Tag: Persig

The Tao

The cherry-bloom has gone–

a temple, in among the trees,

is what it has become.

Buson [1]

Ice on a Nissan Almera, December 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

Om. Tao. The origin of form. The indefinable non-thing that lends structure to the Universe.

According to the Tao Te Ching, which attempts to describe, in a manner as general as possible, the ingredients of a superior life, the Tao is ineffable – is not, in fact, an “it” at all. By living close to the Tao, however, by aligning yourself to “it”, one can live a good life. To the average educated Westerner this probably smacks of sophistry: what possible use is the Tao if it cannot be held in the hand? If it is irreducible and therefore irrational? In the Tao Te Ching, the pursuit of the Tao appears to be synonymous with excellence, but the Tao itself is indifferent, encompassing both good and bad. If following the Tao allows you to live well, but the Tao is not intrinsically good, this suggests that it lies at the root of our ability to assign value to something, to separate good from bad, one thing from another. It is therefore related to our ability to discriminate, perhaps even to think. We arrive then at Robert Persig’s conclusion, expounded in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Tao is “Quality”. Can we explain precisely what is meant by Quality, to show the enormous progress we have made by uniting it with the Tao? Not exactly, no – although perhaps we can explain its flavour in a way that is easier for a scientifically-literate Western audience, largely ignorant of Eastern philosophy, to appreciate.

Quality is the indefinable essence of excellence that marks out good work. In poetry, it is the right balance of specificity and ambiguity of images, purity of subject matter and depth of linguistic expression. For the master craftsman, it is the unselfconscious production of an object that is simultaneously aesthetically and functionally beautiful. In science, an understanding of Quality allows a great scientist to siphon a powerful (c’est-à-dire general) law out of an infinite number of associated facts and phenomena. The Tao is then present in all aspects of human endeavour: in our crafts, but crucially also in our façon de vie. If the link we have made between Quality and the Tao is true, it simply confirms what has been averred by Taoists for centuries: that the Tao is central to a human perception of the Universe.  

Does the Tao have an analogue in other religions or philosophies? Persig points to the Greek concept of aretê – excellence, duty to oneself – and to Dharma in Hinduism [2]. He also observes that the words “God” and “good” have the same linguistic root in English [3]. We can quote the familiar phrase:

God is Good.

Left unqualified, this expression seems more like a description of a person than a statement of equality. It is only looking at one side of the good-bad continuum and ignores the absurdity of human life, the indifference of the universe to human desires. In times of anxiety or self-reflection, humans cleave to the super-human, but it is impossible, as a thinking person, to embrace a loving God. Our only recourse is to dedicate ourselves to “goodness of life”, “goodness of humanity” or some other lofty principle. We can try to develop our previous statement with this in mind: 

God is Goodness.

And now the landscape begins to clear because we are talking explicitly about a scale. Goodness is like a voltage, defined by two arbitrary points of reference, but instead of electrical potential we are measuring fitness/rightness/excellence. The Tao appears therefore as a value judgment – an assessment of quality. We arrive again at Persig’s conclusion:

God is Quality.

When God became personal and helpful, all the subtlety and power of the Tao was lost to superstition and muddy-thinking. God, or Quality, is beyond description – it is impersonal – but you can approach it in work and life through a sensitivity to context. This is difficult for the Westerner to understand because the word “God” is welded to the image of a white-bearded patriarch. In the sphere of industry, Tao is present in the craft of the master artisan who feels intuitively how to mold the materials that they work with. Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery describes the loss of self-consciousness that accompanies the work of a master who is able to identify so completely with their discipline that the work is produced naturally, almost by itself [4]. If art is defined as quality of endeavour [3] then one might say this is when technical work is elevated to the level of art. In life more generally, God lies in the actions that brings mankind into balance with their surroundings, that allows them to cope with the absurdity of existence, with disappointment and suffering.

Taoists understand that the good life cannot be achieved by trying to follow a single set of rules – even those laid out in the Tao Te Ching. Human psychology is too mercurial to be mastered by reading an instruction manual, so the way must be found through experience, by changing our minds gradually and definitively. Though there is no totally general way to achieve this, religious works attempt to trace aspects of the ideal human character: pointing to the importance of humility, unselfconsciousness, amor fati, generosity, moderation. Sufism, for example, teaches that this terraforming of the mind cannot be transmitted purely intellectually. We cannot know in advance what we need, as an individual, to reach enlightenment. We therefore have to learn through action and observation. Sufis also believe that there is a different teacher adapted for every person. This teacher may be a person themselves, or some formative experience. They maintain that the way can be found through the pursuit of any discipline, via ecstatic or mystical or practical experience. In his translation of The Tale of the Three Dervishes, Idries Shah describes three dervishes who are searching for the Deep Truth [5]:

The first, Yak-Baba, sat down and contemplated until his head was sore. The second, Do-Agha, stood on his head until his feet ached. The third, Se-Kalandar, read books until his nose bled. Finally they decided upon a common effort. They went into retirement and carried out their exercises in unison, hoping by that means to summon enough effort to produce the appearance of Truth, which they called Deep Truth. For forty days and forty nights they persevered. At last in a whirl of white smoke the head of a very old man appeared, as if from the ground, in front of them. ‘Are you the mysterious Khidr, guide of men?’ asked the first. ‘No, he is the Qutub, the Pillar of the Universe,’ said the second. ‘I am convinced that this is none other than one of the Abdals, The Changed Ones,’ said the third.

‘I am none of these,’ roared the apparition, ‘but I am that which you may think me to be.’

The head directs the first dervish to the Country of Fools, the second to gaze into a Magic Mirror and the third to seek the aid of the Jinn of the Whirlpool. After many trials, each of the dervishes succeeds in their task and is granted a vision of the Deep Truth. They attract many followers, each of whom desires to know the Truth for themselves, and these followers, having superficially observed the progress of the dervishes, try to emulate the actions that led them to enlightenment. None are successful, however. In a similar way, many of us enjoy reading about people who have achieved extraordinary things. Here, for example, is the story of a woman who achieved enlightenment:

Following the death of  a close friend, an ordinarily diligent and single-minded woman develops a degree of existential anxiety. Her work as a software engineer, originally a source of intellectual stimulation, now feels demanding and even pointless. She begins to worry about the future and shrinks from the enormity of the dangers facing the world. For several days she lives alone in her apartment, leaving only to satisfy her basic needs, without making a special effort to speak to anyone. Nothing happens and her despair deepens. Eventually she starts to search for something fixed and super-human that might allow her to escape her own problems, but finds that she can’t bring herself to believe in a personal God. It occurs to her that she might dedicate herself to principles like “love” or “goodness of life” which feel spiritually fulfilling. She sees that these principles are not entirely abstract, but nonetheless cannot be rigorously defined.

Thinking about why she feels the need to dedicate herself to a super-human entity, the woman realizes she would feel ridiculous labouring under something ephemeral and she struggles for a while to fix a definition of “goodness”. But then, she thinks, all psychological states are arbitrary – from the pessimistic to the optimistic and the soi-disant rationalist outlooks. The “why” is anyway meaningless. She is being given a choice about how to respond to reality. From here, her ability to lead an excellent life depends simply on her ability to alter her mind.

The woman now adopts a less judgmental, more optimistic, more constructive response to life and gradually she starts to live for other people. Her friends admire her and try to emulate her. Strangers are touched by her openness, curiosity and clarity of thought. She understands that not to take this approach to life would be equally “justified”, equally arbitrary, but would not lead to a high-quality life.  

Perhaps this little narrative has been in some sense instructive, but it is doubtful anyone could reach the same conclusions as the woman in the story just by reading about it. Reading about her journey may even impede one’s own development if the mind is not properly prepared.

What is the connection between the Tao, science and morality? In his Foundations of Science, Poincaré examines the origin of scientific and mathematical discovery [6]. He observes that a mathematician cannot just choose facts at random and see if they bespeak a general law – the process would be impossibly long! Gradually, like any craftsman, a mathematician learns what to look for; they become sensitized to a particular kind of abstract beauty. Poincaré concludes that we have to possess an internal critical faculty – a “subliminal self” – that sifts the myriad different mathematical relationships and only promotes a few to the conscious mind.

Travelling a little further along this path, we see that whatever inner capacity (i.e. neurological mechanism) allows us to distinguish good from bad is probably the same that allows us to distinguish a straight line from a curved one. Note that this certainly does not imply that every great mathematician is a moral exemplar. It does suggest, however, that the decision to try to lead a good life is not a choice for most people. Humanity has an instinctive spiritual impulse to reach for the good and the moral that stems from our ability to reason. Without an appreciation of Quality, we would not be able to build a hierarchy of facts and thereby construct the general laws that allow us to adapt to new situations and survive. We admire Quality where we see it1 and it is a more ancient and durable source of morality than the Ten Commandments because it is the mechanism by which a Christian decides to follow Christian doctrine in the first place. 

Moral relativists are horrified by apparent exceptions: inveterate criminals or psychopaths who do not understand the foundational rules of society and who appear to cast doubt on the entire field of ethics. But these exceptionally immoral people are quite natural. Everyone understands Quality to a different degree. People who have an exceptionally high sensitivity to Quality we call variously prophets, angels, geniuses, yogis, enlightened ones. The good life is not weakened because some – perhaps even the majority – cannot see how to achieve it. The wisdom contained in old religious texts is empirical. The sages who wrote them had seen how human psychology can be brought towards goodness in the most general possible way² .

Having considered the pursuit of the Tao as an individual, one can begin to speculate on how best to organize humanity en masse. Years after writing his cynical portrait of a futuristic society in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a fictional island called Pala where Eastern and Western approaches to philosophy and medicine combine, producing people that are peaceful and deeply spiritual but resistant to superstition [7]. The Palanese treat human well-being holistically. Through meditation, hypnotherapy, physical exercise, regular sex, shared parental duties, communal living, artificial insemination and drugs³, the Palanese people approach an upper limit of human happiness. As a country, Pala is scientifically advanced while avoiding many of the social and environmental ills that we associate with contemporary society. Huxley’s Island therefore forms a kind of mirror to Brave New World, where modern technology and psychological understanding are used deliberately for egalitarian rather than totalitarian ends.

Religious people are often concerned about the objective grounding of ethics, but the question of “why” you should be good is ill-posed – it has no meaning. The fact is simply that good actions produce good things and human beings naturally strive for quality in life – for transcendence. It is no more an answer to say I do this because a personal God has decreed it than because I know, on some fundamental biological level, what goodness is. Dawkins rightly points out that most Christians, for example, choose not to take the Bible literally in its entirety, but cherry-pick the bits that seem palatable (i.e. those that conform to the zeitgeist). Nor is it useful to try to write ethical rules in stone. Our society’s understanding of ethics is continually evolving. Graven commandments are often so obvious as to be redundant and later they may even be found to be wrong or incomplete. Where possible, education should help people to discover the rules for themselves. The good life is therefore long like an unending road and must be traveled with an open mind. Aspects of goodness can be described and communicated, which is what produced the Tao Te Ching, Rumi’s Masnavi and other major religious works.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Persig builds up his theory of Quality from the perspective of technical work and artistic expression. Here, we have reached the same conclusions starting from the desire for spiritual fulfilment. We have recast the Tao in terms that are easier for a modern, technically-minded person to understand and have shown how the Tao unites science with “God” and the pursuit of a moral life. The goals of Sufism and Taoism are shown to be identical and the religious or mystic impulse is denuded: all religions come from same source and this source may even be responsible for scientific and philosophical discoveries. Properly considered, we see that there is no conflict between these things. The good life can be followed without appeal to an omnipotent divinity. Nor is this goodness limited to personal relationships because it lies at the heart of all human endeavour: scientific, moral, practical and artistic.

Notes

1 Obviously it does not follow that everyone will agree on what constitutes high quality. Go to an art gallery with a friend and see if you agree on the worth of every artwork…

² Within the limits of the zeitgeist.

³ Drugs are used for social bonding and to help induce ecstatic experiences.

References and Further Reading

[1] H. G. Henderson. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashō to Shiki. Doubleday Anchor Books, pp. 95, 1958.

[2] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 340, 1981.

[3] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 231, 1981.

[4] E. Herrigel. Zen in the Art of Archery. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1953.

[5] I. Shah. Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters Over the Past Thousand Years. Octagon Press Ltd, pp. 103, 1982.

[6] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 237-241, 1981.

[7] A. Huxley. Island, Vintage Classics, Random House, 2005.

Wasp spider (Apple iPhone) – Castle Hill Nature Reserve, South Downs, 03/08/2022.

A Watched Kettle…

It is a kettle in white plastic. Being old and well-used, the plastic is grimy everywhere except around the handle. When I open the lid I see that the heating element is coated in limescale and there are chalky scabs floating in the water at the bottom. Looking at it like this, in one superficial drag, is mildly unpleasant. The materials look cheap, the design mean. At this point I don’t have much idea of how the thing works and if a part of it were to break I wouldn’t know how to repair it. I realise, as I probe my mental image of the kettle, that I wouldn’t have the inclination either. I harbour a degree of antipathy towards it, as though the kettle is being deliberately offensive. The shoddiness of the design has somehow personified the product. It is a sort of synecdoche for “Technology” – Robert Persig’s impersonal “death force” that transfixes people and gives rise to ill-conceived machines that rule over humanity [1]. And this thing is in my house! A mysterious object and consequently hostile.

But there is an alternative way to look at a kettle. With a little effort I can view the object in terms of its function. What is it for? What does it represent? We all know that an electric kettle is a water heater. There is a resistive element in the base that can be connected to the mains electricity supply. As current is drawn through this element it heats up significantly (it has a relatively high electrical resistance) and this heat is transferred to the water by conduction. The kettle appears less threatening from this lofty vantage. It is true to its function and the fact that it is dirty and leaks all over the table top when full are just interesting aspects of this particular kettle. One can always go deeper, of course. I can recall that the plastic casing would probably have been die-cast with molten pellets of polypropylene. Though this makes the kettle difficult to recycle, polypropylene is a remarkably versatile insulating material. There is a crude logic to making it out of plastic. The unsightly accumulation of limescale arrives courtesy of geography. I live in an area with hard water – that is, the water contains minerals like calcium carbonate because it has percolated through layers of chalk or limestone. When the water boils, this calcium carbonate is deposited on adjacent surfaces. It seems the closer I look, the more unique my kettle becomes. Abstract knowledge about the kettle is enhancing its beauty. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins talks at length about the aesthetic appreciation that develops hand-in-hand with scientific enquiry. He quotes the Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman [2,3]: “I don’t see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds.”

We have covered two ways of seeing: one is a superficial, aesthetic mode and the other a functional, or abstract mode. Both perspectives are valid and useful because they supply complementary information about the nature of an object – but now I can feel you eyeing your immaculate glass kettle with LED illumination… Fortunately, these ideas also apply outside of the kitchen. I first encountered them while I was working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Between wrangling oscilloscopes and electromagnetic probes, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and learning how to learn. Initially I found the whole layout of the campus oppressive. I hated the superhuman scale of everything – the glass, the steel, the sham elegance, the anonymity. Later, armed with a way of looking at things in terms of their function, I started to think about why the environment was designed as it was and what exactly was wrong with it.

Psychogeographers will be familiar with these ideas too. A psychogeographer travels around cities and other urban environments in a state of high receptivity – alert to the emotions engendered by buildings and other man-made structures. I think it is difficult to exist in modern cities without an abstract appreciation of your surroundings. How should a sympathetic person respond to the hot press of the London metro system, or the appalling vacuity of an airport shopping arcade? People cope by looking inwards: they listen to music, meticulously track how fast and how far they run, they listen to podcasts. All these activities are admirable in moderation, but eventually they alienate you from the reality of your environment. The author Will Self has often talked about the importance of walking without artificial distraction – he perambulates for miles across London and even to and from airports. In this way he builds a contiguous mental picture of the landscape and his movements within it. Many of us live in miniature worlds connected by disorienting, machine-assisted journeys [3]. We must become involved in where we live so we can discriminate between good and bad design, become less neurotic, more sympathetic and even, perhaps, more political.

References and Further Reading

[1] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 13, 1981.

[2] R. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Penguin, 2006 .

[3] A. Seckel, Remembering Richard Feynman, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII (4) 1988.

[3] W. Self, Psychogeography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVEgOiB7Bo8 First Accessed: 1 July 2018

Zen and the Art of Radio Astronomy

The Lovell radio telescope (Mark I) – December 2017

For several years now, around Christmas – when the trees are bare and bands of tits ricochet through the hedgerows – I have driven to a converted farmhouse in Cheshire to stay with a group of physicist friends. I believe the house was initially chosen for its rare combination of seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a hot tub, but the really magical feature of the property is its setting: the farm lies two kilometres from Jodrell Bank and the Lovell radio telescope is visible from every window at the front of the house.

The Lovell telescope consists of a wide, shallow bowl, 76m in diameter, supported on two sides by towers and an exoskeleton of steel girders [1]. A white rod protrudes from the bowl like a rude stamen with an antenna at its tip. The telescope is mounted on circular tracks that allow it to swivel 360 degrees and point in almost any direction. I will often notice it in one position while drinking my morning tea – then, when I set out for a walk an hour later, it is looking at a completely different part of the sky. The bowl is made from steel to reflect radio waves and its shape allows the telescope to intercept and concentrate extremely faint signals. If a cross-section were cut out of the bowl it would form a parabolic curve, so the bowl is called a paraboloid of revolution [1]. Paraboloids are special because light rays arriving parallel to each other and striking any part of the paraboloid surface will be reflected and meet at the same point – the focus. This means that a radio antenna held at the bowl focus will detect an amplified signal collected from the full span of the telescope. It also works in reverse, so a signal sent out from the antenna will be reflected into a parallel beam for radio ranging (radar). The welcome centre at Jodrell Bank has a wonderful demonstration of this effect using sound waves. Two “whispering dishes”, a couple of metres in diameter, are positioned opposite one another at a distance of about twenty metres. Sound waves are reflected by each dish just as radio waves are reflected by the Lovell telescope, which means that if you whisper at the focus of one dish, a friend standing at the focus of the other will be able to hear you distinctly.

Whispering into a parabolic dish (11 December 2021)
Two-point perspective: an undoctored photo of a road junction near Goostrey, not far from Jodrell Bank (8 December 2017).

One of the most striking aspects of the Lovell telescope – something that is superficially evident long before you think about the telescope as an instrument – is that it is a beautiful piece of architecture. One can talk about “economy of form” or “sensitivity to construction materials”, but I think its peculiar beauty comes from a commitment to function – like a tugboat or stealth plane. It is a scientific instrument – enormous, incongruous – which somehow complements the landscape around it.

Herrigel and Persig have famously written about Zen in the context of archery and motorcycle maintenance. They describe how practitioners of a given discipline can reach such a pitch of mastery that “[t]he nonchalance which he forfeited at the beginning of his instruction…” returns at the end as an “indestructible characteristic” [2]. Quality derives from unselfconscious practice, where the product occurs as an involuntary, ego-less action. Perhaps this is easier to achieve when designing a scientific instrument than an ordinary work of architecture because the requirements are well-defined and exacting. The Lovell telescope must be able to pick up radio waves from space, as well as track the motion of satellites and ballistic missiles. This places strict limitations on form, size and weight: a reduction in bowl radius or quality of curvature will lead to a quantifiable loss of sensitivity. The human ego is irrelevant to these considerations.

In modern municipal architecture there appears to be a lack of sympathy that prevents beautiful buildings from being produced. Often cost is prioritized over elegance, practicality, durability, or sustainability. Cold, hard lines of Euclid and uniform surfaces are in vogue, while traditional proportions and decorative features are replaced by a pabulum of offset panels. Despite a general appreciation that organic forms have a salutary effect on human psychology, we consistently use shapes and textures inimical to Nature.

An interesting case study is provided by Le Corbusier’s Cité Frugès in Pessac, Bordeaux [4]. Designed as low-cost housing for Henry Frugès’ factory workers, the buildings had flat roofs, elongated windows and bare outer walls that gave an unnatural sense of homogeneity. The design was poorly received and after Frugès’ workers refused to move in, the houses were put up for sale. Eventually, with the introduction of cheap government loans for low-income workers, residents were able to buy the flats they were living in [5]. They started to customize their properties by repainting walls and adding flower boxes, decorating gables and putting shutters on windows. There were also practical considerations: leaking flat roofs were converted into pitched roofs and bespoke window shapes were altered because the residents could find no standardized replacements [5]. If all of the workers living in the Cité Frugès were forced to become bricoleurs to make the buildings feel habitable, it suggests there was a fault somewhere in the design process. Le Corbusier did not consider how the lives of the factory workers should inform his design. He felt his taste in architecture was superior, asserting a hard-edged aseptic idealism – his ego – on a green suburb with its own architectural traditions. Unlike the engineers and scientists who worked on the Lovell telescope, I suspect Le Corbusier didn’t understand the parameters of his brief well enough to produce a beautiful piece of architecture.

References and Further Reading

[1] https://www.jodrellbank.net/visit/whats-here/lovell-telescope/

[2] E. Herrigel. Zen in the Art of Archery. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, pp. 102, 1953.

[3] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, 1981.

[4] P. Boudon. Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited. MIT Press, 1972.

[5] P. Steadman. “Life is Always Right: It is the Architect who is Wrong”. https://www.philipsteadman.com/blog/life-is-always-right-it-is-the-architect-who-is-wrong/ Accessed: 29/12/21.