Subject: commonplace

From: "J.S." Dorward <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 94 10:00:19 BST

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
                   By Robert M. Pirsig

Note :- words in capitals are in italics in the book.

"Stuckness. That's what I want to talk about today .....

.....Now I want to show that that classic pattern of
rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made
far more effective through the formal recognition of Quality
in its operation.
 
                          . . .

The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies
the physical stuckness of whatever it is you're working on.

                           . . .

What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all
Western though. You need some ideas, some hypotheses.
Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite
gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these
hypotheses.

                           . . .

Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination
- 'unstuckness,' in other words - are completely outside its
domain.

                           . . .

     I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of
stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon
'objectivity,' a doctrine that there is a divided reality of
subject and object. For true science to take place these must
be rigidly separate from each other. 'Your are the mechanic.
There is the motorcycle. You do this to it. You do that to it.
There will be this result.'
     This eternally dualistic subject-object way of
approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're
used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial
interpretation SUPERIMPOSED on reality. It's never been
reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a
certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and
motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is
destroyed. When rational rationality divides the work into
subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're
really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that
tells you where you ought to go."

>From p282-286, transcribed by [email-masked].