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.)