Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance begins with the narrator, his son Chris, and friends John and Sylvia (The Sutherlands), heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas on their motorcycles.

Throughout the ride, the narrator refers to an insane, evil spirit he keeps seeing by the name of Phaedrus. It is through his ongoing conversations with Phaedrus that he develops his ideas regarding a metaphysics of quality.

According to Dictionary.com, metaphysics is "the underlying theoretical principles of a subject or field of inquiry."

Phaedrus divides human understanding into two kinds - classical and romantic.

"The classical mode proceeds by reason and by laws. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is to bring order out of chaos.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, and intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate.

Motorcycle riding is romantic while motorcycle maintenance is purely classic." (pgs 70-71)

The problem is that most people operate mostly in one mode or the other and, consequently, tend to misunderstand and underestimate those in the other mode. What we need is a way of looking at the world which unites the two understandings (or at least helps them to appreciate each other).

Everything is a system - governments, institutions, ecosystems in nature, even a motorcycle. A system is made up of components and parts.

In a motorcycle, there is a hierarchy of interrelated structures. The components consist of a power assembly and a running assembly. Pirsig says that to revolt against a government or avoid repairing a motorcycle is attacking effects rather than causes, making change impossible.

"A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself."

As the narrator rides across Montana, he explains that the way to solve problems in a system is through logic.

There are two kinds of logic. Inductive starts with observations and arrives at general conclusions. Deductive does the reverse, starting with general knowledge and predicting specific observations. Complicated problems require the logic of scientific method.

Pirsig says, "The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know."

In other words, don't make assumptions! Solving problems requires careful observations and precise thinking.

Pirsig notes that lesser scientists would say that hypotheses come either from nature or from humans. But Phaedrus found that the number of hypotheses is infinite. This was disturbing, because if true, it disproves the validity of scientific method. You can never test all hypotheses!

Einstein said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest."

To Phaedrus, this implied that truth was a function of time. As a matter of fact, the history of science shows continuously changing explanations of old facts. Now Phaedrus saw a genetic defect in the nature of reason itself.

Phaedrus spent the next ten years in India studying Oriental philosophy. This tended to confuse him even more. Here is what he learned.

* Doctrinal differences between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism are not nearly as important as the differences between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

* In Oriental religions, everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To know this fully is to become enlightened.

* Logic, on the other hand, presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore, logic is not final wisdom.

Then, one of his professors told him that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. Phaedrus left the classroom and India and gave up. He returned to the Midwest, got a degree in journalism, married, and did odd jobs, mostly science and industrial-advertising writing.

Phaedrus was now teaching at a college in Bozeman, Montana and here he came up with his "Church of Reason" lecture. I'm not going to expand on it here. You'll have to read it yourself but here's how it begins.

A former church building was turned into a bar. People were complaining to church officials about it. A priest responded by saying that these people were ignorant about what a church really was. Do bricks and mortar constitute a church? The building was not holy. The same applies to a college. Does losing accreditation mean it is no longer a college? If the same activities are going on - teaching, learning, evaluating ideas - then the real college is the continuing body of reason itself.

Phaedrus said, "The primary goal of the Church of Reason is always Socrates' old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as its revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that."

Phaedrus tells a story.

"A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass."

Phaedrus was supersaturated. Then, a fellow teacher said to him, "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students." This was his seed crystal. Within months, he had developed his metaphysics of quality.

"Quality: you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others but what's the "betterness"?...So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?"

Phaedrus found that rhetoric at the University level was taught as a branch of reason alone. He was also having trouble with students who had nothing to say. Especially one girl, who was a serious, disciplined, and hardworking student. She wanted to write an essay about the United States. Phaedrus told her to narrow it to Bozeman but she couldn't think of anything to say. Phaedrus told her to narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman. Still nothing. He then said "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick." The next day she returned with a 5,000 word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana.

We get blocked from our own creativity because we just repeat what we have already heard. Until we really look at things and see them freshly for ourselves, we will have nothing new to say. "For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see."

Life is full of ups and downs. Quality of life depends on how you handle the ups as well as the downs.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts from this book, which I think is a metaphor for life.

"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountains which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."

Phaedrus is getting closer to figuring out where quality originates.

If Quality exists in an object, then scientific instruments would be able to detect it. They can't. If Quality is subjective, existing only in the observer, then it is just a name for whatever you like.

He then wondered if subjectivity or objectivity were the only choices. He concluded that Quality was not part of mind or matter. It is independent of both. Therefore, the world is composed of mind, matter, and Quality.

"At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree." (pg. 250) And: "Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. Since all intellectuality identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects." (pg. 251)

"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. The reason people see Quality differently is because they come to it with a different set of analogues. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience." (pg. 253)

Phaedrus does an interesting experiment, where he takes lines from the 2,400 year old Tao de Ching, written by Lao Tzu, and replaces the word Tao with Quality. To him it fit exactly.

However, he still could not say what Quality was, or whether it was the same as the Tao or Buddha or God. His findings did much more for reason. He felt that reason could be expanded to include elements normally considered irrational. He saw the possibilities for uniting Religion, Art, and Science.

He notes that "the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical." (pg. 262)

Pirsig uses the analogy of a railroad train with 120 boxcars. The train is knowledge. The engine and the boxcars represent classic knowledge or reason. When you subdivide the train into parts, there is no romantic knowledge anywhere. The train is not a static entity made up of parts.

"A train isn't a train if it can't go anywhere." (pg. 289)

He says that romantic quality is the leading edge of the engine. If you divide the train into parts, it can't go anywhere. The track is called Quality and the train only goes where the track takes it. Romantic quality, the leading engine, takes it along the track.

Inner peace of mind consists of physical quietness, mental quietness, and value quietness. What Pirsig means by value quietness is when "one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire." (pg. 302)

When inner peace of mind becomes a part of any work - whether technical or artistic - it is art. An artist is one who brings "patience, care, and attentiveness to what they're doing." (pg. 303) There is no separation between the artist and what he or she is doing.

"Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all - a material reflection of a spiritual reality." (pg. 304)

We're near the end of the book now. After studying Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and others, Pirsig comes to this conclusion.

"Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live." And, "Man is the measure of all things. Man is not the source of all things. Nor is he the passive observer of all things. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things." (pg. 384)