Zam part IV Polarities

Primary America/Secondary America, Psychic Distance/Physical Distance. ( 2 moments of Quality. Isolated from society).

Substantive/Methodological.
Mythos/ Logos, Concepts/Background. Train tracks/ OffTrack, Sanity/insanity.

Immortal Gods/ Immortal Principles. Man is the measure/ Objective reality. Realism/Pragmatism. Good/True. Abstractions/Stories.

Plato: Dialectic/Rhetoric. Arete/”The Good”. Parmenides/Heraclitus. Appearance/Reality. Passions/Understanding. WhiteHorse/BlackHorse.

Aristotle: Dialectic/Physical. Form/Substance. Appearance/Substance. Systems of Order. (Rhetoric). Loss of the Good.

The Conflict with University of Chicago:
Hutchins and Aristotle vs. Scientific Realism. Substantive/Methodological. He gets thrown out but shows up anyway. They try to intimidate him into leaving. He wins, but doesn’t care.

Plato admits the White horse/Black Horse is an analogy. (Mythos before Logos.). Aristotle says dialectic comes before everything else. Phaedrus argues that dialectic comes from Rhetoric, which comes from quality. In this last session with the Chairman, he sees himself as winning points (Rhetoric 2, Dialectic 0) But at this point, he realizes that he doesn’t want to construct a system, and that is what he has been trying to do all along. This means he doesn’t want to be part of the whole social process of This causes him to even lose contact with his classes, and then his family, then with all social graces, which leads to his insanity.

He sees Chicago as all form and substance, no Quality (just style). Scene with the Slugs. Break down of his relationship with Chris. (I’m insane, you’re insane) Return of Phaedrus. Trip continues. They remove their Helmets. Chris takes chances, Narrator lets him. They drive into San Francisco with the sense that things are going to get better.

Zam part III section 2

I’m going to focus on the 2 Chautauquas. Both are allegedly about “down to Earth Practical Information”, but the second is much more so.

The First deals with quality in Science, with some mentions of quality in religion and Art.

His main focus for this is the ideas Poincare. He said that science had lost it’s foundations because mathematics was revealed to be only conventional because of Lobachevsky and Reimann. We now have 3 geometries which contradict each other. Convenience decides which one is true. But isn’t it the one that fits the facts. The problem is, what facts? There are an infinite number of facts, science can’t just collect them all. P. said there is a hierarchy of facts. First of all, the more general a fact is, the more precious it is. Important facts are repeatable, but once we have lots of those, they get boring. The important facts then become the anomalous facts that don’t fit with the others, and are thus in some sense not repeatable. The goal of science than becomes to create a harmony between the repeatable facts and the anomalous facts. How do we do this. Poincare claims that this unity can only be found by what he calls the subliminal self, which the Narrator saw as the same as Phaedrus’ pre-intellectual awareness. This harmonious order of parts is the goal that shapes science, and only an awareness of quality enables one to recognize it. This is classical quality, and it is fundamentally the same as Romantic quality. It just contains an awareness of interrelated parts, rather than a single “groovy’ whole. Poincare contemporaries thought he was saying “truth” is whatever you like. But if quality is seen as a third entity, and/or the ground of all being, there is nothing subjective about it.

Brief interlude about Care and quality as the subjective and objective aspects of the same thing. People who care about what they do have a sense of quality. Similar concept to Heidegger’s.

Stuckness is basically the same thing as Heidegger’s concept of present-at-hand. It is produced by a loss of harmony between the self and an object.

Maps the relationship between Classic and Romantic Quality to the relationship between the Train and the Cars. The Romantic sees the Train, the Classic sees the individual cars. But if you don’t see the train as going anywhere—if you divide it up into cars and ignore the Unity—the train doesn’t go anywhere. There has to be a kind of leading edge of quality awareness that pulls the train forward.

Stuckness occurs when the flow is lost, but it can be the basis of the discovery of a new kind of flow, if you stop being attached to where you were trying to go, and get in touch with where you are. Then it is possible to discover a new leading edge of quality that will pull you forward again. Reasoning won’t help you, the awareness of quality is behind reason, makes it possible.

Stuckness is produced by an attachment to Classical reasoning. There’s also a kind of Ugliness produced by the Romantic point of view. If there is a lack of awareness of the Underlying classical beauty, the Romantic compensates by superimposing an artificial “style” over it, which is phony and inauthentic. (note: These are quality judgments, they can’t be defined.) This phoniness can only be removed when classic and romantic understanding are reunited at a basic level. I think the reference to Omar Khayam is meant to be an example of this romantic attitude of alienation from the world, that sits passively by, and drinks.

Gumption: What you have when you are filled with quality. Stuckness is one kind of “Gumption trap” that drains quality. It can be restored by taking a break when your stuck (a fishing trip.)
He wants to give examples of gumption traps, and how to avoid them, but is afraid anything to specific will not be universal enough to be useful to anyone but him. (read catalogs.) But he takes a chance and creates an Aristotelian Heirarchy of Gumption traps. (for Gumption 101 course.

Setbacks Hangups

Out-of-sequence intermittent failure parts problems Valuetraps, truthtraps, Muscletraps.
Reassembly {ego, anxiety {Logic}{Kinesthesia}
Boredom Impatience}

ZAM part III first section

Intro: The Chautauqua at the end of Part II is to some degree a preview or abstract of the Chautauqua of part 3. He describes what he is going to do, in Part III he does it. The Narrator and Phaedrus both believe that the modern life is lacking in quality is that technology is based on reason and there is something wrong with reason itself. We need to invente a new form of reason, the way Columbus reshaped our view of the earth, and Newton invented Calculus. Phaedrus/Narrator also believe that this must be done by going back to the roots of reason-to the time of the Ancient Greeks. He believes that the mistake must have occurred first with Plato, and that what was lost was probably in the works of the Pre-socratic Rhetoricians. That is why the Narrator refers to his previous persona as Phaedrus, who was one of those Rhetoricians. Diggin up their graves, you will find ghosts.The problem is, because this society is founded on reason, when you question reason itself, there is danger that you will be seen, and possibly become, crazy.



ZAM part 3 first Section

This section can be divided in many ways. It is also about how it is possible to divide things in many ways. The first division that appears is between Phaedrus’ two approaches to the quality problem. The first phase was when he made no attempt to define quality, and simply used the concept as his aid in teaching. The second was the metaphysical stage where he tried to define quality. This was the phase that drove him mad. Chapters 16 through 20 describe how Phaedrus went through those phases. This story about Phaedrus is the main content of the Chautauqua for this part, but it combines Chautauqua and narrative. The other narrative is the Narrator and Chris walking up into the Mountains. This parallels Phaedrus’ ascent into the High Country of the Mind.

I) The Non-Metaphysical phase.
A) Writing about your thumb
1) no clichés
B) Eliminating Grades
1) Most students would drop out, but then they would come back once they had discovered what they wanted to learn. (Similar to Dewey.)
2)Parallels with Chris turning down work, YMCA camp since of adventure. They put him in a low grade, and he got “merit badges” that raised him to a high grade. Living for a future goal (such as grades) is shallow. Must keep what needs to be done in mind, then you will notice things like which rocks are unsteady etc. “The top of the mountain defines the sides”.
a) later he points out that he made a similar mistake when he tried to go to Mt. Kailash. The pilgrims who made it were filled with a sense of devotion to the mountain, not a desire to increase their own private enlightenment.(pp.205-206)
3) P. eventually realizes that what he wanted was to teach them to develop their own sense of what was good rhetoric. But if they already knew what was good, they had no business being in class. So he went back to giving grades

C) What is quality?
1) He asks his students this question, and they are outraged that he doesn’t know.
a) corruption in the Church of Reason. ---you’re supposed to imitate the search for truth, not actually search for it yourself.
2) His answer—we all know what quality is but we can’t define it.
a) He proved this by showing that the students all agreed as to what quality was.
b) This then made it possible for him to single out (not define) aspects of quality that everyone acknowledged. P. 202.
c) This made all the rules of rhetoric, which before seemed pointlessly anal, become worthwhile because they were now followed in the service of quality.
d) Phaedrus now felt his teaching was working because his students now were developing their own sense of quality within the classroom.
3) If quality is indefinable, then esthetics goes out the window, which is good because Phaedrus hated esthetics. (Critique of Judgment.)

D) Justifying himself to his colleagues
1) The Church of reason requires reasons for things, which means definitions
a) parallels Chris’s anger and wishing the trip was over.
2) A thing exists if a world without it would function normally.
3) The point of view that exists when quality is ignored he called squareness
a) The analytic knife starts to get too dangerous, creating lots of different distinctions. Square and Hip, Art and Technology, Classical and Romantic. Are they all the same? This confusion is paralleled in Chris anger at climbing the mountain.
4) He does some mopping up at the end of chapter 18 (p. 216). A real understanding of quality captures the system, and tames it in the service of quality. But he also says “all this talk about quality isn’t quality.” In the narrative, he refuses to answer Chris’s questions about what he thinks about. But their relationship has improved.

II) The Metaphysical Phase. (Chapters 19 and 20)

A) Begins with a description of the Narrator’s dream, and Chris saying that the Narrator was talking in his sleep. “I’ll meet you at the top of the mountain.” More on this later.

B) The Metaphysical phase begins with a constructive dilemma.
1)If Quality is objective, then Scientific instruments should be able to measure it.
a) ‘quality is all that scientists detect’ in Locke’s sense. (Red not Excellence) (Quality vs. Quantity)
2)If Quality is subjective, then it is just another name for whatever you like.
a) This would me that the difference between Britney Spears and Beethoven is just subjective.
b) let’s remove the word ‘just’. Why was “What you like” demeaned with the word ‘just’? Because Authority wants you to do what they like.

3)However, there are so many problems with the subjective-objective distinction, that Quality wasn’t any worse off than anything else.
a)Materialism wouldn’t stand up, because there are so many real things it considers ghosts.
b) Classical Formalism (Plato, Kant, etc.) says these ghosts are the realest things, but this start creating problems with his theory.

4) Quality no longer became the surface beloved by the Romantics.
a) people are often mistaken about quality. Real Quality was often below the immediate surface, like the reality described by the Classical view
b) We thus now have both Classical quality and Romantic Quality, which is starting to get messy and confusing.

C) This problem gets resolved by escaping between the horns of the dilemma: quality is neither mind nor matter, objective or subjective. It is a third entity that makes mind and matter possible
1) This gives him a certain kind of peace (He sings Holy Trinity)
2) This is paralleled by Chris and the Narrator coming to a soft clearing of grass on the mountain top “like a park”. Remember, however, that the Narrator doesn’t trust parks, they’re too tame.

D) He then decides that this Trinity is really a Unity, and that quality unifies everything. It is the ground of all being . This leads to a new map for Reality (see page 243 in my edition.). Romantic Quality is short term quality, Classical quality is long term quality
1) this leads to a shift in his experience. He realizes that quality is now synonymous with the Dao “It all gave way under him.”
2) In the narrative, there is a fear of Rock slides. Chris also reveals that the Narrator spoke to him in Phaedrus voice ‘I’ll meet you at the top of the mountain”. The Narrator is terrified that Phaedrus will return at the top of the mountain. He tells Chris they must head down now, because there is a danger of rockslides—which parallels his fear of sliding into insanity through a similar mystical experience.

ZAM part II

ZAM Part II

Each of these parts has a complete story arc. Part One begins with the Motorcycle trip leaving Minnesota and ends in Montana. The basic problem that inspired the Narrator’s search is illustrated by John and Sylvia’s reaction to technology, and the terrible way that the mechanics treated the narrator’s motorcycle. The Narrator’s relationship with Phaedrus is revealed, and the problems with his sanity, which are echoed in Chris’s history of mental illness. The quotes from the Goethe about a Boy riding with his father, both of whom are being chased by a ghost reflect the fact that both Father and son are being haunted by the possibility of Mental Illness. This also resonates with the Chautauqua about Ghosts like Gravity, and the Narrators remark that Phaedrus chased a ghost, and when he caught it, he became a ghost himself. This ghostlike aspect of rationality is its Platonic aspect. Plato thought abstract forms were realer than what is perceived by the sense organs.

The distinction between Classical and Romantic is described as a way of explaining J &S’s problems with technology. Although it’s easy to dismiss their objections as inconsistent, the Romantics are right about one thing. When Classical reason dissects things with the Analytic knife, something important is lost. When you understand things by dividing them into parts, you lose the whole. The Narrator hopes to recapture what is lost by finding Buddha nature in technology itself, as exemplified by the state of mind that emerges when one has a good relationship with a motorcycle. The relationship with motorcycles illustrates the Aristotelian aspect of rationality. It is more down to earth than the Platonic aspect, but still involves using the analytic knife to reveal underlying forms. (The Beer Can story.)

Part II takes place entirely in a few cities in Montana very close to each other. We could read this book romantically—as a story with an unbroken narrative—or we could read it classically by analyzing the ideas it contains. Here is the Romantic narrative flow, with recurring motifs. There is a sense of “having arrived” at the beginning of this section, contrasting with the trials of the previous section. In Part I, Cold, Heat, Rain, Mosquitos, Wind, etc. all gave a sense that there were obstacles to be overcome, along with the revelations of Chris’s and the Narrator’s mental illness. In this section there a sense of kicking back for a hard earned rest at the end of a difficult journey. They stay in a nice hotel owned by a nice old couple who built the cabin themselves. They are one example of a recurring motif of people who have a sense of quality in their daily lives. A man who has restaurant with really good hamburgers, a man who does really good welding work. There is a sense of all of these people that they what they do is not appreciated, but that it has value anyway. This is one of the first of his indirect attacks on Utilitarianism. Things can have value even if people do not notice the value, and therefore get no pleasure from them. They also have good steaks in a restaurant, visit friends and have trout and Chablis. John and Sylvia are utterly charmed by Montana, and say “you must have been crazy to live here (oops!).

From a Classical point of view, It begins with the Narrator working on his motor cycle, and explaining why motorcycle maintenance is a miniature study of the Art of rationality itself. As usual, When Motorcycle maintenance is discussed, the line between the Chautauqua and the Narrative gets blurred. The Narrator is repairing the motorcycle that he drives in the story, but the advice he gives about repairing it reveal the principles discussed in the Chautauqua. Motorcycle repair takes place right at the Classical/Romantic barrier. We are looking at the motorcycle as it is immediately given but we are also interpreting it in terms of the underlying form discovered by science.

As he examines Motorcycle maintenance, however, he begins to see that rationality is very different from it’s own view of itself. It requires accepting mysteries. (Why did X break? We’ll never know, we have to keep trouble shooting.) He also says he feels like he’s in Church when he does this—a reference to his later concept of the Church of Reason. And most importantly, he points out that a motorcycle is not really a collection of physical parts, it’s a system. Sylvia and John often criticize what they call “the system.” They’re basically right. The reason it works is that all of these parts have the right relationships to each other. It is thus an abstraction, like the Ghosts discussed in the previous chapter. Even steel is a ghost, there was no steel before people existed, none in nature. The potential for steel is another ghost. He begins to talk about other kinds of Rational abstract principles. Causation, Categories, Inductive and Deductiv reasoning. As the Narrator starts dealing with these kinds of abstraction, he begins to enter what he calls the high country of the mind. At the same time his motorcycle is starting to misfire, because the air is too thin, and he begins apologizing because he’s having trouble keeping some of these ideas straight. (Another parallel between the self and motorcycle, see opening dedication.) This is what happens as you enter the high country of the mind. There are also ominous portents of things that appear to be ghosts—boxes that blow into them in the wind as they drive down the road, and almost drive them into the ditch. This is a foreshadowing of the fact that he is going back to Phaedrus home, and Phaedrus himself is coming back.

The problems come when Phaedrus starts to question the philosophical assumptions underlying scientific rationality. The Narrator explains how science comes up with hypothesis, then tests them to see how nature responds. Phaedrus as a young science student was very good at coming up with hypothesis. This proved to be disturbing, because it was obviously always possible to come up with new hypotheses, and impossible to test them all. How can we know that the hypothesis we successfully tested is the best one, when all the others are left untested? This is what Peirce called the problem of abduction. We choose testable hypothesis on the basis of analogies and similarities, but everything is similar to everything else in some sense. How do we tell the difference between relevant and irrelevant similarities? There ‘s no easy answer to that question. This so disturbed Phaedrus that he neglected his studies, dropped out of school, and started drifting.

The Narrator calls this drifting lateral thinking, and eventually Phaedrus realized that he was dealing with philosophical problems. What he needed was not knowledge about the world, but knowledge about knowledge itself. He believed that there was a certain genetic defect in reason itself, and that this was what caused people like John and Sylvia to be alienated from the system called reason. (p.110)

Zen and Motorcyle Maintenance Part I

Ordinarily I don’t like to be told how a book turns out before I read it. However, in this case, because this course is about the ideas in the book, not just the story, I think it is best to tell you this. Part of what we will be doing is mapping the relationship between the Ideas and the story. That doesn’t mean we will be reductionists with regard to the story. Just because we’ve found a connection between the two, doesn’t mean we can replace the story with that connection. There are lots of such connections, keep an eye out for more. I’ve never taught a literature course before, so I’m still not sure exactly how to do this. This course is also about the limitations of the kinds of methods used by philosophers.

This is a story about a man who was deeply obsessed with a philosophical question. He sacrificed everything in his life to solve the problem. When he discovered that it was impossible to solve, he went insane. Because of this he was given electroshock therapy, and forgot who he was. The Narrator is the person who went through this, and is now trying to uncover who he was. He refers to his pre-shock therapy self as Phaedrus. The Author really had something like this happen to him, and wrote ZAM about his experiences resulting from this. (Quote Intro).

We thus have 3 distinct personalities that inhabit the same body. The Author, The Narrator, and Phaedrus. Don’t assume they are the same. The book is about how they come together again, as the Narrator takes a motorcyle trip across America with his son. It’s easiest to confuse the Author and the Narrator, but remember often narrators are ironic. This book also has a much closer relationship to the Author than most other books. How could you possibly write a sequel to a book like this? He did, but it was no where near as good, how could it be? He wrote this book because he had to, and never really expected to get it published. When it was published, the publishers assured him he would never get anything except the advance. But it was a huge critical and popular success, precisely because it was so authentic. (check printings in book.)

The narrative arc of the story is divided into 4 parts. Each part describes a section of a Motorcycle trip the Narrator took from Minnesota to San Francisco over a period of 2 and a half weeks. The part we will be discussing today is the motorcycle trip from Minnesota to Montana, where the Narrator used to work as an instructor of Rhetoric. During this part of the trip he is accompanied by his son, and two friends (John and Sylvia, husband and wife.) The end of this sections is a scary moment for him, because most of the people there he knew he has forgotten, because of the electroshock therapy. He has to confront, and gradually recall, his own past, with the constant fear that if his old self came back, he would go insane.

On the surface, this book looks a lot like the beatnik writings of the 1950s, especially Jack Kerouac. You might thus think it’s just a blog, a diary, where a guy writes about how he spent his summer vacation, and what he thought about at the time. It’s not. Every part is carefully assembled like a Swiss watch, or if you prefer, like a motorcycle. Some critics have said that it is written that way to show the ideal of quality the book is praising. The book is not just a memoir, or even just a piece of art, but also a piece of craftsmanship. We’re going to be taking this book apart to see what makes it tick—to understand the relationship between the story and the ideas. But we must remember that this kind of thinking—which I’m more inclined to, because I’m a philosopher, not a literature prof, can also kill the thing it is trying to understand. Pirsig often refer to rational analysis as a kind of knife, and he points that it can lead to both death and understanding, if it is not used properly. And how to use it properly is very much an open question. To some degree, that’s the central question of the book.

There’s a lot of stuff in this book that sounds very intuitive and mystical, almost anti-rational. He praises motorcycles over cars, because you don’t have a windshield separating you from the land you’re driving through. For that reason, he doesn’t even wear a helmet in those states where he doesn’t have to. He also praises the slow roads that don’t have straight lines over the big freeways that take you right where you want to go. Part of the reason he’s taking his son on this trip is to increase his awareness of this kind of detail (First passage about Blackbirds ‘seen lots of those”). It also contains bits of advice about how to get along in the day to day world. (How to fix a motorcyle, what to take on a camping trip etc.)

At the same time, the narrator is also clearly still interested in abstractions which he discusses in the parts of the book he calls Chautauquas. Chautauquas were tent show lecture series that traveled through Rural America in the 19th century, and intended “to edify, and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment.” This is what people did when they wanted education, and were too far out in the stix to get it. I think he calls these parts of the book Chautauquas because he wants to show that this love of abstract learning is a very deep part of the traditional American life that he is trying to rediscover.

The book thus consists of Narrative, Chautauqua, and something else that is a little bit of both: The day to day advice. These are the kinds of things that you wouldn’t have had to teach in the old time chautauquas, because people working on a farm knew these things. That’s one of the themes that runs through the book. The people who live far away from technology, rural people, usually have a better relationship with technology than people in the Cities who are completely surrounded by technology.

To some degree the day to day advice parts are the most Zen influenced, because they are most concerned with how to be in the present moment. And yet they are the least exotic elements, and so it seems paradoxical to relate them to Zen. That paradox is the main point of the title. There were two other famous books on Archery and Flower arranging--pretty exotic subjects—so the title was a deliberate Oxymoron. Since then there are books on the Zen of everything—most of them are trying to cash in on the success of this one. Before this book, the popular Western view is that meditation consists of doing nothing at all. When I was young, a Rabbi I knew once said the goal of Buddhism was to become a nothing. This is seriously mistaken. What Zen teaches is to do whatever you do with awareness, not to do nothing. That is expressed in the Zen expression. “Before Enlightenment, I cut wood and drew water. After Enlightenment, I cut wood and drew water.” This means in a modern technological world what we do is work on computers or motorcycles--or whatever else we do--with awareness. Not daydream about some possible world where we can cut wood and draw water, but rather be/here/now with motorcycles or whatever.

The Narrative and the Chautauqua have thematic elements that intertwine with each other. I will probably talk more about the Chautauqua in this course, because I’m a philosopher, and this is a philosophy course. But the ideas in the Chautauqua always have some sort of relationship to the story line. Sometimes there’s a kind symbolic resonance of themes between the two. For example, when the Narrator talks about what he calls “the High Country of the Mind” the characters are climbing up into the thin air of a mountaintop. However, I think an even more important narrative element is the narrator’s description of the problems that John and Sylvia have with technology. One of the reasons they are on this trip is that they hate technology. Sylvia mentions how much she hates seeing people stuck in rush hour traffic ‘they look like they’re dead inside”. Unfortunately, to make this trip they need to depend on another piece of technology: The Motorcycle.

The Narrator describes how John refuses to learn how to repair his motorcycle, and how his lack of understanding of his machine causes him to treat it badly, and blame the machine, or the person who sold it to him, when the motorcycle doesn’t do what he wants. He also describes how Sylvia loses her temper with her children rather than acknowledge that she is being irritated by the sound of a dripping faucet she can’t fix. “You always suppress your anger about something you can’t change and permanently hate.” He points out that it is easy to point out that John and Sylvia, like all technology haters, can be easily shown to be inconsistent. He also points out that there is a similar kind of alienation from technology exhibited by the techs who were supposed to fix his motorcycle and almost ruined it. It was this experience coupled with his own earlier experience of not understanding his motorcycle (not checking the gas tank) that made him realize how important it was to develop a good relationship with his motorcycle. The treatment that the motorcycle received also has many resonances with what happened to the Narrator in the Hospital. The motorcycle has many recurring problems that have to be fiddled with to keep it functioning, just as the Narrator has recurring emotional scares and nightmares that recall his treatment and insanity. Look for parallels between the two. At one point he even says “the Motorcycle you are working on is yourself.”


However, The Narrator wants to understand and sympathize with their alienation, not just dismiss it. So he uses a distinction he calls Classical vs. Romantic to explain why their position has a validity to it, despite it’s inconsistency. These terms are used to divide a variety of positions, but the Narrator claims that the essential difference between these two points of view is that classical minds are more interested in underlying form, and Romantics are interested in surface. John is a skilled and successful drummer because he can listen to what is being played right now, and respond immediately skillfully to it. He can “get in the groove”. However, if things aren’t going well—if his motorcycle doesn’t start—he doesn’t have any way of effectively dealing with this. This is what makes him a romantic, in the narrator’s sense.

The Classical view tries to solve problems and achieve understanding by discovering underlying form. This view is the basis of modern science, and science has been very good at solving problems (as well as creating new ones.). The music that is strictly called classical music—Mozart and Hayden—was created during the time when Europeans had supreme confidence in science and reasoning—the period called the Enlightenment. The Word classical is also used to refer to Greek and Roman culture, where rational thought was born in the West. The two great Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, provided the foundation of this kind of thinking, and together they make up the basis of modern science. (Brief distinction between their ontologies—Forms vs. Substance.)

In part one, chapter 3 there’s an example of Platonic reasoning during the discussion about Ghosts. The Narrator uses dialectic (Plato’s method) to reach a very unplatonic conclusion. That what Plato would call the forms are actually Ghosts, like fairy tales. There’s also a hint of how Phaedrus was a Platonist—he went searching for Ghosts and became a Ghost himself. There’s also another similarity between Plato and Pirsig—their uses of setting to interact with the themes of the dialogue/chautauqua. (Symposium/Phaedrus)

In Chapter 4 we see an example of Aristotelian thinking—the use of Categories in deciding what to take on a Camping trip. Both of these kinds of thinking, however, do place underlying form above surface. Platonism sees the perceptible world as being less real than ghosts, and Aristotelianism divides up the world into categories with the knife of analysis, and thus ignores the pre-divided world of the Romantics.

The Narrator ridicules John’s Romanticism with the story of the beer can shim. But he also recognizes that the Classical view of the world denies the existence of something that the Romantics rightly see as important: quality or beauty, that cannot be seen once the world is divided up into categories with the analytic knife of reason. It also disappears when you say that the perceived world isn’t as real as the protons and electrons and chemicals discovered by science. You might also have a Romantic reaction to my lectures if you say something like “Come on, Rockwell, can’t we just enjoy the story without you dissecting it into all these parts?” There is some truth to this objection, but I want you also to consider the possibility that Buddha nature really does reside in

Romanticism is a good word for this objection, because it evokes the similarity with the 19th century Romantics, who were rebelling against the 18th century Classicists. Mozart gets replaced by Beethoven and Brahams. Jane Austen gets replaced by the Bronte Sisters. Rousseau replaces Descartes in French philosophy. In each case what you have is a replacement of reasoning with feeling. Rationalists see this as a flight from reality. What the Narrator is arguing throughout the book is that this presupposes their idea of what reality is. What Phaedrus was trying to do was to question that idea of reality, and create a new theory of reality (or metaphysics) of his own. When he discovered he couldn’t do it, he went mad. What the Narrator is trying to do is to salvage what he can of that theory, and incorporate his somewhat more Aristotelian perspective to make it more applicable to real life.

What this book is about, in short, is how to use the most abstract form of philosophy to heal the sickness of modern life. Some people think that the Narrator in this story, and the value system he defends, is anti-ethical because it emphasizes ideas over people. These readers often remark that the Narrator doesn’t pay enough attention to his son. But I think that the story to John and Sylvia is there to show us that these issues are not abstract. Our confusion on these topics creates genuine human suffering, and careful philosophical thinking could help heal that suffering.

I think this one reason this book is so popular. It shows how to relate the most abstract philosophy to real problems in real life. Many people who have read this book say it changed their life. I’m one of them, and although I don’t like to clutter up my lectures with stories about my personal life, I think this is a time where I really can’t avoid it. (Electronics. Guitar, problems with being able to understand but not repair. Two years spent trying to get the stick to play in tune.)

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