Every so many years I start thinking anew about Robert Pirsig, the author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I’ve written about him and his ideas before on this blog; I even mentioned the short letter that I received from Mr. Pirsig in response to my own letter to him. “Zen and the Art” was a big phenomenon in the late 70’s. I finally read it in ’82, and I was really moved by it. It seemed to me and to millions of others like a life-changing book, the kind of book you’re lucky to come across every 20 years or so. (Caveat: Pirsig might well have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I probably have a lite version of it myself. As such, “Zen and the Art” is an Aspie-tinted view of the world, which may help explain why I found it so moving.)

But Pirsig turned out to be a “one-hit wonder”. He wrote another book, Lila, which has mostly been forgotten; and mercifully so. Pirsig tried to contain the power that he somehow mustered in “Zen and the Art” within a body of written philosophy, his “Method of Quality” or MOQ; but he couldn’t do it. There are still a lot of people on the web discussing MOQ, even though the academic philosophical institutions never accepted it. I tried to get interested in MOQ and in the discussion community gathered around it, but I couldn’t maintain my enthusiasm. And yet, the experience of “Zen and the Art” still haunts me from time to time, and I’m in one of those haunted phases right now. A little, anyway; the echos fade as the years go by.

Anyway, over the past few years I’ve become highly interested in “philosophy of mind” and its various issues, especially the connection between human consciousness, i.e. our experiences and feelings, and the physical workings of the brain. How does the equivalent of a slab of meat with a lot of tiny electrical connections within it create a subjective world of love, hate, greed, nobility, faith, despair, hope, beauty, joy, etc.? One of the key concepts in mental philosophy is “qualia”, the conceptual “unit” of mental experience. I, along with a lot of true philosophers, have been pondering the question of what qualia might be (if it really is anything at all). In one of my recent ponderings, I recalled how Pirsig was so mesmerized by the concept of “quality”. Quality, qualia . . . could there be a connection? Was Pirsig saying something profound about the nature of our minds, about the mystery of the mind-brain relationship?

Actually, he wasn’t. In fact, it may be the other way around. The whole mind-brain problem might be saying something about the mystery of Pirsig and his religious devotion to a metaphysical concept that he calls “quality”. Pirsig’s “MOQ” is very interesting and provides a lot of interesting insights and alternate ways of considering various and sundry issues. But in the end it isn’t really a consistent philosophy. It’s an odd assemblage of notions that have attracted Robert Pirsig’s interest over the past 80 some-odd years of his life. MOQ can probably tell us something about almost anything; e.g. what is the rationale for the making of laws, when does human life begin, what is free will, should the rich assume a greater share of the tax burden, etc. But it really can’t get to the true nature of any of those issues. In a way, it’s an attempt to do what Martin Heidegger did with the concept of “being”, i.e. Dasein. Heidegger wrote a very broad philosophy around the idea of “being”, and is recognized as one of the major philosophers of the 20th Century. Pirsig obviously wanted to go that route.

I think that “being” is ultimately the key to human consciousness, the “om” of the universe. It is THE THING which adds an existential dimension to our sense perceptions and makes us “feel alive”. Heidegger ultimately went off the rails in his attempt to “bottle” the concept of “being”. That’s apparent by his support for national socialism in Germany, well after its dark intentions regarding the Jewish population became apparent in the mid 1930s. Pirsig’s MOQ is much more innocent, much less political, but ultimately no more powerful than Heideggerism. But like Heidegger, Pirsig was trying to capture the consciousness butterfly; and fell off the ledge in doing so. He finally did capture something, but it wasn’t the shocking power that he named “quality”. Just as Heidegger, in his books and articles, and in the life that he lived finally captured something much less pure than whatever first inspired him to chase the concept of “being”.

Not that I’m doing any better than either of them in capturing that which gives our lives its pizzazz or quality or “being” or vividness or whatever you want to call it. It may well be a hopeless quest; but it is fun. So, fool that I am, I won’t stop trying. I may not write a memorable book, and hopefully I won’t support a repugnant cause. But if nothing else, the quest for . . . . whatever you want to call it . . . makes life more interesting!