[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

Ham said:

I have the Bagavad Gita in paperback. I also have Laotzu's "The Way of Life", Suzuki's "Introduction to Zen Buddhism", A.J. Bahm's "Philosophy of the Buddha", as well as The Upanishads..  Truthfully, I never got much insight from these books.  Eastern mysticism seems to be more about psychology and the art of self-control through meditation than about philosophy or metaphysics. Pirsig allegedly got his inspiration for the MoQ from Zen Buddhism.  But when he and Marsha (who also studies Orientalism) conclude that there is no self, I begin to despair that there is any hope left for Western Philosophy.

dmb says:
Don't worry, Ham. Eastern and Western philosophy will both survive Marsha's abuses.
At one point in ZAMM, Pirsig equates his Quality with the Tao. A tiny segment from Standford's article on mysticism shows this connection pretty well, I think. The basic similarity is that they are both undefinable....

"Apophatic mysticism (from the Greek, “apophasis,” meaning negation or “saying away”) is contrasted with kataphatic mysticism (from the Greek, “kataphasis,” meaning affirmation or “saying with”). Apophatic mysticism, put roughly, claims that nothing can be said of objects or states of affairs which the mystic experiences. These are absolutely indescribable, or “ineffable.” Kataphatic mysticism does make claims about what the mystic experiences.An example of apophatic mysticism is in the classical Tao text, Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tsu (6thcentury B.C.E.), which begins with the words, “Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself. Even the finest name is insufficient to define it. Without words, the Tao can be experienced, and without a name, it can be known.” (Lao Tsu, 1984)."

That's exactly what Pirsig says about Quality. It is the mystic reality. It can be experienced and known but not defined. This is a form of Apophatic mysticism, which says the mystical reality is outside of language, is effable, is undefinable and yet you know it by direct acquaintance. It is the non-verbal and non-conecptual part of experience. 

“Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means,” Pirsig says in his first book, “has been with us since the beginning of history. It's the basis of Zen practice."169 He says the same thing in his second book. “Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others,” Pirsig explains. “They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation.”170 This is why mystics will say you that intellect is not a path to reality. Quality or pure experience is what you know by direct acquaintance, Pirsig says. “You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”171 Would it be fair to not only count William James and to count him among the philosophical mystics but also say that there was some Zen in the art of William James? David Scott certainly thinks so.      East meets West. In “William James and Buddhism: American Pragmatism and the Orient”, Scott makes a compelling case that James’s work is very compatible with Buddhist philosophies. “Perceptions of Buddhism were percolating into American thought through various channels by the end of the nineteenth century,” Scott tells us, and one “channel was the Transcendentalist movement,” which was led by James’s godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson.172 Scott tells us that the famous Hindu spokesman Swami Vivekananda, whom James had compared to his Absolutist enemies and criticized as otherworldly, received a letter from James in which he criticized Vivekananda’s negative comments about Buddhism. “That James at Harvard felt concerned enough to have taken the trouble to send this letter to Vivekananda in faraway Calcutta to defend Buddhism is revealing.”173 Further, Scott says, “James was one of the earliest persons to bring Buddhism into this academic debate,” and the “case of ‘Buddhism’ led him [James] to focus on the experiential consequences of religion:”174 Like James’s pragmatism, Scott points out, Buddhism represents a ‘Middle Way’ between monism and atomism. Indeed, James’s radical empiricism gives us a picture of a pluralistic universe or a pluralistic monism, if you will. In other words, James answers the question of whether reality is One or many by saying “yes”. It is both at the same time because conjunctions and disjunctions are both felt and known in experience and so oneness and manyness are equally real.      The perennial philosophy. Pirsig thinks the perennial philosophy is perennial because it happens to be true. It is not a philosophy or religion as such but rather more like a chemically purified extract, as Aldous Huxley put it in his classic book more than fifty years ago. The basic idea is that mystical experiences have occurred in various times and places throughout the world and all of the world’s great religions are built up from these original experiences. On this view, each of the world’s great religions have an esoteric core wherein they agree with each and the apparent differences are just a result of the particular forms of expression given by the various languages and culture. Pirsig identifies his pure Quality or Dynamic Quality with philosophical mysticism and he associates that with religious forms of mysticism to a certain extent, “but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect,” Pirsig says. “Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth.”175 Similarly, James identified “‘mystical experience’ as the ‘fountainhead’ for religion,” Scott says, and this “gives a further bridge into Buddhism.”176  As we just saw, James stressed the importance of the individual’s immediate experience and The Varieties of Religious Experience intentionally says very little about institutional religions or theological doctrines. “Zen Buddhism matches this distrust of language and of intellectual formulations,” Scott says, as its various “techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of ‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization.’”177 The admittedly bold claim here is that Quality or pure experience both refer to the original source of all religions and all of our other conceptual understandings.      Buddha was a pragmatist? Scott’s article is a treasure chest full of information about the connections between James and Buddhism, not to mention the connections he shows between John Dewey and Buddhism. But David Kalupahana expressed this connection most plainly and directly. “In his [Kalupahana’s] A History of Buddhist Philosophy the Buddha is termed ‘a radical empiricist and a pragmatist.’