Literature/1974/Pirsig

Authors
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &

Pirsig, Robert (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. William Morrow & Co.

Excerpts

Science is "value free." The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values. (Section 29)
The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they are consistently doing that which they accuse the Sophists of doing ... using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves. (p.378)
Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. (p.391)
Everything is an analogy.

Critiques

Literature/1982/Norris ^{[^]}

Deconstruction on Two Wheels

Nietzsche's transvaluation of philosophy therefore demanded a return to source and an effort to deconstruct the ruling metaphors of reason itself. There is an odd but revealing parallel to this in Robert Pirsig's novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), where the narrative interest has more to do with Greek philosophy than with Zen Buddhism, as many readers have no doubt been puzzled to find. The central figure is a man on the verge of breakdown and despair who sets out on a coast-to-coast motorcycle trip across America in search of self-understanding. What emerges gradually in the course of this quest is a whole buried prehistory of intellectual conflict which -- we come to realize -- led up to the events of the novel. Through a sequence of dimly remembered episodes the narrator reconstructs a portrait of his own previous life, the last few months of which were spent as a student of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Under the pseudonym 'Phaedrus' -- adopted for reasons which soon become clear -- this doomed alter ego is shown in the process of challenging all the basic assumptions handed down by his teachers on pain of virtual excommunication.

When Phaedrus begins to read back into the sources, especially the texts of Plato and Aristotle, he finds their arguments not only unconvincing but deviously angled in such a way as everywhere to misrepresent their forgotten opponents. The sophists, in particular, are held up to philosophic ridicule by a method of argument which twists their case into a parody of its own just-visible outline. From Socrates down through Plato and Aristotle, the evidence points to a massive suppression and misinterpretation of everything that threatened the sovereign power of dialectical reason.

Phaedrus himself is cast as a latter-day victim of this same 'conspiracy', suffering the taunts of professors and students unwilling to question the wisdom of ages. The 'Church of Reason' is too firmly established in Chicago, with its neo-Aristotelian stress on the virtues of clear-cut logical analysis and firmly categorical thinking. The trouble comes to a head for Phaedrus when his class is taken over -- ominously -- by the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Method. What ensues -- at least in Phaedrus's inflamed imagination -- is an ultimate duel of wits between 'dialectic' and 'rhetoric', with rhetoric decisively winning the day. The turning-point comes with his realization that '"dialectic" had some special meaning that made it a fulcrum word - one that can shift the balance of an argument, depending on how it's placed'. By challenging the Chairman to explain the provenance of dialectic -- its 'genealogy', in Nietzschean terms -- Phaedrus shows it to rest on a willed and systematic forgetting of its own rhetorical origins. Reason, or the supposed self-evidence of reason, is thrown into doubt by its manifest failure to justify its methods on other than purely tautological grounds. Hence Phaedrus's triumphant conclusion:

The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they are consistently doing that which they accuse the Sophists of doing ... using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves. (Pirsig 1974, p.378)

But that way madness lies. Phaedrus cannot communicate his discovery within the norms of institutionalized knowledge and 'dialogue' so zealously preserved by the Chicago Aristotelians. He leaves the university and suffers (like Nietzsche) a collapse into silence and neurosis. (pp. 60-61)

[...]

As Pirsig's Phaedrus accounts for it, rhetoric was denatured and deprived of its force, through being treated as merely a collection of classified devices, reducible to system and order. Aristotle brought this process to a high point of rational perfection: 'Rhetoric has become an object, and as an object has parts. And the parts have relationships to one another and these relations are immutable' (Pirsig 1974, p.368). Whence, incidentally, the motorcycle connection: a machine for Phaedrus is more than the sum of its parts as laid out in a service manual. (p. 63)

Influences

This book was quite a revolution 35 years ago when it was the first introduction a lot of people got to Eastern philosophy. This is another book that I was exposed to in college and is the non-scientific equivalent to "Godel" in opening up a new world to me. The main theme of the book that stays with me is the difference between Western, reductive thinking and the Eastern, holistic style. As noted above, I was being immersed in the world of mathematics which appealed to my analytic nature. I was in love with the idea that you take a big problem, break it into a bunch of little problems, solve each of the little problems and then build it back up to understand the whole. Pirsig argues that this approach is not complete. Using the motorcycle as a metaphor, he tries to explain a concept called "Quality", by which he means that a machine or organism is more than just the sum of its parts. There is a “Quality” of being a motorcycle that cannot be explained by understanding spark plugs, carburetor, pistons, etc. I was totally blown away by the concept when I read it for the first time, and I still go back to it to this day. [1]

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Notes