21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

‘quality’ recognised as real, only ‘quantity’. Hence, the ‘Disqualified Universe’ (Max Weber). In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig essentially sets out a metaphysics of quality. The book is subtitled An Enquiry into Values — it puts quality in the place of truth as the ultimate reality. We will return to this idea in a later chapter, but for now let’s look at what it means for there to be a split in the world.

David Bohm, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order looks at the sentence, ‘It is raining’. What, he asks, is the ‘it’ that is doing the raining? Why do we not just say: ‘Rain is going on’? Clearly, language has created a subject and an object, even where there is not strictly speaking the need to make such a distinction. The point is to illustrate how deeply embedded in our culture and thinking such splits in the world really are. Even language is framed to assume such divisions in the world, so we often adopt them unconsciously and simply as a part of growing up and learning our mother tongue.

As well as this subject and object split we could mention transcendence and immanence, ourselves and others, theism and atheism and future and past. These are all splits embedded in our culture. So too is the manner in which words are regarded either as simple signifiers or set within a context. Each of these dualities will be considered below. Two really big splits take a bit more investigation: the difference between something and nothing and what might be called our innate ideas about the world contrasted with our actual experience. From Kant, and other philosophers, I use the terms

16