If everything is Truth, why are we still arguing?

Pirsig writes, “When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt” (144). This made me chuckle. Phaedrus and many others are basically attempting to remind themselves why their faith is right through teaching it to other people. By being able to say something and have it accepted as right or correct, then it kind of validates what we think and what we’ve said. Because of the idea of a priori logic and empiricism, we really are only validated by what is outside of ourselves. But if everyone is operating under that same scientific, classical mode, as Pirsig claims that all of Western society has forgotten that they operate under, then how can we ever really find validation? I like his follow up on this blind faith idea – “As a result, we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought – occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like – because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences” (163).

After reading these statements, they become sort of bland to me. It’s kind of like a catch-all for what we don’t understand or don’t know; like in an anthropology class I took, and in many other classes, I was taught that the definition of religion depends on the idea that it explains the things that we cannot explain. So it is very interesting to put rationality into this context, claim that it is a religion, or that it is dogma: the Church of Reason is just another way to try and understand those things that we don’t understand. That might sound obvious, but I guess I’m trying to understand his distinction between religion and reason, and I don’t think that there really is one.

When people become so blindly attached to logic that they forget that they are operating within a certain mindset, then essentially we could claim that our idea of reason compared to other kinds of reasonings (like mysticism or occultism) have equal value, in an epistemological sense, rather than in a sense that maybe the Church of Reason produces more...stuff (if you believe that atom bombs are actually atom bombs). But all different ways of understanding immediately become valid when you throw “reason” or “logic” when you realize that it is just another type of frame.

For myself, personally, I’ve kind of come to my own understanding that maybe it is all the same thing but just taxonomised differently. We can’t help it – we just can’t stop naming things and we can’t stop seeing differently because our languages are all different, even between me and you, Reader; because even these words have different meanings for each of us.

But then there is the ultimate question: why should we really be worried about the “why” question, or the “where do we come from” question? That’s a large aim of this novel, and of philosophy, and of human nature; but it is interesting because this novel also seems to be arguing that we need to just live life and let things come to us as they will, and not worry so much about the “arrival.” Pirsig is looking for answers while ultimately trying to avoid answers by taking his roundabout, indirect motorcycle ride. Why?