Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Robert Pirsig tells a story of how one man tried to live a life of reason while dealing with everyday physical routines and activities, juxtaposed with a spiritual search for the universal truth to the meaning of life.

That man was the author, Pirsig himself. Born with the exceptionally high IQ of a genius Pirsig traveled a lonely road of isolation, repelling most ordinary people. After a life-long journey of studying chemistry and philosophy, several jobs, marriage and having a son, suffering a nervous breakdown, being institutionalized in a mental facility and receiving electroshock therapy, he writes this compelling autobiographical tale.

It is an adventure of a father and son traveling across the USA on a vintage motorcycle. It did show more not turn out to be a warm bonding vacation of joyful experiences, fatherly advice, and affectionate camaraderie that you would imagine. Pirsig’s intellectual gift comes with a heavy price; a depth of thought that prohibits him from easy communication with anyone, especially a young boy.

Pirsig does a lot of internal self examination and philosophizing during the hours of riding and shares those thoughts with the reader. His search for the meaning of a quality life leads to reflecting on the ideologies of the philosophical pioneers: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, and Hume. While some people may find the content dry and almost indecipherable, it is actually intensely fascinating. Not just his views (from the perspective of a genius), but his interpretation of different philosophical theories, his analogies, and descriptions of events.

Pirsig’s quandary - is it more important to state the truth, or just go along with popular opinion for the sake of peace an harmony? Which is more harmful in the long run? We all suffer occasions in life that test our integrity. Pirsig was so determined to live a life of truth that he nearly destroyed himself. And by the way, what is Quality? Do we really need to define it philosophically?

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" was written in 1974 and the manuscript was turned down by 121 publishers before Pirsig stumbled across William Morrow and Co., who was willing to take the risk on this very unique, powerful story. And here it is 46 years later, 5 million copies have been sold, and I was fortunate enough to discover it listed as No. 73 on the Modern Library list of top 100 books selected by polled readers. show less

This book...it has a hold on me.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.

This is very likely the fifth or sixth time I've read it, making it the most-read book in my life. What is it about this story that draws me back in every two to three years?

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

I will state right up front that the last quarter of the book, where Phaedrus really comes to the fore, it does become quite dense with all its talk of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, of Sophists and dialectics, etc. And it tends to lose me a bit.

You are never show more dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

But the rest of it? The ruminations on the world at large and our place in it? The thoughts on what, precisely, quality is and how it works? The breaking down of complex ideas into motorcycle maintenance analogies? The travelogue? The interaction with the unnamed main character and those around him? And Chris, the narrator's son? All of it is so compelling to me.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

There's a certain duplicitousness in Pirsig's narrative because, as he seeks to reconcile his past self with where and who he is now, while also struggling to piece together Phaedrus' discoveries and layering his own understanding on them, he's also mostly avoiding the most immediate problem right in front of him...Chris, his own son.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

I think it's the feeling of displacement, the narrator's obvious separation from the world. It's like it's all behind a glass wall. He can see it all, appreciate its beauty ...its quality... and he can interact with others, but there's always something between him and whoever or whatever he's reacting to. There's a point where he describes the moment of quality as a moment of time between the subject and the object where the quality aspect is determined. It's like the narrator holds everyone out behind that wall to allow him more time to judge their quality.

And that's something I can truly identify with. That removal. That separation from the world.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

And so, I find that I cannot be objective about this book. This book burrows beneath my skin in a way no other book has before or, I presume, ever will again. Each time I read it, I rediscover essential truths about the world, about myself. They are not pleasant discoveries, but they are essential ones.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

I can fully understand why others would not like this book, that it would be ponderously slow, or unnecessarily preachy, or simply not of good quality. But for me, this book makes me think in ways I would never have done so without reading it. And that, to me, is what the best writing should do. Make me pause and examine myself and my world.

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. show less

"I want to talk about another kind of high country… the high country of the mind… Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile." (pg. 127)

When first thinking about this review, I intended to describe this book as an autobiographical narrative about a motorcycle journey, interspersed with substantive (and intimidating) digressions into philosophy. But, in truth, the measure is the other way round: this is a philosophy book interspersed with moments of narrative. I'm reluctant to even use the word 'novel' at all, and it's no show more surprise to learn that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first conceived by its author, Robert M. Pirsig, as an essay, not a story.

Regardless of how one chooses to categorise the book, it is a challenging experience. The torrent of philosophical discussion is very detailed; it's well-written but often very murky on what Pirsig is ultimately trying to do. If this had remained an essay, it might well have been a failure; the reader finishes the book rather perplexed, and it is only with a commitment to tackling it that you can begin to understand it. It's certainly one of the toughest wrangling experiences I've had in a lifetime of reading and, while it deserves its fame, it is a surprise that this book proved a commercial success.

There are advantages and disadvantages to Pirsig's idiosyncratic approach, and this tension gives a brittleness to, if not the book, then at least to your confidence in your assessment of the book after you finish it. You're never entirely sure if you've got it right, if you're working too hard to find something in it to justify the time you've put into it, or if Pirsig should not have done a bit more to facilitate the reader's engagement. Certainly, the latter is my opinion: what stops Zen from being a truly great work is that it's a sort of info-dump of Pirsig's ideas. It lacks the storytelling nous that makes, say, Dostoevsky – another writer with big ideas to communicate – so damn compelling and readable.

The narrative aspect of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is certainly its weakest part. The journey of the narrator and his son, Chris, across America lacks the necessary characterisation or plot to relieve us from the heavy, abstract philosophical stuff. However, while as a story it can be quite weak, the narrative seems to be there solely to serve Pirsig's arrangement of his ideas. And it is in these big ideas that Zen excels.

The narrator, unnamed, hints at a mental breakdown in his past, and his removal from his old personality, which he calls Phaedrus. Over the course of the novel, as the narrator revisits Phaedrus' intellectual journey, this alter-ego re-emerges. In a connection that can be identified only after the reader has committed to about two-thirds of the novel, this "mind divided against itself" (pg. 331) mirrors Pirsig's rejection of the conventional world of duality (i.e. our understanding of things as subjective/objective, classic/romantic, and so on) in favour of a sort of post-Christian trinity in which rationality has emerged out of (and is guaranteed by) the irrational human mind rather than being something set apart. Many of Pirsig's ideas were familiar to me due to the comparable modern-day work of Jordan Peterson, whose advocacy of ideas like the Logos, the importance of individuality, and a balance between rationality and metaphysics (as opposed to a zero-sum science vs. religion game) all find echoes here. It wasn't a surprise at all to learn that Pirsig's treatise is on Dr. Peterson's recommended books list.

Once the reader begins to grapple with these ideas (and the muscles do groan as you do so), you begin to make your peace with the nature of the beast. Pirsig's author-avatar narrator notes the "touch of hypocrisy" in his talk of eliminating duality when he himself is struggling with his alter-ego Phaedrus (pg. 401). He notes that Phaedrus was not a good student, because a good student "seeks knowledge fairly and impartially" whereas Phaedrus had "an axe to grind and all he sought were those things that helped him grind it" (pg. 363). This, I suspect, is why the narrative, however slight, is essential for Pirsig's treatise: neither Phaedrus or the narrator are right, but the alter-ego dynamic provides an opportunity for interplay and contrast, an opportunity for Pirsig to be reflective and find a way of settling Phaedrus' big ideas alongside the narrator's desire to retreat from the world and fix his motorcycle.

Once this is realised, the book becomes less of a daunting treatise and more of a piece of writing that is striving towards harmony. That Pirsig achieves this, to some extent, is a great feat. The ideas, however dry, are often profound and the narrative, however slight, brings them into alignment. Pirsig's genius, regrettably, is not the lucid genius that can make the likes of Dostoevsky so approachable in his writing, but it's still a good thing that a cluttered genius mind could produce this book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is testament to the sort of intellectual contraption that a human brain can form if it so desires, and, more importantly, a testament to the fact that there are many readers willing to engage with such a challenging book, for all that market forces and publishing dons tell us there are not. It is, to my mind, much more uplifting for the soul to know that so many people recognise their spiritual and philosophical wanderlust, and seek out art and ideas that might address it, than any balm that might be provided by the content of the ideas themselves. show less

An interesting peek inside the way philosophers and deep thinkers think, all told through the narrator's deep personal retelling. Although the premise of the motorcycle trip linked the deeper philosophic passages together, I thought it was a bit too wordy and unnecessary. Digging deeper, most fascinating to me was how the narrator's sense of genius was in direct conflict with both academia and his own mental health - two factors that caused the destruction of "Phaedrus."
The duality of both technical thinking and artistic thinking continues to exist in our world - and I do believe that they can harmonize. It brings to mind the way Steve Jobs synthesized these approaches in the computer world.

As Robert Pirsig himself admits, this book doesn't contain much about Zen, though it appears that Pirsig (1928-2017) and his son Chris (1956-79, killed by a mugger) were Buddhist practitioners. Pirsig's discussion of motorcycle maintenance is a paean to technology and guide to solving technological problems systematically, by breaking them into categories (an Aristotelian technique--ironic, as later chapters reveal). But primarily the book is about philosophy: esthetics ("Quality" being Pirsig's ruling principle) and metaphysics. It's good intellectual exercise for anyone who remembers Plato and Aristotle but doesn't remember them fondly. Among the nuggets I appreciated (having studied Chinese and lived in China): Whereas the grammar of show more ancient Greece and Western languages generally "finds a strong subject-object differentiation . . . In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy" (Bantam New Age edition, pp.315 and 316).

The book is also an exposé of academic warfare at Montana State College (now University), where Pirsig taught beginning in 1959, and where his obsession with "Quality" was not appreciated. Shortly afterward, Pirsig enrolled at the University of Chicago as a graduate student and became locked in combat with the Platonist and Aristotelian faculty, particularly a tyrannical senior professor (unnamed but identifiable within minutes on Wikipedia). Pirsig became schizophrenic, unable to work or study, and his wife divorced him.

Pirsig breaks up the philosophic discussion with a narrative of his motorcycle journey with son Chris from Minneapolis across the American Northwest to San Francisco. (Enjoyable for me, as I've visited South Dakota, Yellowstone, Bozeman, western Idaho, Mendocino and the Bay Area.) Pirsig narrates the journey and his thoughts on motorcycle maintenance in the first person. But he refers to himself in his past as "Phaedrus" after Plato's Dialogue of that name--as if, before his insanity and involuntary electroshock treatment, he was a different person. Nevertheless, tensions between Pirsig and the uncomprehending Chris (age 12) echo the strife of those academic years. In the end, though, Chris gains appreciation of his father's mental travail and they reconcile. show less

There are people that love this book, and those that hate it. As you may have guessed from my rating, I fall into the latter camp.

By the way, feel free to like it. If it speaks to you, great. If you discovered something profound about the universe through reading it, right on.

For me, I found the mixture too rich, like an engine at high altitudes. There's the frame story, the flashbacks, the philosophical Chautauquas. They follow each other in succession, clumsily falling over each other and failing to gel into a narrative. The characters other than the narrator are nothing but straw men, existing to serve a purpose in the philosophical arguments but with no reality of their own, no truth to support them.

There is a fine line between show more noise and music, sometimes. Perhaps if I had agreed with the content of the philosophy I could have found the groove, but as it stands, it's just a cacophony of nonsense. I rank it right up with Ayn Rand, in the annals of stiff and awkward philosophy made to wear a novel's clothes. show less

It's one of those ubiquitous books that's kept turning up on library shelves, charity shop shelves and bookshop shelves throughout my life and yet i've always walked away from it - until now.

I've always had quite a deep interest in Zen and it always seemed to me that putting it with motorcycle maintenance just wasn't something i wanted to know about. But now i have a motorbike that needs some maintenance and this book turned up in Kindle daily deals for 99p i thought the time was right.

But oh, how wrong i've been all these years. It's not a book about Zen or how to fix a motorbike while practising Zen, it's a wholly different thing altogether.

In fact, it's a road trip book where our narrator takes his son on a road trip on an old show more motorbike across the USA. But it's a road trip with a difference.

At it's heart, it's a book about insanity, the condition of society and its relationship to technology, and a fair bit of Greek philosophy as well - and it's all broken up with the story of the road trip. And it's simply awesome.

With hindsight i'm happy that i've never read it until now as i'm much older and it really blended nicely with my own life experiences - having dropped out of a Philosophy degree course for much the same reasons and now many years later i can look back and see things more clearly.

And the ending in the 'Afterword' is what truly completes this book. It really is a masterpiece of writing. show less