Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Dear X: I just finished a sad and strange book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. The sadness is only in part due to the death of Pirsig's son Chris, which is covered in the last pages of the book. I feel that underneath all the author's spiritual and intellectual wrestling with life and death, truth, subject/object, Quality, and so on, there is from the beginning of the book a melancholy, an awareness that he will never come to the kind of certain or reassuring conclusions about human existence that he seeks. Adding to the melancholy is the realization that the journey toward truth or consciousness is so excruciatingly solitary: "And what is good, Phaedrus,/ And what is not good---/ Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" We are on our own when we set out on the raft of self to explore the world. Philosophy is a lonely journey, even if one is with a son or wife or friends, and it also likely a journey with uncertain rewards and an uncertain end.

I feel Pirsig's sadness, but I don't share his tenacious attitude toward philosophy. His relentless pursuit of Quality finally alienates me from him and his book. What kept me reading is the genuineness of his search. Perhaps I am seeing the book too simplistically, but the specifics of his philosophic quest do not seem that profound. His argument about the need to do away with the split between subject and object is an old one and seems moot to this reader. The problem is that, in reality, wheth

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t why we don't know what's wrong" (308). However, what's wrong is that Pirsig cannot keep from separating Reality from Quality, his self from his life. He creates and re-creates the Subject/Object split every time he tries to find out what's "wrong," or tries to define "Quality" as something separate from his consciousness, or accepts that the split among academics at the University of Chicago is truly a matter of one group pursuing a "value free" science and the other pursuing a science based on values, including Quality (309). Everyone is pursuing values, even if it is the value of the idea that we cannot know what true value is. I believe at the heart of the philosophic quest, at the heart of the geographic quest, is a flight from the self---no matter how rational the explanation or description of the process of the quest might be. It is, of course, at the same time, a pursuit---however inadvertent---of the self. Running away from self, running right into the arms of self. What is so frightening about the self? As Pirsig writes in analyzing his nightmare in the last section of the book: "A mind divided against itself . . me . . . I'm the evil figure in the shadows. I'm the loathsome one. . . . " (298). Here lies the secret o

Category: Philosophy - Z