"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

[fiefoe]

The road trip became perfunctory at best and dismal at its worst. Both the son Chris and motorcycle maintenance (much parallel to computer programming) got shortchanged. After all this lecturing, I'm still not sure what does dialectic mean.

• 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.
• required a backup into the meaning of Quality. But to understand the meaning of Quality in classic terms required a backup into metaphysics and its relationship to everyday life. To do that required still another backup into the huge area that relates both metaphysics and everyday life—namely, formal reason. So I proceeded with formal reason up into metaphysics and then into Quality and then from Quality back down into metaphysics and science.
• scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around.
• 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,
• The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere... 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.
• 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
• The American government isn’t going to get stuck on any set of fancy doctrinaire ideas. The key word is “better”—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.
• This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads,
• 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.
• 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.
• That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.
• to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.
• Quatrain of The Rubáiyat of Omar Kháyyam. It looks like some desert cliff in Persia above
• When intermittents recur, try to correlate them with other things the cycle is doing.
• Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis.
• 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. He had the faith that.
• The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the boxcars of the train of consciousness. The mythos is the whole train of 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.
• Here, a little farther south, is where all our good wine comes from. The hills are somehow tucked and folded differently—exquisitely. The road twists and banks and curlecues and descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and overhanging boughs of trees.
• Phaedrus saw Aristotle as tremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of naming and classifying everything.... His attitude toward Aristotle was grossly unfair for the same reason Aristotle was unfair to his predecessors. They fouled up what he wanted to say.
• Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the “one.” Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the “many.”
• 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,
• 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.
• 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.
• Phaedrus 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.
• 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 aretê.
• 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.
• But in his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping aretê’s place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a “true” order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.
• GREEK perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.