to take a walk and ponder the disconnection between the Rxx and technology. Rather than pondering his direct role in getting everyone moving hours earlier than comfortable (and strictly speaking, necessary)…he concludes that his companions are simply ungrateful for technology.
Despite the profound arrogance and lack of self-awareness that seems to be on display, Pirsig takes the opportunity to include one of the book’s most valuable and insights, “Blind alley, though. If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.”
This focus on solutions rather than name calling endears Pirsig (if not the narrator) to me. It reminds me of the best parts of pragmatism and stoicism that I have often tried to keep close to my self-possession.
There is, of course the ironic double-entendre opener, “blind alley” – as the narrator was just as blind in his reasoning about the situation as would be the person who undertakes name-calling. There is an inherent awareness of the observer-thinker (the narrator) in this situation. He is not separate from the matters he is pondering…he demonstrates a blindness to his own influence on the events that sent him strolling in the cold and unable to remain in the warmth with his friends.
And on this walk, the narrator has not solved anything.
—
Pirsig’s observation that calling someone a name doesn’t actually solve anything seems to be well worth observing in an age when name-calling of one-sort or another appears to be a common-place occurrence. I’m not going to suggest that I haven’t been susceptible to the kinds of anger, resentment and frustration that leads to name-calling in the first place. Indeed, it may even be necessary from time-to-time to give a thing it’s proper name in order to proceed. By the same token, from time-to-time, the application of manners and a bit of practical wisdom suggests that it’s often, if not usually, quicker and more efficient to take a different route. Of course, none of that gives consideration (as Pirsig’s scene allows us to) to consider our own role in manufacturing the name-calling event in the first place. Pirsig’s scene reminds us that we are probably not the pristine, scientific, disinterested objective observers that we might like to believe that we are. The very act of name-calling is, a kind of values-declaration. The names that we may find ourselves in the habit of calling may well say as much about us as those we direct the force of our name-calling at.
At the risk of overstating what is eminently obvious with ZAMM, motorcycle maintenance is Pirsig’s metaphorical way of referring to caretaking of the self. A part of that caretaking includes awareness of our full engagement with our world.
When we write a list of our priorities, whether that list takes the form of a list of physical items that we need to survive or whether it is a list of names that we call those in our lives, we are setting out our values. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve solved any problems. These lists of of ours are not the things they describe. The cutting edge of reality still awaits us.
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A ghost is a disembodied spirit or soul, usually believed to have originated from a person that has died.
Origins/Etymology
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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References & Notes
External Links
If the Buddha may reside in the circuits and gears of a motorcycle, what of its ghost?
Origins/Etymology
The idea of the existence of ghosts as the disembodied soul/spirit/self of a person (usually dead) has probably been a part of human cultures very nearly as long as there has been human cultures in the first place. The most ancient literary and religious texts that we currently have, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh tablets or the Pyramid Texts provide evidence of complicated belief systems which included concepts of human/self existence after death or apart from the human body. It is reasonable to assume that the concept of ghosts has been a part of human culture for tens of thousands of years.
The notion of a self that may be divisible or separate from the physical body relies upon a (minimally) dualistic metaphysical system (i.e. mind as separate or separable from the physical processes and properties of the physical body). The term Ghost in the machine was coined by Gilbert Ryle in 1949 to describe the dualistic metaphysical system wherein a mind may be viewed as separate from the body.
Old Norse (pre-Christian) culture allowed for a self which was comprised of four components: The hamr was the skin or body which was capable of some mutability; the hugr (thought, mind) was believed to be capable of separation from the body (hamr) during sleep or trance; the fylgja was an external companion linked to a person’s fate yet could leave the person after death; and the hamingja was believed to be the embodiment of a person’s luck. Like the fylgja, the hamingja was separable from the person after their death. Mutability and divisibility of the self is an example where a dualistic metaphysical system was minimally necessary.
The word ghost appears to have roots in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language which pre-dates most modern European languages, including English. The PIE root word gheis was used in words which described excitement, surprise and fear. The Old English word gast referred variously to breath, spirits, and human beings. The word that we use today appears to have been in use for between 600 and 700 years.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In this part of Zensylvania, we’re going to begin to explore the notion of “ghosts” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In previous episodes of the podcast, I discussed the first two chapters of the book and the wide variety of themes and ideas that were introduced. While review of those previous episodes may be of interest to you, I’m going to do my best to ensure that you won’t need to listen to those episodes to follow-this one.
Picking up our review of the book in chapter three, Pirsig firmly establishes Zen and the Art as a kind of ghost or gothic story and we’ll be outlining how that happens.
Up to this point in my examination of the book, I’ve avoided dips into later chapters of the book as I wanted to avoid getting ahead of the ideas that Pirsig presented when he presented them. In this episode, I’m going to break with that trend as it seems necessary to explain why the idea of a ghost is so critical to explore.
Whether we believe in ghosts, or not, is very much to the overall purpose of Zen and the Art of Motorcycles and indeed Pirsig’s metaphysical system. Not only is it a consideration that has been with humanity as long as there has been a humanity, it is a consideration that gathers strange new meanings in our contemporary era. Gilbert Ryle’s metaphor of the ghost in the machine is so thoroughly taken-up by Pirsig that he argued the Buddha may as easily resided in the gears and circuits of a motorcycle’s transmission as a human body. And here in the twenty-first century we have Artificial Intelligence computer programs that are on the edge of self-awareness, if they haven’t already achieved this. If a sentient computer program, could well reside in one set of microchips as readily as another, even simultaneously so, in what way does that reflect on what we believe about one of our most ancient and vexing of notions…what is a ghost, exactly?
Before we proceed with that question, let’s back to Henry James. We started this exploration with the first several paragraphs of James’ The Turn of the Screw. That phrase is rather interesting when placed in context of Pirsig’s work. The phrase is a metaphorical way to describe something that makes an already bad situation worse. We can imagine a turn of the screw as the mechanical tightening down of some torturous pressure. In his novel, Henry James increases the pressure presented by a ghastly and grisly presence going after a child by having a ghostly presence going after two children. The stakes are even higher. In his way, Pirsig takes this metaphor and applies it to his story. The increased pressure for Pirsig is presented by the alienating mechanistic world in which he lives…a turning of the screw which he portrays as certain ghosts pursue both him and his son, Chris. It’s no small irony, of course that this mechanical torture, this turning of the screw, is so fundamental to motorcycle maintenance as an activity and to motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for caring for the self.
In the Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of Zen and the Art, Pirsig explained that Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw had a significant influence on his writing of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. According to Pirsig, he had attended a creative writing seminar in the 1950’s wherein instructor explained that Turn of the Screw is not just a straightforward ghost story. Turn of the Screw is a novel “in which a governess tries to shield her two proteges from a ghostly presence but in the end fails, and they are killed.”
Henry James was a novelist who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both his father, Henry James Sr , and his brother, William James were philosophers. William James is renowned for his contributions to pragmatism – an area of philosophy which Robert Pirsig’s philosophy is very comfortable with – and psychology. While it is important to differentiate between Henry James and William James as different people with very different works – knowing that Pirsig cites one of the brothers as a significant influence on the writing of Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance inevitably brings the other into consideration as well. William James’ roll in psychology is one area of concern given that a significant feature of Pirsig’s book considers mental health. William James was also a proponent of radical empiricism, a philosophical perspective that “experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: Any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.”
This perspective is entirely consistent with ideas that John Dewey, another pragmatist philosopher, had expressed. In the Zensylvania exploration of Quality, I examine similarities between Dewey’s Experience and Pirsig’s Quality. Whether by chance or by design (and I tend to think that design is at play) by referencing the Henry James novel, Pirsig telegraphed some comfort with comparison of his ideas to those of William James.
But let’s get back to Henry’s book. The Turn of the Screw was published in 1898 and had an extensive history of analysis even by the time that Pirsig read it in the 1950s and published Zen and the Art in the early 1970s. Pirsig claimed that he initially believed the story was just as it seemed to be – a straightforward ghost-story. When he attended the writing seminar, he learned that James had written with ambiguous language which allowed for either a straight-forward (let’s say naive or accepting) interpretation of the story or a different one. A second interpretation might be that it was not a “ghost who kills the children but the governess’s hysterical believe that a ghost exists.“
It is interesting to note that Pirsig describes his early interpretation as the literal/naive interpretation that the book received from its initial publication up to the 1930s when the ghosts in the story started to be considered as figments of the governess’ imagination. It was the 1970s when text ambiguity was actively promoted as the writing method that allowed the interpretation. If Pirsig’s claim is true that a writing instructor put him on that path in the 1950s, then the instructor was well ahead of the established interpretations.
In the 25th-edition introduction, Pirsig explains that the use of a first-person narrator allowed James to lock the reader’s attention into whatever the narrator has to say….and this say trick is something Pirsig uses in ZAMM. In this Zensylvania episode, we’re going to explore some of the ways that Pirsig leveraged the ghost-story techniques he learned in the 1950s.
I’m going to read a plot synopsis of The Turn of the Screw currently Wikipedia because it serves as well as any other. For those who may have some objection to use of Wikipedia as a source, well that may be fair and reasonable in some contexts but I consider this to be a common-knowledge detail and not worthy of the quibble. At some later time, I’ll write my own plot-synopsis based on a fresh reading of the book. I’ll post that as an entry in my own Zensylvania.com Eric-o-pedia when I do. In the meantime, the common-knowledge repository will have to do.
On Christmas Eve, an unnamed narrator and some of their friends are gathered around a fire. One of them, Douglas, reads a manuscript written by his sister’s late governess. The manuscript tells the story of her being hired by a man who has become responsible for his young niece and nephew following the deaths of their parents. He lives mainly in London and has a country house in Bly, Essex. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school, while his younger sister, Flora, is living in Bly, where she is cared for by Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. Flora’s uncle, the governess’s new employer, is uninterested in raising the children and gives her full charge, explicitly stating that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to Bly and begins her duties.
Miles returns from school for the summer just after a letter arrives from the headmaster, stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears there is some horrible secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the boy to want to press the issue. Soon after, around the grounds of the estate, the governess begins to see the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. The figures come and go at will without being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. She learns from Mrs. Grose that the governess’s predecessor, Miss Jessel, and another employee, Peter Quint, had had a close relationship. Before their deaths, Jessel and Quint spent much of their time with Flora and Miles, and the governess becomes convinced that the two children are aware of the ghosts’ presence.
Without permission, Flora leaves the house while Miles is playing music for the governess. The governess notices Flora’s absence and goes with Mrs. Grose in search of her. They find her on the shore of a nearby lake, and the governess is convinced that Flora has been talking to the ghost of Miss Jessel. When the governess finally confronts Flora, the girl denies seeing Miss Jessel, and asks not to see the new governess again. Mrs. Grose takes Flora away to her uncle, leaving the governess with Miles, who that night at last talks to her about his expulsion. The ghost of Quint appears to the governess at the window. The governess shields Miles, who attempts to see the ghost. The governess tells Miles he is no longer controlled by the ghost, and then finds that Miles has died in her arms.
From that synopsis three features stand out for immediate comparison to Zen and the Art: an un-named narrator, a son who returns home for a summer holiday overshadowed by some seemingly dark secret, a child that dies in the arms of their protector.
The fact that there is a dark secret with Miles for most of the book and that the governess is overseeing the children is a parallel to the relationship displayed between Pirsig and his son, Chris.
The dying in the arms is echoed by Pirsig in his recital of Goethe’s Erlkonig in Chapter Five. The narrator is telling his companions that Chris has been experiencing troubling mental health issues and that he, the narrator had put an end to Chris’ visits to psychiatrists because they aren’t kin; this reminded the narrator of the Goethe’s poem which he describes as, “A man is riding along a beach at night, through the wind. It’s a father, with his son, whom he holds fast in his arm. He asks his son why he looks so pale, and the son replies, ‘Father, don’t you see the ghost?’ The father tried to reassure the boy it’s only a bank of fog along the beach that he sees and only the rustling of the leaves in the wind that he hears but the son keeps saying it is the ghost and father rides harder and harder through the night.” And then explains that in the end, the child dies and the ghost wins. This description of the Erlkonig is a vivid link between the inspiration that Pirsig took from The Turn of the Screw and the drama which unfolds on the motorcycle ride taken by the narrator and Chris.
The reference to the Erlkonig in Chapter Five is the fist major reinforcement of the ghost theme that was first established in Chapter three. The narrator’s rejection of mainstream professional mental health care also connects to his comments in Chapter Three with their skepticism and dis-alignment with science. Chapter five even has a brief dream-sequence where the narrator’s dream casts him and Chris in the roles of the father and son in the Erlkonig. Pirsig is clearly emphasizing that this connection should be made.
The fact that the narrator explicitly rejects professional psychology should seem odd as we contemporary parenting expectations would be troubled to reject professional help. It is also interesting to consider the ironic associations to William James and psychology. Later in the book, of course we find that the narrator had troubling experience of psychiatry given his peronsl history of having received electro-convulsive shock therapy. We’ll explore that in a later episode along with a variety of parallels to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today we’re going to try to stick to the ghosts.
By establishing a parallel between the characters and the narrative methods of The Turn of the Screw, Pirsig invites similar analysis of the book’s plot and scrutiny of the narrator’s trustworthiness as a source of factual information and indirectly a concern with radical empiricism and its relationship to ghosts of various kinds.
Chapters Three and Five both feature settings that are classic ghost-story fare. Chapter three builds up to the ghost story with the riders arriving in town on a dark and stormy night. Both chapters feature the requisite campfire scenes and Chapter five has a silvery moon as the narrator reflects on these matters.
Who the ghost may be and why it may be haunting the family motorcycle ride is not revealed at this point in the narrative. But there are considerable hints so far: science is questioned, the validity of ghosts from a cultural perspective is allowed, mental health is brought in as a concern.
To get us started, I want to compare a couple of definitions of what a ghost is. I consulted several dictionaries and the most common primary definition of a ghost is that it is a disembodied soul or the spirit of a dead person. Clearly there are a variety of usages of the word ghost which draw on its primary meaning. For example, a “ghost of an image” is a faint impression, trace or outline rather than a fully detailed image. But let’s stick with the primary definition for a moment – that is the “disembodied spirit or soul of a person.”
With some word definitions, it can be extremely difficult not to find oneself running around in circles when attempting to pin down what a word means. To say that a “ghost” is a disembodied “spirit” or “soul” as a definition implies that one knows what those other words mean. But what if you don’t? What does it actually mean to be “disembodied”? These words rely on reference to concepts within a pretty complicated metaphysical system. If you don’t know how that metaphysical system is supposed to work, well you really can’t get at what the word “ghost” means.
The word “ghost” relies on the notion that there is something about people that can be separated from a physical body which retains some kind of singular and identifiable consistency or relatedness to the physical body. It’s a pretty extraordinary concept.
In the usual definitions of the word “ghost”, it is almost impossible to avoid indications that “ghosts” are that singular and identifiable something which can be separated from a physical body and that the original person is in fact dead. Clearly there’s a suggestion that ghosts arise pretty much exclusively from dead persons. Indeed, in most understanding of ghosts, physical death of a person’s body is a kind of pre-requisite condition for a ghost condition to be in play.
The etymology of the word “ghost” suggest that it comes from a proto-Indo-European root word, “gheis’ which implied fright, amazement and fear. This is an important root meaning or implication of the word ghost and we shouldn’t let that stray too far from our attention.
In chapter 3, the narrator advances a proposition that a ghost is something which has no matter and no energy. According to the narrator, this is depiction of two key attributes of a ghost fits is consistent with science and the laws of physics…and very shortly thereafter, uses the same attributes to argue that the “laws” of physics, numbers and other such things should also be disbelieved because they have no matter no energy.
Clearly Pirisg is attempting to disrupt the reader’s comfort with what it means to be a ghost…and thereby the metaphysical principles that such a word relies-upon.
Pirsig has taken this definition and, rather uncomfortably for many people, applied it to the “laws of science”. In what way do these laws exist that is different than ghosts. Well one might say that the phenomena would exist in physics regardless of whether we humans explain those phenomena in language or not. If a tree falls the forest, there is sound whether there’s a observing individual or not.
Pirsig introduces the idea that things may be considered “real” within a cultural context. The “real” ghosts of one culture may not necessarily be the “real” ghosts of another culture. I think Pirsig is doing this to shake our confidence in how we view descriptions of “reality” put forward by mid-twentieth century science. This is done early in the book to allow Pirsig space to develop an alternate depiction of how reality works.
In the spirit of The Turn of the Screw, Pirsig seems to be suggesting that the subjective view of reality put forward by our narrating culture (in this case, a culture heavily influenced, if not quite dominate by science) may not actually have any ghosts other than those which we ourselves embody.
Over the course of ZAMM, it becomes increasingly clear that the narrator of the story is haunted by the “ghost” of an earlier self. In Pirsig’s case, this haunting is depicted as a sharply real situation based on the severing of one version of himself from another version via electro-convulsive shock therapy. The narrator is telling the story of Pirsig’s life as though he did not directly experience it and only has access via documents and notes and occasional flashes of recollection.
For the narrator, the “ghost” which haunts him is not only “in his mind” but is his mind. This is a way to examine and critique a concept of dualism which allows a separation of mind and body. If the “self” which occupied the body of Robert Maynard Pirsig has driven out by electro-convulsive shock therapy, is it possible for that “self” to continue to exist as a kind of “ghost”? If not, in what way is that earlier version of the self that is capable of producing a “ghost”?
In what way are memories, idea or other phenomena anything other than ghosts?
The narrator makes an unexpected declaration when he claims that nothing outside of the mind exists. This is rather like the position taken by George Berkeley in the late 1700s. Berkeley’s subjective realism (aka empirical idealism) argues that objects in the physical world cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley’s perspective is a kind of monism (where everything that exists is comprise of some single fundamental thing). In Berkeley’s case, this seems to be a version of “mind” (a deity’s and human).
We must also consider the various alternative positions represented by William James ( radical empiricism, a philosophical perspective that “experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: Any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.”
Again the point here is to shake our confidence in models of reality which rely-upon or tolerate dualism. The idea that nothing exists outside of our mind is ridiculous but that doesn’t mean that some philosophers who proposed such an idea weren’t well regarded in their own time – let alone today.
A reasonable person must also question whether the argument that mind only exists as a consequence of materiality (the opposite extreme position of dualism) may also be considered ridiculous. What makes the proposition that mind only exists as a consequence of physical processes exits within our culture as a result of ghost-like propositions which do not have any physical reality in themselves.
In an experiment to fill a Klein bottle, the presenter states that a number of directly observable things (such as a contained volume) may not be readily obvious to mathematics. Mathematics is a language that may be used to depict the world but the language must be worked out over time by observers who develope ability to depict a particular truth but may not understand the given language which would be required to explain it.
This is the lesson of striving toward an accurate, necessary and true explanation of the universe. Languages, whether they are Greek, Chinese, English, mathematics or something else altogether are developed over time to explain complicated physical and conceptual portions of reality. What is the mathematical terminology for “tiger”? As far as I know, there isn’t one. Yet I can stay “tiger” and the vast majority of English-speaking people will know exactly what I am referring to.
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a work of philosophical fiction written by Robert M. Pirsig. It was published by William Morrow and Company in 1974. It is a Mythologized Mid-life Autobiography of Pirsig’s life up to approximately age 40.
The book draws on Pirsig’s life and intellectual development to showcase Pirsig’s philosophical system, which he called the Metaphysics of Quality and to present critiques of earlier philosophers and their ideas.
Plot
Writing & Publishing History
Philosophical Stance
Zensylvania Podcast
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Plot
The primary plot of the book follows a father-son motorcycle trip taken by Pirsig and his son, Chris.
Writing & Publishing History
Robert Pirsig claimed that it had taken four years to write the book. An insights section of the HarperPerennial Modern Classics edition states that an initial essay regarding motorcycle maintenance was drafted in 1967 while the full volume was completed between 1968 and 1973.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published in 1974 by William Morrow and Company (now a part of HarperCollins). Pirsig claimed that it was the best-selling philosophy book of all time.
Philosophical Stance
Via Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, Pirsig depicted a philosophical perspective which he termed the Metaphysics of Quality. Pirsig considered his metaphysics to be a breakthrough reconciliation between Eastern and Western philosophies.
At the time of publishing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig was reluctant to provide a precise definition of Quality within his system. He claimed that this retained the term’s ability to be an instrument of change. Later in his life, he had provided a variety of interpretations. When asked to differentiate Quality from John Dewey’s concept of Experience, he indicated that “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 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.“
Zensylvania Podcast
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance serves as a central touchstone or point of departure for the Zenyslvania podcast. Most episodes of the podcast have either been fully devoted to analysis of the book and its ideas or have included brief references when examining other matter.
This article is intended to serve as a summary of key facts regarding the book as a supplement to the the analysis and speculation contained in the Zensylvania episodes. Transcripts of the episodes are available to Eric Adriaans’ Patreon page.
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Motorcycle Zen is a philosophical stance and state of mind that originated and was developed on the Zensylvania website and podcast.
Origins
Etymology
Philosophical Stance
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Between the horns of dualism.
Origins
The term Motorcycle Zen first appeared on the Zensylvania website and podcast on September 22, 2021 at 19:21. Eric Adriaans used the term to describe several concepts and rhetorical methods observed in Robert Pirsig’s 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Motorcycle Zen is an abbreviation of Pirsig’s iconic book title but is not intended to be a faithful mirroring of its ideas.
Etymology
The term Motorcycle Zen is derived from the words motorcycle and zen.
The word Zen is from the term assigned to a specific set of philosophical positions, aesthetic practices and daily-living techniques which were formalized in Japan from the seventh century through to the present.
The word Motorcycle is a compound word denoting a two- or three-wheeled motorized vehicle. The root-word motor indicates a rotating mechanism or machine that imparts motion by converting energy from one form (eg. electricity, fuel) to another (eg. mechanical energy, experience) . The root-word cycle is derived from bicycle or tricycle, which more typically refers to two- or three-wheeled vehicles where a human serves as the motor, converting energy into motion via pedals, a chain and gears.
Philosophical Stance
In Zensylvania, motorcycle is intended to be interpreted as a metaphor and potential avatar of the self in consideration of the human condition. In usage as a metaphor, the term may include a range of motorized and non-motorized vehicles in addition to the two-wheeled variety.
Motorcycle Zen, as used in Zensylvania, is an open-minded, contemplative inquiry into formulation of a coherent, logical, necessary personal philosophy which offers the opportunity to individually reconcile twenty-first century human experience and allows every element of our experience to be interpreted.
The stance surveys and incorporates elements of alternate philosophies, perspectives and fields such as stoicism, pragmatism, Zen, process philosophy, biosemiotics, mathematics, machine learning and logic on a contingent (provisional, limited-extent) and instrumental basis.
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If your compass does not point towards Quality, where does it point?
Introduction
I wanted to start this essay with a reasonably brief and straight-forward definition of the word “quality”. As it turns out, I couldn’t find a practical definition that I was satisfied with. It may be a peculiar trait of mine that I prefer a word’s or concept’s definition not to contain words or concepts that merely point straight back to place I started. Like some semantic Ouroboros eating its own tail. Unfortunately, definitions for the word “quality” often circle back on themselves.
For example, Merriam-Webster’s definition says that quality is “a degree of excellence”. Follow-through on this information and you find that excellence is “an excellent or valuable quality” and that “excellent is very good of its kind : eminently good.“. Of course something that is “eminently good” means that it is observably good. Next we find that good is something that is “of a favourable character” or “conforming to a standard” among other things. Finally, something that is of a favourable character is something we favour or prefer while a standard is of course “something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality“.
It’s like that with all of the definitions that I’ve looked at so far – a somewhat fuzzy realm of subjective preferability and objective standardization.
The extraordinary fuzziness and variability of what may be contained within the term “quality” is somewhat surprising but hardly a new matter. Every one of us has some degree of self-assuredness that we know what is or is not of good quality. So certain are we that Pirsig quoted Plato as a kind of heading to ZAMM with And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? We’ve always known what is or is not good….we have our own fuzzy logic system to determine what meets our individual and ever-changing mix of subjective preferences and objective standards.
Regular visitors to Zensylvania will probably be familiar with Zensyalvania’s ongoing preoccupation with Robert Pirsig’s books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. I have readily used Pirsig’s books as touchstones within several investigations and inquiries. These two books are categorized by some people as works of philosophical fiction. This categorization describes a situation where a story is used as the setting, context or framing for some particular philosophical material to be conveyed.
While it is tempting to spend time quibbling over the extent to which the categorization of any book or work as philosophical fiction is meaningful, and indeed the extent to which the term reasonably applies to Pirsig’s books, I’m going to avoid doing that for now. It may be something to examine at some later time. Instead, I’m going to go along with this particular application of the analytical knife because it is clear that Pirsig’s books are intended to communicate some particular philosophical content and that they are fictionalized versions of Pirsig’s life, if not entirely fiction.
The particular philosophical content that the books convey has come to be known as the Metaphysics of Quality. And that is where we’re going to start in this essay.
‘Start” may not be exactly the correct term since that really began in Episode 15, when I spent some time in review of a book titled On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. This is a posthumously published collection of Pirsig’s comments and insights into the Metaphysics of Quality which was released in March of 2022. For this essay, I want to begin by returning to some of my comments from that Zensylvania episode. If you’ve previously reviewed that episode, this may be slightly repetitive, I hope to mitigate any sense of redundancy by expanding on the initial reactions I had.
All of this will be in an effort to pin down a few basic questions when it comes to the Metaphysics of Quality.
Quality Undefined: MovingTowards an Initial Definition
Throughout ZAMM and much of Lila, Pirsig avoided providing a definition of “Quality”. On page 97 of On Quality, there is an excerpt from his 1974 lecture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where he said that, “One of the advantage of keeping Quality undefined – which is central to [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]…as long as you keep it undefined, then it becomes an instrument of change, and you can grow, because the things that you find Quality in are going to change as you grow.“
Despite his early motivation to avoid providing a definition of Quality, Pirsig eventually used the term as a direct or indirect referent to a variety of other concepts which I am listing here:
God
the phoneme “rta” from the Proto-Indo-European language
the essence of experience
selection
meaning
dharma
the pure thing (Hindu traditions); the pure non-thing (Buddhist traditions)
“what holds together”
righteousness; rightness
the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction
duty toward self
virtue of the ancient Greeks
the Cosmic order of things
spirituality
Metaphysics of Quality is Metaphysics of Spirituality
the Tao
This is probably an incomplete list as Pirsig admitted to a preparedness to talk about Quality for hours on end without establishing a firm meaning. Initially, I’d like to focus on the third item in this list, “the essence of experience” as it introduces two underlying connections that should be examined.
In David Grainger‘s 2006 book, John Dewey, Robert Pirsig and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education, Grainger suggests that Pirsig’s idea of Quality is equivalent to Dewey’s idea of “Experience“. For those who may be interested to verify for themselves whether Grainger’s comparison is correct, he seems to rely upon Dewey’s Art as Experience and Experience and Education. You can be sure that these are on my acquisition list for 2023.
In the meantime, here are a few ideas from Dewey. Ordinary experience has no structure. It is a continuous stream. The subject (i.e. person) goes through the experience of living but does not experience everything in a way that composes an experience. Meanwhile an aesthetic experience is a kind of event which stands out from the ordinary or general experience. While I don’t pretend to any kind of authority to correct or alter Dewey’s terminology…it occurs to me that Dewey was establishing that Aesthetic Experience is at least partially comprised of definable events while Ordinary Experience is not. Experiences are structured situations over time – however fuzzy may be the definition of the experience’s actual beginning or end.
Dewey’s ideas do seem to echo Pirsig’s notions of Static and Dynamic Quality where Static Quality seems to share some attributes with Dewey’s Aesthetic Experience and Dynamic Quality with Ordinary Experience.
In FSC Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (that is the book which Pirsig credits with closing his youthful period of drifting and lending direction to his life, there is a passage about “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” and “experience”.
Later in this essay I will look at A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality but for now let me suggest that if there are parallels between Pirsig’s “Quality” and Dewey’s “Experience”, these may also be aligned with Whitehead’s “Process”: “The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself. In this explanation, it is presumed that an experiencing subject is an occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world.”
Granger references’ Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy and says something that links these things together, “all existences, material and ideational, are best viewed as events rather than substances.“
And this leads me to the observation that
Quality is an event.
What is Quality?: Toward a Second Definition
In order that we may get at what Pirsig may have been trying to convey in the Metaphysics of Quality, it seems essential to get at the individual terms in the phrase. I’m going to set aside the term metaphysics for now except to accept a kind of common-knowledge definition of metaphysics as the part(s) of philosophy which deal(s) with the fundamental nature of reality and existence and, by extension, those parts of reality and existence which don’t (at least superficially) appear to have a source or cause in physical, objective sources.
Provisionally I am interpreting the phrase “Metaphysics of Quality” such that the word “of” is a function word indicating origin or derivation. So the phrase, “metaphysics of quality” means: an explanation of the fundamental nature of reality and existence where quality is the original source or cause. Another way to phrase it might be that reality and existence is derived from a primordial Quality.
And now we have the question…what is “Quality“?
Since the Metphysics of Quality is Pirsig’s notion, it seems only fair to begin with explanations that he’s provided. But we will get to some other explanations that I’ve found interesting during that time I’ve been examining the idea….and, of course, also to some of my own observations.
In On Quality, there is an excerpt from a letter dated September 11, 1994 and it includes this brief section:
“Quality can be equated with God, but I don’t like to do so, “God” to most people is a set of static intellectual and social patterns. Only true religious mystics can correctly equate God with Dynamic Quality. In the West, particularly around universities, these people are quite rare. The others, who go around saying, “God wants this,” or “God will answer your prayers,” are, according to the Metaphysics of Quality, engaging in a minor form of evil. Such statements are a lower form of evolution, intellectual patterns, attempting to contain a higher one….” (pg. 81)
This seems to be a good place to start because it establishes and gives shape to a few specific traits that Pirsig posited about Quality. So I want to parse the various phrases here in an attempt to determine what he may have intended.
First he says that “Quality can be equated with God“. I want to take notice that Pirsig did not say “Quality is God“, only that “Quality can be equated with God”. Philosophy can readily be an exercise in splitting and re-splitting of conceptual hairs, but this is one that does seem to need to be split. The difference between the phrase “Quality is God” and “Quality can be equated with God” is meaningful because the concept of equivalence (as represented by the words “equated with“) is not that of sameness (As represented by the word “is“).
By saying “Quality can be equated with God“, Pirsig seems to be suggesting a comparison of two separate concepts based upon a function. The specific function being described is, as established in the brief definition above, that of an original source or cause.
In other words, Pirsig’s Quality functions in his metaphysical system as a monism in a similar fashion to how God functions as a monism in some other metaphysical systems.
The balance of Pirsig’s passage is an attempt to steer examination of “Quality” away from theology. Undoubtedly, there are a number of very good reasons to do that. But it is also very difficult to establish an existential origin story without having to engage the argument for a primordial entity or agent of creation. A deity. When I read Pirsig, I have the sense that he tries to do so.
Of course trying to posit an existential origin story without a deity causes some people a great deal of difficulty. And that maybe one of the reasons that Pirsig phrased things the way that he did. The Metaphysics of Quality is an explanation of existence and reality where the concept of “Quality” functions as the concept of “God” in separate and distinct existential origin stories. Discussion of “Quality” is not, therefore, a theological discussion on the nature of a deity.
Quality vs quality vs qualities: Towards a Third Definition
Now that we’ve established, to a limited extent, what Robert Pirsig had in mind in his Metaphysics of Quality, I’d like to get back to some more practical and familiar conceptions of quality.
In the day to day usage of the term, we may be quite comfortable with referring to any given thing or experience as being of high or low quality or perhaps alternately good quality or poor quality. In other words, we are readily able to assign a value to a thing or experience based upon some collection of subjective (personally perceived) traits and objective (empirically measurable) characteristics.
If we are, for example, visiting an auto-parts store to purchase a bolt to replace one that has broken during a repair on our motorcycle, we might say that a particular store-clerk’s dismissive attitude or lack of knowledge regarding engine bolts was a low quality service; similarly we might feel that the purchased bolt was of excellent quality as its metallurgy and machining met the specifications for the bolt’s purpose. Our subjective and objective criteria either were or were not met.
Often these criteria are considered to be “qualities” of the item or experience. A store clerk’s attentiveness is one quality while their product knowledge is another quality. Similarly, the bolt’s metallurgy and machining are sometimes referred-to as qualities.
This use of the term quality in day-to-day use is actually problematic as these ought more accurately to be referred to as: properties, factors, components, elements, constituents, items (a variety of other terms might easily be added) of the artifact’s or experience’s overall quality.
In this way, quality (and even qualities) are a set of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose.
It would be correct, albeit slightly absurd, to argue that a banana makes a very poor quality engine bolt nor that an engine bolt is a low quality snack. Clearly, banana’s are not intended to be engine bolts and engine bolts are not machined for human nutrition. This means that defined purpose is an important and meaningful consideration. Defined purpose is another way to say that quality is relational and that the quality of an artifact or experience is normally assessed in context of an expected or defined purpose.
Fuzzy Standards: Synthesis of the Definitions
This is where the title of this essay considers what I’m calling “fuzzy standards”. While I am not completely aware whether this term that I’ve used is completely novel, I will say that it derives from my Incomplete Exploration(s) of Fuzzy Logic and concepts therein.
Within Fuzzy Logic, there are so-called Fuzzy Sets which comprise a predetermined set of conditions to inform an input-output decision making model. In this situation, the Fuzzy Set attempts to allow for a nearly infinite range of possibilities between 0 and 1 (the ultimately reductive binary either/or). In a binary-digital world, engine oil might be called either “hot” (denoted by 1) or “cold” (denoted by 0). Clearly this is not correct as temperature is almost infinitely variable and could be assigned a nearly infinite range of temperatures based on the extent to which more (or less) heat is present.
I mention this as an indication that “Fuzzy Standards” begins to consider the matter of the phrase ” the extent to which” in setting of standards within a Dynamic Quality world.
I’ve borrowed Pirsig’s term Dynamic Quality and the fact that a perpetually changing world fundamentally establishes that any standard (eg. a specific oil temperature, a particular metallurgical composition of a bolt, a depth of knowledge of a clerk) must necessarily be fuzzy (situationally-defined) and relational.
The Metaphysics of Quality and The Philosophy of Organism
In Episode 15, I commented that I felt this passage maintains Pirsig’s inquiries in alignment with humanist enlightenment ideas and also some ideas that Alfred North Whitehead expressed in Process and Reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
In that book, Whitehead provided what he called the “Philosophy of Organism“. In my opinion, Pirsig’s philosophy is well-aligned with many of Whitehead’s ideas.
Whitehead opened Process and Reality with the declaration that “This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy.” and then goes on to define and defend speculative philosophy. Well Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality is also an exercise in Speculative Philosophy. Here is Whitehead’s definition “Speculative Philosophy:
Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to form a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.
Since Whitehead was a thorough-going philosopher, he proceeded to provide definitions for most of the terms used in the definition. I’m not going to chase that all down at present. I’m including it here in our consideration of Quality to help set the setting for Pirsig’s definitions (since there have been many) of Quality as a concept within a Speculative Philosophy system as presented by Whitehead.
“I ride, therefore I am.”: Rene Descartes would have written it, if only he’d had the opportunity; Photo Courtesy Pinterest
In Whitehead’s preface to Process and Reality, he explained his approach in contrast to others when he wrote that “The positive doctrine of these lectures is concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of ‘actual entities’. An ‘actual entity’ is a res vera in the Cartesian sense of that term; it is a Cartesian ‘substance’, and not an Aristotelian ‘primary substance’. But Descartes retained in his metaphysical doctrine the Aristotelian dominance of the category of ‘quality’ over that of ‘relatedness’. In these lectures ‘relatedness’ is dominant over ‘quality’.”
Whitehead goes on to give a brief summary of relatedness but again I’m going to defer examination of this to focus on the similarity in approach between Pirsig and Whitehead, specifically that the positioning of quality within a metaphysical system is a meaningful part of that system.
Returning to the earlier passage by Robert Pirsig that Quality can be equated to God, I am grateful that Wendy Pirsig and the editors of the book didn’t shy away from including this passage as it does positively establish the kind of metaphysical positioning of Quality that Pirsig reached.
All of that is to say that Pirsig’s capital-Q “Quality” term may be readily separated from common day-to-day usage of the term since the underlying position of the term is different than a subject-object-relational metaphysics as found in Rene Descarte’s outlook.
I say separate – but that may not be the right term as Pirsig did further divide Quality into “Dynamic Quality” and “Static Quality”.
A Provisional Definition of Quality
While it is certainly tempting to continue running down various rabbit-holes… I think we’ve actually reached a good point to finalize and summarize a provisional definition of Quality.
Quality is an event which a subjective experiencer (an actual entity) has a relationship-to within an actual (objectively real) world; in static form, quality is the aggregation (or fuzzy set) of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose(s) and is consistent with a delimited Aesthetic Experience within an ongoing Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum. In dynamic form, Quality is that which mediates relations between an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum and actual entities. Quality is an idea and term which allows every element of our experience to be interpreted. It functions as a monism and may be best described via the metaphor of a field.
(Editorial Note: the above definition is a second revision circa December 2022).
I hope this jumble of metaphysical jargon is as clear to you as it is me. I will admit that I find it extremely satisfying that this definition has not yet resulted in an Ouroboros–like circle where I end up staying that quality is quality and we all know what it is.
Strangely, I also find that this definition has both practical daily applications which may be just as useful as any metaphysical implications that there may be.
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Cosmology is the area of philosophy and physics which attempts to analyze and describe the nature of the universe. Within physics, cosmology is usually constrained to observable and measurable details of the physical universe and may extend to what may be further inferred via logic and math. Philosophy categorizes further investigations and speculation within the area of metaphysics.
Original Essay
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Original Essay
I began this exploration of cosmology as an exercise to trace out ideas from Robert Pirsig‘s Metaphysics of Quality and Alfred North Whitehead‘s Philosophy of Organism. It is an exercise in speculative philosophy and should be viewed as nothing other than entertainment – with no additional practical value or application(s).
When it comes to the nature of the universe, it doesn’t seem to matter what opinion you may have and express, someone is going to disagree with your ideas – perhaps vehemently. This happens because your opinion, whatever it may be, may just contradict the metaphysical perspectives that someone else has utterly devoted themselves to – again, perhaps vehemently. With that in mind, this is an incomplete, ongoing and subject to change essay where I first re-assert my non-expert status in anything at all. I am not an authority and I don’t always get things exactly right. This gaze into the void of cosmology is an enthusiastically non-authoritative assessment of some available information and concepts. If you disagree with the direction or detail of this exploration of a novel depiction of the universe based on your individual and alternate (and quite possibly, more authoritative) insights – thank you for taking time to browse these meandering paragraphs.
In Zensylvania we try as often as possible to proceed from a motorcycle-zen position wherein metaphors help point to reality the way a finger points to the moon. So let’s kick things off with consideration of one of our favorite metaphors, the internal combustion engine
Internal Combustion Engine
With a piston engine, the piston moves up and down within a cylinder to generate power which may be turned into motion. Below is a diagram of a four-stroke engine’s cycle of intake, compression, power and exhaust. A four-stoke engine is called “four-stroke” because there are is a series of four events when the piston moves along the cylinder. The intake and power stroke are in one direction while the compression and exhaust strokes are in the opposite direction. This is the engine’s process. It seems reasonable that this moving up and down (or back and forth, if you prefer) of the piston entails a moment when the cylinder stops moving in one direction and starts moving in the other direction.
But this observation which seems reasonable is a kind of fallacy. The piston never stops moving. If the piston stopped moving, there would be some serious problems for that engine. There’s a scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which depicts what happens when a piston stops moving in the cylinder:
In a seizure, the pistons expand from too much heat, become too big for the walls of the cylinders, seize them, melt to them sometimes, and lock the engine and rear wheels and start the whole cycle into a skid. The first time this one seized, my head was pitched over the front wheel and my passenger was almost on top of me. At about thirty it freed up again and started to run but I pulled off the road and stopped to see what was wrong. All my passenger could think to say was “what did you do that for?”
Pistons don’t stop moving. If they stopped moving, the crank shaft would also stop moving – and as we can see from Pirsig’s anecdote, that would not be a pleasant experience for a motorcycle rider.
What happens is that pistons change direction within their continuous process of movement. The crank shaft that the piston is attached to is in continuous motion in a circle and this creates an illusion that the piston is moving upwards to a top dead center position and then moving down to bottom dead center. There is no stopping.
Cosmology – Do You See Where This is Going Yet?
I find in the process of an internal combustion engine a useful analogy to considering the nature of the universe. Let me be clear, I am not suggesting the universe is exactly the same as a four-stroke internal combustion engine (ICE). Nor am I suggesting that the universe operates exactly the way an ICE works. It is an analogy. A metaphor. A finger pointing at the moon.
It is possible that at one phase of universal existence there is infinite compression of time, space and matter. In that phase (or expression), duration is infinitely brief and therefore experience is essentially meaningless. It is a kind of top-dead-centre. At the opposite phase of universal, time, space and matter there is infinite dispersal. Duration is infinitely long and therefore experience is again essentially meaningless. This is our metaphorical bottom-dead-centre.
Perhaps the universe progresses between these two extreme states in a continuous change of direction which does not stop – and does not start.
No Big Existential–Metaphysical-Cosmological Bang
I once spoke with a quite engaging individual who happened also to be a quite well-known scientist, professor and published author. On many topics, I found this person to be engaging and informative. He expressed the opinion to me that many people have a very significant challenges with giving-up the idea of that they have “free-will”. It’s an interesting and rather thorny issue and not what I’m considering in this essay. But it comes to mind as many people from both a scientific and a theological point of view would have difficulty in giving up the idea of a concrete beginning to the universe. It’s baked into their metaphysical, cosmological comprehension of how the universe works.
But what if that’s just the way it is? What if the universe seems to have had a beginning only because we are so focused on one part of the machine that we haven’t (yet) observed other parts which negate the premise? Speculating about “how the universe began” presupposes that there was a beginning and it does not seem to me that this can absolutely be presumed. Perhaps the big bang was just the universe going through a particular phase (yes that was an intended pun).
Getting back to Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality
As promised, what I want to do now is try to connect this speculated cosmological alternative of a universe with no beginning to the Metaphysics of Quality. I have no idea whether others have attempted to put these things together, but let’s give it a run.
According to Pirsig, Quality underpins his metaphysical system for understanding the world. Quality comes before the matter, time and space. Indeed, matter time and space are comprised of Quality.
Pirsig also argued that Quality can be understood in two different forms: Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. Static quality is the rigid patterns and established values of the good. With an ICE, the static pattern is a process of intake, compression, power, exhaust which produces power. Static quality might otherwise be perceived as those things which we can ascribe traits and values to. Motorcycles, people, books, governments, relationships and a host of other things that we can relate to. Dymamic Quality is the immediately experienced reality. It is the power and motion that the engine produces. It is the experience of interacting with another person.
What Pirsig seems to be saying is that experience itself is the ‘stuff” of the universe upon which all else is possible.
Decades ago, I wrote a poem (which is included in my Leviathan collection) titled Life is a Psalm of Existence which contains elements of this idea:
Life is a psalm of existence
Will is the strength at the core
Truth is a portrait of thinking
Care is the light of purpose
Love is an echo of beauty
Share is the song of resonanc
Belief is a scent of mystery
Fear is the wall of separation
Pain is the touch of exclusion
Doubt is the death of the striving
Life is a psalm of existence
Will is the strength at the core
A slight re-imagining of the poem using Pirsig’s ideas might alter the title-line to ‘Life is psalm of dynamic quality.’
Shifting Gears to A.N. Whitehead
Using Whitehead’s terminology, there is a process which produces our human actual occurrences. This process is dynamic quality. The concept of reality may roughly equate to Static Quality – a particular pattern of Quality which we recognize and value.
Causal Set Theory
In Causal Set Theory, there isn’t a singular(ity) “Big Bang” to be accounted for. Causal Set Theory (CST) looks at the universe differently than Einstein’s general relativity or quantum physics theory by positing discrete morsels of space-time which it calls “atoms”. CST, whether it is correct or not, offers a conceptual way forward to examine how the universe might work. It is a physicist’s model which can be examined via the language of mathematics. While I am not in a position to suggest that CST offers any form of validation of the kind of cosmology I’m posing int his essay, I mention it as an indication that whatever perspectives one cares to propose, there may be new ideas to explore about the universe is. Lack of conformity to or divergence from some other (arguably incomplete or inadequate) theory is not merely acceptable – it may well be absolutely necessary.
Taking the crude analogy of the internal combustion engine, one may readily posit a series of bangs within a cycle. Clearly, what I am suggesting is that the metaphor(s) which Pirsig and Whitehead used to describe individual human experience can be connected to a cosmology which does not rely on a singular(ity) Big Bang.
Diagrammatic models of the universe can be compelling, despite the impossibility for any two-dimensional diagram to adequately depict how the universe works. Clearly a line drawing of a four-stroke engine is not adequate to fully depict the functioning of the universe. It’s hilarious that anyone even attempts to describe the universe in these reductionist ways. This explains why the assertion that “It’s turtles all the way down” is simultaneously wonderful and ridiculous. Analogies only ever work as far as their limitations. Fingers only ever point to the moon. Whether the analogy is words, pictures or numbers hardly seems to make much of a difference in this.
Has the universe always existed?
This question is a matter of cosmology. It pertains to the nature of how the universe works. Depending upon your perspective, it’s either one of the biggest questions one may ponder – or one of the smallest. For those who are oriented to top-end theoretical physics or metaphysical musings via philosophy or theology, this is one of the “biggest” questions. Certainty about any given response is most difficult to attain and validate.
On the other hand, for those who are definitively not oriented to the previously-mentioned theoretical physics and metaphysical musings – then the question, “Has the universe always existed?” is perhaps one of the smallest questions that may be asked. Consider pragmatism – a philosophical perspective that I have a thorough and long-standing appreciation for. A pragmatist is concerned with the practical applications and implications of any given idea or conception. If you happen to be a theoretical physicist or some other specialist who earns their income by answering questions of this type, clearly you’re in a special category for whom their really is a practical application. For most of us, however, the practical implications to the answer of whether the universe has always existed or not are so far removed from our undertakings, that it is a very small question indeed.
Whether it is a big question or a little question and despite and relative expertise one might have, I think we all tend to have some notion about the answer. Some of us are quite vague while others are extremely precise in their opinions.
For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to set forward a perspective that the universe always exists and establish some context for that statement.
What is the Universe?
It seems only fair to begin with a reasoned definition of terms. The first term I want to deal with is ‘universe‘. I’m going to argue for an extremely transparent definition of ‘universe’ such that it means ‘everything’. There isn’t any physical or non-physical thing, concept, dimension, energy, substance, form, force or what-have-you outside of the universe.
This ought to be a straight-forward principle to work from. It is little more than a trick of language when someone proposes something outside of the universe. I’m going to use the specific example of the ‘multi-verse’ concept where there are proposed to be multiple universes which co-exist in a simultaneous or parallel manner. This is tom-foolery.
I am quite comfortable with the concept of multiple time-and-space-continua which co-exist in a simultaneous or parallel manner. However applying the term ‘universe’ to each time-and-space continuum is entirely inaccurate as they are clearly not ‘everything’ in isolation. Each continuum may well be self-sufficient and complete, but a posited existence of additional continua, means that the term ‘universe’ can only be applied to the collection of all the individual continua and anything else one may care to posit.
What does ‘Always’ mean?
It is exceedingly difficult to phrase comments about cosmology since one’s terminology is bound to include concept of time which are part of the concepts being described. Time itself is a feature of the universe. So my assertion that the universe always exists is somewhat circular because that time element of always is partially embedded within the term universe.
I’ve used the term ‘always’ in its correspondence to the term ‘continuum’. Always is continuity. It is perpetuality. Always is duration itself.
What is Existence?
Existence is the act of being. It is manifestation in any form. Time exists. Matter exists. Concepts exist. Words and ideas exist. Existence equals ‘is’.
Creating a word to represent something does not conjure that thing into manifested physical reality. The idea exists but that does not mean that there is a manifested reality which corresponds to the idea and the word assigned to it. I want to call this an ‘insofaras‘. Vampires, unicorns and anything you care to mention exist insofaras the words and ideas are an identifiable, cohesive and consistent set(s) of meanings but that does not mean the set(s) of meanings have a corresponding physical reality.
In this way, any word or idea has a contingent existence even if that contingency is conceptuality. In this way everything that is must be considered to be contained within the term universe.
To assist, I’m going to invert Wittgenstein’s famous “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” to explain existence. It is not possible to conceptualize anything that does not exist. Once you have generated a novel concept, the concept exists but that does not generate a non-existing thing…it only enlarges the universe by one novel concept. Even if it is a concept of a something that does not have a corresponding manifested time-space physical reality.
The concept of existence goes includes all details of reality – even those that are in addition to time, space and matter.
A Paradox of the statement ‘the universe always exists’
A rather circular and paradoxical character of this statement is that each of the meaningful terms is a dependent of the others. The universe is existence. The universe is always. Existence is always. They are equivalents components of each other with different manifestations.
Models of the Universe
As previously indicated, a line drawing of the universe is utterly inadequate to fully explain how the universe works. It can only point to certain things. One of the most popular theories about the universe is that it began just under 14 billion years ago in a cosmological bang and has been expanding ever since.
What caused this singular big bang and what came before the big bang appears to be fully debatable territory. From my perspective, anyone that posits any kind of anything outside of the universe (which includes everything and all time), has either misapplied the term “universe” or assumed a status of time that is incorrect.
The diagram which depicts the universe as a kind of cone where the big bag is the narrow end and the present is the open end is a compelling image. But is also seems incomplete. This could be a simple deception of trying to use a line drawing to explain the universe. Bu it has offered the metaphorical conceptualization of the universe where there are two funnels which connect to each other within a spherical universe.
This model is visually satisfying as it offers a representation of an ongoing cyclical completion through a process.
What I want to conceptualized here is a perspective on time, matter and space. Time and matter are interconnected. When time and space are very nearly infinitely compressed (inside the sphere, where the cones meet), duration is very nearly infinitely short. Time’s duration is as close to not existing as it is possible to be. This is the singularity. Expect that it is not as a singularity never exists. Matter, time, space, experience, quality and all of the rest of it are never an undifferentiated monism.
At the equator on the outside of this metaphorical sphere, time, matter and space is very nearly infinitely dispersed and duration is very nearly infinitely long. Time’s duration is as close to not existing as it is possible to be. Matter is as thinly resolved as it is possible to be. Space is penultimately null.
I don’t want to give the impression that anyone subscribes to this cosmology. I have no idea if this cosmology corresponds to any theories or ideas that others have previously developed (beyond anything already suggested within this essay) nor whether this meditation achieves anything more than attempting to hand language around a range of accumulated impressions.
The point in all of this is making a case that the universe always exists; that there is nothing else. What can (and does) change is the duration of time, the substantiation of substance, the spatiality of space, the meaningfulness of experience via the mechanisms (physics) of their concentration/density (compression vs. dispersal).
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The Imp of the Perverse is a short-story by Edgar Allen Poe first published in July 1845 in Graham’s magazine. The narrative is the apparent recitation of a court-room confessional address by a murderer. The murderer recounts the motive and method of accomplishing the murder as well as a theory for the reason to voluntarily confess after having escaped suspicion.
Original Essay
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Original Essay
In October of 2021, I posted a reading of a story that I wrote in the weeks leading up to Hallowe’en (The Hole Where the Ghosts Come In). Despite the hasty decision to write and record a Hallowe’en story in such a short period of time, I thoroughly enjoyed the process and have decided to follow-up this year with another Hallowe’en story reading. Alas, this year, I simply didn’t have the time to write a new story – so instead, this year’s ghastly Hallowe’en reading will be something of a classic.
There are many ghastly stories that would have been entertaining to read for the podcast, but the list narrowed significantly when I decided that I absolutely wanted to post something that would be consistent with “philosophical fiction” theme that we’ve established on the podcast.
Edgar Allan Poe
Clearly, as the title of this essay indicates, I settled on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse. I hope that my reading of the story offers some entertainment and a unique voice for the psychopathic murderer.
I became a Poe fan in elementary school when reading his many gothic classics from The Raven, Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart to The Cask of Amontillado. As a result, I can’t be certain when I first read The Imp of the Perverse, but it was almost certainly around that time. Given Poe’s tremendous catalog of horror and gothic stories, it would perhaps have been more in the traditional spirit of Hallowe’en to have read something with more of that grisly imagery that we expect from Poe. The Black Cat, Never Bet the Devil Your Head or The Pit and the Pendulum would have brought that creepy supernatural punch that can make Hallowe’en just so darn entertaining.
On the other hand, The Imp of the Perverse seems to have a lot to offer when it comes to staring-down a marrow-deep psychopath.
Besides being (as I’ve already suggested) more closely aligned to philosophical fiction than most of Poe’s other works, the horror in The Imp of the Perverse is much more subtle to approach. Perhaps because the horror it proposes is significantly more probable and relevant to our daily lives than what appears in most of those other tales. I think it is reasonable to say that we are much more likely to encounter a coldly-calculating, deliberate and un-feeling (and yet still cowardly) psychopath than some unrelenting supernatural force or yet still some grotesque and brutal onslaught. I have found that its the garden-variety sociopaths among us that have caused me the most real-world difficulty.
Following are a few things to consider in reading The Imp of the Perverse.
The Imp
1934 Riley Imp – Perhaps Poe might have enjoyed a phaeton such as this – had he the opportunity to operate one.
Rather disappointingly, an actual imp does not appear in the story. Instead, the Imp of the Perverse is a proposed theory by a convicted murder for the compulsion which drove him to needlessly confess to his crime. It is what the murderer suggests as a reasonable cause since the best theories of his day seem inadequate to providing a cause for his drive to confess. The murderer says very little about his drive to murder, apart from the commonplace motive of personal material benefit as the inheritor of any estate.
So it appears that Poe’s villain does his nasty work and demonic intervention is needed only to get him to work against his own best interests and confess (thus speeding his trip to Hell, of course). So Poe’s Imp is a catalyst for confession as damnation rather than confession for salvation.
As a side note, it appears that Poe was once accused of failing to ever write a moral tale. One wonders if that is entirely accurate, or if the moral lessons that Poe proposed were rather different than his contemporaries may have been used to.
The Narrator
The story’s narrator is clearly a psychopath or sociopath, facing a death-sentence for having committed a murder. In contemporary society, psychopaths and sociopaths are something of a commonplace bogeyman. According to the best psychology of our current times, psychopathy has a prevalence somewhere between 1% and 30% of the population. That is a a wildly big variance and is clearly the result of vastly different approaches to assigning the term “psychopath” to a person. Tempting as it may be to comment on this, I’m going to leave it at that – largely because even a one-in-a-hundred prevalence means most of us must engage with more psychopaths than we’d probably prefer.
Despite their nastiness, society still seems to have a terrific appetite to observe them and hear the tales of the exploitations and horrific crimes which they commit. These are not supernatural predators but are our 20th- and 21st-century human, all-too-human predators (however many of them there may be).
The Victim
The story’s victim is left nameless. Since the story is a first-person narrative, it is interesting to observe that Poe’s villain does not give the victim even the courtesy of being named and recognized. The effect of this anonymity is to convey that the victim is any person whose habits may be studied for a cowardly attack.
Perverse
The narrator uses the term perverse to define a person working against their own best interests. Doing what is wrong for the sake of the wrongness.
The fact that the narrator’s confession is not driven by guilt (i.e. a moral compulsion to confess due to regret and remorse) but by what he calls perversity – acting against his own self interests (by his definition) is the chilling bit to consider. When the narrator says he did wrong for the sake of doing wrong, this was not the murder; the murder was methodically planned and accomplished for profit. The perversity, as seen by the psychopath, is in going against his own interests. Despite the accusations Poe faced, it seems clear to me that he was able to deliver a moral message via his stories.
Confession of a sin or crime, in the context of Christian religion or even secular criminal law might normally be seen as a virtuous act which could lead to redemption. But let’s say re-stated that in a different way. Confession by a normal person (i.e. not a psychopath) might be seen as a virtuous act. Confession by a non-normal person may be a different situation.
Phrenology
The narrator refers to phrenology several times. Phrenology was a leading theory about brain development in the early 1800’s but had lost most of its authoritative influence by the time Poe published The Imp of the Perverse in 1845. It was a theory that attempted to map out human personalities, capabilities and traits based on the shape of their skull.
Sidebar – the feature image for this post is not an example of a phrenological map (see below for that). Instead, it is a map of common brain injuries following motorcycle accidents. Hallowe’en is a scary thing.
This is interesting to observe as Poe was using an ideological doctrine that had both risen and fallen in popular attention. It seems probable that Poe was aware of this and further aware that he was arguing, indirectly, that the leading methods of the times had failed to adequately explain certain compulsions and behaviours that may be found in society.
The story and modern clinical history have both provided further prospective causes of the drives and compulsions that humans experience. With (depending upon your preferred definition) somewhere between 1% and 30% of the population as a cause for concern – you’d think by now that we’d have more detailed answers than: supernatural causes, brain damage, genetics (nature) and the environment (nurture). Reductio ad absurdum? Sure. I’m happy to let the experts do a better job of assessing the matter – this is just an essay in support of a Hallowe’en story.
In a short-story which is about “wrongness”, it is interesting to note that people do get things wrong from time to time…and sometimes even when it may seem that they are “doing the right thing”, exploration of their motivations reveals that we may have some difficulties to explore. And that it may be in our best interests to have a look at the motivations of the psychopaths around us. It could be in our best interests.
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Minimalism is an attitude about one’s relationship to material possessions (‘stuff’) whereby maintaining the greatest possible independence from and indifference to it is ideal.
Original Essay
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References & Notes
External Links
Mimimalism: Is there something missing?
Original Essay
Let me start by asking whether you have ever gone through a period of your life when ‘minimalism’ seemed to have been not only a good idea, but something that you absolutely needed to act on as quickly and thoroughly as possible?
This essay (originally title Footnotes to Minimalism: A Grey and Colourless Philosophy) is about that type of experience – and also about some implications of the contemporary minimalism which I have had occasion to observe and explore. Not surprisingly, my exploration leads to several insights and connections that I’ve found to Motorcycle Zen and the Zensylvania state of mind.
But first let me focus on the title of this essay: A Grey and Colorless Philosophy. I imagine that this word choice presents something of a stark and bleak outlook on what is actually a very popular lifestyle, philosophy and design aesthetic. Despite the characterization I’ve started with, minimalism is a trend that I readily admit a certain affinity for. It is exactly because of this attraction that minimalism has for me that it is worthy of some critical examination and even criticism. And so we come to an essay title that may seem less than flattering.
But it also seems to be a reasonably accurate observation of the mainstream contemporary minimalism that has recently flourished. Dig into the aesthetics of contemporary minimalism and it is nearly impossible not to be buried in avalanches of white, grey and black. Perhaps with some wood-tones mixed-in here and there as a gesture to naturalism. As a design concept, contemporary minimalism seems to have a pre-occupation with objects and environments that are sanitized of colour. Or perhaps purified is a more precise descriptor for what may be happening within minimalism. This is an interesting situation with a variety of drivers worth examining – especially for those who may feel that acting on minimalism is a pressing matter. It can be instructive to appreciate what it is that moves us toward radical lifestyle and ideological changes or approaches. Are we reacting against something – as with a sanitization? Or are we moving toward something – as with a purification? While the outcomes may be superficially similar, the process and aesthetic effects are likely to be very different in quality.
As well, this observation of the aesthetics of contemporary minimalism has, at least for me, a startling connection to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Stick with me and we’ll get there in the essay and also to some insights that I’ve taken away.
As a header image for this essay, I’ve used a photograph of the oddly striking Novus electric motorcycle (or E-Motorbike). The inclusion isn’t in any way intended to be an advertisement for that product; nor is the inclusion an insult to the concept. As I’ve said, it’s oddly striking and may well be an entertaining option. With that being said, the image of that bike immediately struck me as relevant to this essay and I knew I had to include it. A little later one, we’ll be returning to it.
Rather paradoxically, defining minimalism is not a simple task. As with any ideology, there are more than a few underlying concepts, elements and assumptions packed into the larger concept. When you start looking into it, minimalism is actually more complicated, nuanced and sophisticated than it seems.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I’m not going to try to dig into all of these foundational bits as that would make this exploration much larger than we have time for right now. What I’m going to do instead is set-aside as much of the ‘you-won’t-get-this-unless-you-first-get-that‘ philosophizing as possible. So, here is the official Zensylvania definition of minimalism (pending future editorial fiat):
Minimalism is an attitude about one’s relationshipto material possessions (‘stuff’) whereby maintaining the greatest possible independence from and indifference to it is ideal.
This definition of materialism carries several immediate and primary corollaries and outcomes:
(1)stuff is inherently a burden, regardless of the perceived benefits that it may also provide;
(2) owning, possessing and maintaining the least amount of stuff as practically possible is desirable as it reduces burden;
(3) complicated design is the physical representation of conceptual ‘stuff’ and represents intellectual and aesthetic burden;
(2)when stuff must be possessed, the least complicated, ornateand attention-catching of stuff is preferred over the more complicated, ornate and attention-catching.
Are these oversimplifications? Reductionist views? A minimal approach? Hopefully so. And hopefully that makes the definition consistent with contemporary minimalism.
Personal Experience
In 2016, amidst a variety of relatively stressful life events, it occurred to me, in a strangely compulsive kind of way, that it was necessary that I significantly reduce the gross tonnage and clutter of my personal possessions. It was a disconcerting experience to ponder just how much all of my stuff weighed.
While the particular circumstances don’t much matter for this essay – clearly I had been pondering what would be involved to move all this stuff from one place to another. It’s an issue that I’ve needed to consider many times, having moved house to far-flung corners of the province I’ve called home throughout my life. Back in 2008, I recall being somewhat appalled by the thousands of pounds involved in a relocation from Thunder Bay to St. Thomas. And we’ve only acquired more stuff since then. How much might it all weigh, now?
As a detail of minimalism, I put some basic questions to myself:
if I needed to move all my stuff, what would be involved and how much would it cost?
is there stuff I can dispose of now to minimize that burden?
with all of the stuff I own, how much of it is actually meaningful?
Minimalism seemed to offer attitudes, methods, tools and options for reducing the burdens of stuff that I felt – both for stuff I already possessed and maintained and for potential future stuff that would almost certainly cross my path. Predictably, I began an effort to get rid of as much of that stuff as I could as a preparation to move forward in my life. And I also began an investigation of contemporary minimalism and its potential meanings and implications for me.
One of the first things I did was to catalogue my individual, personal stuff. The exercise allowed me to understand exactly how much stuff I had laying around. And how much of it I didn’t really use or need in any active kind of way. I eventually found that I could get my individual, personal stuff to something approximating 100 items. This included such things as clothing, musical instruments, objets d’art, electronics, books and anything solely and exclusively my own. To do so would mean almost wholly culling from my habits of ownership the concept and practice of collection.
I excluded from the scope of my efforts anything with a family- or communal-purpose. I thought it would be unfair to apply my personal considerations to things that other people use and derive benefit from. For similar reasons, I also excluded tools and other items of practical usage that are necessary to maintain our family home. It simply didn’t make sense to ditch stuff that would be useful, if not essential, to getting on with the life that I was interested to put into order.
This reference to 100 items is a popular benchmark in contemporary minimalism. There are books, websites and who knows what else devoted to that somewhat mystically specified quantity. There doesn’t seem to be any objectively certain reason that 100-items should be chosen instead of some other number, excepting perhaps that it is easy to remember and has the practical application of being sufficiently high to allow quite a lot of stuff. Even still, in my own case, I quickly established various conditions and caveats to exempt myself from stuff-possessing limitations.
Still, setting an upper limit of stuff is the whole point of minimalism. It is a practice of setting a personal minimum or baseline.
I recommend conducting an inventory of personally owned items whether you’re interested in minimizing that inventory or not. It is a valid strategy to contemplate the sheer quantities of things that contemporary people possess. Indeed, enumerating what you own is also more readily practicable compared to (for example) pondering the overall mass of your possessions (as in the case of paying for logistics services to move your stuff from one place to another). It is appalling how quickly the list grows…even if you’re prone to counting a pair of socks as a single item. Idealistic, magical numbers, like 100, become quaint rather quickly and you’ll discover the degree to which materialism dominates your daily life.
I say magical because any arbitrary quantity which does not serve a specific, objective limit is indeed dabbling in a kind of fantasy-land exercise – an internal negotiation of the personal boundaries of the material-based basis of your life.
By contrast, consider the objective and practical limits set by airlines for online luggage: nor more than X pieces where each piece weighs no more than Y pounds or kilograms. Airlines look at your stuff as a matter of logistics rather than mystics.
There isn’t a problem with a minimalist pursuit that allows for magic and fantasy. Indeed, my own indulgence is almost wholly composed of it. There is no actively and externally imposed limit the amount of stuff I might acquire within my resources. But the difference between an arbitrary, self-prescribed quantity and an externally-imposed mandate is an education. Consider those who spend some period of their life constrained-by external limits such as long-term care residents, military personnel or the poor.
This exercise of quantifying and limiting my stuff had me reflect that when I was my teens and early twenties, I was mostly satisfied if all of my possessions could be packed into whatever vehicle I happened to own at the time – and therefore, readily transported wherever I happened to be going. This method of limiting my stuff was essentially assigned to me when I moved out of my parents’ home and was given the frank and direct information that anything left behind would be proactively collected for a trip to the landfill. Take that for an externally-imposed scenario.
Humanity
This method of limiting my stuff to the amount I’m able to cart along has turned out to be extremely practical and effective. It’s an approach that seems to strongly align with several philosophies that I appreciate from stoicism and pragmatism all the way through to certain aspects of Zen and Fuzzy Logic.
If you happen to be couch-surfing around or otherwise uncertain what roof (if any) may be over your head on any given night – then it probably makes sense to have only as much stuff as you can move around. Uncertainty reveals that stuff, despite the pleasure and benefits that might be derived, is also a burden. In a world confounded by concerns about environmental damage, rising costs of living, global elites who promote being happy whilst owning nothing, military and social conflicts and other such matters – a sober assessment of uncertainty in your life requires an examination of your relationship to stuff. There may well be very large external forces to consider.
Indeed, I’m struck by the notion that nomadic people throughout history would have considered it common sense that humans need to place transportability at the center of material possessions. Indeed, for the vast majority of human existence, permanent settlements (houses, towns, cities) were unknown. Compared to the millions of years that humans have existed, we have lived stationary, rooted lives for only some ten to fifteen thousand years. We evolved as relatively stuff-less, nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Our deepest instincts, evolved over those millions of years, seem to contradict our drive to gather stuff. In crisis, we look around us for the most essential things to take as we flee. And yet, we are also drawn to acquire and collect everything from pretty rocks at the beach to clothing, books, motorcycles, cars, pretty stones at the beach or frankly any manner or size of bauble that one cares to mention. Perhaps it is a part of some nesting instinct relate to creating a safe and stable territory to provide-for and rear newer generations.
Walden Pond
It is clear that contemporary minimalism is not a direct product of our collective human heritage as nomads. There certainly are nomadic cultures even in this twenty-first century, but most of us are not looking at these cultures as the source of inspiration for how to declutter the closet or design the kitchen. Though perhaps we should.
Contemporary minimalism is clearly also not a direct product of economic poverty. Those who engage in minimalism often seem to have more than enough money to spend, if they wish to. Interestingly, however, minimalism does seem to take its expressive form from scenarios that are necessarily spare in their original occurrence.
The concept of “tiny homes” has been growing in North America and around the world to one extent or another. Tiny homes are akin to minimalism insofar as they are a scaling-back from the average 1,700 square foot home. But tiny homes are often not minimalist in their design.
It seems to me that tiny homes are a distant relative of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond. In essence, this is a reduced square-footage still based upon a presumed longer-term residency when compared to a genuinely nomadic or necessarily uncertain situation.
Culling the Concept of Collections
In my own case, when I approached the inventory of my personal stuff, I unexpectedly learned that I had a strange relationship to ‘collections‘. I think most people would agree that a collection is a situation where we possess and maintain more than one of any given item. Most of us develop a specialty of collecting a particular item and our personal collection of this type of item is larger than what our friends’ and neighbours’ might be.
In fact, if someone were to ask if you had any ‘collections’, you might assume the question pertains to these specialist collections: purses, books, records, antique tea pots, motorcycles. What have you.
Yet, if you conduct an inventory, you may find (as I certainly did) that most of us have a wide-range of collections that manage to grow over time and without any seriously sustained effort. Here are a few examples from my experience: a collection of leather jackets, a collection of audio equipment and related electronics, a collection of shoes.
I hope you take my meaning, I learned that I had a collection of items that were different in their design but still fulfilled the same basic purpose. Even today, I have three different leather jackets which I maintain as each jacket seems to suit a different weather condition. If I remove that modified, ‘leather’, I have to admit to maintaining no fewer than a dozen ‘jackets”.
It turns out that my personal mountain of stuff can be easily lumped into collections of items that all serve the same (or substantially similar) fundamental purpose. It turns out I was (and am) a passive and unconscious collector.
PersonalCase Study Number One: Books
Over most of my life, I’ve had an unreasonable attachment to books. At one point, my personal library included hundreds upon hundreds of books. During house moves, this translated into hundreds of pounds of cartage from one place to another. Cartage that cost money.
Books are just one type of item. After reading a book, the book became an artifact of having read the book. Seeing the physical object was a reminder of the experience, for good or bad.
Eventually, I used Goodreads, the social media platform to document all of the books I read and to serve as a kind of digital artifact. The digital artifact allowed me to let the decaying physical objects go. For me that turns out to have been a good thing as hundreds of pounds of paper have been sent off to to used book stores and the like and hopefully for the enjoyment of others. For me, I now have a much more narrowly curated personal library of books that I actively expect to re-use.
As I said, books are one object and similar situations apply to music library (tapes, CD’s and devices to play them on), clothing and other collections of objects which accumulated and accumulated.
As it turns out, getting rid of all that stuff did not culminate in the path I had expected, but it certainly did allow play a role in preparing me to move forward in my life.
Personal Case Study Number Two: Cars and Bikes
Needless to say, notions of minimalism have even influenced my attitudes about motorcycles and cars.
I admit to having owned an un-necessarily large number of motorized vehicles. And this ownership has cost much more money over the decades than makes much logical sense. I also admit to not caring much about that in the moments that I consider a particularly terrific Yamaha or Moto Guzzi.
However, my experience with and contemplations about minimalism has tempered my approach. At one time, I had three operable and one in-operable vehicle(s) in the driveway. The total fuel-burning displacement of all those engines was almost thirteen litres and the grand total weight of metal, glass and plastic was probably north of 14,000 pounds. That’s a lot of ‘stuff’.
When it comes to quantification, my Yamaha XJ 550 was only a half-litre of displacement and some 400 pounds. Mind you, it was only a practical option for 2/3 of the year. The Novus electric motorcycle pictured at the top of this article is said by the manufacturers to weigh about 85 kilograms – or approximately 185 pounds. As an electric option, the Novus doesn’t directly burn fuel. Here in Ontario, power would have to be provided by some combination of nuclear, wind and hydro-electric infrastructures. Meanwhile my bicycle weighs something less than 25 pounds and has no displacement at all.
Hatchbacks: Amazingly Convenient
So where have I landed? Currently we own a single vehicle weighing about 3000 pounds and displacing two litres of fuel-and-air burning capacity. While it’s still a shockingly large quantity of metal, glass and plastic to fuss with…it does have the capacity to carry quite a bit of my stuff around when and if I need to. And for the forseeable future, this seems (in combination with the aforementioned bicycle) to be the likeliest ongoing vehicle to serve our needs. At least we’re down from thirteen litres of pollution displacement and 14,000 pounds of natural and manufactured resources.
The Meeting of East and West By FSC Northrop: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding
Finally we’re getting to the reason that I titled this essay with that combative characterization of minimalism as a grey and colourless philosophy…and I do hope, despite the meandering path we’ve taken, that we arrive at a conclusion that is indeed consistent with the introduction.
In chapter eleven of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes a period of time when the narrator, Phaedrus, returns from military service in Asia and spends a period of time in confrontation of several fundamental conceptions about existence. While the scene is comparatively brief, I have also found that it is an extraordinarily useful scene for tracking Pirsig’s philosophical influences – and in the so-doing, providing an insight into the aesthetics of mainstream contemporary minimalism.
So let’s have a look at this passage:
...The final strong fragment from that part of the world is of a compartment of a troopship. He is on his way home. The compartment is empty and unused. He is alone on a bunk made of canvas laced to a steel frame, like a trampoline. There are five of these to a tier, tier after tier of them, completely filling the empty troop compartment.
This is the foremost compartment of the ship and the canvas in the adjoining frames rise and falls, accompanied by elevator feelings in his stomach. He contemplates these things and a deep booming on the steel plates all around him and realizes that except for these signs there is no indication whatsoever that this entire compartment is rising massively high up into the air and then plunging down, over and over again. He wonders if it is that which is making it difficult to concentrate on the book before him, but realizes that no, the book is just hard. It’s a text on Oriental philosophy and it’s the most difficult book he’s ever read. He’s glad to be alone and bored in this empty troop compartment, otherwise he’d never get through it.
The book states that there’s a theoretic component of man’s existence which is primarily Western (and this corresponded to Phaedrus’ laboratory past) and an aesthetic component of man’s existence which is seen more strongly in the Orient (and this corresponded to Phaedrus’ Korean past) and that these never seem to meet. These terms “theoretic” and “esthetic” correspond to what Phaedrus later called classic and romantic modes of reality and probably shaped these terms in his mind more than he ever knew. The difference is that the classic reality is primarily theoretic but has its own aesthetic too. The romantic reality is primarily esthetic, but has its theory too. The theoretic and esthetic split is between components of a single world. The classic and romantic split is between two separate worlds. The philosophy book, which is called The Meeting of East and West, by F.S.C. Northrop, suggests that greater cognizance be made of the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” from which the theoretic arises.
Phaedrus didn’t understand this, but after arriving in Seattle, and his discharge from the Army, he sat in his hotel room for two whole weeks, eating enormous Washington apples and thinking, and eating more apples, and thinking some more, and then as a result of all these fragments, and thinking, returned to the University to study philosophy. his lateral drift was ended. He was actively in pursuit of something now.“
First, I want to point out that the beginning of the scene is set among an empty, stark and minimalist bunk compartment of a military ship. When describing the environment, Pirsig provides no direct words to convey colour. At most, colour can only be inferred from the references to steel, canvas and the fact that it is a military area. Overall the scene conveys absence of colour as readily as it conveys a disconnect from the massive rising and falling of the ship in ocean swells.
If there is a life situation that must necessarily be minimalist and practical – where nothing but the necessary is packed along – it must be a military setting. Like nomadic people or the homeless, the military life is filled with uncertainty and a perpetual requirement to be able to pick up and go. The extraneous is soon purged in these environments. Military personnel don’t go about their business lugging a dozen coats just in case the one they happen to be wearing doesn’t suit the occasion.
This massive rising and falling of the ship is a mirroring of the polarizing pendulum swings of the narrator’s perspectives on reality and existence. Inside the compartment, there is no hint that the whole thing is moving – that there are indeed two different perspectives. The compartment is a metaphor for the polarities of Eastern and Western aesthetics that the narrator is reading in the next paragraphs.
At the close of the scene, Pirsig describes Phaedrus, having returned from the East as spending time thinking and eating enormous Washington apples. While it is tempting to let the metaphors speak for themselves, I’m going to indulge in over-explanation to avoid letting anything go un-acknowledged. Apples are often (accurately or not) depicted as being the actual fruit of the tree of knowledge from the Abrahamic religions’ Biblical Adam and Eve story. These two ‘first people’ were evicted from the Garden of Eden for eating this forbidden fruit. Pirsig has almost certainly included this reference to apples in this section to reference this myth.
It is equally certain that Pirsig states that they are Washington apples to emphasize the American, new-world position that Phaedrus was in. As for minimalism – all that is depicted is consuming the fruit of the tree of knowledge and thinking. The hotel room is left colourless. Even the apples are colourless. These are sparse scenes written with a kind of minimalism.
Given the minimalist underpinning of the scene, it is that much more apparent that Pirsig’s nod to F.S.C. Northrop’s book should not be taken as extraneous. Having acquired a relatively battered second-hand copy of it, I’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to read it several times. I’m not sure that I found it to be particularly challenging, but I wasn’t sitting on in an empty bunk-compartment of a military ship at the time.
Apart from a general recommendation to anyone who may be interested to explore Pirsig’s philosophical influences that it is an excellent addition to a collection of ZAMM-oriented library, there is a section of the book that has perspective that we can bring to bear on the relationships between minimalist doctrines and minimalist aesthetics. In chapter two of The Meeting of East and West, Northrop says:
“There is another difference between the Mexicans’ and the Anglo-Americans’ approach to democracy in its bearing on religion. For the Mexicans, art is a necessity of life, not a luxury; religion for them, if it is anything, is a passion, a moving, emotional experience. The culture of the Aztec period and that of the colonial period satisfied both these requirements. Also, Catholic theology, whatever its defects, is rigorously defined and consistently developed. Consequently, the Mexicans know what a doctrinally meaningful, aesthetically adequate, emotionally moving religion is like. For people of the English-speaking world, art tends to be a luxury or an afterthought, or else a hash of souvenirs without integrity because of the use of old art forms for modern institutions and doctrines which deny the theses which the art forms represent. With respect to art, the Protestant Church is scared. At its worst its art is crude; at its best neutral, preferring a pure white in the New England Congregational churches or a dull grey in the Episcopal chapels, which does not commit itself. A church with the diversity of vivid colors, which the Indian aesthetic imagination demands would shock a Protestant congregation. But imagine, conversely, how the Protestant religion must appear to the religious Mexicans. Its exceedingly verbal preaching, its aesthetic color-blindness, and its emotional tepidity and coldness must make it look to them like no religion at all.…”
For those who study ZAMM, this is a significant passage as it establishes the directions that Pirsig takes in his philosophy, provides a philosophical path to follow, and also explains why he ended up at the University of Chicago, trying to advocate for his ideas as a breakthrough in the synthesizing of Eastern and Western philosophy.
It is worth noting that Northrop’s subtitle for The Meeting of East and West is, An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding. It’s a title that invites some sober thought. The book was published shortly after the second world war and Northrop was clearly concerned regarding an emerging global cultural and political world with competing civilizations, empires and ideologies. While the details of these things may be modestly different today, it seems that the general concerns remain very solidly in place. There is still reason to be concerned about world understanding.
A personal practice of minimalism can absolutely be a part of a personal approach to that understanding. From considerations of socio-economic or political certainties, materialistic consumerism to quite valid concerns about global ecology and resources, minimalism connects at practical levels with significant daily issues. There really hasn’t been a better time to examine our relationship(s) to the acquisition and maintenance of stuff.
In The Meeting of East and West, one may also find connections to Alfred North Whitehead‘s Process and Reality and this is another significant recommendation for those interested to explore philosophical work that overlaps Pirsig’s. As to Whitehead, I will admit that Process and Reality readily ranks with Baruch Spinoza‘s Ethics as perhaps the most difficult works of philosophy I have ever read.
But for the purposes of this essay, clearly I’m focussed on Northrop’s contrasting of religious practices which requisitely include and aesthetically satisfying diversity of colour and those that seem to deliberately exclude colour. These latter appear to favour of a kind of doctrinal purity projected by verbal/literate practices and demonstrated by the exclusion of art and colour.
In the spirit of The Meeting of East and West, it may suddenly be clear how the aesthetics of Eastern (and particularly Japanese) minimalist art and aesthetics have been so popular in the Americas where several varieties of Protestantism are to be found. Almost certainly, the cultural forces which produced minimalist aesthetics in Japan and other parts of Asia are significantly different than those that produced Protestantism in Europe and further developed it in North America.
Here I want to reflect again on that Novus electric motorcycle and contrast it with any typical image of a gasoline-powered motorcycle you care to imagine. There, at the very centre of the gasoline-powered motorcycle is the engine itself; at the centre of the Novus? Nothing. The Novus design is clean and striking – fully in line with minimalist principles. That empty space emphasizes what it is not. What it does not have. Just as Protestant religions developed to emphasize the omission of certain gaudy excesses – the Novus electric motorcycle emphasizes the omission of a hydro-carbon burning engine. Earlier, I commented that there is a difference between minimalism that strives to purify and minimalism that strives to sanitize. The distinction that I made was between reacting against something (sanitizing) and moving toward something (purifying). And so I wonder in language echoing Northrop’s, if the Novus is an exercise in sanitizing the concept of a motorcycle. If indeed it is an object which attempts to use the older art form in an empty, grey and colourless attempt to express new ideas. Despite that illusion of the empty space where there is no engine, something really does reside. It is the vast infrastructures of electric power generation.
Those who may have grown up with a grey and colourless religion may find a familiar aesthetic, emotional, and psychological (if not spiritual) experience in a philosophy/design/lifestyle that centers in the principle of omission. It is doctrinal asceticism as aesthetics.
Contemporary Western Minimalism
This observation of Northrop’s, that Anglo-American protestant religion is largely verbal and colorless, strikes me as meaningful in context of what I’m calling Contemporary Western Minimalism.
Minimalism, a design approach which strips away as much extraneous or superfluous excess as possible, seems extremely well adapted to a religious tradition which does much of the same. Protestantism is “nothing but the word”, so to speak. Well minimalism is “nothing but what is necessary.” The concepts resonate.
Science too, is often viewed as sterile….the necessity of science is to remove potentially confounding variables. Control the the experiment as tightly as possible. Make things as black-and-white as possible. And scientific environments such as laboratories, hospitals and even modern high-tech manufacturing facilities are similarly sterile of colour and excess.
Perhaps this is why Pirsig’s motorcycle is described primarily as black and chrome. It is minimalist. It has the aesthetics of the classic. The romantic aspects are the romance of the technical. There’s no colour.
A Colourful Minimalism
There can be several potentially valuable benefits to employing a minimalist philosophy or attitude to your life, home or environment. At particular times of life, it is logistically and economically practical not to have a lot of stuff to move around. No doubt, there are some people who never (or rarely) experience the need to move their residency from one place to another. But for those who do, or even for those who sense any insecurity in their residency, paring down the things that may need to be relocated is a practical benefit. And there’s no practical reason that everything needs to be either grey, white or black when these moves happen. A single orange hatch-back can do the job just as well as a grey one might.
A practice of not acquiring things in the first place is probably more valuable than a practice of paring down. In this age of hyper consumption, it is probably a very good idea to consider all purchases much longer than advertisers would prefer. And when the purchase is made, there’s no reason to exclude aesthetic satisfaction in the list of requirements. It is not the presence of aesthetically satisfying things that must be addressed – it is the clutter of piling thing upon thing to the extent that all that may be apprehended is the over-stimulation of the clutter.
Minimalism has within it a severe doctrine that actively stifles joy in living. Given complete reign, minimalism threatens to extinguish one’s engagement with art, colour, expression and aesthetic satisfaction.
It seems to me that we can and should derive benefits from minimalism or whatever concept that seems to offer some way to improve the conditions of our lives – but that all doctrines require boundaries and limitations. They require counter-weights to ensure that the ideas and strategies we employ to make our lives enjoyable are not employed excessively such that we create harmful or miserable deficits.
So, at least for me, I prefer a colourful variety of minimalism. One that is minimal without being insufficient of the very art, music, colour, joy, substance, expression and emotion that is the stuff of life. The cutting edge of reality is very much a process of meaningfully engaging every part of sensory lives.
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In recent times, I’ve become more and more convinced that the way people use language is complicated and some times confounded by the definitions of the words we use. This seems to be especially relevant when the matters being discussed are topical, contentious, highly contextual or related to deeply-felt sentiments. As a result, it seems useful to explore the ways that we assign meaning to words.
In particular, I want to explore word meaning as differentiated by any given word’s denotations and its connotations. I should be clear, as with everything else in Zensylvania, that I do not claim to be expert in linguistics, semantics or anything else. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think my observations may be useful in navigating the ever-shifting world of communicating with others.
So here’s the Zensylvania Theory of Word Meaning: for every person, every word carries a combined weight of particular individual and general collective meanings composed of various denotative and connotative factors. A denotative factor is the real-world thing which a word is intended to refer to. For example, the word “motorcycle” denotes any real-world, physical artifact that is a motorized vehicle with two or three wheels; similarly, the word ‘human’ denotes any real-world animal of the species homo sapiens sapiens. The denotative factors of words are usually reasonably straight-forward. But not always.
Photo Courtesy Image Search: It is possible to purchase a bat with a Batman logo which is a stylized bat. It’s a bat, man.
Sometimes a word denotes more than one real-world physical thing. For example, the word ‘bat’ can denote a carved wooden or metal stick used in certain ball games or it can denote a class of featherless flying mammal. In most cases, the denoted real world thing is established by the context of usage. When Thomas Nagel wrote a paper to explore consciousness titled, “What is it like to be a bat?” in a 1974 edition of the Philosophical Review, it is reasonably certain that most people assumed Nagel was referring to the mammal and not a three-foot long club.
Of course the situation of multiple possible denotations that I’m referring to is still within the same language and does not (directly) consider situations where the same collection of phonemes could be used for different denotations in other languages. As most of us know, this multiple denotation situation is referred to as a ‘homonym’.
It is also possible for a real-world thing to have multiple denotative words. A ‘car’ may also be denoted by the words: ‘automobile’, ‘vehicle’, ‘sedan’, ‘convertible’ and a long list of other possible denotative words. We can use different words to refer to the same real-world object and most of our fellow language users will take the denotative meaning.
In most cases, a word’s denotation is not an area of trouble. At this time, there are very few real-world things that can’t be denoted with a particular word…and any new thing that may be created is given a word so that it can be denoted.
Exceptions to Denotation
When a word’s denotation is significantly altered from common usage, this can be a source of considerable upset among those who wish to communicate with any degree of clarity or specificity.
Sticking to our automotive theme, let us say that the word ‘coupé’, in common usage, denotes a motor-vehicle with a permanently-installed roof, two doors and (usually) four wheels. As a denotative meaning, particular information is communicated. We can know what a coupé “is”. For the vast majority of the past hundred years (and more if one considers carriage-making), referring to a coupé was instantly recognized as some variation of a two-door.
In recent years, however, the term ‘gran coupé‘ has been used as a denotative term for a (very few) four-door, sporty cars that are rather enlarged compared to a typical sedan. It is a sedan with the proportions of an SUV, but without the station-wagon styled cargo area.
Currently this denotative terminology seems to be limited to a few specific German-branded vehicles. Suddenly, the meaning of the word ‘coupé‘ no longer features the specification of two-doors as a factor. The denotation has been changed.
The shift in denotation is achieved by adding the term “gran“. In automotive culture, ‘gran’ is a a kind of reduction of ‘grand’ from the term ‘grand tourer‘. Or perhaps from the Italian, Gran Turismo. The earliest GT was the 1930 Alfa Romeo 6C 1500 Gran Turismo (according to MotorTrend). Grand touring cars (GT’s) are intended for long-distance, high speed driving. Luxurious sportiness.
So adding ‘gran‘ to ‘coupé‘ results in denotation of a luxurious sporty sedan by leveraging the luxurious sportiness of GT and coupé cars. In effect, the term ‘gran coupé‘ uses or leverages the connotative meanings of these other denotative terms (sportiness, luxury) to designate a new denotative meaning.
This highly un-important matter of what word or words one uses to denote a motorized vehicle is useful for observing how a word’s denotation can be shifted. Suddenly a ‘coupé‘ is no longer solely two-door vehicle. It can also be a four-door vehicle by adding ‘gran’. a defining factor is no longer the quantity of doors but the combination of luxury, comfort and sportiness.
How much more confusing and contentious the situation might be when these shifts in meaning are applied to more topical, contentious, highly contextual or related to deeply-felt sentiments. Thomas Nagel might ask what it’s like to be a bat.
And this brings us nicely to connotative factors in the meaning of words.
Connotations
Connotative factors of a word’s meaning are both individual (and therefore private or intimate) and collective (and therefore public or prevalent). They are the collections of impressions and associations that give a word a special usage or character in our minds. They are the meanings that are very nearly un-spoken except for the coding of the connotative factors.
When some auto-industry executives authorized the use of the term gran coupé to denote a sporty, 4-door, SUV-sized sedan, they intended to use the connotative weight of the words gran and coupé to imply a sporty, luxurious, long-distance touring capable vehicle with a focus on the driver and passenger. These are public/prevalent connotative meanings being used.
The auto-executives rely-upon there also being private or intimate connotations of these words particular to each individual that will enhance these prevalent connotations. Perhaps prospective purchasers are assumed to have fond memories of GT cars that are no longer practical for their actual needs.
From the 1950s through to the early mid 1990s, a common vehicle type was the personal luxury car (or personal luxury coupe). While very similar to a GT, it was perhaps more oriented to luxury than sporting pretensions. Those were time when the standard practice for North American auto manufacturers was to product a 2-door, 4-door and station-wagon version of their main lines. The 2-door was often available with a variety of luxuries to create the “personal luxury coupe”. Over the course of the 1990s and early 200s, the manufacturers went away from this trend with fewer and fewer station-wagon or coupe versions of cars being offered.
In that time, a station-wagon connoted families, a sedan might connote a practical ab dignified choice and a coupe was oriented to the sporty and youth minded.
All this is to say that word-choice has a denotation which carries associations.
Connotations – A non-Automotive Example
Let’s step away from words in the automotive sector to instead consider some of the most pervasive and meaningful of words: our names.
For most people, we know that names have denotations. If considered further, most of us will admit that names will often carry connotations and expectations. If someone were to tell us that we’re about to meet someone we’ve never met before and the only additional information we’re given is a name, we will undoubtedly begin assembling expectations of who that person is likely to be based on the name we’re told they have.
We have slightly different expectations for who Bob, Bobby, Rob, Robbie, Robert and Roberto are; similarly, we have different expectations for who Kerrie, Karen, Karen and Katherine are.
When we say a name, it denotes a specific individual (or in some cases multiple people who happen to have the same name). But it also connotes in our minds various traits and qualities we’ve gleaned from our personal/intimate and collective/pervasive experience of the kind of person that is a Bob or a Karen.
This is a kind of bias which we develop over time and both consciously and unconsciously cultivate and reinforce over time.
Over Time
Over time, a word’s connotations can overtake a word’s original denotation based on common usage. In essence, when the collective/pervasive experiences of a words connotations are so dominant, these connotations (or perhaps even a single connotation) becomes the de facto denotation as well. Consider this rather odd contrasting of associated words:
In this strange example, the various forms of the word “horror” are faithful to the original denotative meaning of the root word. However, in the case of “terror”, one form of the word has taken an opposite meaning. Clearly, some novel private/intimate connotation of the word became a public/pervasive connotation an and altered to render a different denotation.
Why Does it Matter?
As I hinted at the beginning of this essay, this matter of varying denotations and connotations seems to be deeply embedded in every bit of our communication – and insofar as our thinking is based on verbal language, also in our thinking. What we mean when we say a word is both the denoted thing and the connoted values and associations it carries.
From time to time, it may be useful to recall that a word is only a word and may, through common usage, no longer refer to the real world thing that it originally denoted. What has happened is that a word’s individual/intimate connotation(s) became a collective/pervasive denotation.
In my earlier essay, Living Fuzzy: An Incomplete Exploration of Fuzzy Logic, I began an examination of fuzzy logic and how it may be relevant to living the kind of life I want to live and being the kind of person I want to be. Well, a few months have passed and I think it’s time to return to some of those musings and investigations.
In that earlier essay, I explained that it was actually a bit of reading about my 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander’s INVECS transmission that led me to this concept of fuzzy logic. It was an entertaining and moderately insightful investigation which actually made me even more fond of the old Outlander and its transmission. But, as life brings around different priorities at different times, the time for the Outlander to leave our family arrived a short time later. On June 1, 2022, my wife and I accepted possession of a new 2022 Mitsubishi RVR.
So, in celebration of the new vehicle, here we have some further explorations of fuzzy logic!
Bye-bye Outlander, Hello RVR: A Tale of Two ASX’s – Admittedly the photo almost inspires some kind of orange is the new black quip.
Pre-acquisition Matters
At some point during the winter of 2021/2022, we decided that 2022 would be the year that we acquired a vehicle to replace the aging 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander. The car simply wasn’t leaving us confident of reliable transportation on the longer journeys that we wanted to be able to do. Given the probability that gasoline-powered vehicles will probably be outmoded by 2030, it may be reasonable to predict that the newly acquired RVR will be the one of the last gasoline-powered vehicles in our possession (more about that in my nostalgia-driven essays on My Next Bike and My Next (Final) Car).
While I was somewhat reluctant and disappointed to give up the Outlander, the RVR feels like a genuine and natural progression of the automotive experience. In fact, despite the convoluted nomenclature associated with marketing different products in different global jurisdictions, it is reasonable to argue that the RVR is the most recent iteration of a common design intention.
2001-2006 era ASX (Outlander)
The vehicle which I purchased as the Mitsubishi Outlander was sold in other markets under the names Airtrek and was based on a design concept called ASX (Active Sports Crossover). It had a 2,625 mm wheelbase, a 2.4 litre 4G69 MIVEC engine matched to the INVECS-II fuzzy logic transmission (yes, we’re getting there).
Later in 2006 and ’07, the vehicle sold in Canada as an Outlander was a significantly larger and quite different vehicle. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi was showing another ASX concept which was more consistent with the first generation. But Mitsubishi called it RVR instead. Complicated as it may be, the RVR is actually called Outlander Sport in some parts of the globe.
It is interesting that corporations may use the same words to denote different things based on their needs; they’ll also use different words to denote the same thing. A rose by any other name is still a 4-door hatch-wagon with a 2600(ish)-wheelbase.
2022 Mitsubishi ASX/RVR/Outlander Sport
The 2022 RVR is essentially the second generation of the ASX concept and has a 2,670 mm wheelbase. The one we’re now driving has a 2.0 litre 4B11 MIVEC engine matched to an INVECS-III fuzzy logic continuously variable transmission.
The 2001 ASX concept was clearly a 4-door hatch-back 21st century station wagon. A whole lotta glass, metal and plastic.
In the earlier essay, I recommended that one learn how to operate a manual transmission. And I meant that recommendation both literally and figuratively (or metaphorically). In context of Zensylvania, automobiles are an entertaining metaphor and anchor for exploring the self. Learning to operate a transmission for a vehicle gives a person a more thorough understanding of the machines and what it means to move an object weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds down the road. An average motorcycle weight a few hundred pounds while the average vehicle weight of a car today is easily 3500 to 4000 pounds. That’s a lot of glass, metal and plastic, isn’t it? Yet many people seem to have a motivation to take as little responsibility for understanding all that technology as they can while still getting around for their business.
Similarly, responsibility for understanding how the gears of the self work is another thing that many (if not most) people seem to avoid. It’s just easier to get around on auto-pilot.
The transmissions of both of the Mitsubishi’s we’ve owned use fuzzy-logic in their electronic components. That fact reminded me of one of Robert Pirsig’s most famous observations in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which goes:
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a motorcycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha, which is to demean oneself. “
INVECS III
Well in my Mitsubishi ASX vehicles, I’ve had opportunity to observe the Buddha – or at least the concepts that aligns to the Buddha, in both the circuits of a computer and the mechanical operations of a vehicle’s transmission. Once with what I’d call a traditional gear-based transmission and now with a belt-based continuously variable transmission. These have been very different experiences.
Mitsubishi Says That
“INVECS-III CVT achieves low fuel consumption and a smooth ride INVECS = Intelligent & Innovative Vehicle Electronic Control System CVT = Continuously Variable Transmission INVECS-III is an advanced system that automatically selects the optimal gear ratio based on road and driving conditions (“optimal control”), and utilizes “learning control” to match the particular driver’s driving style. In addition, a CVT that brings out the efficiency from the engine performance is provided. Like a conventional automatic transmission, there is no jolt when shifting gears and every time the accelerator is applied there is enjoyable, smooth acceleration.
Furthermore , a torque converter enables creep forward driving (slight deceleration) when the accelerator is not applied and hillstarts are made fun.
The Continuously Variable Transmission makes for optimal driving pleasure by downsizing the pulley piston, reducing the oil pump discharge rate, and controlling direct torque control. All of this results in efficient engine output, offering drivers an exceptionally smooth ride. Based on driver demand as measured by accelerator travel information, optimal efficiency is achieved between the engine and CVT according to the motive forces experienced under driving circumstances. Supple acceleration and smooth driving feel are realized in all kinds of conditions while also improving fuel economy.
I encourage you to compare this language with what Mitsubishi had to say about the INVECS II system. The key values that seem to be emphasized in this current version seem to be: fuel efficiency, smoothness of experience and enjoyment. It would have been far mor succinct for Mitsubishi to claim: INVECS III is smoother, more efficient and more fun than the INVECS II. Mitsubishi’s version however, implies all the complexity which lies in the machinations of a transmission. Of moving thousands of pounds of metal, glass and plastic (plus some occupants) down the road.
What the Hell Does all that have to do with Fuzzy Logic?
In the first part in this series, I used the explanation that fuzzy logic is a system that allows truth values that range between zero and one. With fuzzy logic, there are degrees of truth. I contrasted this with Boolean algebra where things are either zero or one. Either Completely false or completely true. Black or white. On or off. It seems to me that fuzzy logic allows for an understanding of the world that is potentially more accurate and representative than the Boolean alternative.
Particularly as it comes to coping with a world where things are far more dynamic, circumstantial and changing than a black-and-white approach can accommodate. So the fuzzy logic concept seems worthy of further exploration.
In exploring Fuzzy Logic, I necessarily need to begin at the most basic of information. I am not an expert. From the Geeks for Geeks website, I leaned that Fuzzy Logic architecture contains four parts: the rule base, the fuzzification, the inference engine and the defuzzification.
The rule base is a collection of if/then scenario propositions. In the computer programming world, these seem to be the predetermined situations that the computer is expected to encounter. In a vehicle’s transmission, perhaps these might be something like “If slippery road, 4000 RPM engine speed and aggressive driver, then final drive ratio X”. Undoubtedly, it’s far more complicated that this, but for our purposes here (which is not to become fuzzy logic programmers) let’s start there. In understanding the self, that might be “If stressful conditions, thing are happening fast and I’m angry, then behavior X”.
Given that the model allows for a variance not only in the specified variables but also in their degree or scale of intensity, it seems clear that fuzzy logic rule bases provide a more sophisticated decision-making system than a system based on absolutes as in Boolean yes/no scenarios.
Clearly also this seems to match how living organisms actually work on a biological level as well as being a more sensible approach to conscious decision-making. I can’t help but reflect on the so-called “though experiments” intended to challenge and examine a person’s moral or ethical decision-making. Morality that is based on yes/no absolutes are probably more prone to problems than morality that is sensitive to a dynamic and shifting reality with complex underlying factors. Factors that are almost infinitely variable, yet still predetermined.
The second part of fuzzy logic’s architecture is fuzzification. As I understand it, this is the part of the structure that passes raw sensor data into the rule base for assessment. In my depiction above, fuzzification takes the identified criteria (eg. road condition, engine speed, driver aggression) and applies it to the predicted (predetermined) collection of scenario propositions.
In real life, fuzzification is collecting all the variables that affect our behaviour all the way down to their basic measurable reality. Stress? How much stress as measured perhaps by certain chemicals and molecules are present in the system. It truly is marvelous that our minds and bodies already automatically do this. After millions of years of evolution, our incredibly complicated systems have a fuzzy set catalog of the if/then scenarios we are likely to encounter as a human being. That information is the measured and handled, for the most part, without our conscious decisions. For most of us its mostly a smooth, efficient and (intermittently?) enjoyable ride.
The third part of fuzzy logic architecture is the inference engine. As a slight aside, I love that term because it reminds me that language, the symbolic representation of other things (both real and imagined) contains word-meanings which are both denotative and connotative. Word meanings can be explicit or inferred.
Fuzzy logic inference engines establish the degrees of truth based on the raw data and the fuzzification process. The inference engine says which of all the possible scenario propositions are happening at any given time. The inference engine decides what is real and what is not at any given moment.
The final part of the fuzzy logic architecture is the defuzzification. In essence this it the final decision. After all is said and done, the final answer. How much truth is there and what is the appropriate behaviour or outcome?
The fuzzy logic control system is believed to provide human-like thinking which provides acceptable reasoning without necessarily being accurate, to emulate human inference and to manager uncertainty. In evaluating this, it occurs to me that the fuzzy logic system imitates human organism behaviour before thinking rather than the thinking itself. But I do think the model provides an valuable set of tools for evaluating what may be happening under the surface of ourselves and even to structure our decisions to understand what the human animal’ evolution has developed as the predictable scenario propositions, what the relevant data might be, how that data is fuzzified and then defuzzified into the actions we take.
And how we may, as a species be in a world that does not necessarily match our evolved scenario propositions. Like driving a 4000 pound construction of glass, metal and plastic down a slippery road.
Disadvantages of Fuzzy Logic Systems
For computer programmers, fuzzy logic offers some problems or disadvantages. This seems also to be true for the designers of ethical/moral thought experiments. The Geeks for Geeks article says “Many researchers proposed different ways to solve a given problem through fuzzy logic which leads to ambiguity. There is no systematic approach to solve a given problem through fuzzy logic.“
This absence of systemic approach…this ambiguity actually seems to be a strength for anyone navigating life. There’s a tension here…the whole point of fuzzy logic (hence why its termed fuzzy in the first place) is the ambiguity.
Similarly the computer programmer’s disadvantage that “Proof of its characteristics is difficult or impossible in most cases because every time we do not get a mathematical description of our approach.” is not a problem for navigating human life because human life is, for the most part, not navigated via mathematics. Indeed the fact that “fuzzy logic works on precise as well as imprecise data” is not a problem, it’s a definite benefit. Because most of life is not a matter of accuracy, it is a matter of probable survivability.
It is a matter of efficiency, smoothness and enjoyment.
Sentience
A few weeks ago, an employee from Google claimed that one of it’s Artificial Intelligence systems had achieved self-awareness. Sentience. While I’m largely skeptical that this is so, it is a reminded that earth is much closer to the emergence of a new, electronics-based form of intelligence than most of us are adequately prepared to consider. Even if Google’s software is not yet there…something will emerge in the near future.
Via fuzzy logic, we can see that fuzzy control is “a technique to embody human-like thinkings into a control system.“. Clearly we humans value our deep and poorly understood brain systems so much, we want our computers to emulate them.
All the while, we have been working out ways to improve on our human use of reasoning and logic. To make use of science and reliable data. Eventually these two applications will have a meeting of their paths.
In Robert Pirsig’s second book, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, he argues that the conceptual path that Phaedrus took eventually meets up with the path that another scholar had been taking from a different direction. That the two paths meet in the middle and complete each other. Whether this is an accurate depiction or not, I have not examined. However, it is an interesting reflection on the potential that human evolution and the development of machine learning could have a mutually-completing intersection.
The Buddha and Godhead may well, one day reside in the gears of a motorcycle transmission.
If a computer program has very little in the form of physical reality…it is encoded patterns of energy as information…yet may predictably become sentient..this is the godhead.
Computer programs are not bound by a particular physical space. They can be copied. What, then is the potential Digital Buddha. And what is there, therefore to assume that human Godhead is necessarily bound by physical human bodies. Transhumanism.
At the intersection point of humans cultivating logic and interfaces with digital devices and AIs using fuzzy logic to become sentient…there is the point when a new symbiotic Buddha may become possible.
When we are in a position to use symbols and information from digital formats as direct-access neural connections..and why aren’t our eyes exactly that type of system?…it is the storage of memories and the convergence of the simultaneously experienced digital-self and biological-self that will then possibly lead to the ability to transfer the self irrespective of the physical host.
Biosemiotics shows that we are information…bubbled up, layer after layer via fuzzy evolution to be humans. As we build fuzzy logic AIs, a kind of top down imitation of human evolution……digitical complexity to match our human evolutionary complexity.
Our evolutionary descendants may well own the stars and be independent of specific biological or mechanical hosting but capable of occupying either.
Google’s employee suggested that the corporation’s AI is a “child” – well it may be the metaphorical representation of a child of an early form of humanity.
Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind 