If you don't mind it doesn't matter

  Quality is not a thing.  It is an event…It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.  And because without objects there can be no subject—because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself—Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.   

                                                     Pirsig

     What is essential to understand at this point is that until [the Greek philosophers] there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance.  Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later.  The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, “Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,” and you have to say “Where were they?  Point to them!”  And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.

            

                                                      Pirsig

     What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else?  We have none whatsoever.  And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous.  Here is this dialectic, like Newton’s law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey?  It’s asinine.

    

                                                     Pirsig

In college I joined the bandwagon of Robert Pirsig fans when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  No one had spelled out Cartesian dualism so relevantly as Persig did with his presentation of the tension between the dynamic and static forces of the world.  Cartesian dualism is a bear, developed by philosophers all the way back from Plato and reinforced by monotheistic religions.  Gnosticism is only one of many monsters this western dualism has spawned over the millennia.  Pirsig does an impressive job of trying rise above the strangling opposition of subject and object, mind and matter, static and dynamic, by pointing us to the mystical pre-intellectual reality he names Quality.  I can think of nearly dozen discussions relating to Persig’s metaphysics, but I’m trying to stick to the deconstruction of the dualism, specifically the Gnosticism I grew up in and that which is still so prevalent today.

In Pirsig’s terminology, the fundamentalists of today are champions of the static.  Of the mind.  Of the sacred.  Of Truth.  Of the Word.  So deeply imbedded in our culture, we hardly see it, though we swim it in constantly.  We typically have a staunch belief in the ultimate power of the written word, whether it’s the constitution, court of law, science, or scripture.  Let me provide an example.  Western medicine places such a strong emphasis on word that they rename all the body parts in Latin.  Many doctors I know are notorious for using the least vernacular name of a muscle or disease in order to set them apart to make sure, you the lowly laymen, realize they have knowledge to set them apart.  (Your epidermis is showing!)  The very essence of medical education makes it hard not to adopt a gnostic stance towards the whole field.  I’ve heard the comparison of doctors to priests, western medicine to religion, hospitals and clinics to temples.  Anyone who has sat half-naked on that cold table/bed/chair thing, crinkling the paper cover, your feet dangling and wondering where the hell everyone has gone, has experienced the truth of the metaphor.  You’re the poor supplicant helplessly waiting for the priest to come save you.  And damn, don’t we pay out the nose for it.  And the diagnosis is as stubbornly gnostic as anything else.  You got to first name the ailment or sickness.  Only then will you know the right, the true, path to curing the patient.  

I’ve had the opportunity to be treated by some who practice Traditional Chinese Medicine.  In contrast to western medicine, TCMer’s are much more empirical in their approach, at least the ones I have had interaction with.  Sure, they attempt some sort of diagnosis when the patient comes in with certain symptoms, but it’s just to give them some momentum.  If one paradigm of viewing the body is not really curing the problem, they’ll shift to another school of thought.  The important thing is to bring the body back to health. It would be like a mathematician, when having trouble reconciling a complex problem, is willing to try and solve it using a non-Euclidean geometry.  The systems of logic are to serve the greater Good.  Other contrasts between oriental and western medicine hit me psychologically as well.  The realm of the mind and knowledge is often depicted as a barren, cold, and remote.  Seeing a western doctor, you may easily go through your whole appointment and never come into contact once.  Nurses, yes—seeing as they took your vital signs and stuff.  But the high priest maintains minimal contact, using his vast knowledge to decide which medicine is the correct one for your case.  And did I mention that cold, paper-crinkling, feet-dangling, table/bed/chair thingy?  In contrast, the TCMer’s I’ve known spend the majority of the appointment healing with their hands in a sort of painful “massage” called tui na.  And they make sure you stay warm, because that’s important for the blood to circulate freely.  Sure there are herbs and sometimes acupuncture and weird fire cup thingies, but the heart of it is human contact, changing your disjointed energies with their hands.  

I want to be clear that I’m not presently advocating eastern monism—that all is one.  It may very well be true metaphysically, but to bring monism to bear at this point of the discussion is way too impractical for me.  We are very analytic creatures.  Our culture has built a civilization based on the division of mind and matter.  I believe the path that returns to sanity is not one that just chucks everything into a cauldron to try and mix it together inseparably, but rather to acknowledge the categories and come to an understanding of how they can interrelate in a healthy symbiotic matrix rather than the historically antagonistic struggle for dominance.  So…back to the fundamentalists and religion.  The Muslims take it farthest with their scripture.  For them, the Quran is not just human writing inspired or even dictated by God, but is the actual thoughts of God written down by the Prophet.  Consequently, the real hardliners are opposed to even translating the Quran from the Arabic, because inevitably that would not hold exactly true to God’s thoughts.  Many Christians of today come quite close to the Muslim attitude towards scriptures.  In general, our culture believes that we learn what is right and wrong from the law, civil or religious.  Secular law still is understood by many to be good law according to the criteria of whether it functions well to serve the people.  However, here in America, a nation “under God”, the cultural mindset is conducive to bringing religious fervor to the constitution and subsequent law.  Fundamentally, it is a belief that the interrelationship between Truth and Goodness is that the latter flows from the former.  The mind forms matter.  The static informs and controls the dynamic.  God spoke and, through the logos—the rational, logical Word—created the world.  

Pirsig suggested that the reality is much different.  Behind the categories of static and dynamic is the pre-intellectual Quality which manifests itself on both sides of the perceived schism.  There is static quality and there is dynamic quality.  However, Pirsig capitalized Dynamic Quality, because it is much closer to the source, closer to Quality.  Though more remote, more rigid, the static is needed to provide structure to the dynamic, the creative, the pulsing quickening of life.  Without the controlling structure of the static quality, the Dynamic Quality would tear itself apart into chaos.  It needs to be controlled to be sustained, but it remains the driving force.  To name and analyze something is to attempt to control it.  Properly done, this is important in order to sustain life.  With this construct, Goodness becomes the driving force, and Truth and law is simply there to structure it.  Also, mind attempts to control and mold matter, but ultimately the movement is down/up and not up/down.  Societies, intelligence, morality is not so much created by some transcendent being, but rather is a sustainable structure that emerges out from the Dynamic Quality.  In this sense, matter emerges into mind.