QUALITY: A Summer Book Club with CJ The X (Patreon)

TL;DR: starting a temporary book club from June-August 2022 of Robert Pirsig's philosophical works on Quality. Acquire Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a book / free PDF online and join me.

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Quality.

What is it?

You know what has it and what doesn’t, but when you attempt to define it, you have nothing to hold onto.

Everyone likes quality. Everyone seeks it. But what is it?

Why do people disagree on it?

Why do people agree on it?

Is quality different between art and science?

Is the quality you find in a church the same as the quality you find at a rap show?

How do we define this thing pervading every moment of our lives, rarely acknowledged except in opinion and feeling?

Is that all quality is? A feeling?

A subjective whim?

I have always thought there is an objectivity to excellence.

It is real. It is not imagined. We shouldn’t reduce it to unreality.

And yet any person purporting to know the objective mark of excellence quickly reveals themselves to be a close minded enforcer of their personal preference.

So what is quality?

What is it?

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Robert Pirsig was a teacher, a philosopher and an engineer.

He wrote only two books in his lifetime.

Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974, then Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals in 1991.

He died in 2017.

I found him in 2021.

In 2022, his widowed wife released a compilation of letters, lectures and excerpts from his two books.

The book is called On Quality, and it’s her attempt to give Robert Pirsig’s philosophy of Quality one more thrust into public consciousness.

This coincides with my personal discovery of his philosophy.

His treatises on Quality are unconventional, constructed as narrative fictionalizations of his life to varying degrees of biographical verisimilitude. But in between the idiosyncrasy and personal confessional angst, there are brilliant thoughts interrogating this undefinable but unavoidable concept of Quality.

We start with the disconnect between science and art. Objectivity and subjectivity. Romantic and classic experience.

Then we start to unify both under the banner of value.

Values.

Meaning.

Quality.

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In my Objectively Bad Art essay, I posited that objectivity and subjectivity should both be used in pursuit of “usefulness”. I found this to be persuasive in its common sense and practicality, but it asks for tacit agreement as to what is “useful”, often defined by mass consensus.

And mass consensus is something, but not everything.

New controversial game changing ideas don’t come from compromise and agreeability, they come from individuality and transgression.

So there’s this pulsating two pronged assault on nothingness in pursuit of Quality and usefulness, attacking with objectivity and subjectivity and consensus and individuality and intuition and analysis and feelings and facts and it’s all in service of Quality.

But what is Quality? What is useful? What is meaningful?

You can’t say meaning doesn’t exist, of course it does, that’s why we do anything. We either subjectively create meaning or we perceive objective meaning and move towards it.

But things mean things.

Value exists.

Quality is real. Quality is everything. Without quality we simply wouldn’t move or do anything.

SO WHAT THE FUCK IS QUALITY?!~!?

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Expect that video in September, around my 25th birthday.

In preparation I will be rereading Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, then finally On Quality which succinctly summarizes and supplements both.

I invite any Patrons and fans and friends who are interested in joining me to do so.

There’ll be a weekly Patreon text threads to post quotes and discuss them, and monthly livestreams between June and August to have longer conversations about the entire volumes.

I personally own the books, however free PDFs for Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila are immediately available with a single google search, and libraries are free and under-utilized.

Both of the main books are approximately 400 pages, so each week’s discussion thread will cover approximately 100 pages. That’s not strict, just a logical goalpost to erect, spoilers aren’t a major factor here, and there is plenty to discuss in each 100 pages.

The final thing I’d like to emphasize is the importance of the mixed format in which Pirsig presents his ideas. His life was a hard one, he experienced isolation, anxiety, and personal tragedy, and despite his immense passion and intellect his philosophy of Quality was largely maligned by the academic world that he sought to change.

The philosophy is not presented pure and unbiased. It is biased by design.

An excerpt from Robert Pirsig’s student address at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design on March 20, 1974.

“The problem that was bothering me most about the writing was that, although I’m speaking out of my heart, it comes out on paper like somebody’s talking from a pulpit, pontificating. I didn’t know how to beat this. Whenever you write your private, personal thoughts and put them in essay form, and somebody else reads them, the vision that that person gets is that you are sort of high and mighty and talking down. I really wanted to avoid that, but I didn’t know how to avoid that problem.

I didn’t know what the answer was until we got to Los Angeles on the motorcycle, and there, in the middle of Hollywood, I thought, “Well, why not put the whole blessed essay in the mouth of a narrator who is on a motorcycle trip?” Then we get another dimension to the entire story. Now we no longer have a person taking from a pulpit. We have a person out in front, out in the open, in real life, a person who has errors, who has failings, who has weaknesses, who doesn’t know where he’s been, who doesn’t know where he’s going, but who nevertheless has to try to make sense out of this thing as he goes. I wanted this essay to be delivered by somebody who is in the human situation. And so that became the basic format of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

So he and I have a bit of presentation ethos in common.

Join me in reading this summer if compelled.

(Thank you for your financing, there is so much coming this year. All of it Quality.)