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Henry Gurr ZMMQ SiteMaster 23 October 2022, 7 July 2023, April 20, 2024.

This Is A WebPage Which Introduces => '' Robert Pirsig, Michael Polanyi, & Owen Barfield, And Discusses Their Works.

Included Is Valuable Information About Their Contributions To Understanding The Natural Process Of Our Mind And How To Conduct Good Scientific Investigation.

You Also Will Find Major Articles Which Are=> “A Comparison of Robert Pirsig & Michael Polanyi”. Also Owen Barfield.

BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPTS FROM WIKIPEDIA =>
Robert Maynard Pirsig (/ˈpɜːrsɪɡ/; September 6, 1928 – April 24, 2017) was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974) and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), and he co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings (2022) along with his wife (now widow) and editor, Wendy Pirsig.[1]
… In the course of his studies, Pirsig became intrigued by the multiplicity of putative causes for a given phenomenon, and increasingly focused on the role played by hypotheses in the scientific method and sources from which they originate. His preoccupation with these matters led to a decline in his grades and expulsion from the university.[7]
… In 1946, Pirsig enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed in South Korea until 1948. Upon his discharge from the Army, he lived for several months in Seattle, Washington, and then returned to the University of Minnesota, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1950.[8] He subsequently studied philosophy at Banaras Hindu University in India and the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. In 1958 he earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota.
… In 1958, he became a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, and taught creative writing courses for two years. Shortly thereafter he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[10]
… Pirsig's published writing consists most notably of two books. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, delves into Pirsig's exploration into the nature of quality. Ostensibly a first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris had taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of Western culture. He also gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle as part of an ongoing dispute between universalists, admitting the existence of universals, and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig finds in "Quality" a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig
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BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPTS FROM WIKIPEDIA =>
Michael Polanyi FRS (/poʊˈlænji/; Hungarian: Polányi Mihály; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies a false account of knowing, which if taken seriously undermines humanity's highest achievements.
… His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. He pioneered the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in 1921, and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals and other materials in 1934. He immigrated to Germany, in 1926 becoming a chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils, and his son John Charles Polanyi won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. In 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society.
… The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences include an understanding of tacit knowledge, and the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order to intellectual inquiry were developed in the context of his opposition to central planning.
… In October 1918, Mihály Károlyi established the Hungarian Democratic Republic, and Polanyi became Secretary to the Minister of Health. When the Communists seized power in March 1919, he returned to medicine. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown, Polanyi immigrated to Karlsruhe in Germany, and was invited by Fritz Haber to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie (fiber chemistry) in Berlin. In 1923 he converted to Christianity, and in a Roman Catholic ceremony married Magda Elizabeth Kemeny. In 1926 he became the professorial head of department of the Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie (now the Fritz Haber Institute). In 1929, Magda gave birth to their son John, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986. Their other son, George Polanyi, who predeceased him, became a well-known economist.
… His experience of runaway inflation and high unemployment in Weimar Germany led Polanyi to become interested in economics. With the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazi party, he accepted a chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils, Eugene Wigner and Melvin Calvin went on to win a Nobel Prize. Because of his increasing interest in the social sciences, Manchester University created a new chair in Social Science (1948–58) for him.
… In 1944 Polanyi was elected a member of the Royal Society, and on his retirement from the University of Manchester in 1958 he was elected a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 1962 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[Here, Skip Wikipedia paragraphs to the following that shows several of many important Polanyi contributions, as judged by Henry Gurr.
…The below Wikipedia statements Re Polanyi’s conclusions are strongly supported by Henry Gurr’s “Explanation (Theory) of How Our Mind Works” and conversely. ]

… Tacit knowledge, as distinct from explicit knowledge, is an influential term developed by Polanyi in The Tacit Dimension to describe the idea of know-how, the ability to do something without necessarily being able to articulate it or even be aware of all its dimensions: for example, being able to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument without being able to fully explain the details of how it happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi
… Summarized in the slogan "We can know more than we can tell", Polanyi's paradox is mainly to explain the cognitive phenomenon that there exist many tasks which we, human beings, understand intuitively how to perform but cannot verbalize their rules or procedures.
… This "self-ignorance" is common to many human activities, from driving a car in traffic to face recognition. As Polanyi argues, humans are relying on their tacit knowledge, which is difficult to adequately express by verbal means, when engaging these tasks.[2] Polanyi's paradox has been widely considered to identify a major obstacle in the fields of AI and automation, since programming an automated task or system is difficult unless a complete and fully specific description of the procedure is available. [Skip paragraphs]
… As a prelude to The Tacit Dimension, in his book Personal Knowledge (1958), Polanyi claims that all knowing is personal, emphasizing the profound effects of personal feelings and commitments on the practice of science and knowledge. Arguing against the then dominant Empiricists view that minds and experiences are reducible to sense data and collections of rules, he advocates a post-positivist approach that recognizes human knowledge is often beyond their explicit expression. Any attempt to specify tacit knowing only leads to self-evident axioms that cannot tell us why we should accept them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi%27s_paradox
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BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPTS FROM WIKIPEDIA =>
Arthur Owen Barfield (9 November 1898 – 14 December 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings.
… Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth (née Shoults; 1860–1940) and Arthur Edward Barfield (1864–1938). He had three elder siblings: Diana (1891–1963), Barbara (1892–1951), and Harry (1895–1977). He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America. Barfield published numerous essays, books, and articles. His primary focus was on what he called the "evolution of consciousness," which is an idea which occurs frequently in his writings. He is best known as the author of Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry and as a founding father of Anthroposophy in the English speaking world.
… In 1923 he married the musician and choreographer Maud Douie. They had two children, Alexander and Lucy; and fostered Geoffrey. Their sole grandchild is Owen A. Barfield, son of Alexander. After the death of his wife in 1980 he spent his final years in a retirement hotel in Forest Row, East Sussex.
NOTE: In the Michael Polanyi section above, important passages re “Tacit knowledge” are bolded by HSG. And therein you saw Polanyi’s slogan => "We can know more than we can tell". …
… This is an almost exact parallel (for the same basic “How Our Mind Works: reasons) to Owen Barfield’s => "Words mean more than they say"

WIKIPEDIA EXCERPT EXPLANATION => The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Barfield.
… Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling." He had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis and, through his books The Silver Trumpet and Poetic Diction (dedicated to Lewis), an appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien.[2] Their contribution, and their conversations, persuaded both Tolkien and Lewis that myth and metaphor have always had a central place in language and literature. "The Inklings work… taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalisation of Christian intellectual and imaginative life."[3]
… Barfield and C. S. Lewis met in 1919 as students at Oxford University and were close friends for 44 years. "It is no exaggeration to say that his friendship with Barfield was one of the most important in his [Lewis's] life…" The friendship was reciprocal. Almost a year after Lewis's death, Barfield spoke of his friendship in a talk in the USA: "Now, whatever he was, and as you know, he was a great many things, CS Lewis was for me, first and foremost, the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over 40 years, the friend you might come to regard hardly as another human being, but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence.”[4] When they met, Lewis was an atheist who told Barfield, "I don’t accept God!"[5] Barfield was influential in converting Lewis. Lewis came to see that there were two kinds of friends, a first friend with whom you feel at home and agree (Lewis's close friend Arthur Greeves was an example of this) and a second friend who brings to you a different point of view.[6] He found Barfield's contribution in this way particularly helpful despite, or because of, the fact that "during the 1920s, the two were to engage in a long dispute over Barfield's (and their mutual friend, A.C. Harwood's) connection to anthroposophy and the kind of knowledge that imagination can give us… which they affectionately called 'The Great War'.[7] Through their conversations, Lewis gave up materialist realism – the idea that our sensible world is self-explanatory and is all that there is – and moved closer to what he had always disparagingly referred to as “supernaturalism.” To See Barfield Discussion Of “Participation”, Click Here.
… These conversations influenced Lewis towards writing his Narnia series. As well as being friend and teacher to Lewis, Barfield was (professionally) his legal adviser and trustee.
… Barfield was an important intellectual influence on Lewis. Lewis wrote his 1949 book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first Narnia chronicle, for his friend's adopted daughter Lucy Barfield and dedicated it to her. He also dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Barfield's son Geoffrey in 1952. Barfield also influenced his scholarship and world view. He dedicated his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love (1936) to his 'wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,' stating in its preface that he asked no more than to disseminate Barfield's literary theory and practice.[9] Barfield's more than merely intellectual approach to philosophy is illustrated by a well-known interchange that took place between himself and Lewis, which Lewis did not forget. Lewis one day made the mistake of referring to philosophy as "a subject." "It wasn't a subject to Plato," said Barfield, "it was a way".[10] In the third lecture of The Abolition of Man (1947), Lewis suggests that Barfield's mentor, Rudolf Steiner, may have found the way to a "redeemed scientific method that does not omit the qualities of the observed object".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Barfield

”The Marion E. Wade Center .. Offers A Collection Of Resources Available Nowhere Else In The World. Emphasized is the ongoing relevance of seven British Christian authors [“The Inklings”] who provide a distinctive blend of intellect, imagination, and faith: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams.
…At our facility in Wheaton IL => The Wade Center implements these goals by => Assisting scholars in their study of unique materials by and about these seven authors in order to generate new understandings;”

A Comparison Of Robert Pirsig & Michael Polanyi.

An Excellent Comparison Of Pirsig Vs Polanyi In This => Review of Robert M. Pirsig’s “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals”. (New York: Bantam Books, 1991) 409pp. Reviewer: Richard Gelwick, University of New England.

… When I first read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, I wished that I could have written about Polanyi's philosophy with such narrative and literary skill. It seemed clear then that Robert Pirsig was assaulting with marvelous insight and imagination the same destructive cultural disease of scientific objectivism as Polanyi. Pirsig, like Polanyi, was effectively exposing the sickness arising from the mistaken understanding of how science discovers and knows the world. Through a story of a journey on a motorcycle across the United States, Pirsig was showing the inadequacy of a mechanistic and positivist philosophy of life. To the advantage of all concerned about this problem, Pirsig has reached millions through the popularity of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, while Polanyi's work touches mainly an intellectual elite in colleges and universities. The actual connection between Pirsig's thought and the thought of Michael Polanyi never came to light until the centennial celebrations of Polanyi's life and work in 1991-1992. As coordinator of The Polanyi Society, I was organizing a centennial celebration at Harvard Divinity School sponsored by the Faith and Science Exchange of the Boston Theological Institute. A few months earlier my spouse had given me an audio tape of Pirsig's new novel, Lila, to enjoy during my commute to the medical school.
… Again, I was astounded at the congruence of Pirsig's and Polanyi's thought. Shortly afterwards, I heard Pirsig interviewed on National Public Broadcasting's "All Things Considered" and learned that he was in the New England area. I decided to invite Robert Pirsig to the conference. In his reply Pirsig said: "I hadn't heard of Michael Polanyi when your letter arrived, but on the basis of it went to the library and looked at four books about him including your own very well written volume. As far as I was able to see, the Metaphysics of Quality certainly does seem to extend in the direction of Polanyi's thought. I could find no direct conflict at all." Robert Pirsig came and listened throughout the Friday evening and all day Saturday meetings at Harvard. At the closing session, when he was called upon to make some remarks, Pirsig said that "he felt like Robinson Crusoe who had come upon footprints in the sand and discovered that he was not alone, but someone else was also working on the same problem." At that moment, it seemed that Pirsig felt he shared a common philosophical concern with Michael Polanyi. But a few months later, Pirsig write to me:

… Taking Pirsig's new book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” as the statement of what Pirsig is arguing for, we can see truth both in Pirsig's initial and later reflection on Polanyi and his own philosophy. Pirsig is a gifted and profound thinker making a significant contribution toward the enrichment of human meaning in a morally confused age. Like Polanyi, Pirsig sees our society as captive to the disease of scientific objectivism. Further, they share similar views about the undermining of morality by scientific objectivism, about a multilevel reality, about the need for an alternative philosophy, and about a host of related issues such as computers, democracy, and ambiguity too numerous to detail here.
… Yet there is a distinctive difference, and the difference may prove to be complementary and creative. The overt story line of Lila is about the sailing journey of an American writer named Phaedrus who is cruising toward New York City down the Hudson River. Sailing alone, Phaedrus awakens one morning next to Lila sleeping in his berth. Then he begins to remember how he had met her the night before in a bar where he and other sailors had gathered. Lila asks if she can continue on his boat, and Phaedrus consents. But the journey is complicated by two obstacles. One is the behavior of Lila who seems broken, angry, isolated, self-destructive, and desperate yet vital, struggling, and in a world of illusion. The other obstacle is the philosophical meaning of Lila's character in which Phaedrus becomes involved as he considers whether Lila has "quality." This question comes about as Lila's former lover and friend, Rigel, warns Phaedrus to stay away from her.
… Pirsig never says that the writer is himself, but it seems that some aspects of the writer's life are similar to Pirsig's life: the writer has published a successful novel, has interest in Indian philosophy, and has suffered mental anguish as Pirsig did over the violent murder of his son.
… "Quality" is a key term in Pirsig's attempt to discuss the metaphysics of morals as Phaedrus sails on in the intriguing voyage of understanding who we are and what is real and good. Pirsig's skill as a writer produces vivid and natural discussions about the origins of American character, our debt to native Americans, the flaws of objectivist cultural anthropology, the error of subject-object dualism, the nature of tradition and change, the way matter evolves from inorganic to bio logical to social and to intellectual patterns, and the bearing of all of these issues on the future of humanity. Polanyi and Pirsig use very different modes of discourse, but they are both passionate and unafraid to take a stand against the mainstream of modern thought. In fact, they both are polemical and persuasive. Unlike Polanyi, Pirsig is an artist, and his writing carries many levels of meaning. The form of the book is a novel, but it is a philosophical investigation. Also, the name of the book and the central person, Lila, are literary devices. Lila can be just a name, or it can also be a clue and a symbol used by a writer who is a student of Asian thought and knows that in Sanskrit lila is a noun meaning "sacred play," indicating the joyful and free creativity of the divine. By the book's title Lila we are being told something about the importance of the person whom Rigel and others call a whore. Phaedrus, the name of the storyteller recounting the voyage with Lila, is also a clue in its connections with the Phaedrus of Plato's dialogues and also of Pirsig's prior book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All of this is to say that there is a lot going on in this novel, both an interesting story and also a metaphysical dialogue. Pirsig makes an argument and a case, but unlike Polanyi, his view is more related to the ordinary world people live in, the world of juke boxes and junk food, of plastic and of television. Yet Pirsig is analyzing it and showing its urgent need for a philosophy that will give it a practical morality for a technological era.
… The principal argument of the book is for a "Metaphysics of Quality." In the story of Phaedrus and Lila, we discover that the scientific outlook has created a "cultural immune system" that prevents us from seeing the centrality of values {Lila, 51). Values are a form of quality, a term Pirsig uses to return us to this fundamental category. Quality cannot be defined, but it is the universal source of all things (Lila, 76). Quality is more empirical than subject and object. Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world.
… The book ends with these summarizing lines: Good is a noun. ... Good as a noun rather than an adjective … is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn't a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence that would be it. (Lila, 409) The way Pirsig develops this conclusion is what makes this work interesting. Pirsig lines up in story form most of the champions of scientific objectivism from cultural anthropology to logical positivism and refutes their claims by appeal to experience and logic.

Five Points Stand Out As To Me Similarities Between Polanyi And Pirsig.
… The first is that both are moralists like Socrates who influenced philosophy and the world out of a concern for the breakdown of the moral fabric of his own society.
… Polanyi starts from the violence of the twentieth century, unleashed by the destruction of moral standards caused by science classifying them as subjective and unscientific. Pirsig, too, sees in American society a drive toward freedom being undermined because its subject-object science has no place for morals. "Morals have no objective reality”. You can look through a microscope or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral'.
… The second is that they both reject the dichotomy of the knower and the known, of subject and of object. Their alternatives differ here though, in that Polanyi places his emphasis on epistemology and spends most of his time showing how we are essential participants in all that we know. Pirsig emphasizes metaphysics of value and shows that value or quality is prior to any division of subject and object. Either of them would deny that there is such a thing as an impersonal knower, as believed by the modem objectivist scientific outlook.
… The third is that they both reject the reductionist approach to reality that recognizes only what can be analyzed by the principles of physics and chemistry.
… Further, their view of reality is a multileveled, evolutionary one. Polanyi spoke of a stratified universe evolving from inorganic to organic then to plants and animals and now to humans who can be responsible for their destiny. Pirsig similarly sees an evolution of patterns of quality from inorganic to biological then to social and finally to intellectual. Both see in each ascending level an independence and novelty, yet also a need for the lower one.
… The fourth is the menace of what Polanyi called "moral inversion" and Pirsig sees as "amoral objectivity." Both see that the crisis of our culture is in failing to have moral standards that can channel biological energy through social customs and the search for truth. A dynamic but stable social order can provide opportunity for the intellect to explore and to create a better society. But both Polanyi and Pirsig see modern intellectuals as destroying their ability to lead by denying the validity of morality itself.
… ''' The fifth is a belief in a growing and changing tradition. Each sees the danger of absolute answers and views, and shows a way of preserving both tradition and discovery. Polanyi saw a generalized authority represented by tradition open to reform as the way of science. Pirsig sees a difference between stable quality and dynamic quality in the way a free society can choose to follow the values that are the most practical for them. Both share a true democrat's belief in human perception seeking what is real or of quality. It is this belief in the human hunger for the real, that keeps Phaedrus pursuing the quality of Lila. For at times, her face is like the center of a screen with a light behind it trying to shine through.
… The biggest difference between Polanyi and Pirsig is in what Pirsig himself noticed. Polanyi's program, though trying to overthrow the dichotomy in knowing between subject and object that led to objectivism, did argue in the subject and object framework.
… However, in Polanyi's tacit knowing theory, he showed that the inseparability of knower and known is also found in the order of being. Polanyi finds that the principles of part to whole integration in knowing are also found in the evolutionary development of matter.
… Pirsig, instead of bringing subject and object together, starts with their unity through value. "Between the subject and object lies the value" (66). Pirsig finds values or quality to be prior and more basic. Despite this difference, there is enough common ground between Polanyi and Pirsig to make them allies in the struggles to free the human spirit for good. The tragedy of Lila's life is that she has strong biological energy but she has become lost in a social order that has poisoned her intellect so that she cannot be herself. Her only refuge becomes a world of illusion. Or in Polanyi's terms, Lila is a case of American nihilism. Through Lila we can learn much from Pirsig about how to deal with this continuing nihilism.
END REVIEW.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MICHAEL POLYANI.

Polanyi's Theory Of Meaning: Exposition, Elaboration, And Reconstruction. by Walter B. Gulick (USA)

… In the last 15 years of his life, Michael Polanyi, having demonstrated the importance of the personal element in knowledge, especially in scientific knowledge, increasingly concentrated his philosophical attention on clarifying two issues: (1) the nature of the tacit processes underlying human cognition and (2) the types of meaning which are produced by tacit integrations and become manifest in culture. Polanyi's final work, Meaning, which he wrote in collaboration with Harry Prosch, summarizes the results of his inquiry and provides a taxonomy of different types of meaning. I find this to be a highly suggestive work, a compendium of creative insights. Yet little to date has been done either to critique or build upon Polanyi's taxonomy of meaning. One reason which thinkers influenced by Polanyi have given for their neglect of Meaning [ie this book] is that it seems to reopen a gap between science and the humanities which Personal Knowledge had bridged. Another reason, to which I will attend, is that Meaning is not without flaws. I see my task in this article as one of exposition, criticism, consolidation, and reconstruction. This is carried out in the belief that Polanyi's theory of meaning, properly modified and developed, is a rich, virtually untapped resource for contemporary thought.
… Polanyi's notion of meaning is quite different from the usual sorts of understanding of meaning employed by philosophers. Therefore, several preliminary remarks will be offered to provide some orientation to the ensuing discussion.
…It cannot be emphasized enough that Polanyi understands meaning to be experiential in nature. Knowledge requires a knower. There is no Platonic realm of meaning which exists apart from the integrative activities of living beings. Yet several precautions are needed when interpreting or applying this basic Polanyian point. First, Polanyi would be misunderstood if he were simply labeled a subjectivist, an idealist, or a constructivist because of his emphasis on the creation of meaning. For, second, Polanyi imputes to the indeterminate powers of tacit knowing a capacity to comprehend significant structures of reality. Although Polanyi does not strongly emphasize the point, he clearly believes, third, that such an intelligent capacity to appropriate key features of an environment and meaningfully respond to them is a survival mechanism which has evolved through time. As experiential, then, meaning has an event-like rather than a substance-like quality, and it allows humans to cope with the realities they face. However, in this essay attention will not be directed to those realities — not to meanings understood in the sense of objects denoted or items referred to — but to the experiential dimension of meaning.
…Another preliminary observation about Polanyi's theory of meaning is in order. It is to his everlasting credit that Polanyi broadened the conception of meaning so that it is no longer merely an outgrowth of linguistic theories. The key to meaning is not intension and extension, syntax and semantics, or association and reference. Polanyi places meaning in the context of life as such. It is more than just a characteristic of human rationality or the use of language. When animals sense their prey, detect a storm coming, or build a home, they are engaged in activities endowed with meaning.

… The subject of this paper, however, will focus primarily on different types of human meaning construction. Even within this limited range, Polanyi's understanding of meaning is far broader than is usually considered. All sorts of skills, for example, are seen by Polanyi to be meaningful. A dictum of Polanyi's notion of personal meaning is that "we can know more than we can tell" (PK x; TD 4); just so, we are involved in meanings we may not be able to articulate.
… In utilizing a broad definition of meaning, Polanyi may be thought to follow the path laid
out by Charles Sanders Peirce or semiotic theory. That would be a mistaken inference. Peirce's notion of meaning is even more general than Polanyi's: virtually any relationship of one thing to another is meaningful for Peirce. Meaning may exist apart from one who means. Polanyi avoids this incipient Platonism of Peirce; he restricts meaning to the products of tacit integrations of living beings.
… These preliminary remarks are intended to circumscribe the distinctively Polanyian theory of meaning. In the balance of this article I will attempt to survey what lies within those limits but also explore ideas beyond. In a first section, the essential characteristics of his theory of meaning and consciousness will be outlined. This section of critical exposition will be followed, secondly, by an attempt to elaborate upon Polanyi's theory in search of general characteristics of experiential meaning in general. The third and final section will use Polanyi's discussion of meaning in Meaning as the inspiration for a taxonomy of the types of meaning. This section will require a certain amount of reconstruction of Polanyi's thought. Thus the essay will lead from exposition through elaboration to reconstruction.
Click Here For Walter B. Gulick’s Complete Article.

… NOTE: Please pay especial close attention to Gulick’s sentence above that has in it the phrase => “Polanyi's final work, Meaning” This is a VERY VALUABLE BOOK, in that it very well brings together & summarizes, in an especially clear overall manner, Polanyi’s a conclusions concerning his ideas called “Personal Knowledge”, which are in-turn very closely connected to his ideas called “Tacit knowledge”.
…Thus, for this book “Polanyi's final work, Meaning” -> I totally agree with Gulick’s above statement => [it] “summarizes the results of his inquiry and provides a taxonomy of different types of meaning. I find this to be a highly suggestive work, a compendium of creative insights.”
… Please know that Polanyi has written a huge number of books, articles about these topics (bold above) , and in this voluminous literature it is very difficult to get an overall understand what Polanyi is driving at. … Believe me … I know this from direct experience. Thus “Polanyi's final work, Meaning” is the best way to really begin your understanding of Polanyi Wisdom!

Adding To The The Above, Henry Gurr Says =>
1) Clearly the abilities Polanyi calls, Tacit Knowledge, any person can directly observe operative in their own direct experience!! And such observations, are in essence, experimental confirmation of Polanyi !!! AND
2) Most academic philosophers do NOT have in their writing anything close to this. They go in the opposite direction => Logical Positivism. Ditto for Behaviorists. … Ken McClure has a good write-up on this in his "Poetry & Evolution of Consciousness", Chapter 2, on Edmund Wilson. (Which suddenly, more recently, made me think => This is related to the attitudes of the Victorians essentially denying they had a body, when came to sex. )
3) But (contrary to above 2) concerning philosophers,) there is the exception of the Pragmatists, starting with William James.
4) Included with the Pragmatist in many ways is, is Robert Pirsig’s book ZMM. Also books by Owen Barfield, but to a lesser degree.
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While Googling For Information About Michael Polanyi, I Was Reminded Of This Valuable Book => Drusilla Scott's "Everyman Revived: The Common Sense Of Michael Polanyi." Book Guild Limited, 1985).
… In this book about Michael Polanyi and his conclusions about how our mind (and science) works, Lady Scott... "critically takes account of ideas set forth in Polanyi’s book "Meaning" at a number of points, but perhaps she is at her most interesting when showing that Polanyi misunderstood what Coleridge meant by ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’; Polanyi and Coleridge are actually saying much the same thing.”
… Also, discussed is what Jerry Rudolph and Henry Gurr have been saying => Lady Scott expands nicely, and at length, on Polanyi’s human (and animal) abilities that Polanyi calls tacit knowledge.
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A Comparison of Robert Pirsig & Owen Barfield. By Henry Gurr.

The Three Most Significant Areas of Agreement Between Pirsig & Barfield Are A) Destructive Misleading Effects of “Dualisms”, the Most Pervasive (And The Most Destructive) Dualism B) Being Subjective vs Objective. AND C) Both Pirsig & Barfield, Are Careful To Point Out That => Our Modern Form Of Thinking In Terms Of Subjects & Objects Was Not Known Before A Certain Period Of History!

A Question From ZMM Enthusiast Bodvar Studvick => “Does Barfield] Actually Point To The Subject/Object Dualism As A Possible Cause Of Loss Of Original Participation Or Is It You Interpreting Him That Way?”
…My Henry Gurr answers are these => The whole topic of existence of “Subjective Objective Split” (SOS), and related Dualisms, (using Pirsig ZMM language), is exceedingly important to understand, and just how it came to pass and how limiting, nay destructive.
…We can well learn these from Pirsig and Barfield, and their concerns and answers are distributed throughout their writing.
…Both RP and OB seem to have arrived at their Subject-Object conclusions INDEPENDENTLY, which makes their assertions of S-O (& derived conclusions) all the more likely to be true, and useful, as follows =>
…As both RP and OB so aptly lay out before us, it is none other than Subjective-Objective thinking in science & technology, that has enabled the so very successful emergence of modern science starting ~1700’s. We see that RP and OB have mutually supportive points of view =>

E) So RP and OB (and HSG), say that “the subject/object dualism is a major problem in our modern times, and point also to the loss in belief in ghosts. which Barfield calls the Loss of Original Participation.

F) But from both RP and OB, we see that, Science by itself (however vastly wonderfully successful), is NOT a complete answer (socially or philosophically) AND has it’s own problems!!

G) In view of this. better is needed: And we will get guidance, by fully read and fully understand both RP and OB (not to mention Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, John K Sheriff, Pragmatists Philos, and others), to see the usefulness of their:

1) MOQ and Quality for Pirsig

2) Final Participation for Barfield.

3) Personal Knowledge for Polanyi

***********

Back in September 13, 1994, Henry Gurr Sent Mr. Robert Pirsig Excerpts From Mr. Owen Barfield’s below-mentioned Appendix IV, Which Supports ZMM Discussions Of How Subject-Object Split Originated Way-Back In History.
The following is an excerpt from For Mr Robert Pirsig’s Complete Reply Letter, Click Here.
…Thank you for the chapter from Barfield. It's always a pleasure to read someone who says exactly what you already think. It was not made clear enough in Lila, but the Metaphysics of Quality resolves the subject-object problem by containing it at a high level so that there really is no contradiction between the two systems of metaphysics. The MOQ says that the two lower levels of static patterns of quality—inorganic and biological—are exactly synonymous with what is called "objective." The two upper levels—social and intellectual—are exactly synonymous with what is called "subjective." The terms "objective" and "subjective" are no longer needed in any way. They should be avoided as imprecise and confusing. If you get in the habit of stopping every time you see the word "subjective" or "objective" and substitute the appropriate static value level, you will find a lot of fallacious thinking suddenly becomes very apparent, particularly in the social sciences.”
******************
A Google search for Barfield Book “Poetic Diction” AppendixIV SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE, leads directly to this full text of Barfield’s Appendix IV, where you should first read page 204, where OB says “ … at the time our Myths came into being, our distinction subjective & objective can not have existed.”
NOW, to see what OB actually said re The whole topic of existence of “Subjective Objective Split” (SOS), and related Dualisms, you should purchase post haste Barfield’s "Poetic Diction" and then read in this his “Appendix IV SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE “.
Barfield "Poetic Diction" full Text of “APPENDIX IV: SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE “+ Nearly All Of His “AFTERWARD”. Suggest you make a BookMark in your Browser!!
…PS: While you have this in front of you, you might look at last paragraph on page 208 continuing on page 209, where what he says => “a growing awareness of the subject-object dualism”, which is so remarkably close to Pirsig’s “no such thing” in ZMM. Which is in passages below.
***********

The Origin Of Subject-Object Concepts In History.

A) From Robert Pirsig’s Statements In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.

Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy.

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now 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 [always] there.

Phaedrus saw Aristotle, the man responsible for beginning the subject-object split in Western philosophy, as: a prototype for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with [the] dumb ritual of analysis, the blind, rote, eternal naming of things.
*********** ******** **********

“How Subject-Object Split'' Originated Way-Back In History” he words Object and Subject are relatively recent developments in human thinking =>
OBJECT (noun)
…late 14c., "tangible thing, something perceived with or presented to the senses," from Old French object and directly from Medieval Latin obiectum "thing put before" (the mind or sight), noun use of neuter of Latin obiectus "lying before, opposite" (as a noun in classical Latin, "charges, accusations"), past participle of obicere "to present, oppose, cast in the way of," from ob "in front of, towards, against" (see ob-) + iacere "to throw" (from PIE root *ye- "to throw, impel").
…Sense of "purpose, thing aimed at" is from early 15c., from Latin obiectus "that which presents itself to the sight." Meaning "that toward which a cognitive act is directed" is from 1580s. Grammatical sense of "a member of a sentence expressing that on which the action of the verb is exerted" is from 1729.

SUBJECT (noun)
…Early 14c., "person under control or dominion of another," specifically a government or ruler, from Old French sogit, suget, subget "a subject person or thing" (12c., Modern French sujet), from noun use of Latin subiectus "lying under, below, near bordering on," figuratively "subjected, subdued," past participle of subicere, subiicere "to place under, throw under, bind under; to make subject, subordinate," from sub "under" (from PIE root *upo "under") + combining form of iacere "to throw" (from PIE root *ye- "to throw, impel"). In 14c., sugges, sogetis, subgit, sugette; form re-Latinized in English 16c.
…Meaning "person or thing regarded as recipient of action, one that may be acted upon" is recorded from 1590s. Grammatical sense is recorded from 1630s, from Latin subjectum "grammatical subject," noun use of the neuter of the Latin past participle. Likewise some restricted uses in logic and philosophy are borrowed directly from Latin subjectum as "foundation or subject of a proposition," a loan-translation of Aristotle's to hypokeimenon. Meaning "subject matter of an art or science" is attested from 1540s, probably short for subject matter (late 14c.), which is from Medieval Latin subjecta materia, a loan translation of Greek hypokeimene hylē (Aristotle), literally "that which lies beneath."

Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
…The distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is a basic idea of philosophy, particularly epistemology and metaphysics. It is often related to discussions of consciousness, agency, personhood, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, reality, truth, and communication (for example in narrative communication and journalism).
…History in Western philosophy: In Western philosophy, the idea of subjectivity is thought to have its roots in the works of the European Enlightenment thinkers Descartes and Kant though it could also stem as far back as the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's work relating to the soul. The idea of subjectivity is often seen as a peripheral to other philosophical concepts, namely skepticism, individuals and individuality, and existentialism. The questions surrounding subjectivity have to do with whether or not people can escape the subjectivity of their own human existence and whether or not there is an obligation to try to do so. Important thinkers who focused on this area of study include Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Foucault, Derrida, Nagel, and Sartre.

“Pirsig 's Phaedrus: The Journey of the Shaman”. By Joseph E. Levora, Eastern Illinois University (2001) (Excerpts)
…This new vision, which Phaedrus called Quality, does not involve excluding either the classic or romantic. Quality simply involves expanding one's outlook to include both.
…Phaedrus saw as a starting point for the dilemma of the dualistic outlooks Western culture's insistence on division between subject and object, and he attempted to trace this insistence all the way back to its roots. He saw, as the beginning of the problem, the emergence of the dialectic. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, in Phaedrus' opinion, were not after ''truth" but rather just playing a game of constructing elaborate word traps that always talk around the real issues of what is truth and beauty. Phaedrus was of the mindset that man had "built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomenon of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth" (342). For this, however, man had also sacrificed something essential and that is the ' 'understanding of what it is to be a part of the world and not an enemy of it"
…Once Phaedrus realized the problem lies within the division of subject and object that has resulted from the dialectic and beyond, he attacked the problem on
these grounds:
…And so: He rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It
doesn't reside in the material world.
…Then he rejected the right horn: Quality is not subjective, it doesn't
reside merely in the mind.
…And finally: Phaedrus, following a path that to his knowledge had
never been taken before in the history of Western thought, went
straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma
and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It
is a third entity which is independent of the two.
…Phaedrus went even further in his reasoning and suggested that Quality is "the
cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the
cause of the Quality". Phaedrus believed that Quality would solve the
dilemma between the classic and romantic forms of mind.

Phaedrus' concern with the place of values in the development of a society is illustrative of his attempt to broaden the format of external reality so that human beings feel a part of the reality around them rather than isolated from it. The prevailing attitude of science, which Phaedrus is working against, the attitude of the division between subject and object, is what causes the isolation that human beings feel. By making a value, Quality, the central guiding force in Phaedrus metaphysics, he is attempting to show that both subjects and objects are part of the same overall force in the universe, thus uniting them once and for all. This attitude is seen by Phaedrus as "the point of focus where he could begin an attack" on traditional notions of cultural anthropological study (62). This is also the point at which Phaedrus realized that if he is to do anything of real importance it is going to have to be within the field of metaphysics, "the general body of assumption upon which [anthropology] rests"

Pritscher seems to suggest that the sophists Pirsig refers to
in the novel are actually the group responsible for the subject-object split in Western conceptions of knowledge. This throws many of Phaedrus' claims
into doubt.
Click Here For Whole Theses => “Pirsig 's Phaedrus: The Journey of the Shaman”.

“'Subject and Object: A Micro History.” Philosophy Forums. By Streetlight
…One of the more delightful facts of the history of philosophy is that in the Scholastic times, the terms 'subject' and 'object' meant almost exactly the opposite of what they mean today. The 'subject', far from being anything 'subjective' was rather that which stood apart from us in some way. This sense of the 'subject' still survives in some quarters today, as when painters speak of the 'subjects' of their work, or doctors of the 'subject' to be operated upon. The subject here has a kind of autonomy from human design, as that whose depths need to be plumbed.
…Similarly for the 'object' in scholasticism, which, curiously enough, was that which was strictly correlated to a knowing being. The object, far from being 'the thing out there', always meant the intentional object or the object of 'intention'. The esse objectivm ('objective being') is that which strictly exists for awareness. As Paul Bains comments: "For [Duns] Scotus and [John] Poinsot, something was an 'objective being' to the extent that it existed in awareness. The sun and the sea were 'objective beings,' but so were unicorns - they also existed 'in' our awareness. So, within experience, all beings were by definition objective beings. However, not all of them were physical things or events." (Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis). The phenomenological tradition - in Husserl in particular - will continue this notion of objects as intentional.
…That in Kant, the relation between object and subject was reversed (to roughly what we know them as today) was something of a sore point for a few thinkers of his day, who complained about the confusion sown by the reversal. Here is Coleridge, quibbling about the switch in terms by Heinrich Steffens, a notable post-Kantian of the time: "Steffens has needlessly perplexed his reasoning by his strange use of Subjective and Objective — his S[ubjectivity] = the O[bjectivity] of former Philosophers, and his O[bjectivity] = their S[ubjectivity]" (quoted in Galison and Daston, Objectivity). Worth noting also that in Kant himself, subject and object correlate to the categories of the particular and the universal, rather than the mind and world - although Kant himself was rather confusing on this score.
…As far as dates go, the use of the term 'subject' to mean something like a conscious or thinking subject doesn't in fact appear in the English language until almost the 1800s, while the idea of 'objectivity' in the scientific sense only emerges in the mid-Nineteenth century, and has a rather convoluted history which has in fact changed over time, although it seems to have settled - after Popper - on a notion of 'reproducibility under invariant conditions'.
…That our 'modern', intuitive understanding of 'subjective' and 'objective' are a reversal of the scholastics however, is not without lasting consequence. Not only has their meaning changed, but so to have their significance. To understand this, one first need recall that 'subject', from the latin Subjectum means 'that which lies under' - the substratum or the fundamental base from which other qualities were derived - think again of the 'subject matter' of the painting.
…Similarly the object, far from hewing to the side of substantiality, always remained on the side of the insubstantial. A bit more schooling in Scholasticism brings this out: for the Scholastics, 'knowing' took place by means of 'specification' - a "species" being an image which is impressed upon the mind (consider the semantic cloud associated here: specular, spectre, spectacle, speculum (mirror), specious - each harbouring a kind of 'insubstaintiality'). With this in mind, now only has to recall that another word for species in intentio - intension; Recalling again that an object was always an intentional object; the object here is an image, an impression, a species impressed upon the mind.
…With this micro-history in mind, we can now note what has actually happened in the reversal between subject and object: while the terms have indeed traded places, what has not changed is in fact the 'semantic weight' given to place which each term occupies: the object now has acquired a 'substantiality' which it did not have before (it has taken up the 'place' of the subject, which previously bore the brunt of the 'substantial'), while the 'subject' has itself taken the 'place' that the object once occupied: that of the insubstantial, the ephemeral. Interestingly, this trading of places has also entailed the forgetting of the original meanings of both terms, where the subject once stood apart from awareness and cognizance, and the object being that which is correlated to a knowing subject. '''
Click Here For Whole Article => “Subject and Object: A Micro History.”.

Historical Origins Of The Modern Mind/Body Split. by R. E. Lind
Journal of Mind and Behavior 22 (1):23-40 (2001) https://philpapers.org/rec/LINHOO
Abstract
...It is argued that a radical relocation of subjectivity began several thousand years ago. A subjectivity experienced in the centric region of the heart, and in the body as a whole, began to be avoided in favor of the eccentric head as a new location of subjectivity. In ancient literature, for example in Homer's epics, the heart and various other bodily organs were described as centers of subjectivity and organs of perception for spiritual experience and communion with others and the world. Mind and body were integrated. Bur also in the early historical record, as in the Old Testament, the heart and body were increasingly described as rebellious and rejected as impure. Head and heart, mind and body, became estranged. The body was judged an unsuitable, impure vessel for spiritual experience. This change in the location of subjectivity presaged the later development of Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, and Cartesian distinctions favoring mind over and against the body. It may also have contributed to some of the characteristic psychological and pathological processes (e.g., psychosomatic illnesses, repression, narcissism) currently attributed to the psychology of the modern Western, and specifically, North American self
***********

Subject And Object In ZMM Excerpts, Mid Chapter 19, Bolds by HSG:
… He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn’t what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.” '''
… I don’t know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet. ''' [< This agrees with Owen Barfield’s concept he calls "thinking"]
… That sounded warm.
… Quality is not a thing. It is an event.
… Warmer.
… '''
It, is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. [<This also =OB "thinking"]
… 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.
… Hot.
Now he knew it was coming.
… This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event [<This=OB "thinking"]. The Quality event [<This =OB "thinking"] is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
… Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification. that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife.
… "The sun of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!”
… And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long period of time.

********** Ideas above continue in ZMM, Mid Chapter 20. ***********

… The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. .....
… This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, ' Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. ''. [< This agrees with Owen Barfield’s concept he calls "thinking"] ...
… "The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that ‘Quality is the response of an organism to its environment’
… "In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. … Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it. '' [< This agrees with Owen Barfield’s concept he calls "thinking"]

Please Send Email => What think yea!!

Between Don Cruse And Ian Glendinning, A Series Of Emails Concerning The Proper Development Of Science. Included Is How Certain Persons Use Or View Science.

'''Of Interest Is Discussion How Robert Pirsig’s Work Could Be Viewed As Monist And Not Dualist.
…Special Thanks Christopher Goodman For Adding (Below Don & Ian Emails) His Thoughts Concerning Robert Pirsig a "Monist", And How Michael Polanyi Fits In. '''
NOTE: To preview the lay of the land, get an idea where this is going => You may want to, 7 each > Do > Edit > Find > Monist .

From Don Cruse Oct 7, 2010. 11:46 PM

Henry, Ken and Naomi,

Pleased to say that I am mobile again (using a four-wheeled walker) and so
no longer confined to a wheel chair. But while so confined I have been
re-reading Steve Fuller’s book “Kuhn vs. Popper: the Struggle for the Soul of
Science”, and find myself even more inclined to take Karl Popper’s view thar
“the mark of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions that could
in principle serve to falsify it” i.e, a theory that cannot be falsified
(Darwinism for example) is not science.

Yet in this month’s ‘Scientific American’ I find that the theory that most
scientists accept uncritically is Darwinism; what does that tell us?

I have not read Naomi’s contribution, but I can’t agree that anyone who
does not understand Barfield is being ‘too logical’. They well have adopted
a mistaken logic, but that is quite another thing. As you all known, my
fundamental critique of Darwinism is that it a profoundly illogical theory
that uses the language of ‘intelligent design’ while trying to argue that
there is no such thing in nature.

In contrast Barfield is profoundly logical, as is Steiner in the first five
chapters of his Philosophy of Freedom, and Polanyi also in his rejection of
Darwin.

Hope all goes well

Don

From Ian Glendinning Approximately Oct 7, 2010.
To: Don Cruse, And Other Enthusiasts.

Alternatively Don,

We could conclude that it is science as defined by the scientific method of falsifiability that is profoundly irrational, if science believes it can provide theories of everything that matters in the world.

The "scientific neurosis" according to Nick Maxwell, former student of Popper. There is much more to Popper than falsifiability, as Kuhn knew.
http://www.psybertron.org/?p=1426

From Don Cruse Oct 8, 2010. 8:16 PM
To: Ian Glendinning, And Other Enthusiasts.

Ian,

Your use of the word irrational here seems to me out of place, although Fuller does look into this possibility. There is no denying though that falsifyability does lead to an 'open society' whereas its absence leads to dogma. I my opinion, therefore, Darwinism is not science at all, but an irrational sci-mat belief system masquerading under the name of science, although it may take us another fifty years to come to terms with this fact.

Where the 'evolution of consciousness'[of human knowing] is concerned I think Darwinism was perhaps a necessary error, in that it allowed science to at least appear to address the problem of 'origins', and because a genuinely scientific alternative to it still does not exist. That will only come when we have achieved what Barfield terms 'final participation'.

Don

From Don Cruse Oct 10, 2010 8:33 PM.
To: Ian Glendinning, And Other Enthusiasts.

Ian,

Science is defined as 'causal enquiry' and where primary 'origins' are concerned those causes are Either matter Or Mind (spirit), not both (science) must be monist not dualist ‹ because dualism is always contradictory). Richard Lewontin states this very clearly: ³we are forced by our apriori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce mental explanations, no matter how counterintuitiveŠ. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.²

Barfield postulates that our individual minds 'participate' in a spiritual world that is the source of both human consciousness and of all natural creativity, but that it lies on the 'other side' of sensory perception from us. Therefore, when Darwinists claim to have done "falsifiable empirical testing" they start from the wholly theoretical assumption that no such spiritual world exist, and that the only monist causal force in nature is matter. This is what makes Darwinism totally (logically) false, because it takes its start from Matter not Mind and in order to do so substitutes chance for intentionality, but can only achieve any level of credibility through the blatant metaphorical misuse of intentional language (selection, mechanism, design, etc. etc. etc.)

Popper at least partly understood this, and it his later work he disowned Darwinism, while Polanyi embraced Bergson¹s Œelan vital¹ as an evolutionary alternative. I can find you quotes to this effect if you want them.

Don

From Ian Glendinning Approximately Oct 11, 2010.
To: Don Cruse, And Other Enthusiasts.

Hi Don, I don't need any more quotes ...

Just the logic of your argument.
I'm pointing out that your argument is with materialist science in general, not Darwinism in particular. I.E. in the Lewontin quote "science ... adherence to material causes", in your own quote "Darwinism starts from Matter ..."

The PROBLEM is the "a-priori" assumption that science must start from material causes - that is Lewontin's point in fact. It is not fundamentally necessary, just a common a-priori basis for science and
scientists - a big big mistake to assume all experience or participation arises in the material - as we here well know (James / Barfield / Pirsig, etc).

[Henry Gurr Comment => YES to the above 2 whole paragraphs: And my son David Gurr, says that Don should really blame Isaac Newton, and not so much Darwin or Darwinists!! ]

I don't care where or when science or Darwinism "started" in a temporal / historical sense - both have evolved - I do care what they choose as fundamental "first cause". In general neo-Darwinism / pan-Darwinism (precisely because it is about evolution) is allowing itself to evolve at the hands of more enlightened thinkers (Polanyi / Dennett / Marx, etc), whereas science (in general) is stuck in its neurotic dogma of believing its basis in material is somehow fundamental and necessary.

Don't give me another quote just tell me you get my point, or ask me if not ;-)

Ian

From Don Cruse Approximately Oct 11, 2010.
To: Ian Glendinning, And Other Enthusiasts.

Hi Ian, OK no more quotes.

My problem is, as you doubtless know, that sci-mat has no sound epistemological foundation, and that it uses Darwinism as a substitute for that omission , and when you cite Dennett as an enlightened thinker I suspect that you are falling for this. Dennett is a materialist and in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea he tells us that non-Darwinist evolutionists are trying to use "sky hooks" to make there case.

Yet there never was a ‘shy hook’ more deceptive than the way in which Darwin, and everyone since, make use of intentional language to argue a case that is otherwise impossible.

Don

From Ian Glendinning Oct 12, 2010 3:46 AM .
To: Don Cruse, And Other Enthusiasts.

Hi Don,

OK, we are getting to the point.

Darwinism (evolution) is no sky hook in Dennett's terms, it is simply the "engineering" process from the current starting situation, but the "intentional stance" is the key point. There is nothing necessarily materialist in that. Engineering is about "ingenuity" – nothing materialist in that either.

Dennett is simply being honest by making it clear that intention is a "stance". It is not explained nor is it an explanation. Others (both scientists and theologians) use intentional language without acknowledging this .... that would be a sky hook.

So, if we were talking sky-hooks we are talking the cause before the current situation, and ultimately a "first-cause". The point of the intentional stance is that all causation, not just first-cause, is "as if" there were a causal agent. The intentional stance is a human rationalization that allows explanation from there onwards, but doesn't explain the prior cause.

Now, again, notice that this is a problem of ALL "causal" explanations, not just science, not just Darwinism, not just Dennett's neo-Darwinism. My point is that Dennett is honest about this point in allowing explanations to evolve from that "stance" rather than positing the "cause".

There is no easy answer to this problem of explaining causation, but that is no reason to "blame" Darwinism for the problem. That honesty is all I was highlighting.

In our more mystical monist metaphysics (eg Barfield, James, Pirsig),we don't get very far explaining "why" things arose as the ineffable core monad (the Participation, the radical Experience, the Quality) we simply say that it does, and explain "how" the world works from that point onwards .... but pragmatically better, without any dualist baggage, materialist or otherwise.

Regards

Ian
***********

From Henry Gurr Approximately March, 2011.
To: Ian Glendinning, And Other Enthusiasts.

Ian, Don, Ken McClure,

Quite by accident I was lead to re-read your old email thread, next email below.

I now see your email to Don, as quite penetrating and an excellent summary + focus of how (& in what important manner) Barfield, James, Pirsig relate to each other.

Some how I missed this impact back in 10/12/2010, for which I apologize.

Any way, this is definitely worth being expanded and extended into a whole article (Book?) and then posted. I invite this contribution to be on my site. But of course your blog space is perhaps better.

All this gets me to thinking: (Rz) = Realize on a walk:
A) Indeed Quality is a good name for Pirsig's Monism: Particularly since Quality is Pirsig's word for that which runs inside of us and is active in subsequently leading us in a series of steps to construct (radical constructivism) the universe, at least the universe we are aware of. .....
B) Here, from Wikipedia, I discover a OB quote that says OB's equivalent to RP's Quality, " ... the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside in a continually changing way ... " {whole Wikipedia quote from, which this is taken is below)
C) But what about "Participation" for Barfield's Monism? ... Certainly Participation is a VERY important word for OB, But is Participation, about what he thinks "runs the universe", or creates our awareness of it? I'm wondering if "imagination" or similar such as "Colleridgian Barfieldian Imagination"
Ken: Do you have any suggestions??

PS: How I came to reread your email is curious, you would say "SpookY": My wife handed me a newspaper article "Watch Our For Fraudulent Charity Requests" the article suggested a worthy URL link which lead me in a search for where to store this in my computer, with similar information: So I Searched with my Google-Desktop for "charity", where upon I thus found your email in a thread that started with a UK article about allowing Druids a charity deduction.

The chain that lead to your great writing result , is itself significant, in that this is often how the Quality track works!! And Evolution especially!! Which is irrational!!!

Sincerely

Henry

PS: I also notice, that this was sufficiently well formulated, to apparently get Don to think about it, and not have some "yes-but" or other "come-back-objection". I deduce this b/c there were no additional responses from him, on this topic. (if my email records are correct.)

PSS: Don: What do you think"

PSSS: Wikipedia Owen Barfield Quote:
" ... In our critical thinking as physicists or philosophers, we imagine ourselves set over against an objective world consisting of particles, in which we do not participate at all. In contrast, the phenomenal, or familiar, world is said to be riddled with our subjectivity. In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena—all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside, in a continually changing way. ... " [Bold by HSG]
***********

From Christopher Goodman March 3 2011
To Henry Gurr

Hi Henry,
… I think that calling Pirsig a "Monist" is misleading (although correct) because the word is so all encompassing it is almost meaningless. The key thing about his "Monism" claim is that he wants to say that "Quality" is not something we impose on the "Universe" it is "hard wired" (so to speak) into reality. The "Universe" (as you correctly point out) is not only "out there" it is also "in here" and therefore talking about "constructing reality" is also misleading, because we discover that 1 + 1 = 2 quite as much as creating the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. The whole point about "tacit knowing" for Polanyi is that it connects us with reality, even through our connection is of necessity "situated" and therefore perspectival i.e. we are guided by our tacit awareness onto the "Quality" track.
… Goethe said "Let us have the imagination for the REAL" and Polanyi completely agrees. He is in this sense anti-Romantic. But he is also anti-Classical in that he recognises the role of the knower as fallible explorer - not simply mechanically deducing truths as if science was a Euclidean geometry.
… He transcends the "Romantic" and "Classical" in the [Polanyi’s] concept of "Personal Knowing" which for "Critical Philosophers" is an oxymoron. But this "Classical" v "Romantic" distinction is a very "Modern" way of putting it - barely older than Descartes and Rousseau. Polanyi after all looks back to Augustine for his understanding of "Post-Critical" philosophy, and Augustine draws upon Plato. The Greek concern was with "Being", and to this extent Pirsig wants to return us back to a pre-modern conception of philosophy in which it is "Being" ("Quality") that counts, not articulations about the world, which for Polanyi only gain meaning when we give them meaning by drawing upon our tacit awareness.
… This is why Pirsig wants to return us back to metaphysics, but it is a metaphysics which seeks to acknowledge that Being is something which transcends our ability to articulate it, which is a mystical tradition that pre-dates the Greeks. Heidegger is just re-articulating a German mystical tradition (he is very nationalistic and likes to return back to German philosophers) but it predates the Germans. To be fair to Heidegger he agree and traces it back to the Pre-Socratics. He thinks that only the Greek and the Germans produced decent philosophers! But the whole point about the Greeks is that they were interested in dialectic (in argument and logic and reason and theory) and this is the glory of Western philosophy. But for Polanyi (and Pirsig picks this up from Polanyi) asserts that what is articulated has to be situated within a tacit context that cannot be wholly articulated.
… By calling it "Quality" Pirsig in a sense clarifies Polanyi, who never really got to grips with how value can be found in the real, even though transcending the fact value distinction is what Polanyi is attempting to do - rescuing value (and therefore Western Civilization) from assumption that claimed that because value cannot be articulated it does not exist. Hegel for example argues that if something cannot be articulated it is not real. He assumed that the rational is real, and everything rational can be articulated by a rational mind (such as himself), but for t Polanyi this is pure (and destructive) hubris.
… If Quality is God does that make Pirsig (and Polanyi) a Pantheist? Well I think that Polanyi is very interested in the person, and he avoided talking about "Quality" precisely because he rejects Pantheism. God is an ideal for Polanyi that transcends us. But since Polanyi believes in a hierarchy of Being (which unfolds as the universe evolves) with human beings part of that unfolding can he avoid being a Hegelian Pantheist? In orthodox Christianity God is distinct from the universe, and Polanyi seems to agree, but does Pirsig? Sighed Christopher
***********

Thanks Philosopher Christopher Goodman For His Continuing Contributions To This Conversation!
… Your Below Conclusions Re Polanyi Are Right On Target. …
… Especially, As You Previously Pointed Out => “It Is Not True That "Polanyi May Be Thought To Follow The Path Laid Out By Charles Sanders Peirce Or Semiotic Theory."

From Christopher Peter Goodman Jul 21, 2013
To: Henry Gurr And Other Literature Enthusiasts.

… If I was to pick out a philosopher who most influenced Polanyi I would say William James. I think he read him as a teenager. By this I do not mean that he was his follower, He is just there in the background. I do not think Polanyi read much philosophy. Polanyi is an original. He drew upon his experience in the sciences, and was concerned to refute what he saw as false claims about science. This developed into more general claims about the nature of knowledge and the universe, and at the forefront of his mind is what he saw happening in Europe in his time i.e. its nihilism.
… I am not saying that William James was his only philosophical influence, it is clear that Polanyi is influenced by British Empiricism and German Idealism, although this was largely indirectly. I rate Pirsig very highly as somebody like Polanyi who tried to address the issue of value in an age of science. It is no surprise that many who think that modernity has a been a big mistake (many Catholic intellectuals for example) warm to Polanyi but I think Polanyi wants to adsorb the lessons of modernity. To this extent he was like the American Pragmatists. The biggest influence on William James was Charles Pierce. You could argue that Polanyi was an Anglophile who like the American Hegelians was trying to take on board the German contribution to philosophy. But it would be a mistake to see Polanyi as a Pragmatist. I am sure he would see some of its claims as failing to carry through the nihilistic consequences of its assumptions.
… Catholic intellectuals are not wrong to see something of the old time religion in Polanyi, but insofar as he addressed religious practices he was more Protestant than Catholics - or at least he sought to defend the religiously grounded free society that arose as a consequence of Europe getting fed up with the Wars of Religion. When Polanyi talks about tacit knowledge he is not trying to saying something new (although he has new things to say) he wants to connect us once more with the reality of our experience of the world, but this reality is not something that can be reduced into sense data or explicit rules, nor is it simply a case of reading off an order of the universe a la Plato. We are creative agents, but the world is not something we simply create, nor is it something we can wholly explicate, it is something we explore, and via articulation we are able to explore higher levels than is possible for lower animals.
…He found it quite easy to explicate this pursuit of the higher in religious terms, although what his specific religious beliefs were is less clear. His biggest enemy is an account of the world which says that all there is to know is what science can describe, which Polanyi not only thought was a false belief, he thought it was a nihilistic disaster, but his value realism also wants to take on board the human agency that is such a feature of Western [Christian] humanism - that we are in the image of God but we are not God. … Signed Chris Goodman
***********

Proposed New Book: “Robert Pirsig & Michael Polanyi Compared”.
… For some time now, another philosopher and I have been sharing ideas and text documents concerning how Robert Pirsig’s books “ZMM” & “LILA” contrast with that of World Famous Physical Chemist Michael Polanyi.
We had hoped that the above would gradually coalesce into a book with title as given above. :-)) … Although I still hope this project will still move forward, and the material below would be a good start. :-)) … If you know of anyone who would want to help on this project (including yourself), please contact me. Click on "contact Me" at the bottom of this page. :-)) …Henry Gurr ZMMQ Site Master 30 May 2017, & 21 Oct 2022, & 7 July 2023.

APPENDIX I: Other Email Threads Related To Mind & Thinking.

From Gerald Rudolph Nov 10 2010. .
To: Henry Gurr, F Richards.

The belief that time and space are just "tools of the mind" does not lead logically to the conclusion that consciousness is the source of reality. At best it would suggest that reality is not what we think it is, and perhaps incomprehensible. It is also not clear to me whether he is speaking of a universal consciousness or an individual's consciousness. If he is basing his views on the implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle he must be talking about individual consciousness.

He is just positing another view and saying that since quantum physics does not give us certainty about things or leads to conclusions we do not like, then his view must be true.

After all, if space and time are just "tools of the mind" why aren't logic and reason also just "tools of the mind" too and not characteristics of reality. Who is to say that the brain in our skull, as he refers to it, leading us to a sense of certainty or uncertainty has any connection at all to reality.

Jerry

From Henry Gurr Nov 15 2010.
To: Gerald Rudolph, F Richards, And Other Enthusiasts.

Dear Jerry and Michel

I agree with Jerry where he says
" .. After all, if space and time are just "tools of the mind" why aren't logic and reason also just "tools of the mind" too and not characteristics of reality. Who is to say that the brain in our skull, as he refers to it, leading us to a sense of certainty or uncertainty has any connection at all to reality. .."

Although difficult to see what he is driving at, I generally agree with this pagw author, Robert Lanza, He gets into worthy territory (but not worthy ideas) in the following which i have added my thoughts in [brackets].

Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. [I don't accept this statement, and besides it is besides the point: It is clear that our brains create our WHOLE AWARENESS, and hence the allusion of the whole world and our consciousness as well!! This is the "radical constructivism" or Pirsig and Polanyi, which I agree with, and have my own radical extension which I can send if you request. ] Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. [Again beside the point!! Our brain's actions are first, but require INPUT CONSTANTLY from the surrounding world. "Consciousness" is a "secondary by-product of out human brain, and by itself creates nothing. as clearly established by brain researchers (brain electro physiology probes and MRI scans etc) it is an aftereffect!! Of course Lanza may here mean "Brain / CNS" ] At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time [Empty statement: Does he mean for the whole universe?? Or a person.]; you can take any time -- past or future -- as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. [True, but how does this add to what he wants to say? ] In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." [Yes = "radical constructivism"!! So in this view, reality has no reality. Owen Barfield says "Something [out there] exists, but we shall never know it!!! Mr. Barfield, not my science teaches, even in grad school, was the first to say this this very important realization, with which I agree along with Pirsig!! In the radical constructivism view, time space etc, etc, are convenient constructs. and though they seem "real", they "control" or "frame" nothing", they have no existence beyond our thinking of them, like newtons laws. ] Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. [Yes = "radical constructivism"!!] This is the indispensable prelude to immortality. [Not sure about this. I would say our "immortality" is in minds of persons who know us as long as they live, and in our writing, & other artifacts that we constructed / altered / or altered waterways, even plowed up earth, so long as such "remains" exists. And in social and language and legal conventions left behind us, in that we that we helped support & refine & propagate & even multiply them. while we an active part of society. This is one of Owen Barfield's major points in his book "Poetic Diction. ]

SUMMARY => I Would Say, With Polanyi & Pirsig & Barfield That Real World Situated Human Mind Creates For Itself "Convenient Illusions!! Among These Are Consciousness, Time, Space, Reality!! 'Sincerely Henry Gurr

For More Information About The ZMM Book, Please Go To The Following Pages =>

http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/Documents/AlternativesZmm
http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/Documents/ZMMLinksPage

APPENDIX I: Annotations On how Michale Polanyi Supports Robert Pirsig’s Statements In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. By Henry Gurr.

…Below you will see a series of selected passages from Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. Each is followed with Henry Gurr’s comments as to how Michael Polanyi’s words fit or not fit the conclusions of Robert Pirsig.
…Back on 17 Mar 2009, Henry had just finished reading “The Way of Discovery” by Richard Gelwick, which led to Henry’s added observations on how Gelwick’s book correlates to Pirsig’s ZMM.
…You will see that Pirsig and Polanyi are concerned with modern times' general social malaise and being turned off, which comes from how modern society relates to science & technology. Both authors want to get to the bottom of these problems and what to do about them. Such things are major continuing themes for both authors. Similar concerns are found in the writings of Owen Barfield.
…Properly done, these discussions & assertions about Pirsig or Polanyi’s conclusions should be supported with relevant passages from these authors. However the time to do this in not available now.”

Polanyi Correlates To Pirsig’s ZMM.
…To find Polanyi correlates to Pirsig’s ZMM, I searched a full-text version of ZMM for the following words, which is where one would expect to find Polanyi-Pirsig agreement, such as => object & related, dual, dualism & related, observer & related, habit & related, know & related: Concerning these, it is curious that in this word search, I only found 7 hits and all are in routine discussion, rather than an important part of human behavior. Truth & related hit the jackpot for good topics. Discover & related found only a few good hits, and thus conclude that Pirsig does not use discovery word or mode, as Polanyi extensively does, a fact that is shown in index of Gelwick’s book. Method & related, scientific & related, meaning & related found a few good topics. Know & related found many hits, but only a few were pertinent. Absolute & related found no good topics, meaning that Pirsig did not remark directly on anything similar to Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal”, nor our society’s existing scientific understanding, with its demand, for absolutely, perfect, certain knowledge, and how this causes trouble. This is in contrast to Polanyi, who makes a major point of this.
… Also, it occurs to me that William James strongly makes the same point. Of course, Pirsig allows that the knowledge we put together is liable to be error-prone, and something we must watch for. But Pirsig does not mention anything like Polanyi’s uncertainty of knowledge as causing social upheaval.
…Pirsig is very concerned and talks extensively about, the continuous generation of multiple hypotheses and rapid scientific change and the problems caused by science never arriving at a long-term stable understanding of the universe. Pirsig sees this as being a cause of major social problems. (More at “hypothesis” below.)
…Searches for the following found no hits => existential, tacit, nihilism, gestalt, Heuristic, paradigm, pragmatism, but only one hit for positivism.
…Contrary to Pirsig, Polanyi quotes and uses the support data and conclusions of a huge number of other authors as is shown in Gelwick’s book index.

NOTE: Polanyi’s “Tacit Dimension” (available from Google Books), is where is seem an education comment on the page concerning '' “naming-cum-pointing” in communication, and philosophical gap.

'APPENDIX II: Selected Passages From Robert Pirsig’s Book “Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance”, With Henry Gurr [Comments] As To How Michael Polanyi’s Words Fit Or Not Fit The Conclusions Of Robert Pirsig.

'' “It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing . what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They’re not going anywhere. They’re not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. [ << This is n aspect of Polanyi tacit knowledge.]] It’s the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find. .

Other things fit in too. They [John & Sylvia] talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about "it" or "it all". as in the sentence, "There is just no escape from it." And if I asked, "From what?" the answer might be "The whole thing," or "The whole organized bit," or even "The system." Sylvia once said defensively, "Well, you know how to cope with it," which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what "it" was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see. that the "it" was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn’t sound right either. The "it" is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. . [Polanyi agree, especially when it comes to the negative effect of normal science on our culture last ~100 years.]

All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, "Get out." You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, . even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. [Big concern for Polanyi & Pirsig, and both agree.]

Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that "Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, . [Polanyi agree.] other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions . . . " and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained. [Big concern for Polanyi & Pirsig, and both agree.]
To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through the computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force. [Big concern for Polanyi & Pirsig, and both agree.]

the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you already know how one works. The immediate surface impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. Only the underlying form is left. … The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn’t say that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. "You" aren’t anywhere in the picture. Even the "operator" is a kind of personality-less robot whose performance of a function on the machine is completely mechanical. There are no real subjects in this description. Only objects exist that are independent of any observer. … The third is that the words "good" and "bad" and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only facts. [Polanyi agrees: He puts value (back into) at the center of a description of science as he has personally experienced it. Value, and various correlates, are also explicitly mentioned by Polanyi, but caring is not. He decries the “observer-less” ideal, and emphasizes his solution by calling it “Personal Knowledge”. By this emphasis, we conclude he sees that our society’s objective “observer-less” science, is a big cause of our society’s problem, and contributes to the removal of values, even moral values. Polanyi includes such in his “Personal Knowledge” framework.] '''

What makes it important not to shut up about him was that he used this skill in such a bizarre and yet meaningful way. No one ever saw this, I don’t think he even saw it himself, and it may be an illusion of my own, but the knife he used was less that of an assassin than that of a poor surgeon. Perhaps there is no difference. But he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started cutting deep, deeper and deeper to get at the root of it. He was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself. [And Polanyi would say our society was, in the same way, a victim.]
Chapter 7

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
…At Baker, where we stop, the thermometers are reading 108 degrees in the shade. [Polanyi, as does Pirsig & Owen Barfield, talks about meaninglessness. Which I think is a component of nihilism, which Polanyi also mentions several times. See Gelwick. ] '''

If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself.
…But he did ask them, and was unsatisfied with the answers. … The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else. [Polanyi agree, see page 80.5 Gelwick.]

Einstein had said:
…Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it [Polanyi agrees with Pirsig, and both focus on these kind of scientists statements of Einstein and Poincare’ & agree as to what it means concerning skill, (tacit ability) knowledge, and Flash of Insight, from an unknown mental origin.]

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge. [Pirsig recommends the standard scientific method, but here is his big complaint against it. Polanyi has different problems with scientific method as expressed in the “objective knowledge ideal”. Both agree as to the great demoralization and loss of moral sense, Pirsig sees this in people and ugly cities and factories and most workers and senseless warfare. Polanyi focuses on mostly dysfunctional understanding of science, causing dysfunctional social movement, societies and resulting global wars etc. ]

If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change! [Pirsig recommends the standard scientific method, but here is his big complaint against it. Polanyi has different problems with scientific method as expressed in the “objective knowledge ideal”.]

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience—chaos. . [Polanyi agrees in overall effect, but probably for different reasons. He fully trusts the achievements of science, but does not much mention Pirsig’s => Endless generation of too many hypotheses and failure to converge on stable scientific views.]

The cause of our current social crises, he [Phaedrus] would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is—emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
…I’ve a vision of an angry continuing social crisis that no one really understands the depth of, let alone has solutions to. I see people like John and Sylvia living lost and alienated from the whole rational structure of civilized life, looking for solutions outside that structure, but finding none that are really satisfactory for long. [Polanyi agrees in overall effect, but probably for different reasons: Such as nihilism, moral inversion, etc.] ]

He [Phaedrus] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. [Polanyi and James agree. Owen Barfield possibly also. Need research.]

Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth. . [Polanyi certainly had to know about such lateral thinking & indirect way to find new ideas, since he understands well the Flash of Insight. But he does not much discuss this lateral thinking, ~“sideways” in any way similar to the approach Pirsig o. But since Polanyi understood so much about human mental processes, he surely knew of this kind of lateral thinking. Of course, this could be part of his reasons for what he wrong with “objective knowledge ideal”.]
…To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do. [Since Polanyi understands well the Flash of Insight, he would likely be aware of this kind of lateral thinking, and agree we need to study and be aware of the various methods we solve problems, especially with a Flash of Insight and other wise.] '''

What Copernicus did was take the existing a priori concept of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative a priori concept of the world, that it’s spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the a priori concepts fitted the existing sensory data.
…Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics. If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, [ < This is Polanyi’s active observer.] this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a "blank tablet," [<Polanyi’s objective ideal of knowledge?] and truly turning this concept inside out. Kant and his millions of followers have maintained that as a result of this inversion you get a much more satisfying understanding of how we know things. [HSG’s reading including Gelwick, does not give enough to know if Polanyi agrees with Pirsig as above on Kant and Hume.]

Kant’s metaphysics thrilled Phædrus at first, but later it dragged and he didn’t know exactly why. He thought about it and decided that maybe it was the Oriental experience. He had had the feeling of escape from a prison of intellect, and now this was just more of the prison again. He read Kant’s esthetics with disappointment and then anger. The ideas expressed about the "beautiful" were themselves ugly to him, and the ugliness was so deep and pervasive he hadn’t a clue as to where to begin to attack it or try to get around it. It seemed woven right into the whole fabric of Kant’s world so deeply there was no escape from it. It wasn’t just eighteenth-century ugliness or "technical" ugliness. All of the philosophers he was reading showed it. The whole university he was attending smelled of the same ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks. It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free. [This is similar to the impasse that Polanyi sees in our society in modern times.] Chapter 12.

[Now at the DeWeese home. It’s after dinner, with guests listening. ]
"Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really," I expound. "It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."
…They just look at me, thinking about this.
''' …"It’s an unconventional concept," I say, "but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. [Although Polanyi does not much mention Peace Of Mind, he would agree that a steady and tranquil mind is necessary for science and science research.]]

I continue. "Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right."
"Sounds like art," the instructor says.
"Well, it is art," I say. [Although Polanyi does not much mention art, he would agree that the attentive, mindful, artist frame of mind is needed.]

[Now Inside Montana Hall at Montana State College. ]
…And that door leads to Sarah’s office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students." This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal. '''
…Seed crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.
A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.
…He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.
..The one sentence "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students" was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic. [Sudden “Crystallization” is Pirsig’s name for the Flash of Insight and other similar Mental Arrivals. Polanyi agrees, concerning significance, and operation, of the Flash of Insight.]

For the first year of teaching Phædrus had been fairly content with this framework. He felt there was something wrong with it, but that '''the wrongness was not in this application of reason to rhetoric. The wrongness was in the old ghost of his dreams—rationality itself. He recognized it as the same wrongness that had been troubling him for years, and for which he had no solutions. He just felt that no writer ever learned to write by this squarish, by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach. Yet that was all rationality offered and there was nothing to do about it without being irrational And if there was one thing he had a clear mandate to do in this Church of Reason it was to be rational, so he had to let it go at that. [Being completely rational fits with Polanyi’s point that “objective knowledge ideal” controls all our society.]].

'''Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows s what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others . . . but what’s the "betterness"? . . . So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?
Start Chapter 16Part III [Polanyi agree, concerning significance, and operation, of value.] '''

So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.
…Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Polanyi agree, concerning significance, and operation, of value & meaning in all aspects, and surely education also.]

There’s a large fragment concerning Phædrus’ first class after he gave that assignment on "What is quality in thought and statement?" The atmosphere was explosive. Almost everyone seemed as frustrated and angered as he had been by the question.
'''"How are we supposed to know what quality is?" they said. "You’re supposed to tell us!"
Then he told them he couldn’t figure it out either and really wanted to know. He had assigned it in the hope that somebody would come up with a good answer. [Polanyi agree, concerning significance, and operation, of “just knowing”, in all aspects, and surely education also. AND to pay attention to your mental processes at the time when new Mental Arrivals come, such as a Flash of Insight. ] '''

That ignited it. A roar of indignation shook the room. Before the commotion had settled down another teacher had stuck his head in the door to see what the trouble was.
…"It’s all right," Phædrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from." Some students looked curious at this, and the noise simmered down.
…He then used the occasion for a short return to his theme of "Corruption and Decay in the Church of Reason." It was a measure of this corruption, he said, that students should be outraged by someone trying to use them to seek the truth. You were supposed to fake this search for the truth, to imitate it. To actually search for it was a damned imposition. [Polanyi, Barfield, and possibly James, all agree that science, AND the use of it and the understanding of it by society, are are very important, but unfortunately in current times, badly corrupted!!]

A few days later he worked up a definition of his own and put it on the blackboard to be copied for posterity. The definition was: "Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."
The fact that this "definition" was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. [Polanyi agree, that non-material thinking, is not a reason to reject some idea or social process, including religion. Reminds me of William James, who is big this way.]
…There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say, "Quality cannot be defined," I’m really saying formally, "I’m stupid about Quality." [This is “objective knowledge ideal” in operation, and Polanyi would agree with Pirsig, although he does not mention these specific ideas.] ]

This was just intellectually outrageous, and he knew it. He wasn’t teaching anymore, he was indoctrinating. He had erected an imaginary entity, defined it as incapable of definition, told the students over their own protests that they knew what it was, and demonstrated this by a technique that was as confusing logically as the term itself. He was able to get away with this because logical refutation required more talent than any of the students had. In subsequent days he continually invited their refutations, but none came. [Polanyi agree, that non material is not a reason to reject some idea or social process, including religion. Reminds me of William James.]

Now, in answer to that eternal student question, How do I do this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, "It doesn’t make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it’s good." The reluctant student might ask in class, "But how do we know what’s good?" but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him, "You just see it." If he said, "No, I don’t," He’d be told, "Yes, you do. He proved it." The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write. . [Polanyi agree, and says many things like this concerning practicing scientist, minus word Quality.]

Phædrus got this far with his concept of Quality because he deliberately refused to look outside the immediate classroom experience. Cromwell’s statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going," applied at this point. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that it worked.
…In time, however, he wondered why it worked, especially when he already knew it was irrational. Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know. [Polanyi agree, and says many things like this concerning practicing scientist, minus word Quality.]

This was no longer just an interesting idea. This was a dream.
…I don’t think anyone really saw what he was up to at first. They saw an intellectual delivering a message that had all the trappings of a rational analysis of a teaching situation. They didn’t see he had a purpose completely opposite to any they were used to. He wasn’t furthering rational analysis. He was blocking it. He was turning the method of rationality against itself, turning it against his own kind, in defense of an irrational concept, an undefined entity called Quality. [Where does Polanyi discuss similar?]

Phædrus found this last to be extremely interesting. The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?
…He didn’t know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality from a picture of the world as we know it, he’d revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn’t known was there. The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn’t be worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.
He looked back over the distance this line of thought had taken him and decided he’d certainly proved his point. Since the world obviously doesn’t function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.
After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn’t have any, acted very superior, as though he’d lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world.
It was intellectual primarily, but it wasn’t just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws—reason—and that man’s improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith [of the Squares] that held everything together. He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while, conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted some more and thought some more and then finally circled back to where he was before.
Squareness.
…That’s the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. [Need research into where Polanyi agrees. Also James and Barfield.]

If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.
He noticed that from a number of faculty members he was receiving some good-natured smiles.
Phædrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren’t so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies "anything you like." Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three. [Gelwick lists about 5 Polanyi dualisms, but doesn’t mention Subject Object Dualism explicitly. But Polanyi would agree with Pirsig, that Subject Object Dualism is as bad as any. But to me this is part of Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal”. HSG should C&P from his (Soyo and Sys2305 Computer Files) > PragmatismWilliamJamesProjGutenberg+HsgReactV07.doc, which has Richard Hocks in “The “Other Postmodern Theorist :Owen Barfield’: This discusses Owen Barfield’s concept of the “Evolution of Consciousness” which has many interesting parallels similar to Polanyi) Polnnyi also says in passing, that William JJames despised Cartesian dualism. Is the problem the means mind-body or what? Not subject-object, because this was widely prevalent. But also, all philosophers of this standard variety, James had little use for, not just Descartes.] '''
[Pirsig’s Subject Object Dualism is to me part of Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal” in operation, and Polanyi would agree with Pirsig, although he not mention these specific ideas.] '''

I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever. Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. [William James agree, and also Polanyi, since both understand the Flash of Insight, and both willing to accept (tentatively) non rational things like religion. Research needed. ]

The first horn of Phædrus’ dilemma was, If Quality exists in the object, why can’t scientific instruments detect it?
This horn was the mean one. From the start he saw how deadly it was. If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both. In today’s world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don’t get off the ground. [This is Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal” in operation, and Polanyi would agree with Pirsig, although he does not mention these specific ideas. When Pirsig says scientific knowledge, he means “objective knowledge ideal”.]
He remembered Locke’s statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. [Polanyi agrees in essence.]
…The "object" is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities. This answer, if valid, certainly smashed the first horn of the dilemma, and for a while excited him greatly.
But it turned out to be false. The Quality that he and the students had been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. His Quality—"excellence," "worth," "goodness"—was not a physical property and was not measurable. [Polanyi would agree that “objective knowledge ideal” excludes these.]

Scientific materialism, which is commoner among lay followers of science than among scientists themselves, holds that what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable by the instruments of science is real. Anything else is unreal, or at least of no importance. [Polanyi agree.] "What you like" is unmeasurable, and therefore unreal. "What you like" can be a fact or it can be a hallucination. Liking does not distinguish between the two. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one’s work so as to obtain an objective, true, picture of reality. [Polanyi agree.] …When he said Quality was subjective, to them he was just saying Quality is imaginary and could therefore be disregarded in any serious consideration of reality. [This is Pirsig’s Subject Object Dualism, and to me part of Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal” in operation, and Polanyi would agree with Pirsig, although he not mention these specific ideas, except perhaps scientific materialism.] '''

What the classical formalists meant by the objection "Quality is just what you like" was that this subjective, undefined "quality" he was teaching was just romantic surface appeal. Classroom popularity contests could determine whether a composition had immediate appeal, all right, but was this Quality? Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time? . [Polanyi agree.]

He didn’t like the way this was going. The cleavage term that was going to unify the classic and romantic ways of looking at things had itself been cleaved into two parts and could no longer unify anything. It had been caught in an analytic meat grinder. The knife of subjectivity-and-objectivity had cut Quality in two and killed it as a working concept. If he was going to save it, he couldn’t let that knife get it. [Here again we see Pirsig’s Polanyi agree. Generally against dualisms, as causing trouble, and generally tried to argue against them. ]

Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification. that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife.
…"The sun of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!
… And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long period of time. [Although Polanyi, does not get as far on this as Pirsig, he does talk a lot about value, and value like understandings that guide a scientist and all of us. I would have to tally up list of all of these Polanyi scientist value based actions, and then point to how well Polanyi’s list would equal Pirsig’s Quality. Polanyi would agree that the quality actions of scientist create our scientific understanding, and thus would like Pirsig.]
"Blue sky!" shouts Chris.

He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there’s no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant—none whatsoever.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. . This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. [Need examine if Polanyi agree.]

He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally "deprived" people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he’d been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy.
… Squares, he said, because of their prejudices toward intellectuality usually regard Quality, the preintellectual reality, as unimportant, a mere uneventful transition period between objective reality and subjective perception of it. Because they have preconceived ideas of its unimportance they don’t seek to find out if it’s in any way different from their intellectual conception of it..[Polanyi talks about seeing and not seeing ideas, and the steps to discovery of new ideas. And thus he would agree with Pirsig’s above about Quality, as describing our human ability to respond accurately to life’s on-coming problems. But would have to add up a lots of his statements to see the extent of agreement. Polanyi mostly does not discuss the various types of persons who have mental apilities or preconceptions. ]
…It is different, he said. Once you begin to hear the sound of that Quality, see that Korean wall, that nonintellectual reality in its pure form, you want to forget all that word stuff, which you finally begin to see is always somewhere else.

He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything. [Polanyi talks about seeing and not seeing ideas, and the steps to discovery of new ideas. And thus he would agree with Pirsig’s Quality. But would have to add up a lots of his statements to see the extent of agreement. ]
Then his mind’s eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and . . . I don’t know what really happened . . . but now the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into in avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything. It all gave way from under him.

[Now getting close to Three Forks Montana. ]
During Poincaré’s lifetime, an alarmingly deep crisis in the foundations of the exact sciences had begun. For years scientific truth had been beyond the possibility of a doubt; the logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules. [Polanyi agree, that scientists insisted on perfect and doubt free science, ultimately causing big social problems, and would block research, if adopted, which of course is not done in actual practice. Pirsig says this at end of my favorite quote: “mechanic must care”. William James is adamant about the awful “perfect knowledge” philosophers!!]

Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms. … It wasn’t the proof that was alarming. It was its rational byproduct that soon overshadowed it and almost everything else in the field of mathematics. Mathematics, the cornerstone of scientific certainty, was suddenly uncertain. [Polanyi emphasizes “objective knowledge ideal”, as seeking certainty, doubt free knowledge. And this is what Pirsig recognizes as the huge ideal, and demand for, of absolutely certain knowledge. Pirsig mentions that this was greatly troubling to him, but does not go on to say, as does Polanyi, that this demand/expectation was behind the great destructive movements of 20th century.] '''
,,,We now had two contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth, true for all men of all ages, regardless of their individual preferences.
…This was the basis of the profound crisis that shattered the scientific complacency of the Gilded Age. How do we know which one of these geometries is right? If there is no basis for distinguishing between them, then you have a total mathematics which admits logical contradictions. But a mathematics that admits internal logical contradictions is no mathematics at all. The ultimate effect of the non-Euclidian geometries becomes nothing more than a magician’s mumbo jumbo in which belief is sustained purely by faith!
…And of course once that door was opened one could hardly expect the number of contradictory systems of unshakable scientific truth to be limited to two. A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid’s postulate, but also the first axiom, which states that only one straight line can pass through two points. Again there is no internal contradiction, only an inconsistency with both Lobachevskian and Euclidian geometries.
'''…According to the Theory of Relativity, Riemann geometry best describes the world we live in.
At Three Forks the road cuts into a narrow canyon

If the scientist had at his disposal infinite time, Poincaré said, it would only be necessary to say to him, "Look and notice well"; but as there isn’t time to see everything, and as it’s better not to see than to see wrongly, it’s necessary for him to make a choice. [Polanyi would agree generally with Poincare and Pirsig in this WebPage, above and below. And a Richard Hocks article, I just discovered on internet, jarred me to recognition, saying that: “It is significant that RP and MP both zero-in on the same major themes of Poncaire’ and Einstein. Should research how much Polanyi quotes Poincare’.]

Poincaré made it clear that he was not speaking of romantic beauty, the beauty of appearances which strikes the senses. He meant classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp, which gives structure to romantic beauty and without which life would be only vague and fleeting, a dream from which one could not distinguish one’s dreams because there would be no basis for making the distinction. It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony, that is the sole objective reality.
…What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven’t been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know. [Polanyi would agree, and should research how much he studied Poincare’.]
…Poincaré’s contemporaries refused to acknowledge that facts are preselected because they thought that to do so would destroy the validity of scientific method. They presumed that "preselected facts" meant that truth is "whatever you like" and called his ideas conventionalism. They vigorously ignored the truth that their own "principle of objectivity" is not itself an observable fact—and therefore by their own criteria should be put in a state of suspended animation. [Polanyi agree, and I believe Gelwick says this in several places.]
…They felt they had to do this because if they didn’t, the entire philosophic underpinning of science would collapse. Poincaré didn’t offer any resolutions of this quandary. He didn’t go far enough into the metaphysical implications of what he was saying to arrive at the solution. What he neglected to say was that the selection of facts before you "observe" them is "whatever you like" only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system! When Quality enters the picture as a third metaphysical entity, the preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary. The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious "whatever you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. Thus the quandary vanishes. [Polanyi agree, should research how much he quotes Poincaré’.] '''
…It was as though Phædrus had been working on a puzzle of his own and because of lack of time had left one whole side unfinished.
…Poincaré had been working on a puzzle of his own. His judgment that the scientist selects facts, hypotheses and axioms on the basis of harmony, also left the rough serrated edge of a puzzle incomplete. To leave the impression in the scientific world that the source of all scientific reality is merely a subjective, capricious harmony is to solve problems of epistemology while leaving an unfinished edge at the border of metaphysics that makes the epistemology unacceptable.
…But we know from Phædrus’ metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can proceed. [Polanyi agree, but would emphasize the harmony part of the method, and reject arguments to contrary. Should research how much he quotes Poincaré’.] What brought tears of recognition to my eyes was the discovery that these unfinished edges match perfectly in a kind of harmony that both Phædrus and Poincaré talked about, to produce a complete structure of thought capable of uniting the separate languages of Science and Art into one.
On either side of us the mountains have become steep, to form a long narrow valley that winds into Missoula.

A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There’s no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.
If you’re experienced you’d probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you’re inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you’ve had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.
…Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn’t a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.
'''…The book’s no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don’t need any scientific experiments to find out what’s wrong. It’s obvious what’s wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you’re going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out. [I think Polanyi would agree here. Research needed.] '''

Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—"unstuckness", in other words—are completely outside its domain. [I think Polanyi would agree here. Research needed.]
We continue down the canyon, past folds in the steep slopes where wide streams enter.

We’re still stuck on that screw and the only way it’s going to get unstuck is by abandoning further examination of the screw according to traditional scientific method. . That won’t work. What we have to do is examine traditional scientific method in the light of that stuck screw. [Polanyi agree, previous and next.]
…We have been looking at that screw "objectively." According to the doctrine of "objectivity," which is integral with traditional scientific method, what we like or don’t like about that screw has nothing to do with our correct thinking. We should not evaluate what we see. We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for us, and then reason disinterestedly from the facts we observe. . [Polanyi agree that this is traditional science.]
But when we stop and think about it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin to see that this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are those facts? What are we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable side cover plate? The color of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don’t just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we’re not going to just sit back and "observe" them. We’re going to have to be in there looking for them or we’re going to be here a long time. Forever. As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what facts we observe. [Polanyi agree.] [HSG says => Yes indeed, the needed facts stay hidden b/c our conscious mind is occupied or other higher level activities … These have to be calmed down until finally an automatic spontaneous solution (answer) will suddenly Mentally Arrive. ]
'''…The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. It’s long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn’t destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice. [Polanyi agree.]
'…I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality’s insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other. "You are the mechanic. There is the motorcycle. You are forever apart from one another. You do this to it. You do that to it. These will be the results." '
'''…This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we’re used to it. But it’s not right. It’s always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It’s never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you’re really stuck it’s Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.
[Polanyi would agree with Pirsig’s repeated writing against dualisms. Polanyi mentions problem of dualisms used by philosophers. See 4 inches below “divided relationships”. In Gelwicks “An End to Dichotomies” p 141 5 he mentions these Dualisms: mind-body, reason-experience, facts and values, knower-known. Page 142.1 he mentions opinion-knowledge, appearance-reality ….. knowing-being …. Page 145.9 mentions: fact-value, living thing- mere physics & chem. … Pirsig mentions below: mind-matter, and the rest of the book is a repeating refrain, referring to the wrong kind of science mostly as “dualistic reason”. Other times Pirsig mentions: dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system; eternally dualistic subject-object way; dualistically conceived technology; dualistic thought; dualistic technology; formal dualistic scientific outlook; dualistic logic; dualistic mind; eliminate subject-object duality, and part of Polanyi’s “objective knowledge ideal”, Polanyi mentions: spirit-body, good-evil, right-wrong, etc ] '''
…By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck. [Polanyi agree, and says many things like this concering practicing scientist, minus word Quality. And of course he is against dualistic thinking generally.] [ What Pirsig says above, well agrees with Henry Gurr’s “Explanation (Theory) How Our Mind Works”: In fact Henry Gurr’s Explanation well fits the above (and below) “Polanyi Agree” And same for most Pirsig quoted passages.]

[Pirsig’s Railroad Train Analogy For Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge. ]
'''…In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want to call this railroad train "knowledge" and subdivide in into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.
'''…In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge, the knowledge taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. All of them and everything that’s in them. If you subdivide the train into parts you will find no Romantic Knowledge anywhere. And unless you’re careful it’s easy to make the presumption that’s all the train there is. This isn’t because Romantic Knowledge is nonexistent or even unimportant. It’s just that so far the definition of the train is static and purposeless. [Polanyi agree, but needs research.] This was what I was trying to get at back in South Dakota when I talked about two whole dimensions of existence. [classical understanding and romantic understanding] It’s two whole ways of looking at the train.
…Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn’t any "part" of the train. It’s the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn’t a static entity at all. A train really isn’t a train if it can’t go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we’ve inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn’t a train we are examining. That’s why we get stuck.
…The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track. [Polanyi probably would agree, but does not much mention ideas similar to Pirsig’s Quality. Certainly Polanyi does not discuss anything like Pirsig’s Railroad Train Analogy.]
…Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It’s the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don’t have pure reason—you have pure confusion. . The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?
…The past can not remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. [Polanyi agree, and says many things like this concerning practicing scientist, minus word Quality, and minus cutting edge of reality.]
…Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.
…One’s rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more Quality. One doesn’t cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn’t static anymore. It’s not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It’s made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change. [Owen Barfield talks a great amount of the changes that our human minds creates over the millennia, in his “Evolution of Consciousness”. And according to Henry Gurr’s “Explanation (Theory) Of How Our Mind Works”, our Problem Solving Brain is the source and mechanism for ALL Human Creativity! ]
…To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object ledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just "intuition," not just unexplainable "skill" or "talent." It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal. [Polanyi agree, and says many things like this concerning practicing scientist, minus words Quality. Also Polanyi would agree with Pirsig on Subject-Object Dualism: And in agreement with Pirsig, Polanyi generally wants all forms of dualistic thinking bypassed.]
…It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it’s put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you can have. Harry Truman, , of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration's programs, ``We'll just try them -- and if they don't work -- why then we'll just try something else.'' That may not be an exact quote, but it's close.
The reality of the American government isn't static, he said, it's dynamic. If we don't like it we'll get something better. The American government isn't going to get stuck on any set of fancy doctrinaire ideas.
…The key word is ``better...Quality. Some may argue that the underlying form of the American government is stuck, is incapable of change in response to Quality, but that argument is not to the point. The point is that the President and everyone else, from the wildest radical to the wildest reactionary, agree that the government should change in response to Quality, even if it doesn't. Phædrus' concept of changing Quality as reality, a reality so omnipotent that whole governments must change to keep up with it, is something that in a wordless way we have always unanimously believed in all along.'
…And what Harry Truman said, really, was nothing different from the practical, pragmatic attitude of any laboratory scientist or any engineer or any mechanic when he’s not thinking "objectively" in the course of his daily work.
I keep talking wild theory, but it keeps somehow coming out stuff everybody knows, folklore. This Quality, this feeling for the work, is something known in every shop. [Polanyi would agree, and says many things like this concerning actual practicing scientist, minus word Quality.]
…Now finally let's get back to that screw.” ''
…Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a ``hollow-flexible attitude of ``beginner's mind. You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
…The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small.
…But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. [ <This very well agrees with Henry Gurr’s “Explanation (Theory) How Our Mind Works: In fact Henry Gurr’s Explanation well fits the above (and below) “Polanyi Agree” And same for most Pirsig quoted passages.]
…The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality...reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.
…Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
…Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
…With the expansion of the knowledge, I would guess, would come a reevaluation of what the screw really is. If you concentrate on it, think about it, stay stuck on it for a long enough time, I would guess that in time you will come to see that the screw is less and less an object typical of a class and more an object unique in itself. Then with more concentration you will begin to see the screw as not even an object at all but as a collection of functions. Your stuckness is gradually eliminating patterns of traditional reason. [This is an example of a person’s mind automatically spontaneously, changing their awareness of the situation, rather than seeing a fixed world out there. Since Polanyi understands well the Flash of Insight, he would likely be aware of this kind of arrivals of new awareness, and agree we need to study and be aware of the various methods we solve problems, with automatic spontaneous Mental Arrivals, such as a Flash of Insight and other wise. Polanyi would agree with Pirsig’s above changing awareness about a stuck screw, similar to how he understands the process of scientific discovery: But mostly he does not apply this to a single object. He would agree with need to find ways to move from “stuck & impasse”, to new scientific territory such as Pirsig’s above discussion: AND I think he would agree that being stuck, is the threshold of new discovery, but doesn’t use the term” stuck”. ] '''

What your actual solution is is unimportant as long as it has Quality. Thoughts about the screw as combined rigidness and adhesiveness and about its special helical interlock might lead naturally to solutions of impaction and use of solvents. That is one kind of Quality track. Another track may be to go to the library and look through a catalog of mechanic's tools, in which you might come across a screw extractor that would do the job. Or to call a friend who knows something about mechanical work. Or just to drill the screw out, or just burn it out with a torch. or you might just, as a result of your meditative attention to the screw, come up with some new way of extracting it that has never been thought of before and that beats all the rest and is patentable and makes you a millionaire five years from now. There's no predicting what's on that Quality track. The solutions all are simple...after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are. [But since Polanyi understands so much about human mental processes that happen in scientific problem solving, he surly knew of the many ways of “actual solutions” mentioned by Pirsig above.]
…Highway 13 follows another branch of our river but now it goes upstream past old sawmill towns and sleepy scenery.

But the real ugliness of modern technology isn’t found in any material or shape or act or product. These are just the objects in which the low Quality appears to reside. It’s our habit of assigning Quality to subjects or objects that gives this impression.
'''…The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phædrus’ metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use. . [Polanyi agree, and applies this same sense of “ugliness” to causes of two wars, Communism, Hitler, and modern nihalism .and loss of moral behavior. ]]
…Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it’s also reflected in modern street argot. "Getting with it," "digging it," "grooving on it" are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. . [Polanyi agree in this human capacity, some of it trained into them by education, when scientist “sees”, or mathematical “recognizes” a correct step in a proof.]
…And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phædrus’ definition, it has no Quality.
'''…That wall in Korea that Phædrus saw was an act of technology. It was beautiful, but not because of any masterful intellectual planning or any scientific supervision of the job, or any added expenditures to "stylize" it. It was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously. They didn’t separate themselves from the work in such a way as to do it wrong. There is the center of the whole solution. [ Previous three sentences are VERY important. Please remember. ]
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is — not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. [Polanyi agree, as applied to our whole culture. And uses the examples of science and scientist, and apply to our overall improvement.] '''
…When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one’s own life, in a less dramatic way.
In many places room for the road had to be blasted out of it. Just whichever way the river goes. It may be just my imagination, but it seems the river’s already smaller than it was an hour ago.
NOTE: The words “The walls of the canyon here are completely vertical now. .. No alternate routes here.” Should be understood (by Metaphoric Bridge Connection), as ALSO applying to the 5 Paragraphs previous. ]

Such personal transcendence of conflicts with technology doesn’t have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems are the same. In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what "looks good" and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that "good" are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined. [Polanyi would agree: See his discussing how research scientists proceed.]
…The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored. [Polanyi would agree.]]
The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start. [Polanyi would agree, as to the need to include new non-material ideas/desirables, which are currently rejected: But this needs research.]

The answer is Phædrus’ contention that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet un known. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part. [Polanyi agree, but need research.]
'''…At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts — thin art — because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue. [Polanyi agree, but need research.]
'''…At the DeWeese’s I started to talk about peace of mind in connection with technical work but got laughed off the scene because I brought it up out of the context in which it had originally appeared to me. Now I think it is in context to return to peace of mind and see what I was talking about.
Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one’s circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness—so different from self-consciousness—which result from inner peace of mind.
This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.
I’ve sometimes thought this inner peace of mind, this quietness is similar to if not identical with the sort of calm you sometimes get when going fishing, which accounts for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the line in the water, not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving problems you couldn’t solve before and introduced ugliness and clumsiness into your actions and thoughts. [Polanyi might agree, but need research how much he was aware of the oriental/Zen/peace of mind modes.] '''
You don’t have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle. A cup of coffee, a walk around the block, sometimes just putting off the job for five minutes of silence is enough. When you do you can almost feel yourself grow toward that inner peace of mind that reveals it all. That which turns its back on this inner calm and the Quality it reveals is bad maintenance. That which turns toward it is good. The forms of turning away and toward are infinite but the goal is always the same.
I think that when this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context. I’ve said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this—there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right. '''
…We’ve all had moments of that sort when we’re doing something we really want to do. It’s just that somehow we’ve gotten into an unfortunate separation of those moments from work. The mechanic I’m talking about doesn’t make this separation. One says of him that he is "interested" in what he’s doing, that he’s "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"[Polanyi agree. See above at “getting it.] … There are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop. But in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal dualistic scientific outlook. [Polanyi agree.]
…Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one’s consciousness. What I’m talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn’t dominate one’s consciousness. When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.
…So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all. That was what it was about that wall in Korea. It was a material reflection of a spiritual reality. [ Previous four sentences are VERY important. Please remember. ]
''' …I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. . [Polanyi agree.]
… The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. [Although Pirsig says “others can expand … ”, he is by silent omission saying that this paragraph above, is what he wants US to do as well!!! And that is what I see overall, in ZMM ! ]
A town called Riggins comes up …

[After Omar Khayyàm’s Rubàiyat Quatrains, the ZMM topic changes to Gumption.}
In traditional maintenance gumption is considered something you’re born with or have acquired as a result of good upbringing. It’s a fixed commodity. From the lack of information about how one acquires this gumption one might assume that a person without any gumption is a hopeless case.
…In nondualistic maintenance gumption isn’t a fixed commodity. It’s variable, a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or subtracted from. [Polanyi agree.] Since it’s a result of the perception of Quality, a gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one’s enthusiasm for what one is doing. As one might guess from a definition as broad as this, the field is enormous and only a beginning sketch can be attempted here.

Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values make this impossible. [Polanyi agree, but need research.]

The birth of a new fact [Polanyi’s discovery] is always a wonderful thing to experience. It’s dualistically called a "discovery" because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone’s awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears. [Polanyi agree, but need research. I seem to remember him mentioning the assumed idea that => A discovery found something that preexisted, Plationism, waiting for the discoverer: This is to be contrasted with mathematics that is constructed by human minds, as this is happening in the in act of discovery. Brings to mind the two different kinds of mathematicians called classical mathematics & constructive mathematics, as explained by Wikipedia =>
…In the foundations of mathematics, classical mathematics refers generally to the mainstream approach to mathematics, which is based on classical logic and ZFC set theory. It stands in contrast to other types of mathematics such as constructive mathematics or predicative mathematics. In practice, the most common non-classical systems are used in constructive mathematics.
…Classical mathematics is sometimes attacked on philosophical grounds, due to constructivist and other objections to the logic, set theory, etc., chosen as its foundations, such as have been expressed by L. E. J. Brouwer. Almost all mathematics, however, is done in the classical tradition, or in ways compatible with it.
…Defenders of classical mathematics, such as David Hilbert, have argued that it is easier to work in, and is most fruitful; although they acknowledge non-classical mathematics has at times led to fruitful results that classical mathematics could not (or could not so easily) attain, they argue that on the whole, it is the other way round. ]

At first try to understand this new fact not so much in terms of your big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as you think it is. And that fact may not be as small as you think it is. It may not be the fact you want but at least you should be very sure of that before you send the fact away. Often before you send it away you will discover it has friends who are right next to it and are watching to see what your response is. Among the friends may be the exact fact you are looking for.
…After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens you’ve reached a kind of point of arrival. Then you’re no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you’re also a motorcycle scientist, and you’ve completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity. [Polanyi probably agree, but need research. Not sure if Polanyi mention rigidity and/or peace of mind etc.]
The road has come up into the pines again

When beginning a repair job you can list everything you’re going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on. [Polanyi agree?]

Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when you’re in it and work on that before you continue on the machine. [Polanyi agree? But not use that term.]
Dayville has huge shade trees

The desert road winds through rocky gorges and hills. This is the driest country yet.
I want to talk now about traps and muscle traps and then stop this Chautauqua for today. [Since both Polanyi and James have a good understanding of science and the Flash of Insight, they would agree with what Pirsig covers below in Gumptionality. James even uses word gumption in his “Pragmatism”!)] '''
…Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But there’s one trap that isn’t—the truth trap of yes-no logic.
''' …Yes and no . . . this or that . . . one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones
and zeros, that’s all. '''
…Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.
…Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the "phenomenon" that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! There’s nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It’s just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it. . [I think Polanyi would agree, but doesn’t discuss the mu third choice/result.]

Some could ask, "Well, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?"
…The answer, of course, is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. [Good equivalent to Polanyi tacit knowledge in action.]
…But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right.
…The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
…We arrive in Prineville Junction with only a few hours of daylight left.

[Following an interviewed by Professors at the University of Chicago, Phaedrus is brought to thinking about “What is your substantive field?" ]
…In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about ''' Quality and substantive and methodological fields.
Substance doesn’t change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader. '''
…But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them. Quality isn’t a substance. Neither is it a method. It’s outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.
…"Substance" and "substantive" really corresponded to "object" and "objectivity," which he’d rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and method, just as when everything’s divided up into subject and object, there’s really no room for Quality at all. . [Polanyi agree, when applying to ills of modern society, last 100 years..]] His thesis can not be a part of a substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all. But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered. [Polanyi had his own practice of methods to do good science, which were mostly opposite of those of The Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago. ]

This was it. He [Phaedrus] really believed. It wasn’t just another interesting idea to be tested by existing rational methods. It was a modification of the existing rational methods themselves. Normally when you have a new idea to present in an academic environment you’re supposed to be objective and disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very supposition—of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence is achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not. inevitably dualistic full of subjects and objects. [Since Polanyi understands so much about human mental processes that happen in scientific problem solving, he surly would agree with Pirsig’s above “dualistic reason”.]
…He had the faith that he had solved a huge riddle of the universe, cut a Gordian knot of dualistic thought with one word, Quality, and he wasn’t about to let anyone tie that word down again. And in believing, he couldn’t see how outrageously megalomaniacal his words sounded to others. Or if he saw it, didn’t care.

[Phaedrus library research found some of the history of the University of Chicago’s President Robert Maynard Hutchens. ]
''' …Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a "good" education. Science is "value free." The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values.
Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the "oughts" of life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same direction as Phædrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped there. There was a clash. '''
…Even those who were willing to admit Hutchins’ preoccupation with Quality were unwilling to grant the final authority to the Aristotelian tradition to define values. They insisted that no values can be fixed, and that a valid modern philosophy need not reckon with ideas as they are expressed in the books of ancient and medieval times. The whole business seemed to many of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.
…Phædrus didn’t know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn’t feel this tradition should be left unreckoned with. [Polanyi would agree.]

[The ZMM Narrator has finished discussing what happened at the University of Chicago, and in Oregon Campground he says => “Now I want to shift into another direction, which completes Phaedrus story. I never really completed it because I didn’t think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.” ]
The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.
…There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane. . . .
… My God, that just came to me now. I never knew that before.
''' …He knew! He must have known what was about to happen. It’s starting to open up.
You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don’t go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That’s a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos. '''
…Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That’s it. That’s what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. [Polanyi probably agree, and also discussed how we came up out of mythos.] By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
I see Chris returning through the trees now.

[ [After Grants Pass OR] We’re … are soon into the coastal redwood forest, across out of Oregon into California. …Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face—that searching look—then it’s gone.]
…Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—TV, jets, freeways and so on—but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That’s why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles—with Quality—is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time. . [Polanyi agree.]
…Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with—and they are all, sooner or later, dull—and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
…My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. . [Polanyi agree.]] …We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out of gumption. And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource—individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth . [Polanyi agree.] and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.
…Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that—a new spiritual rationality—in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.
It’s begun to rain a little.

[After discussing history of Ancient Greet Philosophers, Socrates, Plato & Aristotle, The ZMM Narrator assembles a long series of important conclusions. ]
…What was Plato’s real purpose in this? Phædrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other. [Pirsig’s conclusions about this Greek history of truth vs good, setting a foundation, continuing to our time, I don’t recall discussed in either Polanyi or James. Barfield would probably agree, but I have no recollection. Research needed.]
…To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some explanation: … Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It’s here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.
…What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. [Thus, the origin of some dualisms.]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. .] [Polanyi agree that present day scientists objects to accepting existence of a non physical idea. James deals with “The One” and “The Many”.]
…But they weren’t, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
…The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
…The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things." These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece. [The improvement of men (and society) is the goal of ZMM, Barfield, Polanyi, and James. Included in these authors, inevitably, is conflict of truth and good and war between absolute and relative. And they are fighting with everything they have!!]
…To Phædrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
…Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people—there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
…The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it’s unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all. [Above we learn how much of our modern way of thinking and doing science originates with the Ancient Greeks. To my memory, Polanyi does not discuss anything like this. ]

[Phaedrus discovers H. D. F. Kitto’s book “The Greeks” ]
…"What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments, "is not a sense of duty as we understand it—duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek Areté, ‘excellence’ . . . we shall have much to say about Areté. It runs through Greek life."
…There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever. Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?
…Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and then . . . what’s this?! . . . "That which we translate ‘virtue ‘ but is in Greek is ‘excellence.’ "
Lightning hits! '''
…Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But Areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along.
The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.

…Kitto had more to say about this Areté of the ancient Greeks. "When we meet Areté in Plato," he said, "we translate it ‘virtue’ and consequently miss all the flavour of it. ‘Virtue,’ at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; Areté, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence."
…Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing Areté.
…Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
…Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth—but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it. . [Polanyi, Barfield, James would agree.]
One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching that horizon. It’s a geometer’s line . . . completely flat, steady and known. '''

'''And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done. . . . [I wonder what present day historians think of Phaedrus’ conclusion concerning the reason for truth had to defeat the good, and why Societies hated the sophists so much? I don’t remember Polanyi or James saying about this, nor any reason to. I think Barfield should agree. Need research. ]]
The road has become so dark I have to turn on my headlight now to follow it through these mists and rain.
Chapter 30

[From the end of Chapter 32:
… After a while he [Chris] says, "Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?"
"If you take care of it."
"What do you have to do?"
"Lot’s of things. You’ve been watching me."
"Will you show me all of them?"
"Sure."
"It is hard?"
"Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard."
"Oh."
After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, "Dad?"
"What?"
"Will I have the right attitudes?"
"I think so," I say. "I don’t think that will be any problem at all."

And so we ride on and on, down through Ukiah, and Hopland, and Cloverdale, down into the wine country. The freeway miles seem so easy now. The engine which has carried us halfway across a continent drones on and on in its continuing oblivion to everything but its own internal forces. We pass through Asti and Santa Rosa, and Petaluma and Novato, on the freeway that grows wider and fuller now, swelling with cars and trucks and busses full of people, and soon by the road are houses and boats and the water of the Bay.

Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.
[The END]

By Henry Gurr 17 Sept 2013. RevRpg8Aug16 HSG MajorAssemblele25Oct22. RevHsg19June-7July23, Rev&AddAppendix21Apr24.
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