Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 1974; New York: Bantam, 1984. Print.

Don’t lose control of your soul.
        —The Loading Zone (1968)

I read this book back when it first came out in 1974 or 1975. A friend named Joe gave me a copy, and I remember enjoying the book and being impressed with the writing. When we discussed it, both of us spoke about the concept of excellence, what the book calls Quality (always capitalized). It struck us both as a very Aristotelian idea, and one that both Pirsig and Aristotle could not quite define. We know it exists because any vaguely mature person evaluates things, ideas, and experiences all the time. The book is subtitled An Inquiry into Values. This is the value that Pirsig investigates.

Recently another friend named Randy quoted from it, but I did not recognize the quotation. He said it came from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I mentioned that I read it over forty years ago and, while I remembered some of it, I had forgotten that detail. He said it was a key to the book and lent me his copy. Now I have re-read it. (N.B.: To protect privacy, I usually do not name acquaintances in this blog, but I have done so here to make the writing clearer, so no reader asks “Now which friend is that?”)

Back in the seventies when I was first given the book, I had given Joe a copy of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. I do not recall who gave which book first, but both books really had a similar message with similar, if not identical, conclusions.

Although both books’ purpose is to discuss a philosophical or metaphysical understanding of the way the human mind works, they are both presented as biographies. Coleridge tells of how he became a writer and of his writer friends and intersperses those things with observations about how the imagination (what Bronowski calls the creative mind) functions.

Pirsig describes a cross-country motorcycle trip he took with his eleven-year-old son Chris and a married couple John and Sylvia. They began in Minnesota, crossed the Dakotas to Montana and Yellowstone, and then passed through Idaho and Oregon to San Francisco. John and Sylvia accompanied them on the first part of the trip. Like Coleridge, he intersperses his observations about the countryside and caring for motorcycles with reflections on how we perceive reality, told mostly as reflections from the past from the point of view of an alter ego named Phaedrus.

Phaedrus historically was one of Socrates’ foils in the dialogue of Plato by that name. It literally means “wolf.”

Back in the seventies I owned a motorcycle. I had known very little about mechanics before then. My father was one of those people who never opened the hood of his car but relied on professional mechanics even to change the oil.

Owning a motorcycle is different. Most owners have to learn about the machine themselves and have to do their own work. I learned a lot. I still laugh today when I think of the awkwardly translated Honda service manual I relied on. A few sentences I am sure made perfect sense in Japanese but were incomprehensible in English. Still, the pictures helped even when the text did not.

So Pirsig sets up a contrast between his perspective on taking care of a motorcycle and his friends’. John and Sylvia could afford a new BMW bike. Back then it was the most reliable model. They figured that if they had a reliable new bike and did not drive it into the ground, that they would be OK. John saw the mechanical specifics as an almost irrelevant mystery, not unlike the way my father viewed automobiles.

Pirsig notes a philosophical difference between these two approaches. He calls his classical and his friends’ romantic. Indeed, at one point he even quotes Coleridge who wrote “every person is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.” Pirsig tries to reach a kind of common understanding between the two, as did Coleridge—though John Stuart Mill would update Coleridge’s observation by writing “every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean.” While Mill clearly takes the side of Bentham, he calls the two men the “seminal minds” of his era.

Pirsig certainly begins on the Aristotelian/Benthamite side, but his investigation is looking for something more. This is perhaps where the Zen comes in.

I confess it is hard to tell how significant the Buddhism is in the overall impact of the book. When Joe and I discussed it, we both felt as though it had a lot more to do with Aristotle—the materialist approach with a search for quality or excellence. Pirsig even gives a disclaimer at the beginning that his book “should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.” (ix)

At one point he tells of going to India to study the oriental religions. He explains that Zen (dhyana in Sanskrit) is a discipline for the elimination of physical, mental, and emotional activity. That sounds very much like the elimination of the things that make us human. In the long run, the quest for Eastern enlightenment was futile:

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed like the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange. (126)

We are told that Phaedrus, “left the classroom, left India and gave up.” (127)

This reminds me of the episode of the Hindu and the teakettle as told by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. Her father Francis Schaeffer was having a discussion with a Hindu man at Cambridge University. The Hindu was expounding the same idea that everything was illusion. A friend of Macaulay’s named Tom picked up a boiling teakettle that was sitting on a gas burner and walked over to the man and began to act as if he was going to pour the hot water on his head.

Everyone looked surprised and the Indian student looked scared to death.

“If what you believe is true,” Tom said firmly, “there is no ultimate difference between cruelty and noncruelty. So whether I choose to pour this boiling water over your head does not matter.”

There was a moment of silence and then the Indian rose and left the room without comment. He could not match what he believed with real life. (Macaulay 29)

It is hard to escape reality. Even if they preferred not to do it themselves, John and Sylvia still acknowledged a necessity sometimes of doing maintenance on motorcycles. John even seemed to admire Pirsig for his knowledge.

At another point, however, the author seems to accept an idea that Buddha is God, or at least a god. He writes that “Buddha is everywhere,” and that he “exists independently of any analytic thought.” (70)

I recall a song that began “Oh, Buddha was a man.” To say that a man becomes a god or even the God sounds suspiciously like the Fall of man: “You shall be like God.” (Genesis 3:5) Those are words of the devil. History has been the story of mankind’s attempt to recover from this misconception.

Still, the focus is not on Zen or Buddha, but the question—how do we arrive at Quality? An epigraph from Plato suggests it:

     What is good, Phaedrus,
     And what is not good—
     Need we ask anyone these things? (xi)

Pirsig demonstrates Quality both from his experience with motorcycles and his experience teaching writing to college freshmen (both are things I can relate to).

In the case of the motorcycle, it is a matter of keeping it in good running condition. For example, once his chain guard breaks. There is a parts store in town, but they do not have one in stock. He takes it to a welder. Now, Pirsig has learned something of welding in caring for his bike, but he is surprised when the welder uses a different technique from what he thought would work best. But the welder knows what he is doing, and Pirsig acknowledges that the repair is better than he could have done himself. The welder knew Quality.

He also spoke of this when he was teaching freshman composition at a university in Montana. He intentionally did not tell students what their grades were until the end of the marking period. Instead, after reading each assignment, he copied a few compositions as samples and gave them to the class to evaluate. Pretty soon the entire class was understanding what quality writing was, and the writing of the whole class improved. As they say, “Show, don’t tell.” Or as Socrates would say, “Need we ask?”

When I teach my first-year composition class, the first thing I have students read is Jacob Bronowski’s essay “The Creative Mind.” I wonder if Pirsig had read this. Bronowski, a mathematician, came with a group of scientists to Nagasaki in 1946 to survey the effects of the atomic bomb there. Bronowski is Western (born in Poland, emigrated to England, died in New York), so his question was not whether or not the damage from the bomb actually existed, but what value did the knowledge of the atom’s innards have? Was it good or not good?

In examining this question, Bronowski first looks at how the creative mind works. That was the same question that Coleridge was examining in his Biographia. Like Pirsig, Bronowksi quotes Coleridge at one point. Bronowski would say that something of quality not only demonstrates a discovery of the writer or artist (be it science or art), but it also lets the audience share that discovery.

That is what Pirsig does. Like most Westerners since the middle of nineteenth century, Pirsig is brought up on the scientific method. We learn by observation after forming a hypothesis. If the observation can be duplicated or is duplicated, then we can draw a conclusion that the hypothesis is valid.

Yet how do we come up with hypotheses? Many, if not most, are not valid, or at best limited. Why do some hypotheses become breakthroughs? Pirsig uses Einstein as an example; Bronowski uses Newton. Yet when Pirsig looks closely at Einstein there is something more than mere hypothesis and experimentation. He quotes Einstein:

The supreme task…is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience can reach them… [ellipses in original]

Pirsig reacts. “Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.” (99)

Much of the Phaedrus story of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then tells how he gradually becomes discouraged at finding truth. He is somewhat disillusioned with his inquiries into oriental philosophies but the occidental ones seem perhaps just as subjective.

We learn early on that Phaedrus was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a period of time. Gradually we see how this happened, but ultimately we understand he was not insane. He was simply caught up in some great questions and was unsure of the answers, if there were any. The piece my friend Randy quoted was on the question of the author’s sanity.

His attraction to the oriental ways came from their emphasis on the mind. “It is all in the mind,” so to speak. So from the beginning of the book, he distinguishes the classical or rational (i.e., Aristotelian or Benthamite) from the romantic or emotional (Platonic or Coleridgean?).

This is a division that appears to be artificial. It is not, at its core, the division that either Coleridge or Bronowski make, however superficially alike they may appear. Coleridge uses the terms objective and subjective.

Objective, of course, refers to things apart from the individual, things that happen or are true whether we experience them or not. The sun rising every morning is an objective occurrence whether we are specifically aware of it at the time.

Subjective refers to a personal response or interpretation. I really enjoyed reading this book. As the reader can tell, it got me thinking. My friends Joe and Randy also liked it. Joe gave me a copy. Randy tells me that he borrowed it from his wife on a trip and would not give it back until he finished it. Those are all subjective responses.

Pirsig’s problem, I believe, is that he made the distinction or division in the wrong place. Traditional Judeo-Christian teaching tells us that the soul is the mind, will, and emotions. If we understand things that way, then the subjective includes our reasoning. In other words, Coleridge had it right. The objective is the other, that which occurs in reality and which our mind, will, and emotions interpret.¹

Pirsig was trying to bring the mind and emotions together when they are not meant to be separated in the first place. Different personalities may emphasize different aspects of the soul. In the traditional understanding, the personality that emphasizes thinking or reasoning is the melancholic. This sounds like Pirsig himself.

The personality that emphasizes the will is the choleric. The one that leans toward the emotional side is the sanguine. (For those wondering, the phlegmatic personality is motivated primarily by the body or the flesh, a part of our humanity but not part of the soul.)

Perhaps, then, this gets to what Einstein was saying. Whether the hypothesis comes from reason or intuition, it still comes from the soul, the individual. Coleridge or Bronowski would say, then, the creative mind (Coleridge calls it the imagination) takes what is objective but expresses it in such a way that people grasp it subjectively whether it is rational, emotional, willful, or some combination of the three.

It is interesting to note that this also roughly corresponds to the rhetorical ideal. Many of those freshman composition classes, including those that Pirsig taught, are called rhetoric classes. Classical rhetoric tells us that effective speaking or writing appeals to the logos (the word, the logic), the ethos (morality, the will), and the pathos (sympathy, emotion).

Unlike the Indian philosopher, Pirsig and Bronowski saw that the destruction of Nagasaki really happened. If we deny it, we are either pretending or ignoring the truth. So the real philosophical split is not between the rational and emotional. I suppose one could say that if the division between the parts of the soul is too great, it ends up causing a split personality or some other kind of mental distress. It sounds like that is what Phaedrus was experiencing.

The real philosophical division is between the objective and the subjective. The goal, then, of writing, speaking, (rhetoric) and of living a good life (ethics) is to be able to bring the objective and subjective together. One may even quibble over whether the objective is simply the physical world as an Aristotelian would, or if it is an overriding concept or ideal as a Platonist would, but discovery, originality, and truth bring them together. It is truth, not its elimination, that sets us free. (See John 8:32)

Coleridge himself went through such a transformation. As a young man, he was Unitarian; he was even ordained as a minister in the Unitarian Church. By the time he was thirty, he had pretty much given that up and would eventually join the Church of England as he acknowledged the Trinity. For him, then, the ultimate objective reality is God Himself.

God reveals Himself in His creation and in His Word. Those exist objectively. At the same time, God reveals Himself to the individual in different ways depending on the individual’s personality, needs, and experiences. We read, for example, that after his resurrection, Jesus came to Mary Magdalene in one way, Thomas in another, and Peter in still another. In each case, they had seen Him die and knew now He was alive, but He had something unique to communicate to each one of them.

Now that I think about it, His approach to Mary was more on the emotional level, Thomas on the intellectual or rational level, and Peter’s on the will or ethical level. All were valid, and all today can be used as evidence to demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead.

I mentioned early in this review that what I recalled from the seventies when I first read this book was the emphasis on excellence, on the motorcycle maintenance. The book ends with an effective discussion on Quality. The Greek word Aristotle uses is aretê. I think my friend Joe and I may have read the same translation of Aristotle because in our discussion I recall using the word excellence. Quality in this context means the same thing. I note that English translations of the New Testament often also use the word excellence or sometimes the word virtue for aretê.

Yes, I loved this book both times I read it. The first time because I had a motorcycle. The second time because I have taught writing for many years. I could identify. The book itself is well written. I was an English major. I liked the expression and the stories—both the road trip and the Phaedrus tale. It had echoes of both On the Road and The Bell Jar.

My two friends came from the scientific side. Joe was a Ph.D. candidate in biology. Like Pirsig, who enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy, Joe became disgusted with the politics of the program and he began to see that he likely would never be able to claim his degree due to roadblocks beyond his control. Randy has had a career in computer programming after majoring in applied mathematics in college—very rational, Pirsig might say. It spoke to them as well.

There was one difference this time reading it that was honestly shocking to me. Pirsig wrote an afterword to the book in 1984. Obviously, the first time I read the book, the afterword was not included. This time I read a more recent edition which included it. Part of the afterword expresses Pirsig’s almost stunned response to the popularity of the book. He writes that 121 editors had turned the book down. The one who accepted it thought it was well written, but he was not expecting much. That it became a bestseller is almost a miracle.

That part was not unlike the introduction to The Glass Menagerie which Tennessee Williams wrote after that play became a hit. He called the essay “The Catastrophe of Success.” His title expresses something of how both men felt when their work was publicly acclaimed.

Without giving away too much, Pirsig writes a little of some other things that happened in his life after writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One thing he relates was shocking and sad. Let us just leave it at that. Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of spoilers.

Let us leave on a positive note. One which I believe Pirsig, Aristotle, and Plato would all affirm each according to his own logic:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4:8)

And, yes, excellence here in the original Greek is aretê.

Note

¹If we consider Pirsig’s earlier definition of Zen (dhyana) as “a discipline for the elimination of physical, mental, and emotional activity,” then this sounds like the elimination of the soul, or at least a good part of it. According to Jesus, that is dangerous. He warned, ” What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36) Even if it were possible to be “enlightened” this way, is it worth it if you lose your soul?

Work Cited

Macaulay, Susan Schaeffer. How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig. Colorado Springs: Cook Communications, 1982. Print.