"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance" by Robert Pirsig

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance was a cult book in the 1970s. It had a big impact on me, and I think it is not a book that should be forgotten.

It is a philosophical adventure story - the true story of Robert Pirsig's resolution of a philosophical problem underlying people's experience of alienation in modern culture. At the beginning he describes the book as a 'Chautauqua' - 'a popular talk intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.' He resolves this philosophical conflict during a motorcycle trip across the North-West United States with his son Chris, so the story has two parallel dimensions - a philosophical development paralleling the journey. In fact it has more than two, as the philosophical journey is also a journey into his forbidden past as a warrior in the arena of philosophy, which had culmulated in madness and suppression of his identity with a very extreme form of electroshock, called annihilation therapy. This starts to unfold as they pass over the Rockies and visit friends in Bozeman, Montana, where he had been a lecturer in English during this period. One thing that interested me, given the fame of the book, is that if you go to the site of the university (Montana State University) and do a search on Pirsig, there is only one reference, which turns out not to exist. Their silence is fascinating.

He does not originally intend to confront the ghost of his past - he refers to this ghost as Phaedrus, from Plato's dialogue of the same name, and we only gradually learn that Phaedrus is actually Pirsig.

The trip starts in Minneapolis, and he eases into a discourse about how his friends John and Sylvia, who are artists, are alienated by modern technology, in particular by motorcycle maintainence and react with anger when he tries to discuss it. I've come across this myself. Before I became homeless, I used to work in IT support, and I can think of Robert, Yan and Luzette as friends who reacted in this way every time I offered to give them a tiny bit of information about computers which would have empowered them and saved them hours of frustration. It was as if they wanted some technocrat spouting jargon so that they could complain about it.

Pirsig arrives at the idea that there are two ways of understanding the world - a classical one which analyses it in terms of underlying form in the way that science or any form of reason does, and a romantic one, which is concerned with the aesthetics of immediate experience.

The route that Pirsig, his son and friends follow leads them across the Great Plains and over the Rockies to Bozeman. It is now that we start to hear more of Phaedrus, Pirsig before his identity was destroyed with electroshock. Phaedrus studied biochemistry at university but became dissatisfied with scientific method when he realised that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given hypothesis is infinite". For me that's not a major issue because I don't treat scientific theory as absolute truth but as a model which is useful in predicting what will happen; in modern terms I could say that I am more interested in performance than truth. However it created a major hole in Phaedreus understanding of the world, leading him to fail exams and be expelled from university. He drifted for a while, and went into the army, which sent him to Korea. Afterwards he studied philosophy, firstly Western philosophy at an American university, and later Oriental philosophy at an Indian university. He ended up disillusioned with both systems and returned to the U.S., got married and after working as a journalist and a science writer, bought a farm. "His pursuit of what has been called the ghost of reason had been given up. That's important to understand. He had given up."

The concept of quality and its development

For some reason he got going again, and came to teach rhetoric at the University of Montana Teaching rhetoric in this instance meant teaching the students how to produce writing with power and presence - writing which had an impact. He was supposed to teach the rules of how to produce good writing, but realised that there weren't any rules worth shit.

Then something happens. A lady called Sarah comes down the corridor on the way to water her plants, and in passing says to him "I hope you are teaching quality to your students".

This is the event which triggers Phaedrus epic philososphical journey to the final duel with Richard Mckeon, chairman of the committee on the analysis of ideas and methods in the University of Chicago, and Phaedrus subsequent breakdown and obliteration with annihilation therapy.

OK - This next bit is a bit fragmented and written at different times - it may get revised at some point

After several remarks about quality from this lady, which Phaedrus didn't pay much attention to, it suddenly hit him. Of course he was trying to teach how to write work of quality - but - what the hell was quality? To me, once again, this is not too big a deal. What is a definition anyway - simply a clarification of how you intend to use a word.

Anyway, Phaedrus discovered that he could empower students to write work of quality by using tricks to get them to forget the rules and write about their direct experience and how they felt about it.

He then removed another set of rules - the grading system. After initial uproar, this also produced an increase in quality work. I would like to remark at this point that grading is based on quantity, but how do you quantify quality?

Phaedrus is asked by other members of the English faculty whether quality was a property of objects or of the perceiving mind.

He eventually rejects both possibilities and defines it (Page 215) firstly as the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object and then as the cause of subjects and objects.

Watch out. There's semantic slippage here. Up until now, Phaedrus has been contrasting an experience of quality in doing work with production in which there is little experience of quality.

Now he is using quality as the event connecting subject with object - all subjects and objects - he is no longer contrasting two kinds of experience. He's changed his use of the word quality. And he's using the word 'cause', which has a precise meaning, in a slipshod way, too.

Hmm ... leaving that to one side ... Pirsig develops this idea of quality as what (can) happen at the genesis of art, science and spirituality. He looks at the work of the philosopher and mathematican Poincare, who seems to be one of the first to point out what a lot of scientists and mathematicans are increasingly aware of - that existing scientific and mathematical ideas are arbitary, in the sense of being only one possible way out of many of describing the world in a scientific way, but one that has evolved out of the many possibles because it was one with a pre-intellectual experience of quality. I could add that this is reflected in the modern idea that the performance of a scientific model - how useful it is in understanding and interacting with the world, has superceded that of absolute scientific truth. (I've said a bit more about ZMM and the philosophy of science in the reflections at the end)

In the next part he uses the idea of quality to help with the problems of fixing motorbikes, or more precisely, what to do when you get stuck and it's not in the manual. He wants to free classical knowledge (the manual) from being static rules out there and say that that manual comes from a process of interaction between mechanic and machine that includes quality, but the manual has frozen it, and you have to thaw it out and make it a process once again. And the best way to get there is to chill out - go for a walk, have a cup of coffee, chat to someone for a bit, go off to the mountains - and then come back to it. "Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work. It's the whole thing" "The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks goods, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through"

Hopefully this will allow you to analyse the thing that's got you stumped in terms of the properties of a process and allow you to see it as a larger picture - the solution may be at any level - from boring out the screw to catching a train to deciding to go fishing instead. "Now in getting that stuck screw out, you aren't interested in what it is. What it is has ceased to be a category of direct thought and is a continuing direct experience""What your actual solution is is unimportant so long as it has quality."

To finish this section he looks at all the 'gumption traps' that trip people up when performing a task and how to get around them.

Confrontation and madness

The last part of the book is about Phaedrus showdown with Richard McKeon, chairman of the Committee on the analysis of ideas and the study of methods at the University of Chicargo. Phaedrus goes there to study on the courses run by this committee in order to develop his ideas about quality into a doctorate.

He discovers that the underlying ethos of this committe is the defence of moral value from an Aristotlean standpoint in opposition to the value-free science espoused by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle - Schick, Mach, Ayer etc (The Vienna Circle and logical positivism aren't mentioned in the book but it does mention that the origins of the committee were in the 1930s - the heyday of the Vienna Circle.)

Phaedrus was in sympathy with the oppostion to value-free science but not with Aristotle. Also, the original, open-minded leaders of this position had left, leaving Richard McKeon, to who was completely intolerant of any opposing viewpoint. Phaedrus forthright oppostion to Aristotle came out in an early clash, and from then on, the knives were out for him.

Like the committee, Phaedrus believes that the origins of present day rationality lie in the work of some of the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, over 2000 years ago. Where he differs radically from the committee is that he believes that present day rationality, with its split between cold objective reason and 'subjective', 'emotional' quality is flawed, and that the origins of the flaw lie are in Plato's misrepresentation of their opponents, the sophists. These thinkers argued that judgement of the truth was qualitative and changeable in opposition to Socrates and Plato's idea of fixed truths made clear through the dialectic. Plato has got away with misrepresenting them as unprincipled orators who mislead through rhetoric because he wrote the dialogues in which they appear as foils to Socrates. None of their own writings survive.

This antagonism comes to a head in a confrontation between Phaedrus and McKeon over the interpretation of Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, where our Phaedrus dramatically rips apart McKeon's position. However the tension of this mental conflict leads to Phaedrus breakdown

Well, that isn't a very satisfactory ending to this review, but I need a pause for reflection for a bit

Some Reflections

One thing that strikes me is that when he is writing about science there is that he doesn't seem to be aware of the central figures in 20th century philosophy of science, - especially Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and most important of all, the anarchist philospopher of science, Paul Feyerabend.

Anyway, I have been recently reading an extremely clear introduction to the philososphy of science by Alan Chalmers, called 'What is this thing called Science' and it does seem to touch on many of the problems that Robert Pirsig raises. In particular, I want to quote a wonderful passage from Paul Feyerband's 'Against Method', which came out at about the same time as ZMM and seems to have very similar ideas.

"None of the methods which Carnap, Hempel, Nagel, Popper or Lakatos want to use for rationalising scientific changes can be applied, and the one that can be applied, refutation, is greatly reduced in strength. What remains are aesthetic judgements, judgements of taste, metaphysical prejudices, religious desires, in short, what remains are our subjective wishes: science at its most advanced and general returns to the individual a freedom he seems to lose in its more pedestrian parts."

This seems strikingly similar to what Pirsig is saying, except that for him the source of judgement is quality, not subjectivity.