Value Comes First

A person sitting on a hot stove doesn't need to think about whether the situation is bad. The low quality of that moment isn't a judgment, isn't a description, isn't some abstract philosophical concept—it's an experience.

The value itself is the experience. And it comes before any thought, any word, any oath that might follow. "Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths," Robert Pirsig writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. "It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths. Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value."

This value—this quality—is more immediate than any intellectual construction of "self" or "object." It's the primary reality from which everything else follows. People may disagree about which objects possess quality, Pirsig notes, but they don't disagree about quality itself. "Quality, on which there is complete agreement, is a universal source of things. The objects about which people disagree are merely transitory."

The experience of value comes first. Everything else is constructed afterward.