Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Has anyone ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Man, that book is intense. When the author isn't rambling for three pages about all the teeny tiny parts that make up a motorcycle, he's spending three more pages talking about really heavy, complicated philosophies while ignoring his son Chris. It's a long, often boring book, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you are really extremely interested in both philosophy and motorcycles.

However, there are some really fascinating points that the author makes in the novel. The one I want to talk about relates to Hume quite nicely.

(Here come spoilers, watch out.)

The big premise of the novel is this concept of Quality. Quality is the binding force between subjectivity and objectivity--it transcends those two dimensions. Basically, Qualtiy with a capital Q is the inherent quality with a lower case q which every object has. It precedes subjectivity and objectivity--it is just there. Quality is where objectivity and subjectivity originate. (Pretty heavy, huh?) It's hard to summarize without sounding ridiculous--the book itself is actually really detailed and convincing in this whole argument of Quality. I hope that explanation made some kind of sense.

Hume describes early in his essay that one philosophy of taste considers sentiment and judgement to be two separate and irreconcilable factors. Every sentiment is correct--and any judgement of the value of sentiments is inherently flawed. This is really similar to what a lot of people, including myself, think about art theory--it's too subjective. Hume's entire paper just made me think of this notion of Quality. Subjectivity is a tricky business, because you can't have subjectivity without having objectivity also. It's like the dichotomy between good and evil--you have to have a comparison for the two ideas to be valid. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Quality was the underlying factor upon which the entire universe is founded. Quality is taste. Art may depend on people's tastes and it may be subjective, but in order for this to be true there has to be such a thing as "taste"--and that is what Quality is. If any given thing did not have its own quality, how could anyone ever judge it at all?