A Critical Reading of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainte…
T. Dylan Daniel reads Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to understand the Metaphysics of Quality.In Robert Pirsig’s famous work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a metaphysical concept is born. Pirsig explores his relationship with his son as he explores the US on a motorcycle and as he explores the very concept of sanity. The goal he seeks is what he refers to as Quality. The work itself is structured as a novel, but this thin veil barely conceals some of the deepest postmo...
PageDAO’s Story
Life has gotten weird lately, and this piece of writing will also be somewhat weird. It has to be - it is the story of an incredible, weird, fun organization, and the struggle we’ve all faced as we’ve birthed it. Let’s dig in. This is the story of the PageDAO. I have to explain a bit about myself, my own weirdness, for this to work. But I will keep it brief because I’m just one person, and PageDAO is composed of many people. My name is Thomas Dylan Daniel, and I go by epicdylan (a username I ...
Philosophical Suicide In The Myth of Sisyphus
What does the great French philosopher Albert Camus have to say to us about philosophical suicide?Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting sta...
https://dylan.cent.co
A Critical Reading of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainte…
T. Dylan Daniel reads Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to understand the Metaphysics of Quality.In Robert Pirsig’s famous work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a metaphysical concept is born. Pirsig explores his relationship with his son as he explores the US on a motorcycle and as he explores the very concept of sanity. The goal he seeks is what he refers to as Quality. The work itself is structured as a novel, but this thin veil barely conceals some of the deepest postmo...
PageDAO’s Story
Life has gotten weird lately, and this piece of writing will also be somewhat weird. It has to be - it is the story of an incredible, weird, fun organization, and the struggle we’ve all faced as we’ve birthed it. Let’s dig in. This is the story of the PageDAO. I have to explain a bit about myself, my own weirdness, for this to work. But I will keep it brief because I’m just one person, and PageDAO is composed of many people. My name is Thomas Dylan Daniel, and I go by epicdylan (a username I ...
Philosophical Suicide In The Myth of Sisyphus
What does the great French philosopher Albert Camus have to say to us about philosophical suicide?Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting sta...
https://dylan.cent.co
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It’s hard to believe two years are all the time that has passed since Formal Dialectics was released at the end of 2018. Authoritarianism, an out-of-control pandemic, and continuous misadventures by top officials in government have characterized the past period in our shared political history and the time has dragged by as we collectively suffered for these mistakes by our political elite.
My reason for investing so much time into the creation of Formal Dialectics was that it seemed philosophy could be used to improve decision-making at the highest levels; it appears the world is not yet ready to engage in such quality cognition.
The Case For Optimism, Even In The Present Day Though it sounds pessimistic at first, the message here is one of optimism. In Formal Dialectics and elsewhere, I speak with some dismay of an academic system that seems to be falling apart in the United States. True to the form of postmodern anxiety, I never really answered any of my deeper questions about academia to any degree of satisfaction. I spent most of 2019 working in biotechnology and have been quarantined since March in 2020, writing articles for various online outlets to avoid exposing myself and thereby my family to the deadly pathogen that permeates our environment here in West Texas, where nobody seems capable of orchestrating anything like a coherent attempt at widespread mask-wearing.
Despite my great interest in philosophy, it is likely that I will not have another opportunity to obtain a post at a university as a teacher. And our society has much, much bigger problems to deal with than the higher education funding problem that leads to atrocious working conditions for adjunct lecturers in the humanities as well as the sciences. Introduction level science classes have long been so bad on the average that even qualified students avoid them.
Instead of having a moment to deal with these issues, we Americans are beset by a plague and by a disgraceful authoritarian President who still refuses to admit he lost the election this year. The myriad crises will likely keep even first lady Dr. Biden, an education advocate, from making much headway on education-related issues in the near term.
The absurdity of the historical moment is so vividly apparent that it’s difficult to even conceive of a philosophy book as anything like relevant, but the most bizarre realization for us here is simply the growing recognition of the fact that our absurd choices at the collective level directly led to the absurdity we’re all experiencing individually.
So how do we end up at anything even resembling optimism in the midst of a pandemic?
Why, dialectically, of course.
The character of rationality itself is one of continuous development towards a particular goal: better predictions that lead to better consequences when we act. In The Plague, Albert Camus recognizes what he calls the feeling of absurdity in the soliloquy delivered by the character Tarrou, who I characterized in an essay as the hero of the story. In the speech Tarrou delivers to Rieux, the physician, we see the virtue of the individual man’s action as an absolutely central mainstay to the survival of the collective; yet he dies, alone and virtually unthanked for his service!
And yet…. the character of the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective has never been so clear as it is in these stark passages. In such a large mass of individuals, bad ideas and hence regrettable actions are inevitable. In a deep understanding of the works of Camus, we see the twin threads of hope and despair are largely made of the same components; what separates them is a combination of attitude, character, and understanding. What makes us good is service to the greater whole, yet at times the best way to serve the human collective is precisely to oppose the ones who hold power.
And the struggle is one of life and death. The survival of social humanity is contingent upon the general trend toward increasing social consciousness and responsibility, yet many people are unable to perform the basic ethical calculation necessary to function on the rational autonomous axis of human behavior at all. The constrictions of illusory economic opportunity and an unprecedented level of debt have made the case in favor of changes to the centerpieces of our economic structure impossible to deny.
That’s where the optimism comes from. We eventually reach a tipping point, if this continues, and a transformation follows. What emerges ought to be better than what we left for it, at long last.
The Future Of Formal Dialectics In Formal Dialectics, I disputed Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous claim that the world was headed for a new dark age on the grounds that the internet stands to facilitate increasing communication between people who live in different places-the opposite of a dark age. Yet here we are, having lived through four years of a Trump presidency that did an untold amount of damage to humanity’s effort to mitigate the ill effects of climate change and the global order itself. During this time, the internet has shown us its dark side by enabling bad actors to obtain power by misguiding the masses via social media. Of that there is no question. But perhaps the tide is turning.
Soon, we may see a more resilient, more democratic, and more powerful avenue for political expression in online networking. Our lifestyles are only increasing in terms of connectedness. Perhaps we will eventually all learn to live together. And perhaps the time of a popular Formal Dialectics is coming. It is a beautiful book and the argumentation it contains has withstood the test of time thus far. I believe in this little book, full of powerful proofs and honest dialectical reasoning. It seems that some on the religious right are opposed to the very concept of dialectics itself, and I look forward to conversations with such people because I believe their view is self-contradictory.
Dialectics is nothing to be afraid of, and it is not “against god” anymore than building an iPhone or going to the moon is against god. The sorts of conversations that can be had, using the dialectical method, are the type of thing that creates answers to even the most difficult questions, not by providing simple axioms, but by providing the dialectician with a multifaceted view of the entire situation. The reason preachers are against dialectics is that dialectics is an activity in which the individual is forced to think for himself; this makes people less easy to control and makes many religious people uncomfortable because the whole religious game we humans like to play so much is a game about social cohabitation more than anything else.
The Catholic Church, in particular, has struggled to keep up with the times as dialectical reasoning has progressed. It could be argued that the Recovery of Aristotle was such a monumental event historically as to lead to the excommunication and later canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas precisely because it reintroduced the dialectical component of The Philosopher’s thought into the school system the Church had developed. It is my firm belief that dialectical engagement with the subject is the method by which excellence can be reached.
A dialectician is not interested in being the argument’s winner, or in being right all of the time. Rather, dialectically inclined thinkers like to know about the possibilities, about the arguments that can be made by various involved parties, and hence we are interested in the people, the situation, and the solution to whatever problem we may be looking at.
The result?
A deeper grasp of the situation that leads to, not trolling and winners or losers, but a greater understanding of the situation itself and the motives of the actors taking part in it.
With this thought in mind, I am proud to announce that I will be creating a series of videos about Formal Dialectics. I’m still fine-tuning my home studio to produce quality content for everyone who is interested in the book, but within a few weeks my YouTube channel will feature them. Go ahead and follow it to be notified as I release the Formal Dialectics Video Series.
It has been two very full years since Formal Dialectics came out, and now over six years since the concept exploded into my mind. I don’t know what hasn’t changed: I’m experimenting with new media and on a new, freelancing-oriented career path that keeps steering me toward blockchain and cryptocurrency. One thing remains the same: I’m still working on Dialectics of Liberation, with no end date in sight. I suppose it also still seems feasible to provide a material reductionist account of ethical decision-making. Were this thesis to be borne out by time and thought, it could signal the end of the postmodern era and the beginning of a new age, with its own archetypal patterns and a different set of shortcomings.
In these as well as many other things, time will tell.
It has now been almost three years since this essay dropped! There is a new Formal Dialectics in town as well (with a new cover!), which you can check out here:
It’s hard to believe two years are all the time that has passed since Formal Dialectics was released at the end of 2018. Authoritarianism, an out-of-control pandemic, and continuous misadventures by top officials in government have characterized the past period in our shared political history and the time has dragged by as we collectively suffered for these mistakes by our political elite.
My reason for investing so much time into the creation of Formal Dialectics was that it seemed philosophy could be used to improve decision-making at the highest levels; it appears the world is not yet ready to engage in such quality cognition.
The Case For Optimism, Even In The Present Day Though it sounds pessimistic at first, the message here is one of optimism. In Formal Dialectics and elsewhere, I speak with some dismay of an academic system that seems to be falling apart in the United States. True to the form of postmodern anxiety, I never really answered any of my deeper questions about academia to any degree of satisfaction. I spent most of 2019 working in biotechnology and have been quarantined since March in 2020, writing articles for various online outlets to avoid exposing myself and thereby my family to the deadly pathogen that permeates our environment here in West Texas, where nobody seems capable of orchestrating anything like a coherent attempt at widespread mask-wearing.
Despite my great interest in philosophy, it is likely that I will not have another opportunity to obtain a post at a university as a teacher. And our society has much, much bigger problems to deal with than the higher education funding problem that leads to atrocious working conditions for adjunct lecturers in the humanities as well as the sciences. Introduction level science classes have long been so bad on the average that even qualified students avoid them.
Instead of having a moment to deal with these issues, we Americans are beset by a plague and by a disgraceful authoritarian President who still refuses to admit he lost the election this year. The myriad crises will likely keep even first lady Dr. Biden, an education advocate, from making much headway on education-related issues in the near term.
The absurdity of the historical moment is so vividly apparent that it’s difficult to even conceive of a philosophy book as anything like relevant, but the most bizarre realization for us here is simply the growing recognition of the fact that our absurd choices at the collective level directly led to the absurdity we’re all experiencing individually.
So how do we end up at anything even resembling optimism in the midst of a pandemic?
Why, dialectically, of course.
The character of rationality itself is one of continuous development towards a particular goal: better predictions that lead to better consequences when we act. In The Plague, Albert Camus recognizes what he calls the feeling of absurdity in the soliloquy delivered by the character Tarrou, who I characterized in an essay as the hero of the story. In the speech Tarrou delivers to Rieux, the physician, we see the virtue of the individual man’s action as an absolutely central mainstay to the survival of the collective; yet he dies, alone and virtually unthanked for his service!
And yet…. the character of the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective has never been so clear as it is in these stark passages. In such a large mass of individuals, bad ideas and hence regrettable actions are inevitable. In a deep understanding of the works of Camus, we see the twin threads of hope and despair are largely made of the same components; what separates them is a combination of attitude, character, and understanding. What makes us good is service to the greater whole, yet at times the best way to serve the human collective is precisely to oppose the ones who hold power.
And the struggle is one of life and death. The survival of social humanity is contingent upon the general trend toward increasing social consciousness and responsibility, yet many people are unable to perform the basic ethical calculation necessary to function on the rational autonomous axis of human behavior at all. The constrictions of illusory economic opportunity and an unprecedented level of debt have made the case in favor of changes to the centerpieces of our economic structure impossible to deny.
That’s where the optimism comes from. We eventually reach a tipping point, if this continues, and a transformation follows. What emerges ought to be better than what we left for it, at long last.
The Future Of Formal Dialectics In Formal Dialectics, I disputed Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous claim that the world was headed for a new dark age on the grounds that the internet stands to facilitate increasing communication between people who live in different places-the opposite of a dark age. Yet here we are, having lived through four years of a Trump presidency that did an untold amount of damage to humanity’s effort to mitigate the ill effects of climate change and the global order itself. During this time, the internet has shown us its dark side by enabling bad actors to obtain power by misguiding the masses via social media. Of that there is no question. But perhaps the tide is turning.
Soon, we may see a more resilient, more democratic, and more powerful avenue for political expression in online networking. Our lifestyles are only increasing in terms of connectedness. Perhaps we will eventually all learn to live together. And perhaps the time of a popular Formal Dialectics is coming. It is a beautiful book and the argumentation it contains has withstood the test of time thus far. I believe in this little book, full of powerful proofs and honest dialectical reasoning. It seems that some on the religious right are opposed to the very concept of dialectics itself, and I look forward to conversations with such people because I believe their view is self-contradictory.
Dialectics is nothing to be afraid of, and it is not “against god” anymore than building an iPhone or going to the moon is against god. The sorts of conversations that can be had, using the dialectical method, are the type of thing that creates answers to even the most difficult questions, not by providing simple axioms, but by providing the dialectician with a multifaceted view of the entire situation. The reason preachers are against dialectics is that dialectics is an activity in which the individual is forced to think for himself; this makes people less easy to control and makes many religious people uncomfortable because the whole religious game we humans like to play so much is a game about social cohabitation more than anything else.
The Catholic Church, in particular, has struggled to keep up with the times as dialectical reasoning has progressed. It could be argued that the Recovery of Aristotle was such a monumental event historically as to lead to the excommunication and later canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas precisely because it reintroduced the dialectical component of The Philosopher’s thought into the school system the Church had developed. It is my firm belief that dialectical engagement with the subject is the method by which excellence can be reached.
A dialectician is not interested in being the argument’s winner, or in being right all of the time. Rather, dialectically inclined thinkers like to know about the possibilities, about the arguments that can be made by various involved parties, and hence we are interested in the people, the situation, and the solution to whatever problem we may be looking at.
The result?
A deeper grasp of the situation that leads to, not trolling and winners or losers, but a greater understanding of the situation itself and the motives of the actors taking part in it.
With this thought in mind, I am proud to announce that I will be creating a series of videos about Formal Dialectics. I’m still fine-tuning my home studio to produce quality content for everyone who is interested in the book, but within a few weeks my YouTube channel will feature them. Go ahead and follow it to be notified as I release the Formal Dialectics Video Series.
It has been two very full years since Formal Dialectics came out, and now over six years since the concept exploded into my mind. I don’t know what hasn’t changed: I’m experimenting with new media and on a new, freelancing-oriented career path that keeps steering me toward blockchain and cryptocurrency. One thing remains the same: I’m still working on Dialectics of Liberation, with no end date in sight. I suppose it also still seems feasible to provide a material reductionist account of ethical decision-making. Were this thesis to be borne out by time and thought, it could signal the end of the postmodern era and the beginning of a new age, with its own archetypal patterns and a different set of shortcomings.
In these as well as many other things, time will tell.
It has now been almost three years since this essay dropped! There is a new Formal Dialectics in town as well (with a new cover!), which you can check out here:
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