Dean's Address

In the early years of his teaching experience, the narrator, obviously Pirsig himself under an alter ego, experienced a profoundly disturbing event. In the course of formulating the theme of his doctoral dissertation, he had occasion to be in his classroom one day when a fellow instructor entered, a matronly teacher in the old school tradition, and uttered to him in passing,‑"Mr. Pirsig, I'm glad you've decided to teach real quality to your students"‑. The statement took the professor aback, not because his classes were not then studying in areas touching aesthetics and rhetorical quality, but because for the first time he questioned whether he was in fact imparting quality education to his students. It had always occurred to him, to his own dismay and chagrin, that his best students were invariably failing. These were the wise acres, the aloof occupiers of the rear seats in the class who seemed to sleep or hibernate through his lectures, only to be brought to clear consciousness when he made the rhetorical slip, or a mistake in rational deduction, at which time they pounced upon him with alertness and alacrity, making him query to himself whether they were failing‑or he.

The problem of the failure of his best or most intelligent minds, seemed to Pirsig to be part and parcel of the crux of the world's problems, since the advent of the intellectual revolution. There seemed to be a gaping chasm between what he termed the "romantic" and "classical" worlds. He came to view college and all classical education as perhaps a threat, and certainly a place of tedium, for the romantic intellectual. Classical education, taught in the classical mode employing Aristotelian deductive logic, historical texts and set formulae, seemed to stultify the majority of the minds he considered most imaginative. The successful, i.e. the "A" students, seemed to be the squares; and the worst students occasionally, if not as a rule, seemed to be those who were mal‑content with sitting and being forced to ingest classical learning doled out as the restricted diet, or communion, in what he called the church of reason. The church of reason being a somewhat tongue‑in‑cheek appellation for all classical institutions of learning. All of us, if we strain our memories , we can recall the near‑total drudgery of the casebook method of assimilating law. We are told on entering law school we should resign ourselves to the fact that the law is a jealous mistress. By the time we graduated, we had learned that the characterization of law as a jealous mistress was really unfair‑the law is not a jealous mistress; rather, to the truly conscientious scholar‑she's a domineering bitch.

Throughout his electrifying treatise, Pirsig relives the travails he suffered in the formulation of his doctoral thesis, an essay on quality. It occured to him finally that quality, or the concept of quality, excellence if you will, is or was the secret to the unfolding and uniting of the world as he saw it. The problem of the world was by Pirsig epitomized in the difference between the relationship he had with his motorcycle, and the relationship his friend and co‑traveler had with his.

Pirsig had trained himself in depth in the art of motorcycle maintenance, the mechanical intricacies of which being similar to those involved in maintaining the simplest of modern man's machines. We can all relate to the frustration of experiencing a breakdown in one of our mechanical "conveniences". Which of us is really knowledgeable when it comes to remedying a dripping faucet, or adjusting the float tank in our mechanical privy? Which of us isn't exasperated when his automobile falters more than a mile from his friendly mechanic? Pirsig had mastered the art of maintaining the mechanical things which touched his way of life, first by limiting the number of mechanical things on which he relied, and then by understanding totally and fully their principles, parts and inner‑ machinations, much as we advocates have had to master the mechanics of the judicial process and its supply store of judicial precedent. Is it possible that we can learn a lesson from a motorcycle mechanic which we can apply to our advantage in the search for excellence in the legal profession? A rhetorical question‑I suggest, of course we can. Pirsig's traveling companion chose as his vehicle the very finely constructed and high‑quality BMW Motorcycle, principally because it required very little maintenance, and hence understanding. All considerations on the complexities of converting fossil fuel into kinetic energy upon the highway frustrated Pirsig's romantic friend to the point of desperation. The comparison of the two individuals in the book, and their respective relationships to their machines, presents a microcosm of experience from which is projected the author's conception of the schism dividing the civilized world. There is a schism between romantic youth, or at least their left‑wing hippies, and us old classical squares. Reading the periodicals today, we find that the colleges are now graduating people with honors who have occasionally not even mastered the basics of reading and writing intelligibly. Those of us who have employed Phi Beta Kappa quality associates have sometimes been appalled at the relative inepitude of today's youth in expressing thoughts with logical and rhetorical precision. They definitely have the intelligence we conclude, but why is it that they have come to reject apparently all semblance of coherence and facility with the logical language of our classical predecessors. There is even such a metamorphosis in this observable in our appellate reports, where some of us old schoolers rue the relative dearth of beautiful deductive rhetoric we read in school, with opinions in the excellent tradition of justice Cardozo of the New York Court of Appeals.

There are many suggestions given by Pirsig to the frustrated technician who must earn his daily bread through solving problems according to an instruction manual. The book contains a beautiful essay on the achieving of excellence in performing one's trade, when it is desired to perform that trade in the classically deductive manner. Some of the suggestions are well taken. The example used is, of course, Pirsig's repairing his own rather problematic motorcycle; but some of the things he suggests are well taken points of advice any tradesman can heed. He suggests rules so simple that we sometimes erroneously assume we have followed them. He suggests having a clean, well‑lighted work area, with all conceivably required tools at hand. He recommends coffee and cigarettes as collateral detours available to take when one arrives, in the process of solving of a given task, at the near‑inevitable period of creative aridity which he terms a "gumption trap". When we reach a stage in attacking a problem where returns seem to be diminishing, he recommends as a rule that the task be temporarily abandoned for purposes of psychic refreshment. Coffee and cigarettes are common detours, and if they don't satisfy, Pirsig suggests total abandonment for a period, with the possible intervention of sleep or subconscious therapy. All these rules are, however, tendered by the philosopher as a means of properly attacking a problem, or achieving excellence in its solution, in the classical fashion. The rare meat of the author's philosophical essay comes not in this, but perhaps in his attempt to reconcile the hiatus between the romantic and classical worlds. The romantic/ classical schism exists not only between generations, but between professional groups, nationalities, religions and most importantly in ourselves individually. We all have in varying degrees warring factions of the romantic and classicist vying for dominance within ourselves at all times. Most of our professional lives are lived while we are in the process of solving legal problems with our classically legal tools. Very often we are, romantics that we sometimes are, totally frustrated by the apparently inane legal hurdles which are set before us in achieving our goals. Frustrated by the fact that it takes sometimes three or four years to litigate a client's rights in the Federal Court, vexed by the dilatory tactics employed by some practitioners to thwart our quest for this truth or that legal right, we are incessantly forced to follow a protocol in our judicial process which is borrowed or inherited from a system we can trace further back than our own genetic roots. There is frustration everywhere, and yet we have all tasted the nectar of excellence. We have all been winners and surmounted hurdles of every nature and description; and there is joy and satisfaction in that. The joy is experienced by both our classical and romantic sides, and in this joy our warring sides are wed.

Our problem is one of renewal. We practitioners are not capitalists in the truest sense. We cannot patent our accomplishments and thereafter recline on our accolades or feed ourselves on royalties. Each day of our lives we must continue to put out at least a marketable quantity of excellence. But where is it? Looking back on various of our successes, it often seems that we simply put together a winning structure by resorting to an instruction manual, legal precedent, and so on, employing the classical rules of logical analogy; and the victories we experience seem, in the light of that reality, sometimes dry. There is, however, a certain undeniable satisfaction even in applying the manual and solving the problem according to the creative instructions of a predecessor.

But I will suggest to you that a greater joy than the achieving of classical perfection is had when we are sometimes fortunate enough to be met by a problem or legal situation where we have to wed the warring factions in our minds, that is our romantic and our classical souls. It seems to me that the most profound concept which I learned from Pirsig's treatise is that idea of stuckness. When we are confronted by a problem which can be solved nicely and neatly through the application of the classical text, we prevail and earn our fee. When we are met with problems that permit or demand more of us, then and only then are we presented the rare opportunity of giving vent to that which in us is unique‑our creative potential Stuckness is the occasion, then, according to this catechism, out of which quality can appear. The secret to the world, to the spanning of that hiatus between the romantic and the classical factions in the world and in our own minds, seems to involve the phenomenon of stuckness. It is with the aid of that catalyst, stuckness, that neverbefore‑related ideas occupying the free‑floating analogues of our intellects are joined in a fashion unique to ourselves‑It is akin to genetic mutation, which process incidentally we can safely thank for our greater‑than‑monkey intelligence. It is through the saving grace of this phenomenon that we become one with our work and begin to contribute something to the legal process uniquely our own. It is through quality, fostered in the school of stuckness, that excellence is born, to become the precedent of the future.