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Both writers argued that value is relative to the individual.
Saint-Exupéry: "If orange-trees are hardy and rich in fruit in this bit of soil and not that, then this bit of soil is what is truth for orange-trees."
Similarly, Pirsig: "One geometry [such as Euclidian or Riemann] can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." Therefore, "quality" may be "just what you like." People tend to counterargue that you oughtn't do "just what you like" given that you oughtn't commit crimes, but these people, Pirsig comments wrily, are "making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable."
Saint-Exupéry complains about the overreliance on logic to prove points. Any ideology can be defended logically; this performance does not help us choose what to believe and value. Ideologies contradict each other, and people fight each other to the death for them. "Truth," by contrast, "is the language that expresses universality…Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable," he writes. That which is unavoidable, unpreventable, fated.
People have "identical yearnings," he claims, and therefore "we must never set one man's truth against another's. All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic." The important mission seems to be not proving the validity of a person's existential values, but respecting those values. Because of this, a man ought to "share with other men a common and disinterested ideal" and men must be "looking outward together in the same direction." It is only "methods" and "reasoning" that drive people apart, not their ultimate and deepest goals.
Similarly, Pirsig identified one of his central questions as whether a man "accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos...is 'insane.' To go outside the mythos is to become insane..." Mythos, here, refers to a cultural narrative architecture that defines one's place in the world. For an individual to declare that he sees the world differently than he has been taught to see it is always, by definition, to go against the current. He will have to use different stories, methods and reasoning to arrive at the same shared, universal human goals and values.
Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 25, 2013.
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