When I was a young man in high school, we all read books. I’m not convinced youth do this much anymore, please tell me they do! The most influential books popular among us at that time were: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, by Richard Bach; The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter; and Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I utterly hated them all, except for Godel, Escher, Bach and Zen and the Art. I don’t think Godel, Escher, Bach has withstood the test of time, at least not for me. It has rarely come to mind since those days. Zen and the Art has regularly popped into my head throughout the years, though. I thought I’d give it a revisit and I re-read it. Its worth has held up over time! The book remains relevant, and worthwhile.
I remembered it mostly as a philosophical book, and that remained true. A little zen finds its way into the text. A lot of motorcycle maintenance does. But the book isn’t really about zen nor about motorcycle maintenance. The book has a good literary framing-story that’s quite interesting, and Pirsig handles it very well. But the main dish is philosophy.
The Literary
The book unfolds an autobiographical motorcycle adventure. The narrator, Robert Pirsig, is traveling with his son, Chris, and their friends, John and Sylvia, on motorcycles from the American Midwest to the Pacific Coast. Each day provides a diary-entry of sorts, what Pirsig terms a “Chautauqua”. On each day that passes, however, they travel over lands that evoke submerged memories inside of Pirsig. Years before, Pirsig had gone insane and was committed into an insane asylum which in those days were anything but actual asylums. Horrific remedies ruled the day, such as electro-shock therapy. Technicians effectively submerged his personality into his subconscious as a dream or a ghost, and created a new personality more functional among society. It was an MK-ULTRA move straight out of A Clockwork Orange. That submerged ghost inside of him is called, “Phaedrus”, and as the motorcycles travel through places linked to Phaedrus through fragments of submerged memory, Phaedrus grows stronger and slowly re-emerges.
Battles of sane-self vs. crazy-self are hardly new to literature. Sophocles in his play Ajax may have started the genre. In that play the goddess Athena drives the Greek warrior, Ajax, temporarily insane on the fields before Troy, where he slaughters the prize cattle and sheep of the Greeks thinking they are his enemies. Famously, Shakespeare gives us King Lear and Hamlet. But usually the insane version of a character is portrayed as a lamentable or fallen version of the sane. Zen and the Art has it the other way around, where you like Phaedrus, the insane one, more than Robert, the safe and rational one. The son Chris surely does. He finds the insane version of his father preferrable and much more fun and also more humane than the straight-laced version. We find another similarity to A Clockwork Orange, where the protagonist, Alex, is preferrable and more authentic as his thug-life self than his “broken-wing” self. In Anthony Burgess’ novel, but not in Stanley Kubric’s movie, Alex does move towards a healthy synthesis between his sane-self and his insane-self, and that also happens in Zen and the Art. By the end of Zen, Phaedrus has “won” the contest and a Robert-Phaedrus synthesis emerges as a new, better version of the man.
The duel between Robert and Phaedrus finds reflection in many forms in the text. An uneasy father vs. son relationship exists between Robert and Chris; a philosophical one exists between Robert, who is a technologist, and the couple of John and Sylvia, who are artists. Throughout the book the central opposition is between the technical people, such as those who embrace motorcycle maintenance and technology, and the artistic or aesthetic people who abhor technology. It’s the aesthetic stance such as in Zen opposed to the mechanical demands of motorcycles, and hence the title of the book. All of these oppositions are wrapped around the central contest in the book, which is a philosophical one. Philosophy is what drove Phaedrus mad originally. He had tried to resolve the Platonic duality of philosophy which pits Appearance against Reality. The final Robert-Phaedrus synthesis pleases Chris, who gets his old father back at least in part. And the Robert-Phaedrus synthesis embodies the result of Phaedrus’ philosophical struggle.
The Philosophic
Plato postulated a metaphysics that poised Reality apart from Appearance. This is the Platonic dualism, famously described by Plato as the situation where Man is stuck sitting in a cave watching a poor reflection on the cave walls of the real world outside of the cave. This Platonic dualism in the many forms that would follow became the defining problem of Western philosophy, as reflections of this dualism fell out everywhere. For example, it is always said that there are two kinds of people of some kind, and always along the terms of the Platonic duality. “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”, and so on, ad infinitum. Endless combinations of this duality are possible.
| Reality | Appearance |
|---|---|
| Aristotelian | Platonic |
| Masculine | Feminine |
| Roman | Greek |
| Practical | Theoretical |
| Left-Brain | Right-Brain |
| Occidental | Oriental |
| Apollonian | Dionysian |
| Robert | Phaedrus |
The problem with all these divisions is that they aren’t neat, and, since infinite combinations of this duality are possible, they lack explanatory power in the end. You are never 100% masculine or 100% feminine; you are never 100% practical or 100% theoretical. Always this duality exists in some combination, never in purity. But the thing to keep in mind is that in the wake of this Platonic duality, thought forked along two lines, being two lines of a false or incomplete duality. Today, modern science can be seen as entirely a pursuit of Reality, whereas philosophy can be seen as entirely a pursuit of Appearance. This is not a happy situation as it exists in division. In The Birth of Tragedy, the same book where Nietzsche described the Apollonian vs. Dionysian as mentioned above, Nietzsche blamed this on Plato’s teacher, Socrates. The expectation and demand of Socrates was that any knowledge, if it were to have real worth, ought to be reducible to terms and explanations that were governed by Reason. This negates and robs of power any other approach to knowledge, accepting only what survives the filters of his Apollonian demands – and nothing survives those filters, as Socrates himself found out!
In Zen and the Art, the young Phaedrus leaves for university to begin a scientific career having fully embraced the governing paradigms to which we were all enculturated. He believes in the power of the Scientific Method, as the ultimate tool for seeing beyond Appearance and testing Reality against hypotheses, thereby accruing knowledge. He soon arrives at a crisis, however, when he discovers the Infinite Hypothesis Problem. It turns out that for any given scientific problem he faced, he realized that an infinite number of valid hypotheses could be formulated. In the same manner that the “ad infinitum” transforms of the Platonic dualism are found, so are all scientific hypotheses. And, since it is not possible to test an infinite number of hypotheses, the Scientific Method fails by its own terms. It is a fatally self-contradicted chimera. No definitive solutions exist. You’re never going to know the best one if you can’t test them all. Only established solutions with the “best fit” to our arbitrary expectations exist. Everything, going back to the Platonic dualism, has to be re-thought.
Phaedrus eventually settles on Quality as a potential unifier to the Platonic duality conundrum. What is Quality? Does it really even exist, or is it all in your head? It’s a thing in that category of “you know it when you see it,” but it resists any firm definition. Phaedrus at first attempts the Socratic method, meaning asking everyone he encountered for their definition of Quality. He got the same results as Socrates. Nobody could really pin Quality down. But everybody claimed to know what it is, they just failed to explain it even to their own satisfaction. Phaedrus then resorts to a pre-Socratic method, ontology. Ontology is by definition the study of existence, of investigating which things exist and why. It is a method of philosophy that has languished mostly in ill-repute since the advent of the Platonic dualism, actually, followed by the logical investigations of Aristotle. Phaedrus applies it to his problem, however. He concludes that yes, Quality exists, and that Quality is ultimately a phenomenal aspect of being. Every moment that you perceive the reality around you and you comprehend it, i.e. you “make sense” of it, THAT experience is Quality. It is the bridge that unites Reality and Appearance. Since Quality is phenomenal and entirely immaterial, it resists quantization and explication according to the rational demands of science, and is therefore largely “undefinable” and ignored by the Apollonian-dominated sorts. Furthermore, pursuit of ever-better experiences of Quality is the impelling force behind seeking a better life, in harmony with nature, yourself and every task and activity. “Anything worth doing is worth doing right!”, as our wise fathers used to drill us. It here that the technical and the aesthetic merge.
Conclusion
The book succeeds on the whole. The literary portions of it are well done, and the philosophic aspects lay real groundwork for further investigations. I thank the book for opening my eyes to the problems of the scientific method and of Platonic dualism all those years ago. It also alerted me to the great and neglected power of ontology. This all was a great service to me, for which I’m thankful. The book was, and remains, impactful.
Any negative criticism of it that comes to me are from the brief sections where Robert strikes out on his own, extemporizing on the work of Phaedrus. These are the parts of the book about “gumption” and “value traps”. While these points are not particularly bad, they do have the flavor of seeming to be ad hoc. They do serve as derivative “asides” from the real philosophical work done by Phaedrus. Thankfully, these “asides” are brief.
Furthermore, while the book does break the ground for rich philosophical contemplation, it does not offer any kind of system in detail. This is very much a “let’s get you thinking” sort of book. That’s not a bad thing, especially since the issues tackled by the book are important and do lead somewhere, imho. In the future I will be posting about a complete, honest-to-God, Theory of the Universe, Life and Everything that answers all the questions in the universe. I’m not kidding, that does exist, and the answer is not “42”. That’s a yuge thing to tackle, though. But that journey to those things could begin here, with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because this book is on the right path forward.
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