Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a narration of a
motorcycle ride with Pirsig's son, Chris,
from Minnesota to southern California, chronicling some of the events,
and most of the thoughts that happened during that trip. It is a
book about Quality, the results of scientific thinking, and
insanity. It is a look at how ancient Greek philosophy has
affected Western civilization, particularly in how it is worked out in
our own culture. And it is a description of Pirsig's search, his
insanity, and the culmination of his search afterwards.
Pirsig and Chris begin the trip with John and Sylvia, who are artists
that Pirsig knows. Pirsig, as a technical writer, understands and
is comfortable with technology. In particular, he maintains his
motorcycle himself, because it takes care and attention to detail to do
it right, attention that is not given at the mechanic shop where
workers play the radio and count the hours 'till quittin' time.
John, on the other hand, owns a shiny BMW motorcycle and has the
mechanic keep it in good shape. John and Sylvia look at life from
an emotional perspective and thus they do not understand technology
(which is not very emotional), seeing it as hollow and empty.
They are, Pirsig asserts, like many Americans are somewhat frightened
by technology. This difference, the difference between those who
understand technology and those who are frightened by it is what he
wants to explore with the book.
Amidst the camping at the evening and the meals at restaurants, Pirsig
explains the scientific method and maintenance of motorcycles.
The scientific method is the keeping of records of the hypotheses and
their proofs or disproofs. It is an understanding of the
motorcycle as a set of systems and their interactions, each performing
a particular function. It is a detached observation and will
eventually solve any problem.
The job of the scientific method is to select between hypotheses.
However, Phaedrus, Pirsig's self before a court-ordered electrical
personality destruction, discovered that there are an infinite number
of hypotheses for a given observation, so it is impossible to choose
between them all. In fact, instead of finding the absolute truth,
science has found multiple truths, which Pirsig points to as the cause
of the current social crisis. "As long as the need for food,
clothing and shelter is dominant [rationality] will continue to
work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no
longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed
down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins
to be seen for what it really is--emotionally hollow, esthetically
meaningless and spiritually empty." This conclusion led him to
abandon his studies in molecular biology and after some time in Korea
and the discovery of Eastern thought, led him to pursue philosophy.
From philosophy, Pirsig eventually became an English teacher at
Bozeman, a small college in the middle of Montana. Here he
developed the idea of the "Church of Reason", that is, the
University. It's job is the search of the Kantian absolute
truth. From a chance phrase dropped by a colleague, he began to
think about Quality. Sure, he taught it, but what was it? He and his students
both seemed to agree on whether something was Quality or not (the class
analyzed anonymousized papers), but they could not define it.
Here the Church of Reason was failing in its job, because the moment
that he attempted to define Quality, it disappeared. Without a
definition, Reason cannot be applied.
Phaedrus eventually came to the conclusion that Quality was an
event: it is the event at which both the classic (scientific,
intellectual) and romantic (emotional) awareness of an object is
possible. Furthermore, he said that Quality is the cause, that
ultimately Quality is that from which everything springs, finding an
epiphany in Tao Te Ching, in
that the "Tao" and "Quality"
can be substituted from each other. Unfortunately, this is also
the point where he started to go insane.
Pirsig notes that perhaps Phaedrus had gone too far in what Quality is,
and expounds Qualitiy in a more helpful way by talking about
stuckness. Inevitably the rational mind will eventually get
stuck, in writing or in solving a problem. This is because
solutions occur at the edge of knowledge, where the manifestation of
Quality has yet to be identified. We get stuck when we start
looking behind the edge, at the knowledge that has already been
discovered. Stuckness is, in fact, a good state, because
eventually we will start re-examining our assumptions about what is
important, what is relevant and become unstuck.
At this point we rejoin Phaedrus as he studies at the University of
Chicago. Here he discovers the Greek philosophers, the foundation
of Western culture. After much research Phaedrus discovers that
before Plato, there were groups of thinkers who propounded an absolute
truth, but could not agree on what it was. Plato attempts to
unify this by splitting it into Truth and Good. Against Plato
argue the Sophists, who say that "Man is the measure [not creator] of
all things," namely that truth is relative. So Plato's
surprisingly forceful damning of the Sophists was essentially damning a
philosophy of relativism versus a fledgling idea of absolute
truth. Plato won, and from him and from absolute truth sprung
Western civilization. But in gaining the notion of absolute truth
that has so propelled Western society, we lost the oneness with the
world, because now the Good (which is very similar to Quality) is now
an abstract idea, and as such can be demoted to less than Truth by
Aristotle.
At this point Phaedrus sees that the University is not interested in
Quality and ceases caring about the world, leading to his being
sequestered in the asylum. Likewise, Pirsig begins to agree with
Phaedrus, taking leave of the mythos of our culture and going insane
again. You get out of the asylum, he says, by figuring out what
they want you to say and saying it well, denying the part of you that
is insane. Pirsig's intention was to sell the motorocyle when he
hit the ocean, send Chris back on the bus, and check himself into the
mental hospital. He is dissauded from doing so by the anguish his
son Chris, and Pirsig discovers that Chris is the reason he denied
Phaedrus to get out, and Chris is the reason to deny Phaedrus again.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance is a little schizophrenic, clearly on purpose.
The motorcycle journey matches the mood Pirsig's thoughts and provides
a running narrative to break up the exposition. The exposition,
unfortunately, is written as if he were thinking it as he goes.
This serves to reinforce the motorcycle journey (which was taken from
true events), but prevents clarity of exposition. Perhaps this
was a goal, to show the thought process, but if so, it obscures the
main goal, which is to show that, to regain the quality of living that
we lost through the quality of our technology, we need to treat Quality
as the highest ideal, and because people's views of what constitues
Quality for them, we need to have a more relativistic outlook.
I am sad to report that this book, while interesting, does not resonate
with me. As Pirsig says in his introduction, "the success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
seems the result of this culture-bearing phenomenon." Perhaps the
culture in 2004 is too unlike that of 1974, when the book was first
published, now that relativism and post-modernism have taken a firm
hold, so the ideas are no longer the
just-what-I-have-been-thinking-but-couldn't-identify ideas that make a
culture-bearing best-seller. Perhaps it is that, as a Christian,
I am firmly in the camp of Absolute Truth, and long ago rejected the
relativism of my own culture. Nonetheless the thoughts expressed
here are quite applicable. While I stop short of viewing Quality
as different for everyone, in this age of cookie-cutter subdivision and
vast stretches of featureless cement, we do, indeed, need to have
Quality or Beauty in our work, not just technical improvement or
expedience. And while the book is, unfortunately (but by design)
more of a Chautauqua, or an entertaining education, than a treatise,
the ideas are worth considering and even adopting, at least as far as a
devotion to Absolute Truth will allow.
Review: 8.0
I finished this book unsure what to
think. It was recommended to me as a discussion of what it means
to be insane, but this is not clearly presented. Clearly Pirsig
has a message, too, but it is so well hidden that it was only be
attempting to summarize the book for this review that it made
sense. In fact, I found it a great book for insomnia. So
while I think the contents are potentially worthy of a higher score,
this explanation of them could be much more clearly presented, even in
the Chautauqua form.
Useful Ideas
- "[Phaedrus'] lack of faith in [R]eason was why he was so fanatically dedicated
to it. You are never dedicated to something you have complete
confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is
going to rise tomorrow. They know
it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically
dedicated to political or religious faiths or any of the kinds of
dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in
doubt."
- "Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's
the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train
[of knowledge] on the track [of Quality]. Traditional knowledge
is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has
been. At the leading edge there are no [observers], no objects,
only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of
evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train
has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure
reason--you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where
absolutely all the action is. The leaing edge contains all the
infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of
the past. Where else could they be contained?" p. 283
- Squareness is unique to intellectuals because intellectuals
ignore the romantic part of the quality edge.
- Gumption is required to do a quality job, because gumption is
essentially ones willingness to do the job well. Should gumption
evaporate (due to frustration, etc.), one should cease work for a while
and do a gumption-restoring task (like perhaps organizing your tools,
which takes your mind off the work, probably finds the tool you were
looking for, and aid future work).
- "What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each
generation is the continuing, onging mythos, transformed into logos but
still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds
as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is no so
united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is
not to understand what the mythos is.
"There is only one kind of person, Phaedrus said, who accepts or
rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that
person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is
'insane.' To go outside the mythos is to become insane ...
He knew! He must have known what was about to happen." p.
350
- "Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and
Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists
against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists.
Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone
thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for.
The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the
history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It
can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists
without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people--there
are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he
completely ignores. Hee damns them because they threaten
mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That's what
it is all about.
"The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that
followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we
know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish
unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much
beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science
and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are
dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of all." p. 373-4.