Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
About This Book
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most thought-provoking and philosophically important books of the twentieth century — a work that is simultaneously a father-son road trip memoir, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of Quality, and a deeply moving exploration of what happens when an extraordinarily rigorous mind reaches the limits of what ordinary rational thought can grasp. The book's central investigation concerns the concept of 'Quality' — the undefinable something that distinguishes good work from bad, genuine engagement from going through the motions, real understanding from mechanical application of rules — and the question of where this quality belongs in the classical/romantic divide that Pirsig sees as the fundamental fracture in modern Western consciousness.
The motorcycle provides the perfect governing metaphor: to maintain a machine well requires both the romantic engagement of genuine attention to what is actually happening (the quality of the sound, the feel, the running) and the classical understanding of how the machine works conceptually. The failure of most people's relationship to technology — and to the world more broadly — is their inability to integrate these two modes of knowing into a single unified understanding. Pirsig's solution, which he calls the Metaphysics of Quality, suggests that Quality is not in the object or the subject but in the event of genuine meeting between them — a position with deep affinities with Zen Buddhism's understanding of the dissolution of subject-object duality.
What You'll Learn
• Understand Pirsig's concept of Quality as he develops it: why it cannot be defined without being immediately falsified, why it precedes the distinction between subjective and objective, and how recognising it as the primary reality rather than a secondary evaluation transforms one's relationship to every activity
• Grasp the classical-romantic divide that Pirsig identifies as the source of most modern alienation: how the separation of rational analysis from aesthetic engagement produces both a technology that is spiritually empty and an art that cannot understand its own relationship to the material world
• Recognise the Phaedrus strand of the narrative: how the story of Pirsig's previous philosophical investigation — and the mental breakdown it produced — illuminates the genuine danger of pursuing the implications of a radical philosophical inquiry all the way to their conclusion
• Learn the Metaphysics of Quality as Pirsig proposes it: how Quality as the primary reality would reorganise the relationship between science, art, ethics, and religion in a way that resolves the conflicts between them rather than simply adjudicating the dispute in favour of any one
• Appreciate the relationship between the philosophical inquiry and the practical work of maintaining the motorcycle: how genuine craft — the kind of attention that maintains a machine well — requires exactly the integration of classical and romantic knowing that Pirsig's philosophy proposes
Reader Reviews
No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts on this book.
