Decontructing "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

Classicism and Romanticism: Opposing Realms of Consciousness or Consituents of Quality?
by Anna Chan

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Our perception of reality is based on the relationship between the subject (us) and the object (whatever that is being judged). Hence, there is no separation between classic and romantic: one must need the other to live. The search for the ultimate truth very well includes a value system with which we can measure the quality of an arrived truth. We all have 'classic quality' within us, which means that we must, if not all, harbor 'romantic quality' as well. The only thing that separates one mode of thought from the other "lies wholly in a difference of judgment and intellectual bias.(endnote 31) What we judge as good or bad is Quality. Likewise, what we deem romantic or classical is also Quality. For that reason, "no artist can be a whole-hearted Romantic, for the creation of a work of art demands some detachment and self-awareness." (endnote 32)

Unknowingly, Feyerabend stumbles upon the truth about quality during his campaign against scientific method. He writes,

"Not only is the description of every single fact dependent on some theory, but there also exist facts which cannot be unearthed except with the help of alternatives to the theory to be tested, which become unavailable as soon as such alternatives are excluded. This suggests that the methodological unit to which we must refer when discussing questions of test and empirical content is constituted by a whole set of partly overlapping, factually adequate, but mutually inconsistent theories." (endnote 33)

Since quality is how we view things, then it is equivalent to reality. This reality, in turn, is the "whole set of partly overlapping" yet "mutually inconsistent theories," which are the respective classical and romantic qualities. Man's search for the truth about his identity, his soul, causes him to assume that, by placing himself within a category, he can find what he truly is. This is perhaps the categorizing "dream-world" or "external standard of criticism" which Feyerabend claims that we need "in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream-world)." (endnote 34)

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