Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Change a Person
I feel like Robert G. Pirsig has wronged me personally.
When I was quite young my encephalon said to me, after a particularly long and stoned session listening to Pink Floyd and discussing philosophy, 'oh give me a interruption'. And then I said to my brain, 'there's no demand to be and so rude,' and my brain said, 'no seriously, I can't handle this anymore, really, let me have a break'. And then it did and I've been operating on brain-stem alone ever since. I don't know it'due south made that much departure. I wonder if the writer's brain was thinking similar mine was? Certainly when I was reading this book and sort of enjoying it (2 stars-worth), I was also thinking I am simply besides old to be reading this sort of cod-philosophy, also one-time and non stoned plenty. I read other people'south reviews and have to conclude that they all saw something in this book that impressed them as deep and me every bit deeply populist. Either way, I didn't really relish it and it simply gets ii stars because the writing was ok, the book wasn't arduous to read, some parts of it were interesting and enjoyable. I wasn't that keen on the author's exploration of his mental breakup either. I find when other people tell me the dreams they had terminal dark, or I have to read them in a book I turn off also. I really don't know why, nor do I know if others also experience this manner. When telling last dark'due south major really interesting dream to someone else, I've never said, "Practice yous find this as boring as I would if it was you telling me?" Actually that'southward a load of guff, I don't tell other people my dreams considering I suspect they would be bored rigid and neither do I tell them nearly my mental breakup when I saw three rainbows in the sky and didn't impale myself considering I couldn't find a nightie that was suitable. Run across, tiresome! I kept thinking that Roberts (the writer of Shantaram) and Pirsig would go on really well. They could sit in cafes in foreign parts swapping tales of derring-practise, drugs and their fascinating insights whilst waiting for an audience to join them. That'south a bit mean-spirited as Pirsig is a keen deal more appealing as an writer and person than the somewhat sleazy Roberts, but I recollect you become what I hateful. And I will say that information technology's quite readable, the travel descriptions are very well done, the characters, apart from the hero, are in general interesting but... I still couldn't get into it. Anyhow, information technology'southward a Lord's day, much love and an extra star!
There are three threads weaving through this book (none of which, as is pointed out, has much to do with either eastern philosophy or with motorbike maintenance.) The first is a straightforward narration by a human riding across the country with his young son and two friends (a married couple). This evocative travelogue is by far the virtually enjoyable aspect of the novel. The 2nd chemical element is a sort of mystery as that homo struggles with his memory; it's gradually revealed that he's on the route both to escape his past and to try to call up information technology. The last thread is where the book only falls apart. Through the narrator's dialogue with himself, Pirsig puts frontward his ludicrous "philosophy of quality," which essentially holds that "quality," whatever that might be, is somehow the primal reality of the universe. If that sounds similar nonsense then y'all understand it perfectly. When we discover out why the narrator had lost his memory in the showtime place, the answers don't live upwards to any expectations we might take been unfortunate enough to have developed.
Robert Chiliad. Pirsig, Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "I can meet by my watch, without taking my manus from the left grip of the bicycle, that it is eight-xxx in the morning." I have read Zen probably 4 or v times. The clinical precision of the writer is apparent in all the item here ("left grip", "eight-thirty"). The self-reference of the author looking at his own picket will become a leitmotif as the unabridged book is well-nigh the author looking deep into his own soul (so deep in fact that the real author became temporarily insane betwixt finishing Zen and starting the sequel Lila.) The author is definitely a morning kind of a guy, already rolling downwards the highway early in the morning time. The fact that he looks without taking his mitt off the grip, gives united states a very cinematic presentation of this otherwise banal scene. As well, the mundane nature of riding a motorcycle and looking at a watch and finding the even of import enough to write about centres u.s. on the bike itself and foreshadows the many allusions and allegories that volition come betwixt philosophy and cycling. At that place is an extended analogy between the state of mind of Pirsig as he tunes and tweaks his motorcycle and his concept of quality every bit the leading edge of a train in time. I always found it helpful to recall and recall about. The relationship between Pirsig and his son is a focal bespeak of this volume and poignant without unpleasing towards the pathetic. At that place was a very peachy tragedy in Pirsig's life when his son was killed some years after, and naturally, Pirsig's already feeble mental country was shattered again. This book takes place during the son'southward adolescence and it is striking to run into how these two communicate and how Pirsig is somewhen able to connect with him. This book is a bang-up introduction to philosophy, peculiarly Zen Buddhism and I get something more out of information technology each time I read it. Truly a masterpiece. I highly recommend also reading his follow-up book to this chosen Zen for me remains a go to book for solace and reflection. I deeply mourn the passage of Pirsig as a misunderstood and nether-estimated thinker and writer. R.I.P.
I must offset by saying that this is one of my favorite books always. Although information technology is deep and complicated and takes a lot of focus to read, I feel that in that location are a lot of neat letters here in the writer'due south search for Quality. This was my second time reading this book, and I liked it more this time. "…physical discomfort is important simply when the mood is incorrect. Then you spike on to whatever matter is uncomfortable and call that the cause. Simply if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much." "Caring well-nigh what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted." "That's the first normal matter I've said in weeks. The residuum of the time I'm feigning twentieth-century lunacy merely similar y'all are. So as to non 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 downwards a manufacturing plant or to defection confronting a government or to avert repair of a motorcycle because it is a arrangement is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects simply, no alter is possible. The true organisation, the real arrangement, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down only the rationality which produced information technology is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another mill. If a revolution destroys a systematic government , but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that authorities are left intact, then those patterns will echo themselves in the succeeding authorities. There'southward so much talk virtually the system. And so picayune 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, and then it is clear that all hypotheses can never exist tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of whatsoever experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls brusk of its goal of establishing proven knowledge." "Sometimes it'due south a picayune better to travel than to go far." "You look at where you lot're going and where yous are and information technology never makes sense, just then you expect dorsum at where you've been and a pattern seems to sally. And if you projection forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something." "But what'southward happening is that each yr our one-time apartment 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 issue nosotros're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought – occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like – because they experience the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are existent experiences." "The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the mode it ever is. People should see that information technology'southward never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It'south never been anything else, e'er, but you can't get that beyond in an essay." "The allegory of a concrete mount for the spiritual one that stands betwixt each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind u.s., most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to mind 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 get in at their destination. Nonetheless others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their ain routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make information technology. Once there they become more aware than whatever of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are equally many routes as there are individual souls." "He was merely stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything." "Any endeavour that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is spring to end in disaster… When you endeavour to climb a mount to prove how big y'all are, you almost never make information technology. And even if y'all exercise it's a hollow victory. In social club to sustain the victory yous accept to prove yourself once again and over again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false paradigm, haunted by the fear that the image is not truthful and someone will notice out. That'south never the style." "The holiness of the mountain infused into their ain spirits enabled them to endure far more than annihilation he, with his greater physical strength, could take." "Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same matter. A person who sees Quality and feels information technology as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who'due south bound to have some feature of quality." "They accept patience, care and attentiveness to what they're doing, but more than this – at that place'south a kind of inner peace of listen that isn't contrived just 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 modify together in a progression of shine, even changes until his mind is at remainder at the exact instant the material is right." "Or if he takes whatever dull task he's stuck with – and they are all, sooner or later on, dull – and, only to proceed himself amused, starts to wait for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, only for their ain sake, thus making an fine art out of what he is doing, he'southward likely to detect he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people effectually him considering his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, simply others, too, because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality chore he didn't call up anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a piddling better because of it and is likely to laissez passer that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going. "What is adept, Phaedrus, and what is not skillful – demand we inquire anyone to tell the states these things?"
Interlaced with stories from an across-the-west motorbike trip with his son and some friends, Pirsig tells the story of his by in an almost former life before beingness admitted to a mental establishment afterwards going crazy in his pursuit of Quality. He often uses the motorcycle as an analogy, as well equally climbing mountains. With what many would meet as also much depth and particular (merely non 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 forcefulness.
I don't really feel that there is a lot that I can say to do this book justice in a short review form similar this. I'll but write up a bunch of underlined quotes instead.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further comeback of the globe will be washed: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.God, I don't desire to have whatsoever more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that go out individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to exist built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We've had that individual quality in the by, exploited as a natural resource without knowing it, and now information technology's just about depleted. Everyone'due south only about out if gumption. And I think it's about fourth dimension to return the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth. In that location are political reactionaries who've been saying something shut to this for years. I'yard not one of them, merely to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more than money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, cocky-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do."
OK, possibly I'thou beingness a little too harsh. I actually enjoyed the idea of the cross-state motorcycle ride, the details about motorbike mechanics, and specially the portrayal of the narrator'due south relationship with his son. The son was the all-time function of the whole book. Unfortunately, there wasn't much space for sonny, because dad was too busy advert the author's brilliant philisophical insights. Fifty-fifty more unfortunately, the insights weren't brilliant, and consumed hundreds of tedious pages. It occured to me to wonder whether the author was trying to make the betoken that the narrator was a pompous idiot; however, the intent seemed to be for the reader to be blown abroad by the brilliance of the narrator's philosophical insights, and hence past the luminescence of the author who conceived of the narrator and the philosophical insights. I can't believe I made it through 380 pages of this.
Vivid! Pirsig might be something of an American Montaigne, producing readable philosophy with a minimum of abtractions. That'south a gift. After undergoing electro-convulsive therapy 28 times, Pirsig, in this book, gives his formerly insane cocky a doppelgänger-like change-ego, Phaedrus, and bravely tries to piece together that formerly insane self's idea in social club to learn from it. This solitary is fascinating. At the same time Pirsig is reviewing aspects of eastern and western philosophical thought. I need books that brand philosophy comprehensible. All too often I find the nifty geniuses incoherent amid their heaped abstractions. Another recent philosophy-decrypting book I found helpful was Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, in which the author lays bare the foundations of phenomenology and existentialism. Another was Walter Kaufman'southward Nietsche: Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist. But while those books are, in the beginning case, explications of two related schools of philosophy, and in the 2nd, of a particular philosopher's idea and how it was driveling by fascists, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a forensic reconstruction of a philosophy which sent its author to the nut house. In that respect alone, the volume represents an astonishing act of bravery in the face of unimaginable suffering. Quality is explained as part of a trinity non equivalent to listen and matter, but anterior to it. Quality is the proto-reality that exists before our minds can hitch analogues to sensed perceptions. I didn't quite understand it at outset either. Probably because these were the arguments that led Phaedrus to 28 electro-convulsive therapies and a long hospitalization. He "...felt something let become" and was overwhelmed with a "whole new flood of philosophical associations." He pulls out his re-create of the Tao Te Ching and at that place information technology is, his idea of Quality, equally revealed past the mystic Lao Tzu 2,400 years agone. Insanity. Just so slowly, nether the patient questioning of the recovered mail service-treatment Pirsig, the argument begins to coalesce. We are then introduced to Jules Henri Poincaré and larn of the crisis in the exact sciences of his day. Poincaré goes on to find the subjectivity of systems, his indicate of departure being Euclid's troublesome Fifth Postulate. Poincaré determines that it is facts which are infinite and it is up to the man mind to select subliminal factual harmonies—the mathematicians'southward beautiful proof, for instance—which rises to consciousness seemingly unbidden in the form of eureka moments. Thereby, says Poincaré, are systems devised and they are legion. In coming to this decision, it turns out, Poincaré long ago built a back channel to the thought of Quality Phaedrus would develop. I take neglected to mention the culling narrative with which all this woolgathering is contrasted—Moby-Dick-fashion—and that is the cantankerous country motorcycle trip the author takes through Montana and Idaho and Oregon and California with his son, Chris. That storyline ties in with the philosophy in a subtle mutually supporting way that's a joy to read. I enjoyed the set on on Aristotle, whom I've ever constitute unreadable. But how Pirsig tin make sitting through doctoral seminars so riveting is something to be pondered. It helps, I suppose, if one'due south teachers are consummate assholes, as they are here. The haymaker Phaedrus delivers to the glass jaw of the Great Books curriculum at the University of Chicago is enormous fun to read about. Phaedrus attends a course on rhetoric there that is—past Pirsig's later definition—insane. Pirsig claims that everything not on the metaphorical train of Quality is by definition insanity. That's why he tin can't go out the train, no one can. I await forward to reading this ane over again. A Great Book in itself mayhap. Recommended with alertness.
The difference between a good mechanic and a bad mechanic, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the practiced facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability near which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. Information technology's long past fourth dimension to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who brand and so much of these facts later on they are "observed." I think that it will exist plant that a formal acknowledgment of the part of Quality in the scientific procedure doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. Information technology expands it, strengthens information technology and brings it far closer to bodily scientific practice. (p.288)
Plato'due south Phaedrus said, "And what is written well and what is written desperately...demand we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose author, to teach u.s. this?" Modern Phaedrus said, "And what is good, Phaedrus, I go on re-reading passages from Zen and the Art and Tao of Pooh and Siddhartha and effort to make sense in the context of everyday life (which is where I firmly believe any philosophical questions need to be answered - If it is not applicable in your kitchen, it is non real philosophy) and quite strangely the answers seem to come from tying in the learning from these metaphysical and spiritual works with a book like The Story of Stuff - neither a nifty book nor a literary accomplishment or a jump in thinking - only information technology helped me understand the real meaning of the discussion 'materialism' when I read it in parallel with these other books. I volition try to give an expanded review soon as a weblog post at my web log And So? "I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth." Yous can sort of tell these things...
And what is non good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
I just re-read this book and HAD to comment it considering information technology sent my caput swimming. I'd studied quite a lot of philosophy since I read information technology a year and a half ago and so the philosophies didn't go over my head this fourth dimension. First, I must say if you find the narrator off-putting, residuum 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 manifestly some people oasis't gotten that as I've read comments of several people lament near the narrator. Robert Pirsig'southward 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. Information technology turns out that the motorcycle is a symbol of the soul. A cursory summary of Pirsig's "chautauquas" follows, simply bear in mind that this list is advisory, whereas his volume is spirited and transformational. (Chautauqua means "talks intended to edify and entertain, meliorate the mind and bring civilisation and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer." p. 15) There are 2 ways of experiencing a motorcycle: Romantic feel is "in the moment." Classical experience connects the past to the futurity, allowing united states of america to build on previous knowledge: Pirsig creates an analogy comparison noesis to a railroad train that is always going somewhere: Creative energy is "gumption" or enthusiasm (enthousiasmos means literally "filled with theos" or God—advisable since God is the inspiration of creativity). Quality is understood in Western Culture as arête/excellence. 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 event with the Sophists and established dialogues—or the Dialectic (discussions through which the Truth can exist 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 primal generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, by and present, all noesis, everything." (p. 254)
1. Romantically—riding a cycle downward a mountain road, invigorated by the wind rushing past
2. Classically—familiarizing yourself with the working parts of the machine, developing a feel for how tight to secure the bolts.
ane. Systems of Components and Functions—physical working parts which we come to know either:
a. Empirically—knowledge gained by the senses
b. a priori—cognition gained intuitively (known without prior experience)
ii. Concepts—Ideas with the potential to be realized (the thought precedes the creation of the physical object).
a. Inductive ideas showtime with observing specific examples and end with a full general conclusion.
b. Deductive ideas starting time with general noesis used to predict specific observations.
Connecting the Romantic to the Classical is Quality. To care virtually something will increase its quality.
• Classic Knowledge is the engine and the cars.
• Romantic reality adds the dimension of time—it is the cutting edge of the experience, the moment in time.
• Traditional knowledge is the body of classic knowledge plus the history of where the train has been.
• Quality is the track—the "preintellectual reality" or "the moment of vision earlier the intellectualization takes place" (p. 247). What carries the train frontward is a sense of what is good. It is understood intuitively and enhanced by skill and experience.
• If your railroad train gets stuck, understand two things:
o Existence stuck eventually produces real understanding as y'all look for the solution in your train of noesis. (A classical experience)
o Don't be agape to terminate and analyze—yous tin see in patterns not only the physical object but the thought or function of the object. Somewhen y'all will exist able to break through barriers.
Gumption Traps ("An examination of affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks in the perception of Quality" p. 305) :
1. External (Setbacks)
2. Internal (Hangups)
a. Inability to larn 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 lot thought.
b. Ego (falsely inflated self-image)—permit your work struggles teach you lot to be quiet and modest.
c. Feet (reverse of Ego; you're afraid you won't become it correct 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; recollect fifty-fifty the best make enough of mistakes.
d. Colorlessness—take a break, rest, or clean out your space.
eastward. Impatience (results from an "underestimation of the amount of fourth dimension the job will take" p. 317)—permit yourself plenty of time to finish the chore, break the job down into smaller goals.
Quality is understood in Eastern Culture as dharma/"duty to self".
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