Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I must start by saying that this is one of my favorite books ever. Although it is deep and complicated and takes a lot of focus to read, I feel that there are a lot of great messages here in the author’s search for Quality. This was my second time reading this book, and I liked it more this time.tInterlaced with stories from an across-the-west motorcycle trip with his son and some friends, Pirsig tells the story of his past in an almost former life before being admitted to a mental institution after going crazy in his pursuit of Quality. He often uses the motorcycle as an analogy, as well as climbing mountains. With what many would see as too much depth and detail (but not me), he dissects the ideas of rhetoric, quality, the scientific method, technology and many ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers and tries to take down an entire academic department in the search of a unifying truth/god/connecting force. I don’t really feel that there is a lot that I can say to do this book justice in a short review form like this. I’ll just write up a bunch of underlined quotes instead.“…physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”“Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”“That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as to not draw attention to myself.”“Nobody is concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable anymore. We are in a Western town.”“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government , but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”“If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.”“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”“But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought – occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like – because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”“The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”“He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.”“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster… When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.”“The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.” “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”“They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this – there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.”“Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with – and they are all, sooner or later, dull – and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others, too, because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual quality in the past, exploited as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out if gumption. And I think it’s about time to return the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.”“What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
I just re-read this book and HAD to annotate it because it sent my head swimming. I'd studied quite a lot of philosophy since I read it a year and a half ago and so the philosophies didn't go over my head this time.First, I must say if you find the narrator off-putting, rest assured that the protagonist is NOT the narrator. The narrator is the nemesis who has eclipsed the protagonist; the story reveals their struggle. The introduction of my edition hints at this, but apparently some people haven't gotten that as I've read comments of several people complaining about the narrator. Robert Pirsig’s genius in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is to insert classical forms of thought into the backdrop of a cross-country motorcycle trip. He piques our interest by waxing philosophical in an effort to get to the root of the ghost story haunting him. He succeeds in creating the quintessential philosophy book of the 20th Century. It turns out that the motorcycle is a symbol of the soul.A brief summary of Pirsig’s “chautauquas” follows, but bear in mind that this list is informational, whereas his book is spirited and transformational. (Chautauqua means “talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.” p. 15)There are two ways of experiencing a motorcycle:1.tRomantically—riding a cycle down a mountain road, invigorated by the wind rushing past2.tClassically—familiarizing yourself with the working parts of the machine, developing a feel for how tight to secure the bolts.Romantic experience is “in the moment.” Classical experience connects the past to the future, allowing us to build on previous knowledge:1.tSystems of Components and Functions—physical working parts which we come to know either:a.tEmpirically—knowledge gained by the sensesb.ta priori—knowledge gained intuitively (known without prior experience)2.tConcepts—Ideas with the potential to be realized (the thought precedes the creation of the physical object).a.tInductive ideas start with observing specific examples and end with a general conclusion.b.tDeductive ideas start with general knowledge used to predict specific observations.Connecting the Romantic to the Classical is Quality. To care about something will increase its quality.Pirsig creates an analogy comparing knowledge to a railroad train that is always going somewhere:•tClassic Knowledge is the engine and the cars.•tRomantic reality adds the dimension of time—it is the cutting edge of the experience, the moment in time. •tTraditional knowledge is the body of classic knowledge plus the history of where the train has been.•tQuality is the track—the “preintellectual reality” or “the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place” (p. 247). What carries the train forward is a sense of what is good. It is understood intuitively and enhanced by skill and experience. •tIf your train gets stuck, understand two things:otBeing stuck eventually produces real understanding as you look for the solution in your train of knowledge. (A classical experience)otDon’t be afraid to stop and analyze—you can see in patterns not only the physical object but the idea or function of the object. Eventually you will be able to break through barriers.Creative energy is “gumption” or enthusiasm (enthousiasmos means literally “filled with theos” or God—appropriate since God is the inspiration of creativity).Gumption Traps (“An examination of affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks in the perception of Quality” p. 305) :1.tExternal (Setbacks)2.tInternal (Hangups)a.tInability to learn new facts—slow down and decide if the things you thought were important are really important or if the things you thought were insignificant are more important than you thought.b.tEgo (falsely inflated self-image)—let your work struggles teach you to be quiet and modest.c.tAnxiety (opposite of Ego; you’re afraid you won’t get it right so you freeze up or don’t try)—“work out your anxieties on paper” (p. 315) Read about the topic, organize your thoughts on paper; remember even the best make plenty of mistakes.d.tBoredom—take a break, rest, or clean out your space.e.tImpatience (results from an “underestimation of the amount of time the job will take” p. 317)—allow yourself plenty of time to finish the job, break the job down into smaller goals.Quality is understood in Western Culture as arête/excellence.Quality is understood in Eastern Culture as dharma/”duty to self”.Early cultures used Rhetoric to teach Quality in terms of virtue, but after some time the technique of rhetoric was corrupted by the Sophists as ethical relativism. (pp. 376-77) Socrates took issue with the Sophists and established dialogues—or the Dialectic (discussions through which the Truth can be arrived at). Excellence became subordinate to Truth. Rhetoric fell from its supreme position of Excellence (Quality) to teaching mannerisms and forms of writing and speaking.Quality, Pirsig discovers, is "the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything." (p. 254)
What do You think about Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (2006)?
I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no one should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another neo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the only reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read: pompous scumbag) friends will accept them into the hippie circle. Although I know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to meet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a bigger hoax than the bible. So I have written, and so, therefore, must it be.
—Zora
Read young and never looked back. At this point the only thing I remember, even vaguely, is the discussion on 'quality.' Which led me to reading the Plato myself. While this book is not philosophy, it is philosophical. The detractors out there can think of it as sloppy new-age mysticism, a poorly constructed novel, a deficient stab at serious thought. That's ok. (But if you do, I urge you to read the serious stuff and see how much of it ends up reminding you of "Phaedrus'" academic fate.)I am, perhaps, over-generous with my stars on account of nostalgia. Yet, I think the lesson that the author-narrator learns is an important one: tempering your own arrogance does not mean the end of truth seeking.
—Christopher Klein
Well, this book is not for everyone, and I have certainly heard people say that they found it overblown, pretentious, pointless, etc. but I loved it and found that what I read and my life experiences as I read it formed a didactic and interesting dialectic with the content of the book.The book itself interstices Pirsig's account of a motorcycle road trip with his son and some friends with the story of his personal and professional struggles developing his philosophy of "the metaphysics of quality". There is also some history of philosophy, although this is to provide an exposition for Pirsig's arguments, so he cherry-picks the stories and interpretations that he tells. This is fine because it is not meant to be a primer on classical or any other kind of philosophy; I don't really have an extensive philosophy background but the little I did know helped I think.Not that they have anything to do with the book, but I have a couple of stories about it. I figure that most people who have any interest in this type of book are already pretty familiar with it, so I won't say too much about it other than that I couldn't put it down and I wholeheartedly recommend it. While I don't agree with Pirsig's entire viewpoint, most of it rang true and even that which didn't was still an excellent impetus for introspection.I got a copy at a used bookstore (I'm pretty sure it was this one) on a trip up to San Francisco with my girlfriend and a mutual friend. At first I had been browsing, and had found a cool coffee table book on phrenology which the lady at the counter chatted with me for a little bit. Encouraged by the chatting, I asked her if they had a book I had been looking for, The Secret Teaching of All Ages by Manly P. Hall, which is an encyclopedic reference about the occult, masonry, astrology, etc. (although it is reprinted in paperback, the original book had lots of charts, illustrations, etc that would not fit in the smaller paperback format and had to be abridged, so I was looking for the original, which I am told is something of a collector's item in certain circles). At this point, the warmth drains from her face. There is an ominous, beginning-of-a-movie-like silence, and she informs me, "No. I don't sell that book. I'm a Christian." When I ask for further clarification, she says that the book contains "a secret spell to undo the universe" and that she didn't want any part in helping anyone undo the universe, so she would not sell the book even if she had it. Well, things got kind of awkward at this point, and while trying to avoid eye contact with her, I saw a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in a stack of books waiting to be shelved, and tried to help myself. My friend Ian H had told me it was really good and I figured I'd check it out. She swatted my hand away and sent someone to get me a copy off the shelf. She told me that it was by far the most popular title that they sold.I didn't get around to reading the book until almost a year later, when me and Vinny were on our rail trip to and through Hokkaido. The book got really water damaged during our ill-fated hike up and down Rishi-fuji-zan right around when I was reading Pirsig's mountain climbing allegory. A lot of the stuff about how when "you can't move forward, you move sideways" and etc. resonated with my at times aimless wanderings over the past couple of years.So, in summation, you'll really like this book, unless you instead think it's interminable, rambling, and obtuse like this review.
—Kevin
