Quality

Lately I've been reading a lot of books, articles, and journals dealing with spirituality. Authors like Brené Brown, topics like aggression, and occasionally I hit a spark like I did reading parts of a classic that I've always found difficult to finish.

I've picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance probably a dozen times since it came into my possession. It's been so long since I first got it that I can't remember which of my two brothers gave it to me. Some of the abstract, and circular logic confuses me, most of it exhausts me. Yes I get it, if you think about it hard enough existence is nothing more than perception. Does acknowledging that serve any purpose?

The title of this post refers to a moment reading where I was lost, and searching for meaning. For some reason something about quality hit home in me. In the book, the narrator asks a class, but really he's asking us; what is quality? I foolishly continued on without stopping, but take a moment and think about that question. Try to succinctly define quality, you can even google the word if you like. We can even stick with the adjective form of the word to make things less complex (relatively):

of or having superior quality: quality paper
producing or providing products or services of high quality or merit: a quality publisher.

Not exactly starting in a good place when the definition includes the word that it's trying to define. This doesn't even do a good job of that as it focuses on aspects of good quality. It is such a strange thing that something we know so intimately, and base a lot of important decisions in our life on, is something that we have almost no ability to define.

You know good quality when you see it. You've either been taught the scale of quality for individual things (that's a really good quality television), or inferred it based on accumulated knowledge (a good quality tree is one that exemplifies traits that make a tree useful).

The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig, presents to us our own thinking. We believe that the quality inhabits the object, but simultaneously we're painfully aware that what we find to be of good quality may not be universally seen as such. So you flip the owner to try and make sense of things, the quality inhabits the observer, our mind. This also doesn't work as each individual doesn't have their own catalog of quality, it is influenced by other observers, by other objects even.

So Pirsig, through the fictional Phaedrus, tries to define quality by separating it entirely from mind or matter. Instead he tries to define quality as an event. Our mind perceives matter in our world, and instantaneously, after perceiving it, the "quality event" occurs. It's this instantaneous scoring of every perceived object on a scale of quality.

So I've taken this postulation and sort of....worried it over a lot. I began to ask myself a lot of uncomfortable questions. How much of my life is based solely on this instantaneous metaphysical scoring system? Am I trapping people, objects, experiences simply based on a gut check categorization of good or bad? How much have I missed out on doing this?

I don't believe wholly in the idea that there's this event outside of reality that is the sole source of quality's definition, but it is hard to ignore the idea that our brain makes choices in perception of our reality for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's safety, or sometimes it's aesthetics, but for the sake of brevity our brain quite often just guesses.

We're very often taught in higher education to question things, but very rarely are we instructed to question ourselves. That could prove dangerous. Trust your instincts, we're told, it is better to be alive than to be loved. This task of defining quality presupposes the goodness or badness of that quality.

I had a conversation recently with someone about making tacit and complete judgments about one's own opinions. That we're apt to frame things definitely, a show is bad, a joke is not funny. These are qualities we're talking about, but through language, cognition, and our mind's constant act of tricking itself, we lead ourselves to believe these statements of quality.

It might be simpler to think of it in terms of art. We have the cognizant recognition that what is or isn't good art is in the eye of the beholder. Why is any other quality different? I did not find the joke funny, but that does not mean that it isn't funny. The simple telling of a joke implies that the person telling it found it funny enough to relay.

Deeper and deeper I dove, until I was basically pissed off with quality. I had personified it, and I hated it. Who was quality to tell me what my reality definitely was? Why do we let quality dictate...the quality of conversation we have with others?

So I've challenged myself to recognize quality more. When I'm applying quality in my life to my own detriment, and how I can listen more to other's quality to learn experiences outside of my own. Humanity can be seen as levels of interconnectedness. We have a sentience that allows us to think about the fact that we're thinking, but our brain is combating us at every turn in an effort to be succinct, to survive by acting quickly. I'd like to think past that.