Levels of Quality (Process and Reality)

In “Lila” Robert Pirsig outlines four distinct levels of “quality” - which also correspond to stages of evolution. He names these material, biological, social and intellectual . A large part of his book is devoted to working out the implications of how these different levels work, and how they come into conflict with one another.

I date my own first experience of Quality (apart from the inarticulate, felt sense of it in early childhood) to the year 1968; and I recognize its emergence - in a range of different contexts - both before and after I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . I take it as something “there” to be discovered and explored by each of us from our own place in the world. And thus I have been attempting to think about if, on parallel lines to Pirsig, for many decades past.

For me there was always a context for Quality: it was the quality of connection with another human being, the quality of the ambience in a roomful of people, quality in music heard, and quality as the experience of the zone when playing music myself. I could also recognize Quality emerging out of biological levels of human connection, and Quality as an aesthetic or artistic kind of experience.

But these four levels! Is Pirsig’s to be taken as a first approximation, or as some kind of definitive statement? For me there is a question that cannot be avoided, of how we can go about resolving alternative formulations. For instance: I see intellectual activity as one form of social or cultural activity; this, for me, does not argue for it as a distinct level . I wonder what to do with my impulse to resist Pirsig’s mapping in this respect? What the implications are, of counting “intellectual” as a distinct level in its own right? What would the consequences be, in any case, of a mistaken categorisation ?

Again: I have taken a great interest in Benedetto Croce’s distinctions between “Aesthetic, Philosophical, Practical (utilitarian) and Ethical” levels(1)n. What would be the conceptual apparatus needed, to open a dialogue between the different formulations?)

I do not find an answer to these questions within the intellectual structure of Lila . For me, it does not help, to set up a “Metaphysics of Quality” in apparent opposition to a “Subject-Object Metaphysics”. I suspect that the very idea of “Subject-Object Metaphysics” is confusing, in that it melds together two very distinct commitments. There is, in the first place, the everyday, common-sense experience of “things in the world” - which all of us do our best to grapple with as best we can. And there is the pernicious and rigid metaphysical doctrine which Pirsig rightly rejects - but which I do not see as notably rampant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pirsig’s sharp polarisation encourages his followers to indulge in rash judgments: condemning or ignoring a wide range of philosophers who do not fit in comfortably with these two disjunctive types of Metaphysics.

An example of this, close to my own heart, is the whole current of “Classic American” philosophy (Peirce, James, Whitehead, Dewey, Mead, Randall, Buchler) - which seems to me entirely sympathetic to a sense of “quality” pervading the whole universe, but which has been severely neglected by Pirsig and his readers.

I notice that at the end of Lila , Pirsig emerges with what is for him a key insight: “Good is a noun !” This caused me to start thinking: nouns normally exist in relation to verbs, adjectives, prepositions and so forth. Also “Quality” is so intensely bound up with qualities of ..... of things, or actions, of emotions.... (in other words, the context that I was referring to earlier. If we are making Quality a noun that stands alone, then I need some reassurance that a Metaphysics of Quality isn’t seeking to exclude such things as actions, processes and relations; or isn’t subordinating them, trying to account them less of a reality than the Quality which pervades them.

Let us agree that the Subject-Object metaphysics is indeed a pernicious reductionism - that it tries, insanely, to reduce the entire universe to a collection of “objects” that exist in an apparently sterile relationship to an imaginary “subject”. It certainly seems to me (and here I refer to the trend of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and the later positivist axis) that the main current of “modern philosophy” has tended to subordinate actions, processes and relations as being “merely subjective” or at best an inferior sort of reality to the Objects with which it is concerned. I do not accept this; I do not want things, qualities or relationships placed in subordinate relationships or argued out of existence; I want my metaphysics to co-ordinate my experiences of things, of qualities, of actions, processes and relations - all as meaningful facets of complex reality which is unfolding through time. Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality is ambiguous in this respect, but he does seem to imply at times that “quality” is more real than the other aspects of the web of our experience. Then it starts to look like a reductionism too. And I have no wish to trade one reductionism for another one.

Whether we are talking nouns, verbs or adjectives, I need the context of an unfolding pattern of activity, in order to make sense of the parallel emergence of biological quality out of an underlying material quality; and of social quality emerging out of an underlying biological quality. In my own research into these matters I, like Pirsig, have departed from a Subject-Object metaphysics. But I have leaned towards depicting lived experience as a kind of landscape : one whose geography is made up of elements which appear to us in the diverse forms of fact (either perceived, or thought), of feeling , and of the actions which we initiate in the context this landscape.

This is the frame of reference that has enabled me to understand very much better, the parallel universes of materiality, biology and sociality - and this has included the essential question of the process by which one level may have emerged from the next level down. How, for example, the level of biology actually arose out of a domain of material quality; and how social quality arose from a domain of biological quality.

At first sight, this tracing of the emergence of one level out of the level below it could appear to be vain speculation indeed - since we are trying to understand something which presumably happened in the remote regions of historical time. There is another way to look at it, however, which is to see this as a process of continuous creation - such that the biological is continuously re-emerging from the material - and in the same way, the social is continuously emerging from the biological. From this vantage point, we can reasonably start to wonder: what is happening - at the material level which embodies the animal organism - which creates in real time the living process with its unique qualities, its aspirations and its successes and failures. So again, the focus shifts to activity and the qualities of the activity - not on “quality” as a noun sufficient unto itself.

This points towards a distinct domain of exploration which Pirsig may be seen as pointing towards, but - at least in his published work – he has not entered into to any significant extent. It is to imagine a kind of resonance - of these layers, these intellectual, social and biological qualities, happening simultaneously within each moment of experience. It also implies the emergence in real time, of each level of quality out of the immediately subterranean level of process - that level of process which engenders it now - but also must have engendered it for the very first time in some lost, primordial time of evolution. When I read the narrative sections of “Lila” with their very sensitive evocation of the subtleties of relationship of two people reading and mis-reading each other, I feel it is honest and true to the real interplay of these simultaneous layers of quality.

In the academic world - in the discipline of Cognitive Biology, in fact - there is a prototype for this model of higher-level properties emerging in real time, in a particular view of the living process which was first conjectured by the Chilean neuro-scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. They pictured the life process as having a very specific power: that of creating itself out of the simpler components which it can obtain from its immediate environment. It is, in effect a “self-winding” process - whose product is the very organisation that is managing the construction, or winding, process. Capturing, as it goes, the very energy which will drive the energy of capturing(2).

This leaves life, on our horizon, as essentially mysterious and wonderful - but also as deeply and intricately material . It is a higher level of process, with Quality that is specific to this particular level of functioning, as compared with the purely material (the kinetic, the chemical and the electro-magnetic) processes which subserve it.

In later sections of my study I have tried to trace out the emergence of “higher” levels, out of the of biological quality as it is outlined by Maturana and Varela. These levels have come out differently than Pirsig’s. My best understanding of this, is that the differences need to be resolved by research and not primarily by philosophical argument. But the nature of the research, and how it relates to the philosophy, opens up a whole new dimension of question and answer. Clearly, it needs to be postponed for another day.

NOTES
(see: CROCE, Benedetto (1912) What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

see the relevant chapter in: WINOGRAD and FLORES (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition - which also contains many other references.