Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – A Hubbing of Arguable Quality

It was the summer of 1999 when the long-gone 17-year-old version of me happened across my Father’s old copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – An Inquiry Into Values. Quite naturally, the title alone captivated me well-enough for me to open it right up and begin reading. Immediately, the narration evoked in me a feeling that the perspective with which the contemplative motorcyclist views the passing landscape, and attempts to share it with his pre-teen son and passenger, was likely to foretell a decidedly profound discussion in later pages. Needless to say, my intuition was much more than confirmed. After all, a book with a title as seemingly oxymoronic as to include a reference to ‘Zen’ and the maintenance of motorcycles must promise a marriage of sorts between the two…

What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.

As I continued to read, I found myself more and more excited by my growing anticipation of what was to come, and having only opened it for a cursory glance inside, resolved to get back to it another time – when I could devote my attention as deliberately and attentively to it as the material seemed to demand. Very likely I simply picked up my guitar and resumed my usual metallic bombardment of the eardrums of my neighbours. A seventeen-year-old has routine-priorities unique to his interests and disposition, of course.

When next I picked the wonderfully promising book up again, I had even greater reason to devour it as thoroughly as I could – I’d spoken to my Father about having found it among so many others of his, boxed and stored in the spare bedroom that I’d so recently come to occupy, and his excited recollection and endorsement of it served to strengthen my interest in the book. When I’d looked into it the first time, I found the narrator’s patiently—paced introduction to his general subject riveting – as I devoted more time to it, I found his tactful switching back-and-forth between descriptions of the events of the motorcycle journey being taken by a friendly foursome and his penetratingly insightful asides easy enough to follow, urging me onward to share in what depths of understanding the narrator might disclose. Quickly though, I found myself struggling to keep up as Pirsig seemed to quicken the pace.

I slogged through, taking my time but probably not taking enough, and finally finished the book. In truth, I was more carried by the plotline of unfolding events than by the philosophical investigations within, but I nevertheless placed it among my most treasured books, and still had plenty of new ideas and new channels of exploration to wade through as a result.

It was some six or seven years afterward that I acquired another copy of the book, (after happily loaning my Father’s old copy to a deeply interested roommate who subsequently skipped town), and upon re-reading it, found such a wealth of familiarity as to cause great wonder at how much I’d actually taken-in underneath the level of conscious understanding. It seemed to me, upon second reading, that many of the seemingly original and spontaneous insights I’d had in the intervening years could be identifiably traced back to my having read this fantastic book years before. My conceptual understanding of the value and meaning of various things as they occurred in my daily life, the mechanics of my contemplation of such things, and the generally many-faceted perspectives I strove to achieve in examining new challenges as I grew and matured seemed, in large part, to trace their origins to Pirsig’s carefully exhaustive account of his own such examinations, (albeit fictionalized in a tactfully manufactured narrative).

The book is narrated by an unnamed man (presumably a characterization of Pirsig himself, given whatever changes ‘for rhetorical purposes’), taking his young son on a motorcycle trip across America in the company of his friends John and Sylvia, whose apparent attitudes about technology in general form a concise point of comparison by which Pirsig comes to initially address his theme of ‘romantic’ vs ‘classical’ modes of perception – the appreciation of immediate appearances vs the valuation of underlying form. Or - the enjoyment of the experience of travelling with friends across the countryside vs the appreciation of the underlying means by which the journey is made possible.

The comparison of the narrator’s views regarding the maintenance of his motorcycle vs John’s tendency to leave that sort of thing to experienced mechanics provides a wonderfully apt introduction to his later examination of the nature of ‘Quality’ itself – an elusive ideological concept which, contrary to its apparent self-evidence, seems to defy either subjective or objective definition…

The reader is taken through the narrator’s ongoing recollection of the maniacal search by the mysterious Phaedrus for a complete understanding of Quality, and the recounting of the devastating effects this quest had on the man’s life and livelihood – expulsion from his teaching position at a reputable University, self-willed exile into solitude, and even court-mandated ‘removal from society’ – culminating at last in the rediscovery of self and the reunion of loved ones made estranged.

The introduction found in my current, May 2006 print-edition by HARPERTORCH, (An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) by the author, refers to a description in the press as “the most widely read philosophy book, ever.” (The London Telegraph and BBC radio). I can certainly appreciate the claim, even if I can’t precisely believe the actually suggested fact – I wonder whether some of the historical works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Epictetus (just to name the four I can remember offhand), might actually be more widely read, albeit in less statistically discernible a fashion, such reading presumably occurring over the span of many centuries… Nevertheless the fact that the modern-day press would be so bold as to make such a claim is quite telling as to the popularity of the book.

To quote Wikipedia:

“The book sold 5 million copies worldwide. It was originally rejected by 121 publishers, more than any other bestselling book, according to the Guinness Book of Records.”

Pirsig’s follow-up work, Lila – An Inquiry into Morals, published in 1991, seventeen years after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, delivers a more explicit dissertation on Pirsig’s ‘Metaphysics of Quality’ – while similarly incorporating a narrative style as to creatively accentuate the matters under discussion.

One gets the impression that Pirsig strives in his writing to balance the difficult business of expressing his profound philosophical ideas with a suitable narrative style, working both to break up the tedium of dry reasoning and rhetoric and provide an evolving setting in which to contextualize his views as perceived by the narrator himself. In this regard I feel he has done an exemplary job, given the extraordinary weight of his topic.

Robert Maynard Pirsig was born to Maynard Pirsig (of German descent) and Harriet Marie Sjobeck (of Swedish) in Minneapolis, 1928. His Father was a notably successful legal scholar and academic.

At the age of nine, Robert had an IQ of 170. Granted a high-school diploma in May 1943, (five months or so before his fifteenth birthday), and enrolled in the University of Minnesota the following Autumn, to study biochemistry.

Working in the lab, Pirsig was at first amused and delighted by the evident fact that there always exists many more hypotheses to explain a given phenomenon than can be explored.

“Phaedrus’ break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it was painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.”

At first amused and encouraged by the infinite plenitude of hypotheses to explore, he soon became quite distressed by its implications. Before long, this inescapable curiosity of scientific inquiry so thoroughly dominated his thinking that he simply couldn’t continue his work with the sort of zeal he’d previously had. Failing grades and this lack of interest in his studies resulted in his expulsion from the University.

“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, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.”

Given this loss of faith in scientific method, and the natural philosophical reasoning that brought him to it, Pirsig resumed his abandoned education several years later, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Eastern Philosophy in 1950. Throughout his studies in years to come, he consistently lived up to his childhood precociousness by thoroughly examining every new idea, rejecting those which didn’t add up and accepting those that did in his determined pursuit of complete understanding. His obsessive pursuits and their repercussions in his personal and professional life culminated in his being diagnosed by psychoanalysts as a paranoid schizophrenic and a sufferer of clinical depression. He was subjected to electric shock therapy numerous times.

Since the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig has been quite reclusive. In Lila – An Inquiry into Morals, the setting is the boat Pirsig has indeed been sailing around the Atlantic in for years.

Chris Pirsig was stabbed in the chest in 1979 outside the San Fransisco Zen Center, when two muggers grew infuriated by his lacking any money for them to rob. His right lung filled with blood from a severed pulmonary artery, he fell to the sidewalk and died. He was two weeks away from his 23^rd birthday. To excerpt from the afterword (1984) found in subsequent editions of the book in which Chris played so prominent a figure:

“What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris’ body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn’t find anything. That’s probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center itself upon.”

When Pirsig’s second wife conceived unexpectedly, they deliberated carefully and decided to terminate the pregnancy. Going over the whole decision in detail one last time, Robert reports experiencing a strange kind of dissociation, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He came to understand that the larger pattern of Chris had found a material thing to center itself upon after all, and they reversed their decision. Now into his fifties, Robert Pirsig fathered a little girl named Nell, in whom the life-pattern of his son Chris resumed itself in Pirsig’s life.

“Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn’t bother. There is always Chris’ silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

I mentioned earlier that many of the insights I’d had in the years between my first and second readings of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seemed traceable to what philosophical ideas and rational discussions of Pirsig's I found so difficult to consciously understand as a seventeen-year-old. Still, I can’t say that those insights were no more than a reproduction of the ideas expressed in his book – I’m more inclined to say that his brave investigations into philosophical matters inspired, (more than directed) my own lines of reasoning and contemplation, both consciously and subconsciously.

In this regard I feel a strong resonance with his words about “the larger pattern that holds us all together.” My Father had read the book when he was a young man, and treasured it as I came to much later on. The life-pattern of Robert M. Pirsig became, in some way or other, a part of that of my Father. In turn, both through the constant example my Father provided me, and through my own careful absorption of Pirsig’s ideas, the greater pattern of my own life has been made all the more richly decorated with ideas and understanding entirely my own.

Instead of contributing a decidedly conclusive body of factual information concerning the themes he explores, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance challenges the reader to think critically and thoroughly examine our various understanding of everything we experience, and especially the underlying value, as it appears to us, of it all.