Zen? What Zen? On not finding too much Zen in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Pirsig, convinced that this was his life’s work, used to work on this manuscript between the hours of 2 to 8 in the morning before he proceeds to work writing computer manuals. The manuscript would have taken four years and were rejected by a hundred plus publishers save one, who’d take the publication on for idealistic reasons more than for profit. They sold off 50,000 copies in the first three months and has since become a cult classic. But a cult classic to whom, I’m not entirely sure.
Much of the book is based on Pirsig’s own life and adventures. In this way, it is difficult to separate Pirsig the writer, Pirsig the narrator (though the narrator was never identified) and Phaedrus, the alter ego who kept haunting the two. Much of what happened in the book were taken straight from the author’s life: being obsessed with the motorcycle engine, having a son named Chris, having gone through the controversial electrotheraphy and being admitted to an asylum.
The whole crux of the book lies in answering the question of Quality, just as Camus would justify living in the Myth of Sisyphus, or Plato would in a rounabout way explore the concept of justice in The Republic. Whether Pirsig (the author or the narrator) had answered this question remains debatable, whether the word answers the basis of Western thinking, and consequently, our existence. Regardless of the result, it is still an admirable effort.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a Quality novel. Literally.
Surprisingly, the word “zen” is barely mentioned much in the book. There is a passage which mentions the roots of the word “zen”, and how our pseudo-protagonist, Phaedrus rejects the idea of achieveing zen through meditation. Zen, with its oriental origins was a mispronounced sanskrit word meaning wisdom, dhyana, somehow bastardised to Chan in Japanese, and bastardised again to Zen. I don’t know whether this is comparable to the enlightenment that beatniks who dabbled in Buddhism were chasing towards: that bodhittsava.
But it does smell a lot like it. Yet, we also need to have a look at the parallels of Pirsig’s life to the narrator of the philosophical novel. Both the author and the narrator embarked on a journey of reconciliation when Chris was six years old. Yet, we cannot discount the fact that the book is fictional and a mere vehicle for the author’s intellectual thoughts, that I believe remained unresolved. But for a while, yeah I followed his arguments about Quality. Yet, it is also when I started to lose interest.
Quality was Phaedrus’s lifelong mission to define, putting him at odds with how education is taught in Western universities and how we belittle it as scientific institutions and empirical thought dominate how we think. This is the classic school of thought. On the other side of the coin, the romantic school is all about passion and emotions — the Epicurean side of things. These forces will always be the battleground which define the progress of our thoughts, innovations, art and our actions.
Through this lens alone, this is something that we have seen before — Nietzsche struggling with opposing but complementary Dionysian and Apollonian forces, along with his German compatriots such as Mann and Hesse. It is a compelling battleground which forever will have no clear winner. But Pirsig had taken this thought further by putting Quality as the umbrella above the romantic and classical thought. Classical and romantic thoughts were originally borne out of Quality.
The convoluted history of Quality. And a bit of a fuck you to Greek philosophers.
I’m not going to rehash the chain of thought which Pirsig used to trace this demotion of Quality as a byproduct of classical and romantic thoughts, but there are some jarring thoughts which turn the logic of conventional paradigm of early Greek philosophers on its head. Socrates, who had never written a book was well-known for his untimely death at the hands of Sophists for corrupting youth. His words were in fact, Plato’s words injected with a healthy degree of bias.
Yet, Pirsig argued that Socrates, not really withstanding the Sophists were really the greatest Sophist himself. Yet, Socrates stood for reason. The sophists who championed the idea of excellence (the Greek arete), were undermined by Socrates as he promoted logic and didacticism. Plato, as the star successor of Socrates elevated this thought in his most famous work, The Republic. Plato, in his hardline approach promoting the philosophers as the representatives of logic was more than willing to cut out the poetry in The Iliad and The Odyssey leaving a barebones journalistic recount of the story.
Aristotle then put logic on steroids by being the Don King promoter of deductive logic. What we know now as Western philosophy has their roots in Aristotlean thought, following deductive reasoning to a tee. But the Sophists and Greeks, prior to this were obsessed to the encompassing word of excellence — arete. This is akin to man trying to achieve excellence in every thing that he does, to try and be his own best imitation of the Renaissance man.
Yet, this Greek word arete is almost the very definition of that Quality. It is, for me, at best an ambiguous word. But think of a word long enough and anything could be ambiguous. Words such as table or chair may perhaps become fuzzy after hours of thought. And maybe this word “Quality” doesn’t really hit the nail on the head. It is like defining that word “essence” — something we know makes up the substance of something, without which we feel that something is missing. Is this Quality? Pirsig did his best, but I had a feeling for the latter part of the book that we were chasing the ghosts of Quality. I still don’t think it’s the right word and still feels a bit off. Yet, I know what Pirsig was getting at. Essence isn’t the right word either, but it is something along those lines.
The form is everything, and nothing
You won’t have read another book like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I honestly don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is an ever divisive book, with equal amounts of lovers and haters if Goodreads reviews are to go by. For me, it lurches somewhere in the middle. It is a book which perhaps tried to do too much in its form: a philosophical journey in the physical realm, represented by the narrator’s journey with his son; the temporal and psychological realm, represented by the narrator’s memories of Phaedrus which was a representation of his past self; and ironically, in the didactic realm as the narrator spiels on in his long “chaquatas” or philosophical meanderings which may or may not lead anywhere.
Is it a new repertoire to the school of thought? I don’t know. I wasn’t born in the 1970s when the book came out, but Pirsig himself, in the afterword declared the book as one of the culture-bearers of literature (something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Yet, I can’t think of an example or actually anybody who had read the book and was impacted by it and changed their lives because of it. It didn’t sit right with me and smells a bit like self-aggrandisation. I know people who had taken on long trips to who knows where because they read On the Road, but I have yet to meet anybody taking on slow living or motorcycle maintenance because they read Pirsig’s book. I question the book’s cultural significance.
However, I’m not entirely sure that I can say that the form is everything. Maybe there is something in the way Pirsig intertwined the journey with his son, his ghosts of his past self in Phaedrus and all the didactic chaquatas. Take away any of these three aspects and the book will suffer for it. Another irony, in that the best parts for me was when Pirsig was writing about motorcycles. I don’t think the motorcycle maintenance fit perfectly as the jigsaw puzzle to his philosophical thought process, but it was a joy as a reader to hear about the intricacies and temperaments of the motorcycle.
Perhaps if the proportion of the motorcycle maintenance is more significant than academic history, it would have been a more enjoyable read. I didn’t know what I was getting into with this book. I was wishing perhaps that this book would get me more interested in the mechanics of things, but perhaps I’d just buy an oven, break it apart and try to reassemble it. Then write a book about it.
