Motorcycle Zen is a philosophical stance and state of mind that originated and was developed on the Zensylvania website and podcast.
Origins
Etymology
Philosophical Stance
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Between the horns of dualism.
Origins
The term Motorcycle Zen first appeared on the Zensylvania website and podcast on September 22, 2021 at 19:21. Eric Adriaans used the term to describe several concepts and rhetorical methods observed in Robert Pirsig’s 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Motorcycle Zen is an abbreviation of Pirsig’s iconic book title but is not intended to be a faithful mirroring of its ideas.
Etymology
The term Motorcycle Zen is derived from the words motorcycle and zen.
The word Zen is from the term assigned to a specific set of philosophical positions, aesthetic practices and daily-living techniques which were formalized in Japan from the seventh century through to the present.
The word Motorcycle is a compound word denoting a two- or three-wheeled motorized vehicle. The root-word motor indicates a rotating mechanism or machine that imparts motion by converting energy from one form (eg. electricity, fuel) to another (eg. mechanical energy, experience) . The root-word cycle is derived from bicycle or tricycle, which more typically refers to two- or three-wheeled vehicles where a human serves as the motor, converting energy into motion via pedals, a chain and gears.
Philosophical Stance
In Zensylvania, motorcycle is intended to be interpreted as a metaphor and potential avatar of the self in consideration of the human condition. In usage as a metaphor, the term may include a range of motorized and non-motorized vehicles in addition to the two-wheeled variety.
Motorcycle Zen, as used in Zensylvania, is an open-minded, contemplative inquiry into formulation of a coherent, logical, necessary personal philosophy which offers the opportunity to individually reconcile twenty-first century human experience and allows every element of our experience to be interpreted.
The stance surveys and incorporates elements of alternate philosophies, perspectives and fields such as stoicism, pragmatism, Zen, process philosophy, biosemiotics, mathematics, machine learning and logic on a contingent (provisional, limited-extent) and instrumental basis.
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If your compass does not point towards Quality, where does it point?
Introduction
I wanted to start this essay with a reasonably brief and straight-forward definition of the word “quality”. As it turns out, I couldn’t find a practical definition that I was satisfied with. It may be a peculiar trait of mine that I prefer a word’s or concept’s definition not to contain words or concepts that merely point straight back to place I started. Like some semantic Ouroboros eating its own tail. Unfortunately, definitions for the word “quality” often circle back on themselves.
For example, Merriam-Webster’s definition says that quality is “a degree of excellence”. Follow-through on this information and you find that excellence is “an excellent or valuable quality” and that “excellent is very good of its kind : eminently good.“. Of course something that is “eminently good” means that it is observably good. Next we find that good is something that is “of a favourable character” or “conforming to a standard” among other things. Finally, something that is of a favourable character is something we favour or prefer while a standard is of course “something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality“.
It’s like that with all of the definitions that I’ve looked at so far – a somewhat fuzzy realm of subjective preferability and objective standardization.
The extraordinary fuzziness and variability of what may be contained within the term “quality” is somewhat surprising but hardly a new matter. Every one of us has some degree of self-assuredness that we know what is or is not of good quality. So certain are we that Pirsig quoted Plato as a kind of heading to ZAMM with And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? We’ve always known what is or is not good….we have our own fuzzy logic system to determine what meets our individual and ever-changing mix of subjective preferences and objective standards.
Regular visitors to Zensylvania will probably be familiar with Zensyalvania’s ongoing preoccupation with Robert Pirsig’s books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. I have readily used Pirsig’s books as touchstones within several investigations and inquiries. These two books are categorized by some people as works of philosophical fiction. This categorization describes a situation where a story is used as the setting, context or framing for some particular philosophical material to be conveyed.
While it is tempting to spend time quibbling over the extent to which the categorization of any book or work as philosophical fiction is meaningful, and indeed the extent to which the term reasonably applies to Pirsig’s books, I’m going to avoid doing that for now. It may be something to examine at some later time. Instead, I’m going to go along with this particular application of the analytical knife because it is clear that Pirsig’s books are intended to communicate some particular philosophical content and that they are fictionalized versions of Pirsig’s life, if not entirely fiction.
The particular philosophical content that the books convey has come to be known as the Metaphysics of Quality. And that is where we’re going to start in this essay.
‘Start” may not be exactly the correct term since that really began in Episode 15, when I spent some time in review of a book titled On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. This is a posthumously published collection of Pirsig’s comments and insights into the Metaphysics of Quality which was released in March of 2022. For this essay, I want to begin by returning to some of my comments from that Zensylvania episode. If you’ve previously reviewed that episode, this may be slightly repetitive, I hope to mitigate any sense of redundancy by expanding on the initial reactions I had.
All of this will be in an effort to pin down a few basic questions when it comes to the Metaphysics of Quality.
Quality Undefined: MovingTowards an Initial Definition
Throughout ZAMM and much of Lila, Pirsig avoided providing a definition of “Quality”. On page 97 of On Quality, there is an excerpt from his 1974 lecture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where he said that, “One of the advantage of keeping Quality undefined – which is central to [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]…as long as you keep it undefined, then it becomes an instrument of change, and you can grow, because the things that you find Quality in are going to change as you grow.“
Despite his early motivation to avoid providing a definition of Quality, Pirsig eventually used the term as a direct or indirect referent to a variety of other concepts which I am listing here:
God
the phoneme “rta” from the Proto-Indo-European language
the essence of experience
selection
meaning
dharma
the pure thing (Hindu traditions); the pure non-thing (Buddhist traditions)
“what holds together”
righteousness; rightness
the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction
duty toward self
virtue of the ancient Greeks
the Cosmic order of things
spirituality
Metaphysics of Quality is Metaphysics of Spirituality
the Tao
This is probably an incomplete list as Pirsig admitted to a preparedness to talk about Quality for hours on end without establishing a firm meaning. Initially, I’d like to focus on the third item in this list, “the essence of experience” as it introduces two underlying connections that should be examined.
In David Grainger‘s 2006 book, John Dewey, Robert Pirsig and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education, Grainger suggests that Pirsig’s idea of Quality is equivalent to Dewey’s idea of “Experience“. For those who may be interested to verify for themselves whether Grainger’s comparison is correct, he seems to rely upon Dewey’s Art as Experience and Experience and Education. You can be sure that these are on my acquisition list for 2023.
In the meantime, here are a few ideas from Dewey. Ordinary experience has no structure. It is a continuous stream. The subject (i.e. person) goes through the experience of living but does not experience everything in a way that composes an experience. Meanwhile an aesthetic experience is a kind of event which stands out from the ordinary or general experience. While I don’t pretend to any kind of authority to correct or alter Dewey’s terminology…it occurs to me that Dewey was establishing that Aesthetic Experience is at least partially comprised of definable events while Ordinary Experience is not. Experiences are structured situations over time – however fuzzy may be the definition of the experience’s actual beginning or end.
Dewey’s ideas do seem to echo Pirsig’s notions of Static and Dynamic Quality where Static Quality seems to share some attributes with Dewey’s Aesthetic Experience and Dynamic Quality with Ordinary Experience.
In FSC Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (that is the book which Pirsig credits with closing his youthful period of drifting and lending direction to his life, there is a passage about “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” and “experience”.
Later in this essay I will look at A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality but for now let me suggest that if there are parallels between Pirsig’s “Quality” and Dewey’s “Experience”, these may also be aligned with Whitehead’s “Process”: “The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself. In this explanation, it is presumed that an experiencing subject is an occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world.”
Granger references’ Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy and says something that links these things together, “all existences, material and ideational, are best viewed as events rather than substances.“
And this leads me to the observation that
Quality is an event.
What is Quality?: Toward a Second Definition
In order that we may get at what Pirsig may have been trying to convey in the Metaphysics of Quality, it seems essential to get at the individual terms in the phrase. I’m going to set aside the term metaphysics for now except to accept a kind of common-knowledge definition of metaphysics as the part(s) of philosophy which deal(s) with the fundamental nature of reality and existence and, by extension, those parts of reality and existence which don’t (at least superficially) appear to have a source or cause in physical, objective sources.
Provisionally I am interpreting the phrase “Metaphysics of Quality” such that the word “of” is a function word indicating origin or derivation. So the phrase, “metaphysics of quality” means: an explanation of the fundamental nature of reality and existence where quality is the original source or cause. Another way to phrase it might be that reality and existence is derived from a primordial Quality.
And now we have the question…what is “Quality“?
Since the Metphysics of Quality is Pirsig’s notion, it seems only fair to begin with explanations that he’s provided. But we will get to some other explanations that I’ve found interesting during that time I’ve been examining the idea….and, of course, also to some of my own observations.
In On Quality, there is an excerpt from a letter dated September 11, 1994 and it includes this brief section:
“Quality can be equated with God, but I don’t like to do so, “God” to most people is a set of static intellectual and social patterns. Only true religious mystics can correctly equate God with Dynamic Quality. In the West, particularly around universities, these people are quite rare. The others, who go around saying, “God wants this,” or “God will answer your prayers,” are, according to the Metaphysics of Quality, engaging in a minor form of evil. Such statements are a lower form of evolution, intellectual patterns, attempting to contain a higher one….” (pg. 81)
This seems to be a good place to start because it establishes and gives shape to a few specific traits that Pirsig posited about Quality. So I want to parse the various phrases here in an attempt to determine what he may have intended.
First he says that “Quality can be equated with God“. I want to take notice that Pirsig did not say “Quality is God“, only that “Quality can be equated with God”. Philosophy can readily be an exercise in splitting and re-splitting of conceptual hairs, but this is one that does seem to need to be split. The difference between the phrase “Quality is God” and “Quality can be equated with God” is meaningful because the concept of equivalence (as represented by the words “equated with“) is not that of sameness (As represented by the word “is“).
By saying “Quality can be equated with God“, Pirsig seems to be suggesting a comparison of two separate concepts based upon a function. The specific function being described is, as established in the brief definition above, that of an original source or cause.
In other words, Pirsig’s Quality functions in his metaphysical system as a monism in a similar fashion to how God functions as a monism in some other metaphysical systems.
The balance of Pirsig’s passage is an attempt to steer examination of “Quality” away from theology. Undoubtedly, there are a number of very good reasons to do that. But it is also very difficult to establish an existential origin story without having to engage the argument for a primordial entity or agent of creation. A deity. When I read Pirsig, I have the sense that he tries to do so.
Of course trying to posit an existential origin story without a deity causes some people a great deal of difficulty. And that maybe one of the reasons that Pirsig phrased things the way that he did. The Metaphysics of Quality is an explanation of existence and reality where the concept of “Quality” functions as the concept of “God” in separate and distinct existential origin stories. Discussion of “Quality” is not, therefore, a theological discussion on the nature of a deity.
Quality vs quality vs qualities: Towards a Third Definition
Now that we’ve established, to a limited extent, what Robert Pirsig had in mind in his Metaphysics of Quality, I’d like to get back to some more practical and familiar conceptions of quality.
In the day to day usage of the term, we may be quite comfortable with referring to any given thing or experience as being of high or low quality or perhaps alternately good quality or poor quality. In other words, we are readily able to assign a value to a thing or experience based upon some collection of subjective (personally perceived) traits and objective (empirically measurable) characteristics.
If we are, for example, visiting an auto-parts store to purchase a bolt to replace one that has broken during a repair on our motorcycle, we might say that a particular store-clerk’s dismissive attitude or lack of knowledge regarding engine bolts was a low quality service; similarly we might feel that the purchased bolt was of excellent quality as its metallurgy and machining met the specifications for the bolt’s purpose. Our subjective and objective criteria either were or were not met.
Often these criteria are considered to be “qualities” of the item or experience. A store clerk’s attentiveness is one quality while their product knowledge is another quality. Similarly, the bolt’s metallurgy and machining are sometimes referred-to as qualities.
This use of the term quality in day-to-day use is actually problematic as these ought more accurately to be referred to as: properties, factors, components, elements, constituents, items (a variety of other terms might easily be added) of the artifact’s or experience’s overall quality.
In this way, quality (and even qualities) are a set of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose.
It would be correct, albeit slightly absurd, to argue that a banana makes a very poor quality engine bolt nor that an engine bolt is a low quality snack. Clearly, banana’s are not intended to be engine bolts and engine bolts are not machined for human nutrition. This means that defined purpose is an important and meaningful consideration. Defined purpose is another way to say that quality is relational and that the quality of an artifact or experience is normally assessed in context of an expected or defined purpose.
Fuzzy Standards: Synthesis of the Definitions
This is where the title of this essay considers what I’m calling “fuzzy standards”. While I am not completely aware whether this term that I’ve used is completely novel, I will say that it derives from my Incomplete Exploration(s) of Fuzzy Logic and concepts therein.
Within Fuzzy Logic, there are so-called Fuzzy Sets which comprise a predetermined set of conditions to inform an input-output decision making model. In this situation, the Fuzzy Set attempts to allow for a nearly infinite range of possibilities between 0 and 1 (the ultimately reductive binary either/or). In a binary-digital world, engine oil might be called either “hot” (denoted by 1) or “cold” (denoted by 0). Clearly this is not correct as temperature is almost infinitely variable and could be assigned a nearly infinite range of temperatures based on the extent to which more (or less) heat is present.
I mention this as an indication that “Fuzzy Standards” begins to consider the matter of the phrase ” the extent to which” in setting of standards within a Dynamic Quality world.
I’ve borrowed Pirsig’s term Dynamic Quality and the fact that a perpetually changing world fundamentally establishes that any standard (eg. a specific oil temperature, a particular metallurgical composition of a bolt, a depth of knowledge of a clerk) must necessarily be fuzzy (situationally-defined) and relational.
The Metaphysics of Quality and The Philosophy of Organism
In Episode 15, I commented that I felt this passage maintains Pirsig’s inquiries in alignment with humanist enlightenment ideas and also some ideas that Alfred North Whitehead expressed in Process and Reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
In that book, Whitehead provided what he called the “Philosophy of Organism“. In my opinion, Pirsig’s philosophy is well-aligned with many of Whitehead’s ideas.
Whitehead opened Process and Reality with the declaration that “This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy.” and then goes on to define and defend speculative philosophy. Well Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality is also an exercise in Speculative Philosophy. Here is Whitehead’s definition “Speculative Philosophy:
Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to form a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.
Since Whitehead was a thorough-going philosopher, he proceeded to provide definitions for most of the terms used in the definition. I’m not going to chase that all down at present. I’m including it here in our consideration of Quality to help set the setting for Pirsig’s definitions (since there have been many) of Quality as a concept within a Speculative Philosophy system as presented by Whitehead.
“I ride, therefore I am.”: Rene Descartes would have written it, if only he’d had the opportunity; Photo Courtesy Pinterest
In Whitehead’s preface to Process and Reality, he explained his approach in contrast to others when he wrote that “The positive doctrine of these lectures is concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of ‘actual entities’. An ‘actual entity’ is a res vera in the Cartesian sense of that term; it is a Cartesian ‘substance’, and not an Aristotelian ‘primary substance’. But Descartes retained in his metaphysical doctrine the Aristotelian dominance of the category of ‘quality’ over that of ‘relatedness’. In these lectures ‘relatedness’ is dominant over ‘quality’.”
Whitehead goes on to give a brief summary of relatedness but again I’m going to defer examination of this to focus on the similarity in approach between Pirsig and Whitehead, specifically that the positioning of quality within a metaphysical system is a meaningful part of that system.
Returning to the earlier passage by Robert Pirsig that Quality can be equated to God, I am grateful that Wendy Pirsig and the editors of the book didn’t shy away from including this passage as it does positively establish the kind of metaphysical positioning of Quality that Pirsig reached.
All of that is to say that Pirsig’s capital-Q “Quality” term may be readily separated from common day-to-day usage of the term since the underlying position of the term is different than a subject-object-relational metaphysics as found in Rene Descarte’s outlook.
I say separate – but that may not be the right term as Pirsig did further divide Quality into “Dynamic Quality” and “Static Quality”.
A Provisional Definition of Quality
While it is certainly tempting to continue running down various rabbit-holes… I think we’ve actually reached a good point to finalize and summarize a provisional definition of Quality.
Quality is an event which a subjective experiencer (an actual entity) has a relationship-to within an actual (objectively real) world; in static form, quality is the aggregation (or fuzzy set) of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose(s) and is consistent with a delimited Aesthetic Experience within an ongoing Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum. In dynamic form, Quality is that which mediates relations between an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum and actual entities. Quality is an idea and term which allows every element of our experience to be interpreted. It functions as a monism and may be best described via the metaphor of a field.
(Editorial Note: the above definition is a second revision circa December 2022).
I hope this jumble of metaphysical jargon is as clear to you as it is me. I will admit that I find it extremely satisfying that this definition has not yet resulted in an Ouroboros–like circle where I end up staying that quality is quality and we all know what it is.
Strangely, I also find that this definition has both practical daily applications which may be just as useful as any metaphysical implications that there may be.
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Cosmology is the area of philosophy and physics which attempts to analyze and describe the nature of the universe. Within physics, cosmology is usually constrained to observable and measurable details of the physical universe and may extend to what may be further inferred via logic and math. Philosophy categorizes further investigations and speculation within the area of metaphysics.
Original Essay
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Original Essay
I began this exploration of cosmology as an exercise to trace out ideas from Robert Pirsig‘s Metaphysics of Quality and Alfred North Whitehead‘s Philosophy of Organism. It is an exercise in speculative philosophy and should be viewed as nothing other than entertainment – with no additional practical value or application(s).
When it comes to the nature of the universe, it doesn’t seem to matter what opinion you may have and express, someone is going to disagree with your ideas – perhaps vehemently. This happens because your opinion, whatever it may be, may just contradict the metaphysical perspectives that someone else has utterly devoted themselves to – again, perhaps vehemently. With that in mind, this is an incomplete, ongoing and subject to change essay where I first re-assert my non-expert status in anything at all. I am not an authority and I don’t always get things exactly right. This gaze into the void of cosmology is an enthusiastically non-authoritative assessment of some available information and concepts. If you disagree with the direction or detail of this exploration of a novel depiction of the universe based on your individual and alternate (and quite possibly, more authoritative) insights – thank you for taking time to browse these meandering paragraphs.
In Zensylvania we try as often as possible to proceed from a motorcycle-zen position wherein metaphors help point to reality the way a finger points to the moon. So let’s kick things off with consideration of one of our favorite metaphors, the internal combustion engine
Internal Combustion Engine
With a piston engine, the piston moves up and down within a cylinder to generate power which may be turned into motion. Below is a diagram of a four-stroke engine’s cycle of intake, compression, power and exhaust. A four-stoke engine is called “four-stroke” because there are is a series of four events when the piston moves along the cylinder. The intake and power stroke are in one direction while the compression and exhaust strokes are in the opposite direction. This is the engine’s process. It seems reasonable that this moving up and down (or back and forth, if you prefer) of the piston entails a moment when the cylinder stops moving in one direction and starts moving in the other direction.
But this observation which seems reasonable is a kind of fallacy. The piston never stops moving. If the piston stopped moving, there would be some serious problems for that engine. There’s a scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which depicts what happens when a piston stops moving in the cylinder:
In a seizure, the pistons expand from too much heat, become too big for the walls of the cylinders, seize them, melt to them sometimes, and lock the engine and rear wheels and start the whole cycle into a skid. The first time this one seized, my head was pitched over the front wheel and my passenger was almost on top of me. At about thirty it freed up again and started to run but I pulled off the road and stopped to see what was wrong. All my passenger could think to say was “what did you do that for?”
Pistons don’t stop moving. If they stopped moving, the crank shaft would also stop moving – and as we can see from Pirsig’s anecdote, that would not be a pleasant experience for a motorcycle rider.
What happens is that pistons change direction within their continuous process of movement. The crank shaft that the piston is attached to is in continuous motion in a circle and this creates an illusion that the piston is moving upwards to a top dead center position and then moving down to bottom dead center. There is no stopping.
Cosmology – Do You See Where This is Going Yet?
I find in the process of an internal combustion engine a useful analogy to considering the nature of the universe. Let me be clear, I am not suggesting the universe is exactly the same as a four-stroke internal combustion engine (ICE). Nor am I suggesting that the universe operates exactly the way an ICE works. It is an analogy. A metaphor. A finger pointing at the moon.
It is possible that at one phase of universal existence there is infinite compression of time, space and matter. In that phase (or expression), duration is infinitely brief and therefore experience is essentially meaningless. It is a kind of top-dead-centre. At the opposite phase of universal, time, space and matter there is infinite dispersal. Duration is infinitely long and therefore experience is again essentially meaningless. This is our metaphorical bottom-dead-centre.
Perhaps the universe progresses between these two extreme states in a continuous change of direction which does not stop – and does not start.
No Big Existential–Metaphysical-Cosmological Bang
I once spoke with a quite engaging individual who happened also to be a quite well-known scientist, professor and published author. On many topics, I found this person to be engaging and informative. He expressed the opinion to me that many people have a very significant challenges with giving-up the idea of that they have “free-will”. It’s an interesting and rather thorny issue and not what I’m considering in this essay. But it comes to mind as many people from both a scientific and a theological point of view would have difficulty in giving up the idea of a concrete beginning to the universe. It’s baked into their metaphysical, cosmological comprehension of how the universe works.
But what if that’s just the way it is? What if the universe seems to have had a beginning only because we are so focused on one part of the machine that we haven’t (yet) observed other parts which negate the premise? Speculating about “how the universe began” presupposes that there was a beginning and it does not seem to me that this can absolutely be presumed. Perhaps the big bang was just the universe going through a particular phase (yes that was an intended pun).
Getting back to Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality
As promised, what I want to do now is try to connect this speculated cosmological alternative of a universe with no beginning to the Metaphysics of Quality. I have no idea whether others have attempted to put these things together, but let’s give it a run.
According to Pirsig, Quality underpins his metaphysical system for understanding the world. Quality comes before the matter, time and space. Indeed, matter time and space are comprised of Quality.
Pirsig also argued that Quality can be understood in two different forms: Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. Static quality is the rigid patterns and established values of the good. With an ICE, the static pattern is a process of intake, compression, power, exhaust which produces power. Static quality might otherwise be perceived as those things which we can ascribe traits and values to. Motorcycles, people, books, governments, relationships and a host of other things that we can relate to. Dymamic Quality is the immediately experienced reality. It is the power and motion that the engine produces. It is the experience of interacting with another person.
What Pirsig seems to be saying is that experience itself is the ‘stuff” of the universe upon which all else is possible.
Decades ago, I wrote a poem (which is included in my Leviathan collection) titled Life is a Psalm of Existence which contains elements of this idea:
Life is a psalm of existence
Will is the strength at the core
Truth is a portrait of thinking
Care is the light of purpose
Love is an echo of beauty
Share is the song of resonanc
Belief is a scent of mystery
Fear is the wall of separation
Pain is the touch of exclusion
Doubt is the death of the striving
Life is a psalm of existence
Will is the strength at the core
A slight re-imagining of the poem using Pirsig’s ideas might alter the title-line to ‘Life is psalm of dynamic quality.’
Shifting Gears to A.N. Whitehead
Using Whitehead’s terminology, there is a process which produces our human actual occurrences. This process is dynamic quality. The concept of reality may roughly equate to Static Quality – a particular pattern of Quality which we recognize and value.
Causal Set Theory
In Causal Set Theory, there isn’t a singular(ity) “Big Bang” to be accounted for. Causal Set Theory (CST) looks at the universe differently than Einstein’s general relativity or quantum physics theory by positing discrete morsels of space-time which it calls “atoms”. CST, whether it is correct or not, offers a conceptual way forward to examine how the universe might work. It is a physicist’s model which can be examined via the language of mathematics. While I am not in a position to suggest that CST offers any form of validation of the kind of cosmology I’m posing int his essay, I mention it as an indication that whatever perspectives one cares to propose, there may be new ideas to explore about the universe is. Lack of conformity to or divergence from some other (arguably incomplete or inadequate) theory is not merely acceptable – it may well be absolutely necessary.
Taking the crude analogy of the internal combustion engine, one may readily posit a series of bangs within a cycle. Clearly, what I am suggesting is that the metaphor(s) which Pirsig and Whitehead used to describe individual human experience can be connected to a cosmology which does not rely on a singular(ity) Big Bang.
Diagrammatic models of the universe can be compelling, despite the impossibility for any two-dimensional diagram to adequately depict how the universe works. Clearly a line drawing of a four-stroke engine is not adequate to fully depict the functioning of the universe. It’s hilarious that anyone even attempts to describe the universe in these reductionist ways. This explains why the assertion that “It’s turtles all the way down” is simultaneously wonderful and ridiculous. Analogies only ever work as far as their limitations. Fingers only ever point to the moon. Whether the analogy is words, pictures or numbers hardly seems to make much of a difference in this.
Has the universe always existed?
This question is a matter of cosmology. It pertains to the nature of how the universe works. Depending upon your perspective, it’s either one of the biggest questions one may ponder – or one of the smallest. For those who are oriented to top-end theoretical physics or metaphysical musings via philosophy or theology, this is one of the “biggest” questions. Certainty about any given response is most difficult to attain and validate.
On the other hand, for those who are definitively not oriented to the previously-mentioned theoretical physics and metaphysical musings – then the question, “Has the universe always existed?” is perhaps one of the smallest questions that may be asked. Consider pragmatism – a philosophical perspective that I have a thorough and long-standing appreciation for. A pragmatist is concerned with the practical applications and implications of any given idea or conception. If you happen to be a theoretical physicist or some other specialist who earns their income by answering questions of this type, clearly you’re in a special category for whom their really is a practical application. For most of us, however, the practical implications to the answer of whether the universe has always existed or not are so far removed from our undertakings, that it is a very small question indeed.
Whether it is a big question or a little question and despite and relative expertise one might have, I think we all tend to have some notion about the answer. Some of us are quite vague while others are extremely precise in their opinions.
For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to set forward a perspective that the universe always exists and establish some context for that statement.
What is the Universe?
It seems only fair to begin with a reasoned definition of terms. The first term I want to deal with is ‘universe‘. I’m going to argue for an extremely transparent definition of ‘universe’ such that it means ‘everything’. There isn’t any physical or non-physical thing, concept, dimension, energy, substance, form, force or what-have-you outside of the universe.
This ought to be a straight-forward principle to work from. It is little more than a trick of language when someone proposes something outside of the universe. I’m going to use the specific example of the ‘multi-verse’ concept where there are proposed to be multiple universes which co-exist in a simultaneous or parallel manner. This is tom-foolery.
I am quite comfortable with the concept of multiple time-and-space-continua which co-exist in a simultaneous or parallel manner. However applying the term ‘universe’ to each time-and-space continuum is entirely inaccurate as they are clearly not ‘everything’ in isolation. Each continuum may well be self-sufficient and complete, but a posited existence of additional continua, means that the term ‘universe’ can only be applied to the collection of all the individual continua and anything else one may care to posit.
What does ‘Always’ mean?
It is exceedingly difficult to phrase comments about cosmology since one’s terminology is bound to include concept of time which are part of the concepts being described. Time itself is a feature of the universe. So my assertion that the universe always exists is somewhat circular because that time element of always is partially embedded within the term universe.
I’ve used the term ‘always’ in its correspondence to the term ‘continuum’. Always is continuity. It is perpetuality. Always is duration itself.
What is Existence?
Existence is the act of being. It is manifestation in any form. Time exists. Matter exists. Concepts exist. Words and ideas exist. Existence equals ‘is’.
Creating a word to represent something does not conjure that thing into manifested physical reality. The idea exists but that does not mean that there is a manifested reality which corresponds to the idea and the word assigned to it. I want to call this an ‘insofaras‘. Vampires, unicorns and anything you care to mention exist insofaras the words and ideas are an identifiable, cohesive and consistent set(s) of meanings but that does not mean the set(s) of meanings have a corresponding physical reality.
In this way, any word or idea has a contingent existence even if that contingency is conceptuality. In this way everything that is must be considered to be contained within the term universe.
To assist, I’m going to invert Wittgenstein’s famous “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” to explain existence. It is not possible to conceptualize anything that does not exist. Once you have generated a novel concept, the concept exists but that does not generate a non-existing thing…it only enlarges the universe by one novel concept. Even if it is a concept of a something that does not have a corresponding manifested time-space physical reality.
The concept of existence goes includes all details of reality – even those that are in addition to time, space and matter.
A Paradox of the statement ‘the universe always exists’
A rather circular and paradoxical character of this statement is that each of the meaningful terms is a dependent of the others. The universe is existence. The universe is always. Existence is always. They are equivalents components of each other with different manifestations.
Models of the Universe
As previously indicated, a line drawing of the universe is utterly inadequate to fully explain how the universe works. It can only point to certain things. One of the most popular theories about the universe is that it began just under 14 billion years ago in a cosmological bang and has been expanding ever since.
What caused this singular big bang and what came before the big bang appears to be fully debatable territory. From my perspective, anyone that posits any kind of anything outside of the universe (which includes everything and all time), has either misapplied the term “universe” or assumed a status of time that is incorrect.
The diagram which depicts the universe as a kind of cone where the big bag is the narrow end and the present is the open end is a compelling image. But is also seems incomplete. This could be a simple deception of trying to use a line drawing to explain the universe. Bu it has offered the metaphorical conceptualization of the universe where there are two funnels which connect to each other within a spherical universe.
This model is visually satisfying as it offers a representation of an ongoing cyclical completion through a process.
What I want to conceptualized here is a perspective on time, matter and space. Time and matter are interconnected. When time and space are very nearly infinitely compressed (inside the sphere, where the cones meet), duration is very nearly infinitely short. Time’s duration is as close to not existing as it is possible to be. This is the singularity. Expect that it is not as a singularity never exists. Matter, time, space, experience, quality and all of the rest of it are never an undifferentiated monism.
At the equator on the outside of this metaphorical sphere, time, matter and space is very nearly infinitely dispersed and duration is very nearly infinitely long. Time’s duration is as close to not existing as it is possible to be. Matter is as thinly resolved as it is possible to be. Space is penultimately null.
I don’t want to give the impression that anyone subscribes to this cosmology. I have no idea if this cosmology corresponds to any theories or ideas that others have previously developed (beyond anything already suggested within this essay) nor whether this meditation achieves anything more than attempting to hand language around a range of accumulated impressions.
The point in all of this is making a case that the universe always exists; that there is nothing else. What can (and does) change is the duration of time, the substantiation of substance, the spatiality of space, the meaningfulness of experience via the mechanisms (physics) of their concentration/density (compression vs. dispersal).
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On the interior panel of the dust jacket cover of On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence, there is a brief proclamation attributed to Robert M. Pirsig that “The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment.” This was, apparently, Pirsig’s opinion in 1962 – well before either of Pirsig’s more famous books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Lila, were published. On Quality, has been published posthumously and a few short months ago. For reasons peculiar to my own interests and inquiries, this proclamation strikes me as tremendously important as well as being something that might just take one down a long path of discovery.
This observation that one of Robert Pirsig’s sentences bears the potential for protracted curiosity is fully consistent with my experience of examining Pirsig’s earlier books. There is usually something to explore, contend-with or discover just about anywhere one happens to open the book.
For example, as I’ve not yet run down the relationship between “enlightenment” and “excellence”, I’m not confident that I fully agree that the ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. Perhaps for Pirsig it seemed to be. Having reflected on that sentence, I would actually prefer if Pirsig had claimed that the “ultimate goal in the pursuit of enlightenment is excellence.” My revision of Pirsig’s circa 1962 sentence seems, at least to me, to be more in keeping with the Metaphysics of Quality philosophy that he later developed. And I do wonder if he might have similarly revised that sentiment if given the opportunity. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. But I tend to think that Pirsig may have been the kind of person who updated his opinions when new information was available.
I’m also not certain whether Pirsig’s 1962 conception of “enlightenment” aligns with his perception of “enlightenment” in 1974 or 1990….nor for that matter with my understanding of “enlightenment” here in 2022. The same word may have been used to describe three slightly different things.
One thing that the word “enlightenment” often refers to a process where a person is freed -up from ignorance and misconception. The enlightened individual understands things as they really and truly are. Enlightenment is therefore a process by which one achieves that state of understanding. This version of the word “enlightenment” seems to track well with Pirsig’s 1962 sentence…pursuing excellence might well lead to an enlightened status relative that status one is pursuing excellence within. If motorcycle maintenance happened to be the field, then so be it…an enlightened motorcycle maintainer. Even if by “motorcycle maintenance” we are actually metaphorically saying “self maintenance.”
This initial definition of “enlightenment” may, however, be tracked via (at least) two different major philosophical paths – that being the Enlightenment of Western Philosophy and the enlightenment of Buddhism in Eastern Philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza: There’s no reason not to think of Spinoza when examining Pirsig
In the Western/Euro-American tradition, the Enlightenment is what I will call a humanist intellectual movement that is generally recognized as beginning in the 1600s and, arguably, continues on today. I have no difficulty suggesting that Robert Pirsig’s philosophy sits comfortably on a branch of the major route that is the Enlightenment. The humanist Enlightenment movement synthesizes a worldview that focuses on reason, science and a common humanity with goals of human understanding, freedom, and happiness. Robert Pirsig had certainly been exposed to both Western and Eastern philosophy by 1962 and would have been well aware of the Enlightenment. I doubt that Pirsig was specifically referencing the formally recognized enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th century. But it is not inconceivable that he may have been aligning with the ideals and goals iterated as a part of all that. So the pursuit of excellence could be argued to ideally end in human understanding, freedom and happiness.
Finally, along the Buddhist path, we find that enlightenment refers to a blessed status that is free from desire and suffering. Again, we know that Pirsig had been educated about Eastern concepts and would have been able to contemplate whether the pursuit of excellence had an end goal of being free from desire and suffering. On page 109 of On Quality, Pirsig states that Soto Zen Buddhist doctrine holds that “everyone is enlightened. What occurs at “enlightenment” is the falling away of the illusion that one is not enlightened. But the enlightenment has been there all along.” This is from a letter dated August 17, 1997. Putting this perspective into play in the earlier sentence, The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment….we might get something like “The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is the falling away of the illusion that one is not enlightened.”…it seems not quite right. But that partly depends on what one might mean by the term “excellence”, doesn’t it?
However, a version that follows my ultimate goal in the pursuit of enlightenment is excellence would be The ultimate goal in the pursuit of falling away of the illusion that one is not enlightened is excellence.”…also seems to be a better presentation.
Of course, there is nothing preventing Pirsig from having been comfortable with all of the possible associations within the proposal that the ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. Even though the several notions that I’ve described are not exactly the same, they aren’t necessarily contradictory in nature. In fact, there is significant overlap despite the unique territory that each covers.
It seem to be an “and gate” situation. As, potentially, is the “pursuit of excellence” and “enlightenment”…each in the various possible meanings.
As a person moves toward expressing something they think/know/experience/comprehend/apprehend/understand, they are presented with the challenge to explore the words and word-orders that most suit their meaning. It is both a creative process and an exploratory process. It is a process which first brought Pirsig to explore “Quality” in his first book and then later to talk about Static Quality and Dynamic Quality, the established patterns (on the one hand) and chaotic cutting edge of reality (on the other).
Another Book to Consider Buying
Well, I will certainly be considering all of these terms and the relations and expect that they may form the basis of future Zensylvania territory. In the meantime…
In writing this essay, I realize that I have come dangerously-close to writing a book-review rather than my preferred intention to document only my own reactions to an original work. This is mostly due to the fact that On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence is mostly NOT a new and original work.
Given what seems to have become for me a long-standing interest in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, I was very eager to obtain a copy of the follow-on Inquiry into Excellence as I hoped to obtain a significant quantity of new material and previously un-revealed insights. Unfortunately, there’s a lot less new material than there is re-printed versions of information that is already available. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ANY new insights or collections of words that make the book worthwhile…it simply isn’t as robustly new as I would have preferred.
Still, I don’t regret the purchase. And I should send a significant thank-you to my daughter Chloe-Lynn for the fathers-day gift card which I used to expand my motorcycle-zen themed collection. And largely, that is the role that this Inquiry into Excellence plays for me today. It’s an artifact…and it is a kind of finger pointing to the moon.
The book was released for sale in April of 2022 and I received my first edition hard-copy several weeks ago. At 150-pages of relatively large-font print, I’ve only read through the book a couple of times so far but I intend to give it serious examination over the course of the summer.
Photographs
Throughout the book there are pictures of Robert Pirsig’s tools. According to the book’s preface, written by Robert Pirsig’s wife Wendy K. Pirsig, the photos were taken by David Lindberg – a nephew of Robert.
That brief paragraph offers the opportunity for observations about Pirsig’s writing and philosophy that I appreciate. First, consider the fact that the book was marketed as, at least in part, a collection of previously unpublished material by the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book’s preface is credited to Wendy Pirsig, an individual with a direct family relationship to Robert, who died in 2017. Actually, what needs to be said is that Wendy is an individual with a kin relationship to Robert. The reason that this phrasing is important can be found in Chapter Five of ZAMM.
Clearly, David Lindberg also has a kin relationship with Robert Pirsig…and as an artist, his contribution is a collection of photographs of tools used by Pirsig. Tools serve an important function in the pages of ZAMM and also in our lives.
The handing-down of legacies (consider Footnotes to Being Water) has always been a massively important feature of individual and collective human endeavour. The handing down of tools – as artifacts and as useful means to achieve let’s say excellence…cannot be emphasized enough. Handing down a tool is:
handing down a culture;
handing down an artifact symbol of past survival and creativity;
handing down an artifact object to serve future survival and creativity;
Robert Pirsig’s tools are a symbol of his past and could be photographed as objects or picked-up and used for the practical purposes that Pirsig acquired and used them for during his life.
Finger Pointing to the Moon
The Inquiry into Excellence is a finger pointing to the moon as the majority of it’s work is as an exhibition to reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. It is a hard-backed museum.
In the creation of On Quality, an artist has presented photographs of the tools which a person used in the living of their life. The creative act of photography was a dynamic quality act. The photographs are static quality products. Presumably those tools were objects which enabled Robert Pirsig to tune-up and maintain his Honda Super Hawk. Each tool was a kind of sacred object to those dynamic quality rituals he undertook. Now that Robert Pirsig no longer completes those tasks, they are artefacts of that past. They are patterns of static quality.
The photographs point to the dynamically-lived life of Robert Pirsig but they are a finger pointing to the moon. Of course all of these books are fingers pointing to the moon of Pirsig’s philosophy and way of understanding the living at the cutting edge of reality.
MOQ
Many people who choose to investigate On Quality will be interested, as I was, about any new text addressing the Metaphysics of Quality. I’m not going to outline every new or renewed thing I found in the book. If you’re interested, I hope that you’ll buy a copy and thereby contribute to the Pirsig family legacy.
However, there were several passages that engaged my attention that I want to feature in this essay. In a letter dated September 11, 1994, I found a passage which seems, I think to justify my observation that Pirsig’s philosophy was consistent with humanist enlightenment:
“Quality can be equated with God, but I don’t like to do so, “God” to most people is a set of static intellectual and social patterns. Only true religious mystics can correctly equate God with Dynamic Quality. In the West, particularly around universities, these people are quite rare. The others, who go around saying, “God wants this,” or “God will answer your prayers,” are, according to the Metaphysics of Qualty, engaging in a minor form of evil. Such statements are a lower form of evolution, intellectual patterns, attempting to contain a higher one….” (pg. 81)
Alfred North Whitehead
It’s quite a tough stance and frankly one that I think not only sets MOQ in alignment with Enlightenment ideals but is also consistent with notions that Alfred North Whitehead expressed in Process and Reality.
I am grateful that Wendy Pirsig and the editors of the book didn’t shy away from including this passage as it does positively establish a metaphysical position of the MOQ.
As a follow-on to that, Pirsig also suggests (c. 1995) that his MOQ solves a list of philosophical “problems”
The Metaphysics of Quality is valuable because it provides a central pivotal term that the Western, scientifically structured mind cannot dismiss. The second reason is for selection of Quality as a pivotal term is that is solve the “Two Worlds” problem of C.P. Snow, the division between the arts and sciences….“
The list goes on and I encourage you to obtain a copy of the book and examine the list. I am not certain of the extent to which I agree with Pirsig on his assessment. And that is not a coy way of saying that I disagree.
However, the work does rather go to Pirsig’s critics to do a good job of explaining how/why MOQ might (in good faith) be dismissed.
C.P. Snow
Dharma- Rta – Quality
Many critics of Pirsig’s metaphysics (as of any metaphysics whatsoever) may be expected to be come form those deeply-embedded in the physical sciences – biology, chemistry, physics and the like. On page 101, Pirsig is cited as writing that…”So far [readers seem] struck mute about the equivalence of the terms “Quality” and “dharma”, which are both derived from a common prehistoric root, “rta” meaning “the cosmic order of things.” The Buddhists have no trouble understanding that the dharma is the origin of things, but I think it’s going to take another century or two to convince Westerners that Quality is.”
It is very difficult, if not essentially impossible to approach a comment like that as anything other than a kind of soothsaying that can’t be evaluated. It will take another 150 years or so to know the extent to which Pirsig may be on to something. From my own outlook, I think that the field of biosemiotics seems to be most likely to reveal whatever truth there may be in Pirsig’s metaphysics and prediction.
Quality Undefined
Throughout ZAMM and much of Lila, Pirsig avoided providing a definition of “Quality”. On page 97 of On Quality, there is an excerpt from his 1974 lecture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where he said that, “One of the advantage of keeping Quality undefined – which is central to [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]…as long as you keep it undefined, then it becomes an instrument of change, and you can grow, because the things that you find Quality in are going to change as you grow.“
In this little book though, Pirsig’s use of the term Quality is equated, directly or indirectly with
God
the phoneme “rta” from the Proto-Indo-European language
the essence of experience
selection
meaning
dharma
the pure thing (Hindu traditions); the pure non-thing (Buddhist traditions)
“what holds together”
righteousness; rightness
the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction
duty toward self
virtue of the ancient Greeks
the Cosmic order of things
spirituality
Metaphysics of Quality is Metaphysics of Spirituality
the Tao
This is probably an incomplete list as Pirsig admitted to a preparedness to talk about Quality for hours on end without establishing a firm meaning.
On page 32 and running for about ten pages there is a delving of the phoneme “rta” as found in words like arete, art, right, rhetoric, arithmetic, aristocrat, virtue and more…this is from the proto-indo-European language. This is interesting as it establishes how words can be “cognate” with each other in descent from that common ancient language. In this case, ‘rta” or “rt” as a phoneme is seen to bear a fundamental meaning of rightness.
Clearly other language groups may have a different phoneme which would affirm something similar. Something about “rt” seemed to convey to a particular community of people that “rt” meant rightness at the most fundamental level. Just as “Ya” seems to indicate “yes/positive/affirmative” or “na” seems to indicate “no/negative/dis-affirmative” across many languages.
A term or word is only correct/useful insofar as it accurately and precisely identifies the object/phenomenon/event/idea that it is intended to identify. Pirsig’s preference to avoid defining “quality” was, as described a trick to maintain exploration and curiosity…but also as seen, it was placed (eventually) in the context of that single syllable meaning rightness.
But not as a judgement after the fact..rightness as a fundamental trait.
What Was I Looking For
When I purchased this little book, I was certainly looking for original material by Robert Pirsig that I hadn’t read before. Inevitably, that might have been some expansion of the work he’d begun in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. But I found that I was also looking for further glimpses into what kind of a person Robert Pirsig may have been after having written these books. The largest clues come not from Robert Pirsig but from Wendy Pirsig. In the preface, she comments that a depression which followed the murder of Chris Pirsig, led to the delay in publishing of Lila. This indicates that Pirsig experienced a depression that lasted somewhere between 10 and 13 years. Perhaps longer.
She also wrote that Robert “contemplated other works, but they never materialized. His work in later years, involved maintenance of our home, the boat and the motorcycle he kept for the rest of his life.” This seems to be the boundaries of Robert Pirsig’s public persona. Boat. Home. Motorcycle. And, of course two books.
And that may be more than enough.
An Inquiry into Excellence is considered by Wendy to be a reminder of Pirsig’s “challenge to Western Philosophy and science to take on a study of Quality and stop thinking of it as vague and unworthy.“
This book focuses on the Philosophy and not on motorcycles or motorcycling. Neither does it focus on the literary side of ZAMM (and to a lesser extent, Lila). It may be inevitable that people will want to make the philosophy the focus as that did seem to be a central ambition of the book.
But as I’ve attempted to describe in my Footnotes essays, there is literary meat on the bones as well. The focus on the philosophy of the metaphysics can be seen as getting in the way of apprehension of the message. Stop looking at the finger and start looking at the moon.
Your experience of this moment right now is the cutting edge of reality. Just as Pirsig’s sentence “The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. ” seems to me that it ought to be flipped to say “ultimate goal in the pursuit of enlightenment is excellence” consider what happens when you flip the question “What is the meaning of life?” to “Life is meaning.”
You don’t have a purpose. You are one of many purposes.
You may have noticed that this essay (or episode if you’re listening) is titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part Five. It’s part of an as-yet-indeterminate series of examinations of Robert Pirsig’s books. You may wish to go back to earlier parts of the series before taking this one in, but it isn’t obligatory in any way. You may also want to listen to take in the “On Footnotes” essay which is available on the website in print and is included in the first episode of this series. Just to get a sense of why I’ve titled so many essays in this way. But as I’ve indicated previously, it isn’t necessary to backtrack if you’re not inclined to.
Right now we’re going to take a look at Chapter Two of Pirsig’s book. At about nine pages, it’s a relatively brief chapter but it contains two of the books most memorable motorcycle-themed scenes and a number of interesting passages which reinforce Pirsig’s messages about self-reliance.
The chapter begins with a reminder that Pirsig and his companions have only just begun their motorcycle vacation. Similarly, the reader has only just begun exploration of Pirsig’s journey and philosophy as well. The first paragraph of the chapter says, “The road winds on and on….we stop for rests and lunch, exchange small talk and settle down to the long ride. The beginning fatigue of afternoon balances the excitement of the first day and we move steadily not fast, not slow.“
I interpret this as a kind of prescription by Pirsig for approaching both the reading of this book and for approaching life – remembering that the motorcycle journey is a metaphor for living life. It isn’t a terrible prescription to take breaks out from the business of life’s journey to stop for rest, meals and the small and inconsequential talk that doesn’t carry immediacy and import. To move steadily through life. neither fast nor slow is probably a good thing.
From the chapter sample that I opened this episode with, we can see that this thesis of steadily, neither fast nor slow is something Pirsig repeated near the end of the chapter. I appreciate how internally consistent Pirsig’s writing is. It isn’t merely repetition, it is reinforcement.
Typical of Pirsig, the next paragraph seems to continue about the motorcycle riding but actually introduces an ominous element…”Lately, there’s been a sense of something, as is we were being watched or followed…” If you haven’t read the book, my next comments may be something of a spoiler…but my presumption is that anyone following this series is either already familiar with the book or will appreciate that I’m trying to unpack Pirsig’s design as we go….this brief passage is a very early hint of a ghostly presence inside the narrator’s mind.
It’s a terrific bit of foreshadowing and reinforces one of my arguments that ZAMM may fairly be called a gothic story or ghost story. This is the introduction of a theme of ghosts and ghastly elements that will come up many times in the book.
In the third paragraph, Pirsig seems to break away again and takes time to talk about the flue flax blossoms in a nicely phrased, poetic line talking about the fields along the road, “Some of them are blue with flax blossoms moving in long waves like the surface of the ocean.” This mention of the ocean is also a bit of foreshadowing as Chris and the narrator do eventually arrive at the Pacific Ocean.
Photo Courtesy: Flickr
With the hint of ghostly presence and mention of the ocean, I am reminded of S.T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I don’t think this is a far stretch….Pirsig is clearly conjuring maritime imagery in the next paragraph describing the plains ” as if you were siailing out from a choppy coastal harbor, noticed that the waves had taken on a deep swell, and turned back to see that you were out of sight of land.”
The ominous tone that Pirsig introduced is very effectively reinforced and then she says “I have a feeling none of us fully understands what four days on this prairie in July will be like.”
It’s quite a threatening statement which he moderately softens with memories of other trips and with discussion of the group’s planning. But the suspense and hint of tortures and trials to come is absolutely there.
And here I want to mention that ZAMM often recalls to mind the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno. It’s a kind of invocation, isn’t it? Four Days on the prairie in the July Heat..a road that winds on an on…just as Dante and Virgil wound their way into Hell’s circles?
Dante’s Inferno Circles of Hell
ZAMM is absolutely in line with epic poetry traditions and it should be reinforced that Pirsig was absolely able to bring this imagery in without feeling the need to explain that this is what he was doing. ZAMM is Pirsig’s Divine Comedy…It is a story of his mid-life’s journey.
The narrator says of the trip through hell that he felt Sylvia should go along to maintain harmony among the riders…”to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a promised land..”
There is a break in the chapter and then Pirsig takes time to talk about some storm clouds on the horizon (another foreshadowing)..air temperature and weather play an ongoing role throughout the book..the inteplay between hot and cool..physical discomfort. “on a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely a part of it.“
The narrator’s comments about Sylvia being along for the ride through a hellish prairie may be a reminder of Dante’s goal to be united with Beatrice. But clearly Pirsig is taking a different tack and while Sylvia may be a kind of analog of Beatrice, clearly they are not the same. Suffice it to say, it is valuable to ponder who the narrator’s companions in this epic journey are and what function they may serve in Pirsig’s design.
Next comes an is an interlude wherein the narrator provides a kind of amusing anecdote of a father-son trip from Minnesota to Canada. This is interesting to me as my family and I spent several years living in Thunder Bay Ontario, the area that is immediately north of Minnesota and could have been a kind of destination of the trip. I’m certainly very familiar with the geography. While this is personally interesting, I think the reference to Canada is another one of Pirsig’s reinforcements. In American literature and popular culture, Canada is often presented as a kind of wilderness garden of eden…a promised land. A serene place to escape to. Perhaps this observation of American culture of mine is oversimplified. Be that as it may, The accuracy of this picture of Canada is highly questionable.
The anecdote is filled with rain, mishaps and misery…ultimately leading to an end of the trip when the narrator failed to diagnose an empty fuel tank. The story fulfills a number of tasks. These are storms of Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the horrible stations along Dante’s path.
It shows the narrator, and Pirsig as someone not unlike everyone else. He’s had failures and times when he was unprepared for the storms of life. To the point of being on the side of the road without gas and without even knowing he didn’t have gas.
To one extent or another, we all start out as a younger version of ourselves and without all of the knowledge and preparation to deal with the storms we will have to face. Literal and metaphorical.
I’ve found myself on the side of the road in a vehicle with no gas on a couple of occasions…once in the middle of a cold winter day…I’ve also found occasions to be on the side of the road variously lacking oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, power steering fluid and engine coolant. My point is that life can be complicated and as it gets more complicated, there are more things that can shut you down. Whatever the cause, being shut down can bring about a deep and genuine dejection.
Being shut down with no clue why you’re shut down is particularly awful. But it is the helplessness, whether you know why you’re shut down or not, that takes the toll…and this is what Pirsig describes…his son’s tearful questions of why the fun is all over are your tears….why am I shut down? Why can’t things move ahead.?
“But there weren’t any mechanics. Just cutover pine trees and brush and rain.” This is the emotional wilderness. No help from specialists who know what to do. No shelter from the storm. Just storm.
Pirsig said the machine they were on (no brand mentioned) was a “six-and-one half horsepower cycle, way over-loaded with luggage and way underloaded with common sense”.
Clearly the motorcycle trip into Canada is a metaphorical depiction of progressing through life. And its also a call to self-reliance and education…we have to learn how to live…how to make it through the storms, how to equip ourselves and be prepared.
The story is summed up with “Now we are on a twenty-eight-horse machine and I take the maintenance of it very seriously.” As life’s stakes are greater, we owe it to ourselves to take things a bit more seriously.
Right now, as you are living your life – whether you’re, metaphorically speaking, operating an 8-and-a-half-horsepower machine, a 28 horsepower-power machine, or the latest 125-horsepower high tech delight, I wonder how seriously you have taken the maintenance of that machine. And if that machine is not a motorcycle at all, but is in fact your own self, what has been your attitude to these things?
I wonder how seriously I’ve taken these things myself. There seems to be something in the world that doesn’t give much encouragement to giving serious consideration to maintenance. It’s either assumed to be irrelevant or presumed to be taken-care-of without effort or forethought on our part. But I’m not sure trouble-free-motoring has been a real thing for anyone. Ever.
Still, we seem to live in a world and a society that is predisposed to using things up rather than engaging with them as things to be conserved. This seems to be a fundamental feature of contemporary attitudes. And it does seem to be a genuine problem.
In the chapter, suddenly John cuts in (the character from the first chapter who we know doesn’t even want to think about maintenance…John who is heading into Hell’s circles ignorant and unprepared…to tell the narrator that they’d ridden past a sign for their turnoff…telling the narrator (and us?) that it was as big as a barn door.
Well it is big as a barn door isn’t it? Are you prepared for life’s storms? Have you been taking things seriously enough? Will you be able to diagnose when you’re gas tank, radiator, oil pan, brake fluid or power-steering fluid reservoir – or the complicated contemporary-life-reservoirs for which they are metaphors are empty?
The narrator’s realization of his inattention to the road…having missed the big as a barn door sign while pursuing his memories of the past trip set the narrator to checking his engine temperature. The narrator is shaken out of focusing on the past and tries to put his attention back in the moment. The here and now.
I want to take a moment to recall Pirsig’s mention in chapter one that country road sign makers don’t tell you twice…one may assume that this is true when the sign is as big as a barn door.
Soon however, a second set of memories takes hold of the narrator’s attention and a new lesson is investigated. It’s another of the most memorable motorcycle-themed scenes. It pertains to anyone who has needed to deal with mechanics. Mechanics, of course are the specialists who fit the motorcycle metaphor… the narrator’s story ought to be applied to all of the various specialists and professionals upon whom we give our dependence.
And we do give our dependence don’t we? Lawyers, doctors, psychologists, bankers, financial planners, plumbers, university professors, politicians,….all the contemporary specialists who we allow to to fix and perhaps sometimes even design our problems for us. These specialists and the problems they correspond to often set us on particular paths, don’t they? And rather like Pirsig’s narrator, it isn’t unusual to find ourselves lost in the memories of yesterday or the dreams for tomorrow rather than focussing on the road we’re riding on right now.
Well…anyone who has dealt with any professional, particularly a professional who clearly does not seem to know what they are doing will share the narrator’s frustration and concern. It’s one of the most valuable scenes in the book.
It talks about care;
about professionalism;
about people being engaged in what they are doing;
about being competent.
Right now, we are living the times that Pirsig is talking about. Do we give over our lives, that is to say place ourselves in a position of dependence upon these incompetent, uninvolved chimpanzees when there are big as a barn door signs that they’ve simply wandered in and been handed a wrench? After all, it is your motorcycle going home with you after you’ve paid the fees.
Pirsig runs through the clues and decides it is the expressions, “Good-natured, friendly, easy-going – and uninvolved…..you had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job”
These are the big as a barn door cues he ought to have noticed.
Pirsig then explains he is a technical writer and found the spectator attitude in the manuals…the separation…” And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant, or taken for granted.“
It bears repeating that the mechanics that Pirsig’s narrator recalled stand-in for all of the specialists who we give our dependence to. Lawyers, doctors, psychologists, social workers, politicians. I think you take my meaning.
You may have noticed that I have emphasized that I think it would be a mistake for me to claim to be an expert in anything at all. It isn’t that I necessarily view expertise as problematic…however, our relationships to experts seems, in my experience, to be very problematic indeed.
This caring about life, by ourselves about our own lives…or alternately by the specialists and professionals when we choose to be spectators rather than the primary agents of our lives, this caring is the central concern. And we need to approach this caring steadily, neither fast nor slow.
Spectator should remind you that the narrator mentioned that he felt someone was watching….a spectator. So the spectator theme arrives with two distinct, though not necessarily unrelated purposes….the ominous spectator that seems to be monitoring the narrator’s journey and being a spectator of one one’s own life. Naturally enough, in zen meditation there is a concept of observing your own thoughts.
I suddenly notice the land her has flattened into a Euclidian plan. …we have entered the Red River Valley….In the Zensylvania episode containing an incomplete examination of Fuzzy Logic, I spent some time connecting dots between Pirsig as a technical writer and the field of formal logic. Here is a big as a barn door sign that Pirsig’s writing is involved in logic and mathematics. Euclidian Plane1?
This just isn’t the kind of reference that one would normally associate with riding a motorcyle. This single sentence is, at least for me, validation of my argument that Pirsig has incorporated the language of mathematics and formal logic into the structure of Zen and the Art.
In mathematics, a plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends indefinitely in all directions. The fact that the narrator describes the Red River Valley as a Euclidian Plane is very unusual and a very clear reference to Euclid, the ancient thinker and mathematician. We have to stop to think what Pirsig might be up to? It’s not an indiscrete reference. In fact it is big as a barn door. But its up to us to consider what that sign may be pointing at.
For me, I’m reminded of navigation and the first chapter of ZAMM when the narrator talks about dead reckoning. In the earlier Footnotes episodes, I’ve spoken about my opinion that the book that uses motorcycles as a metaphor for the self and a motorcycle journey as a metaphor for living life – and also that the idea of dead reckoning one’s way through life is quite an interesting way to think about how we navigate our way from one point to another of our human existence.
Earlier in this essay, we’ve seen how Pirsig continues to use these established themes to place the storms of life as a real presence in living a life. I’ve also said that Zen and the Art is Robert Pirsig’s analog to Dante Alighieri’s mid-life journey – the Divine Comedy. For Dante, his trip through the inferno was a series of descending circles. For Pirsig, the inferno seems to be a Euclidian plane – a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends unbroken in all directions. A featureless place devoid even of the sparse cover that a few cutover pine trees had offered during past trips. The fact that Pirsig used the language of mathematics to describe his inferno is not unimportant. It is, in fact, a part of Pirsig’s overall design. How indeed, does one navigate an unbroken, featureless wasteland which extends in all directions. Dead reckoning may well be a reasonable answer.
And with this very unusual and reference, the narrator – and of course Robert Pirsig, ends the rather ominous second Chapter of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than “time”….and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Chapter 1
Original Essay
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
Original Essay
I’d like to begin by commenting that my Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance essays are probably best appreciated by those who’ve read the book once or twice already. Clearly, some prior familiarity with the text will make my comments and observations more readily accessible. But I am going to try to take an approach that will render the analysis of value or interest even if you haven’t or don’t intend to read the book. Or for that matter, even to those who may not actually be particularly interested in either Zen or motorcycles. Though I suspect relatively few people who may take time to listen to these ramblings will fit that description.
As you may have noticed, this episode is titled “Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part Two” and is the second installment in an as-yet indeterminate series of explorations of this book. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to listen to Part One, you may wish to go back to that episode, wherein I consider the book’s Title and the Author’s Note, before proceeding on to the things I have to say here. Backtracking like that isn’t in any way obligatory, but there may be some comments and insights from that earlier analysis that may be helpful in this ongoing study.
Otherwise, I hope you’ll stay with me for a ride into the ideas, values and aesthetics this book has to offer.
The first chapter of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM or sometimes Zen and the Art) is perhaps the most approachable in a book that can be a rather off-putting and alienating read. For that reason and also since I think its important to point-out how densely-packed the book is right from its beginning, I’m going to take a slow ride through the first chapter. I’ll be exploring and considering the many insights and layered meanings or messages that may be found along the way.
Photo Courtesy Goodreads
So let’s start with a brief reading of the first few paragraphs of chapter one. I have two copies of the book that I work from. There’s my very marked-up William Morrow Paperbacks Edition published in 2005 (ISBN 9780060839871). You can see a photo of this edition at left. I purchased my copy in 2016 with the specific purpose of having a copy that I would be able to mark up with pens and highlighters. I rarely mark books up this way, but wanted the freedom to dig into the text but still have my earlier copy left undamaged.
I purchased my Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ISBN 9780061908033) in February or March of 2014 but it was published in 2008. The font is a little larger and my copy remains in excellent condition. I use this copy for readings on the podcast. There’s a photo of this edition below right.
As the page numbering for the two editions is different, I have to assume that page numbering for all editions will vary slightly. For This essay, I’ve selected a relatively brief passage from the beginning of Chapter One through to the paragraph that ends with the narrator’s observation that the marsh is at it’s “alivest”.
Photo Courtesy of Goodreads
As a starter to exploration of the chapter and to the story conveyed by the text, I want to suggest that this beginning is just as significant as any beginning you’re likely to encounter in literature. In my opinion it ranks with Leo Tolstoy’s opener to Anna Karenina “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Or with Charles Dickens’ opening to A Tale of Two Cities : “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity….”
What I’m saying is that, like these other masterpieces of literature, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance opens memorably and immediately upon key themes that are explored throughout the text. The opening paragraphs should not, and indeed cannot, be considered as throw-away lines. They immediately put you on a motorcycle and on the specific journey that Pirsig has designed.
In literature this opening is called “in media res” or in the middle of things. With your first approach of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the characters have already begun their day’s riding. The action is happening. All of the explanations, the Chautauquas ( these are Pirsig’s versions of meditations or lectures). The reason(s) for the trip. The preparations. The life that led to the trip. We must wait for all of these things to be revealed. We start with riding.
This placement of the riding immediately before the reader is an assertion of riding as the primary concern. Why is that important? For starters, the book’s cover promises that the book will, in some way, be about motorcycles. There isn’t a more sure way to deliver on that promise than to have the books’ first sentence moving sixty miles per hour on a bike. That’s an immediate connection. Within the context of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a motorcycle is a metaphor for the self. Pirsig made this clear in a later passage that states, “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.”
With a motorcycle as the metaphor of the self – riding, clearly is the metaphor for the self living life.
I can’t help but mention that I am inevitably reminded of “Homeless” Kodo Sawaki’s rather dense and strangely worded explanation of zen meditation as being “the self selfing the self”. To be frank, Sawaki’s comment is not particularly helpful to the unprepared. How exactly is a person supposed to be enlightened by a comment like that. As a contrast, Pirsig’s use of motorcycle-based metaphorical language is so much more poetic and relatable. Pirsig’s approach is to give the reader a hands-on-grips metaphor through which it is just possible to catch glimpse of Kodo Sawaki in your peripheral vision, so to speak
The idea of motorcycle-as-self and riding-as-living ought to remind even non-riders of the motto “Live to Ride, Ride to Live” often associated with “bikers” – particularly Harley Davidson, cruiser style, bikers. This sense that living and riding go together….that they are metaphors for each other. There is a synthesis here. So next time you see that catch-phrase emblazoned across a bumper sticker, t-shirt or some such thing, you may want to consider whether the motto may be more than just a blustery declaration of someone’s favorite recreational pastime. Maybe it’s a deeply-considered existential insight.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr
Let’s say, however, that motorcyles aren’t your thing – that they don’t inspire any kind of eagerness or excitement. Well that’s ok because the specific metaphor isn’t the key consideration….it is, in a manner of speaking, only the finger pointing at the moon….if you prefer a different metaphor….whether that is gardening, horseback riding, swimming, a martial art, or something altogether different…well go ahead and substitute that metaphor while recognizing that the metaphor is there to reveal truths about yourself and living in your world.
This in media res introduction to the chapter, like those by Tolstoy and Dickens that I already referenced are a kind of summary of the book’s ideological and aesthetic principles: that is, that living life is the primary consideration.
Even though we’ve only just cracked the first moments of the book, I want to, metaphorically speaking, halt our progress through Zen and the Art and observe that “in media res” is exactly where we find ourselves at every moment in our lives. Usually, we’ve been so caught up in the thick of things that we don’t recognize this fact. But every now and then, it does catch up to us. Maybe during the commute to work or to complete some errand; maybe while sitting on the porch or patio, a moment or two of clarity arrives and we recognize that all of the hustle and activity that led up to that moment and all of the hustle and activity that we are yet to experience is all around and we’ve been dropped into the middle of it. Those moments aren’t really different or separate from the rest of our lives except for our recognition that we are always in the middle of things. Perhaps we may even find that living that present moment, living all of our present moments, rather than being caught up and swept away by the distraction of daily events, that this is what we need to focus on.
That is riding a motorcycle. Or, for those who may prefer a different metaphor for living and being – that is your self simply living. As Sawaki would have it the self selfing the self.
Robert and Chris Pirsig – Do you think you could read your watch at sixty miles per hour?
In the first paragraph of the book, beyond dropping the reader right into the synthesis of riding and living….Pirsig has also launched a theme that will be explored later in the book. And this is an exploration of truth and rhetoric. If you have a look at the chapter’s first sentence again, the narrator says “I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight thirty in the morning.” If this does not yet seem to be an exploration of truth and rhetoric, let’s examine the situation further. While the book never explicitly states that the narrator is Robert Pirsig, most readers consider this to be the case. If that is so, then most readers also consider the motorcycle that the narrator is riding to be Pirsig’s Honda CB77 Superhawk. There’s a photograph readily available on the internet showing Pirsig and his son, Chris, sitting on the bike. Chris is showing what seems to be a fairly good-natured smile to the camera while Pirsig has his hands on the motorcycles grips, seemingly ready to head off on the dirt road in the background. Then there’s another publicity photo of Pirsig in an improbable pose leaning over the back of the bike with a wrench held to the tail-light, one foot on a chair or stool, glasses sliding down his nose and a watch poking slightly from his sleeve. In considering the two photos, it seems extremely improbable to me that anyone could see the time of their watch without taking their hand from the grip. And almost certainly not at the secondary highway speeds (sixty miles per hour) the narrator would have been riding…even if he was only wearing a long-sleeved shirt rather than a protective leather jacket of the day.
Robert Pirsig – Wrenching on the Rhetoric
The statement can’t be taken as very probable. It is a rhetorical statement and a rhetorical truth.
Later in the book, Pirsig makes clear that he places great value in rhetoric and the sophists that Plato, Aristotle and any number of other philosophers did not respect. So this deployment of a rhetorical statement sets up practical consistency with his later assertions in support of rhetorical techniques and perspectives. And that is a consideration that a reader of Zen and the Art should return to frequently while reading.
Clearly, it is entirely possible to read the rest of the chapter and book without giving consideration to whether that first sentence is likely to be factually correct or not. On face value, all the narrator has indicated is that they’re on a morning ride. It’s a setting of the scene. Taken as something more than scene setting, however, there’s a priority on the sentence’s implications more than on its verifiable content. What is important is that the rider and the reader both observe that this is in fact a morning ride (living a life, as we’ve already established) at a particular time. Whenever Pirsig sets out some particular fact for notice, it is the reader’s job to investigate what precisely he may be gesturing to.
The time, 8:30 is close-upon a Catholic Canonical Time – 9am. This is the Terce, or third hour which establishes “a brief respite from the day’s activities. It’s recognized as a time for prayer. Nine a.m. is associated with the descent of the Christian “Holy Spirit” upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost…therefore it isa time when invocation of that “Holy Spirit” for strength in dealing with the conflicts of the day is most appropriate.
By selection of 8:30 am, Pirsig is indicating a kind of rhetorical invocation. The subtlety of this invocation is wonderful. But I don’t want to suggest that Pirsig was taking a Catholic nor necessarily even a Christian position in the book. Instead, I feel certain that Pirsig merely opened the ability to discuss certain theological concepts. Pirsig is suggesting that a holy spirit is due to be visited. So Pirsig has also begun to unveil some exploration of spiritualism, religion and particularly of messianic presence.
Invocation of the gods and muses for assistance is, of course, an ancient tradition within epic poetry. What comes to mind for me are works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. In epic poetry, the hero of the epic must undergo a literal or metaphorical trip through hell. The narrator’s journey can therefore be contemplated in comparison to the journeys of other epic heroes.
It may seem as though I’m making more of that first sentence than Pirsig may have intended. But I really don’t think so. In Pirsig’s second book, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, Pirsig describes a bizarre and exhaustive writing process whereby every sentence and statement of a final work is individually documented and filed in a kind of card system – then sorted in and out of the whole text in relation to other statements and sentences. It is a kind of truth process. Given that Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art before word-processors were available, it seems unlikely that this process was actually used in the writing…but it does give a perspective on the scrutiny that Pirsig is willing to have his writing undergo. Based on all of this I think it is fair to argue that the first sentence of Zen and the art:
Is intended to fulfill the book’s title’s promise that motorycles -literal and metaphorical are the central concern;
Is itself a rhetorical rather than a factual sentence;
Is intended to support Pirsig’s later arguments on behalf of rhetoric;
Is a subtle invocation of divine support of this venture – in the spirit of the epic poetry and Catholic canonical tradition;
Is a foreshadowing of exploration of messianic religion – and a promise of visitation within the book of a divine spirit; and,
Is intended to present an in media res perspective on living life – a perspective that is not inconsistent with zen philosophy that is also promised on the book’s cover.
In the second half of the opening paragraph of the chapter, the narrator says, “The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what is going to be like in the afternoon.”
This description brings forward an ongoing concern with temperature and weather that occurs throughout the story. Certainly for a motorcycle rider, these are significant matters that a car driver (for example) doesn’t usually need to give much attention to. Even the worst or most extreme weather conditions are not directly experienced inside a protective climate controlled cabin. But a motorcycle rider always experiences weather and is therefore far more aware of and sensitive to it.
As an extension of the metaphors…motorcycle as the self; riding as living….weather is the events and times within which we live. Pirsig is asking if the beginning of an uncomfortable warmth are present so early in the ride, how unpleasant, how difficult will the times be later. If living is difficult now, what about later when we may expect things to be even more so? Pirsig and the narrator are amplifying just how in media res the opening is. Things are already “hot”.
At eight thirty – this time when we have respite and grace…what about when that respite and grace is gone? There is a potential for reverence here that one may not expect or even be looking for. This potential reverence is present throughout the book.
Pirsig’s use of the term “Sixty miles per hour” is another phrase were different thing are being communicated simultaneously. Sixty miles an hour is another way to say – a mile a minute. It is an old phrase for someone talking or thinking fast. That they have a lot going on.
In 1974 the American federal government passed a law which set the National Maximum Speed Limit at 55 mph in response to the 1973 oil crisis…ZAMM was published in 1974. While it may be a coincidence, it isn’t a meaningless one. Within the story, Pirsig’s narrator is already exceeding the speed limit and has a lot going on – arguably overwhelmingly too much.
Following that initial invocation passage, we have a bit more scene-setting.
“In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck-hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.”
Certainly an initial preoccupation with temperature is emphasized but there is also this rather odd reference to duck-hunting sloughs.
So what’s up with ducks? Well there’s a whole lot to be navigated when it comes to ducks. Do a bit of searching and you’ll find that the duck has a variety of symbolic meanings in different cultures. It can symbolize clarity, family, love, vigilance, intuition, nurturing, protection, emotioin, self-expression, balance, adaptation, grace, and strength. Duck symbolism is closely connected to water symbolism, which is about mystery, magic, and inspiration.
In China, the mandarin duck symbolizes love
In Christianity,…The way a duck preens itself to become waterproof is linked to anointing in Christianity, a symbol of blessing, protection, and enlightenment.
Then there’s the extension of that waterproofing – water off a duck’s back or not letting things bother you.
In Greek mythology Penelope is a character in Homer’s Odyssey known for her loyalty to Odysseus. The name Penelope contains the root for a particular species of duck. Penelope avoided marrying other suitors during Odysseus’ absence.
With all of this potential symbolism that Pirsig has drawn upon, it’s no small task to consider what he might have been driving at. Significantly, it is important to point out that, regardless of which specific symbol he may be playing with or if indeed the whole collection of meanings has been targeted, the ducks are subject to hunting. From an ideological point of view, Pirsig has established that symbols and meanings are targets.
The duck hunting image recurs a few paragraphs later and then again in the next-to-final chapter when the narrator confronts his young son and makes a mental comparison to snapping the neck of a duck that he had shot but not killed during a hunting trip. It is a rather ugly and problematic scene
.
Since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is also a book of Zen, let’s consider how ducks may be an important part of teaching that tradition.
Following is the koan, Master Ma’s Wild Duck. There are a variety of versions of this story available online. Master Ma refers to Mazu Daoyi who was an influential Chan Buddhism teacher during the Tan Dynasty of China. He lived 709-788. Master Ma’s teaching style of “strange words and extraordinary actions” are a kind of paradigm and staple of Zen teaching.
Once, when Great Master Ma and Pai Chang were walking together, they saw some wild ducks fly by. The Great Master asked, “What is that?” Chang said, “Wild ducks.” The Great Master said, “Where have they gone?” Chang said, “They’ve flown away.” The Great Master then twisted Pai Chang’s nose. Chang cried out in pain. The Great Master said, “When have they ever flown away?”
Now a koan is brief story that is intended to teach a zen lesson. Based on this story, Master Ma’s teaching style seems to be more abusive than instructive. In Zen the idea is that the abuse is intended to awaken a student from their ignorance. And perhaps that is what Pirsig intends by juxtaposing the uncomprehending look in a duck’s eyes just before its neck is snapped with the uncomprehending look in his eleven year old son’s eyes when confronted with the idea that both he and his father are, clinically speaking mentally incompetent.
Wellin zen, a koan is intended to be a story or value that the zen practitioner is to become one with rather than intellectualize. If inhabiting the values of a story are intended, then Pirsig’s story of shocking his son into enlightenment of his true nature is consistent with a paradigm of zen teaching.
Even if these connotations are correct, we again must recall that Pirsig’s reference is to hunting ducks and it seems equally likely that he’s hunting this zen teaching paradigm as much as any of the other symbols, traditions or ideologies in the book.
So we’ve arrived at the third paragraph of the first chapter of Zen and the Art. If you’re still with me, I’m grateful that you’re been patient with what I promised was going to be a slow ride. Soon, things are going to move along a little more quickly…though perhaps not a mile a minute.
“I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles…There’s a red-winged blackbird.”
Ushiku Marsh by Kawase Hasui
I think this passage is particularly attractive. It reads like a traditional Japanese painting with the simple images of cattails and marsh grass…it is also a fairly direct comparison of meditation with the “nowhere famous for nothing”. The road is literally and metaphorically an old path…not the newer one that had been built and presumably goes, very nearly to similar destinations.
A very significant theme of Zen and the Art is coping with modern society, the paths – these two and four lane roads that our travellers have access to and choice between can be thought-of as different modes of life that we may choose. Cycle is self, riding is living, weather are events and conditions of our lives and the path is the way we choose to reach our destination. Clearly by contrasting a new 4-lane highway that the riders are not actually on (but that we may all readily imagine) with this older highway that is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all is a symbolic contrast of these different paths or values.
Most two lane highways area actually a single unified road while modern 4-lane highways are often two roads separated by a median. It’s another double-meaning image where the single-lane highway represents the monism of zen while the four-laner represents dualistic approaches.
Pirsig reinforces the duck imagery but also invokes turtles…establishing a connection to the spirituality of native north American cultures…and then there is a strange emphasis of seeing a blackbird. The paragraph is, of course, a long form haiku…where the cut line occurs between turtles and the mention of the blackbird.
Why blackbird? Again, with a wide variety of cultures to draw upon, the Blackbird may be viewed as a messenger of good or bad news. It is sent to bring a message that one is to learn from.
The narrator then “whacks” his son’s knee to bring his attention to the blackbird and his son lets him know he’s already seen blackbirds….we then come to the the unsettling passage where the narrator recalls duck hunting
“You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred-up by the hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and seen nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living our their lives in a kind of benign continuum.”
Pirsig’s use of language of this passage always reminds me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner…a kind of epic in its own right – an impression that catches me frequently in the book. This connotation is another one of those situations that may not have been intended by Pirsig yet carries a variety of valuable parallels. Arguably, Pirsig’s narrator is not so very distant from the ancient mariner character in Coleridge’s poem – after all, he is a figure that hunted a bird he really ought to have left alone.
Perhaps unique to my study of Coleridge, the associations here also remind me of Coleridge’s collaboration with William Wordsworth on the 1798 book of poetry called Lyrical Ballads and thereby also to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and by long extension the old English poem title Beowulf. While I’m not gong to delve that now, I wanted to mention these works now as I expect to reference them in future evaluation of Zen and the Art.
Well we’ve only covered a few hundred words of a book that’s over 400 pages long…but I feel that it is important to travel some of these early passages slowly and with care. Not only is it interesting to identify and engage with the wide variety of potential meanings and sources that Pisig may have been gesturing to, it is valuable to consider how these themes may relate to any integrated world view that a person may consciously decide to embody during their lives.
Do we prefer to stick to some form of traditional two laner of something like Zen or do we go along with the four-laner? Do we hunt down the ideologies that guide our decisions and, metaphorically speaking, snap their necks or do we travel along without even knowing they’re there? Is living each moment our central concern or do we find ourselves overwhelmed by the in media res nature of living between our memories of the past and anticipations of the future?
Robert Pirsig was proud that his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a genuine attempt to create a new metaphysical philosophy. Whether that is completely accurate or not is certainly open for question, as is the question of whether the specific system he attempted to work out (the Metaphysics of Quality) is entirely reliable. I agree with Pirsig’s pride in attempting to work things out and in writing which provides such a wide range of possible sources and meanings to engage.
I think that the use of a motorcycle as a metaphor of the self was an inspired and effective choice. It is a metaphor that allows us to consider ourselves by considering the metaphor. I would be interested to hear your thoughts about the motorcycle as metaphor, about this introduction to Robert Pirsig’s book or any other matter that may have come to mind. For now, I can see by my watch, without lifting my fingers from the keyboard, that it’s six pm and its time to bring this installment of Zensylvania to a close.
See Also
Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 1
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Several months after my forty-fourth birthday, I purchased a battered and abused 1982 Yamaha XJ Five-fifty Maxim. While I had previously owned and enjoyed many different cars and trucks, the Maxim was my first motorcycle. So far, it has been my only motorcycle. In part, I acquired the Maxim to fulfill a long-deferred curiosity and ambition. That being, of course, to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I was certainly aware that buying a motorcycle and learning how to ride it could be a significant event or feature of my life. After all, that’s why I was doing it. However, I really had no idea how much of a fundamental change and impact that the experience would have on my relationship to learning and my general approach to day to day life.
At the motorcycle garage and sometime dealer where I found the bike I would eventually buy, there was a small selection of used bikes to choose from. I had originally visited the shop with the intention to look-over a couple of early 1980’s era Honda Magna’s that had been advertised. Alongside the Magna’s however, I found a yellow seven hundred and fifty c.c. Maxim as well as the smaller five-fifty. In fact, the five-fifty was tucked away and not quite forgotten. I could probably have purchased any of the larger displacement bikes without regret. To be honest, the bigger motorcycles even appealed to an immature and egotistical impulse. But something about the five-fifty attracted me. Sitting on the bike felt comfortable and right. The Maxim’s teardrop-shaped fuel tank and side covers were black with purple flames stretching, in that classic hotrod style, toward the back of the bike. Despite such a styling cliché, the flames didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously. I mean really, purple? And the whole paintjob was what may be generously called “tired”. The flames had gone past cliché to quaint. At some point in the decades before I’d owned it, someone had also removed the original curvy chrome handle-bars that the bike had been sold with to a straight, black motocross-style bar. I could hardly have known what a good idea that had been when I bought the bike, but that handlebar set-up gave the bike its own personality and handling that helped to build my confidence as a rider. The bike’s original dual chrome exhaust pipes had also been replaced by a matte black four-into-one design. Inside the cement cinder block walls of the garage, revved to a few thousand r.p.m., the little four-cylinder sounded racy and entertaining. Inviting rather than intimidating. The gauges and instruments didn’t seem to be original to the bike either. Here was a motorcycle that was clearly past prime condition and into a second or third shot at life.
With thirty year-old patina. The purple flames that didn’t take themselves too seriously. The genuine exhaust note. Dropping eight hundred dollars in the middle of February in 2014 meant that the little four-cylinder motorcycle, and all of the possibilities it presented, was mine to be had. I wouldn’t be able to ride it for several months, but I was excited and satisfied to obtain what seemed to be an apt avatar and metaphor of my self.
More recently, as my fiftieth birthday came and went, I approached another long-deferred curiosity and ambition: beginning to learn the martial art called Tai Chi. It might be forgiven if someone were to argue that learning to practice Tai Chi seems rather less exhilarating and significantly less dangerous than learning to ride a motorcycle. After all, isn’t one of the archetypal images of Tai Chi that of grey-haired elders moving slowly, and probably in unison, in a park-like setting? But at fifty I had – and continue to have – expectations that learning Tai Chi would be every bit as enriching an experience as learning to ride a motorcycle had been.
In Zensylvania, it isn’t the riding of a motorcycle or the performance of a particular Tai Chi movement that we are necessarily concerned with. Those experiences are moments in time that can be enjoyed and remembered, for sure. But what we are more concerned with is our relationship to learning how to do these things in the first place. The creation of the state of mind where it is possible to learn a new skill or set of knowledge is itself an achievement that is worthy of consideration.
Aesthetically, learning to ride a motorcycle and learning Tai Chi may seem to be opposing activities which would appeal to very different types of people. Riding a motorcycle can be brazenly loud and smelly, not to mention physically demanding. Riding a motorcycle carries the ever-present threat of injury or death. Riding a motorcycle is potentially the fastest and riskiest iteration of yourself in motion that you can experience. Stop paying attention at the wrong moment and you could face the worst (or even the last) day of your life.
Meanwhile practicing Tai Chi seems to be the epitome of the quiet, the calm and the physically un-intimidating. The greatest danger faced by the person engaged in Tai Chi seems to be that of peacefulness and serenity. But there is a dark side. Tai Chi is potentially the slowest and most connected iteration of yourself in motion that you can experience. Stop paying attention at the wrong moment and you could be faced by your own lack of physical coordination, balance and self-understanding.
For me, these two very different activities appeal to a similar need. That is the need to be a genuine learner or novice with something. Despite the external and overt aesthetic differences, these two activities have some very considerable similarities when it comes to learning and re-setting my understanding of myself.
When I decided that I would finally learn to ride a motorcycle, I was already firmly established in middle age. While the objective to ride had been something I’d carried all the way back from my early-twenties, finally doing it was not some kind of stereo-typical mid-life crisis grab at youth. Nor was it a form of fantasy life-style wish-fulfillment. I had no interest in becoming a wild-life biker, speed-track rider or whatever may come to mind when some middle-aged man buys a new toy. In fact, the idea of riding a motorcycle had always been both attractive and intimidating for me. It had mostly seemed like something that other people did but that I probably wouldn’t. It was the kind of thing that would inspire the thought “Wouldn’t it be great to experience riding a motorcycle”. But that thought was usually followed by ” But that isn’t the kind of thing I’ll really actually do”.
At that time, my family and I were having a tough year. Several things had happened that seemed to be out of our control. Health issues. Career issues. Life issues. Things that I had taken for granted or that I felt that I had achieved – or that I felt were still achievable, had rather suddenly become uncertain. The details of those times are almost wholly irrelevant to the point that I want to make. Most people experience a version of the kind of crisis I’m talking about at some point in their lives. For some people the crisis they experience, the difficulties they encounter may be so enormous and shattering, that anything less dramatic might seem embarrassingly small in comparison. Setting comparisons aside, however, sooner or later life knocks us down.
Suddenly I was in shadows of fear, self-doubt and uncertainty. For me it was a time when when my confidence in myself and in the fundamental rightness of the world had been seriously dinged-up. There were parts of me that were emptied out as they hadn’t been in decades. I didn’t consciously know it at the time, but I needed to take something on that would help me re-build my integrated self from the ground up.
Perhaps through the force of an instinct that I wasn’t aware of, I did it. I tackled something that was almost wholly outside of my character and skill-set. I put myself in the position of a beginner and a learner. I can’t emphasize enough how important this point is. In Zen philosophy, there is a well-known expectation that a person should maintain a “beginner’s mind”. In Zen, there is the word “shoshin” which has this sense that a beginner approaches something without pre-conceptions. Shoshin indicates that the experience, the thing that the person has begun, is fresh, new and not already known. A person who is a beginner is a whole learner. Relative to the thing that is to be learned, the beginner has no status and no standing. Everything is still un-acquired.
But so much of the life, career and society I grew-up with and into had negated the value of a beginner’s mind. Building a career, a family, a home and a sense of self was, for me, the opposite of maintaining a beginner mindset. Building a career or a sense of self is exactly that – building. It’s an additive process. Experience upon experience. Year upon year. Becoming a specialist or an expert in a career of any kind is a process of amassing knowledge, skills, competence over time. You don’t “get ahead” in a career by being a beginner. And being ahead is, by practical application, no longer being a beginner. On the corporate ladder, beginners are at the bottom rung, not at the top.
Similarly having a home with a set of family traditions and memories means adding, day-to-day, night-to-night, year-over-year, occasion after occasion to everything that came before. Birthdays. Holidays. Weekdays. Weekends. Meals. All of the activities that a family encounters are built through a combination of familiarity, repetition and in some cases, improvement. I had spent decades becoming the person I was. I wanted to continue to be better – but my conceptions of better were additive rather than reductive. I wasn’t un-happy with myself. But I was facing situations where I really didn’t know how to continue building in the face of the experiences and difficulties I had recently had. Motorcycling came along as an opportunity to place value in being a ground-up beginner.
With motorcycling, I started with a two-hour long try-it-out course at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It was the kind of course for people who’ve never been on, or probably near, a motorcycle. People who’d ridden a dirt-bike as a kid, or maybe had a motorbike earlier in life didn’t take this kind of course. This was for genuine, full-on beginners. On the day that I took the course, there were about a dozen students of various ages, but we were all equal in our skill. Essentially none. We needed to show up with a helmet, gloves and other basic gear to allow basic, safety-oriented exposure to motorbikes. Beyond that, the instructors assumed we knew nothing about how to approach and operate a motorcycle. But there was no condescension by the instructors as regards our role as beginners nor was there any apparent assumptions about us as people. Unlike someone who may be starting a new career from scratch or re-building their home finances after a major set-back, the beginner motorcyclist isn’t necessarily faced with anxieties over those really big components of life.
Ironically, this absence of real or perceived social and economic consequences is exactly what makes this kind of activity valuable to developing and maintaining a beginner’s mind.
In that all-too-brief course, we learned where the various controls on the bike were and how they functioned. We learned how to operate the clutch and how to operate the gear selector. We learned about the brakes and where we should be looking while riding. And we started to learn how to put all of these things together while riding. By the end of two hours, the instructors let us putt around in first-gear on the college’s Honda Titan 150 bikes. Riding at less than ten kilometers per hour was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my adult life.
And for me, it was enough to lead to buying that five-fifty Maxim and to signing up for the weekend-long learner course that was designed to help turn beginners like me into competent (if not proficient) street-legal riders. I am not a risk-taking thrill-seeker at heart and was very confident that there was no point in jumping on any motorcycle without expert guidance to help keep my middle-aged skin and bones intact. By the end of the second training course, I had done something that I hadn’t done since I was a kid – I learned the basics of a completely new physical skill.
But I had done another thing that was probably more important to me. I had re-set my ability to be a full and true beginner. I sold the motorcycle after a couple of years. I’d ridden around my county frequently enough to feel confident on the bike but without ever feeling like an expert. I was able to ride. I could now look at a motorcycle and say, “wouldn’t it be nice to experience riding a motorbike” and the second thought was “I know what that’s like” rather than “but that’s not something I’d ever actually do.” Learning to ride was an exciting, dangerous and extremely enriching personal experience. After a couple of seasons exploring Elgin County’s farm-and-Carolinian-forest-lined roads, I sold the bike. At the time, I had other priorities and felt that my curiosity about motorcycles had been satisfied and the ambition fulfilled. I got out without sustaining any injuries and that seemed to be enough at the time.
Being a beginner can be exhilarating but the best thing about being a beginner is that it lets you build or re-build yourself from the ground-up.
The process of building a part of myself from the ground-up helped me to be willing and able to build other parts of myself from the ground-up. In areas of myself where there was more consequence. It enabled me to bring one career to and end that I was satisfied with. And to be prepared to build a new one from the ground-up. It isn’t easy to set aside a couple of decades of progress up one career ladder to start-over down at the bottom rung. I found that I wanted all that previously climbing to matter, to be counted. But that other climbing didn’t really matter all that much. Learning to ride a motorcycle. Learning to be a beginner helped to make the state of mind adjustments I needed to get on with the present.
More recently, the whole world has undergone dramatic and unprecedented changes that has made almost every aspect of our lives uncertain and overshadowed with fears. For many people, myself included, the pandemic brought changes to the pace and presentation of our daily lives. Before the pandemic came, I was working in a large corporate centre alongside hundreds of others. I went about my day-to-day business as a fifty-plus-year-old member of my community in my own way. I shopped for groceries or other goods and services when and how I preferred to. I obtained medical services when needed then – and, unfortunately, this was with increasing frequency. Most things were reasonably convenient.
For me and for everyone else, in March of 2020, however, the reliable and predictable parts of our lives suddenly weren’t.
Health issues. Career Issues. We all had to wear masks and curtail our usual habits of daily living. Living arrangements that had been working just fine suddenly needed to change. Many people lost their jobs, temporarily or permanently. I was extremely fortunate that the pandemic resulted in being newly-established as a home-based worker doing the same work I had already been doing. But that relative good luck didn’t mean that the world and my daily-life wasn’t suddenly very different, very stressful and requiring some different approaches to life. I still needed to do my best to be healthy and happily content in my daily life.
So I decided to tackle another long-standing ambition. I decided to begin learning Tai Chi.
Deciding to learn Tai Chi during the social distancing social and regulatory environment of 2020 and 2021 have meant that the only viable sources of expert guidance were to be found via the internet. And there’s no shortage of potential experts to choose from. Frankly, I was quite pleased to learn in the seclusion of my own home. Compared to the possibility of
dropping a motorcycle or launching myself into some unforgiving obstacle amid a group of peers, waving my limbs around with a group of strangers in a group class is the more intimidating idea. At least motorcycle gear provides a degree of anonymity. Self-conscious to a state of mortification? Strap a motorcycle helmet (preferably with a tinted visor) to your head. Problem solved.
Which brings up the matter of “gear”. With a motorcycle, the requisite gear includes protective equipment from head to toe. Helmet. Gloves. Sturdy Leather jacket and boots. Etcetera. Riding without the gear is dumb. The idea is to reduce one’s risk and vulnerability during an inherently vulnerable and dangerous activity. Meanwhile, with Tai Chi, I seem to get away with loose, light clothing such as a pair of baggy sweat pants and a t-shirt plus a pair of moccasins or socks. My Tai Chi gear isn’t designed to provide protection in the event of an eighty kilometer per hour crash. It is designed to allow movement and flexibility. My motorcycle gear hid and protected my frail forty plus year old body. My tai chi gear un-inhibits and connects me with my my even more frail fifty year old body.
Thanks to the generosity of Youtube’s community of content providers and potential Tai Chi experts I was able to find a few teachers who were offering free, reasonably detailed and easy to follow instructions on how to get started with the one hundred and eight movements contained within the martial art known as Tai Chi.
One hundred and eight movements!
It seems to be an established perception that the physics of motorcycling is like life itself -a complex and imperfectly understood thing. I’m not certain if anyone has taken the trouble to catalog the number of critical motions and combinations of motions that are required for riding. A dozen? Two dozen? Whatever the exact number may be – it surely pales compared to Tai Chi’s one hundred and eight.
After a little more than a year of practicing Tai Chi, I am still an utter beginner. I rely on about a dozen movements that I enjoy. I no longer feel a nagging, hurky-jerky impulse to correct myself or remind myself how to move. I still move far more quickly than I think that I should and I don’t quite feel that I’m able to extend my range of motion much over what I had twelve or fifteen months earlier. But I feel that I have taken control over my own process of learning.
Whether riding a motorcycle or learning to waggle my limbs in something that approaches a synchronized and intentional way, I am learning a new physical ability. Let’s not call it a skill yet. With the motorcycle, I was tremendously satisfied with the confidence and courage that I acquired as I learned. Learning something new, something with its own immediate risk but not with potentially dire life consequences, is a terrific way to relearn who you are physically, intellectually and emotionally. With Tai Chi, I am experiencing the same learning and self-connection.
There is a maxim that is recited in any number of training environments that goes something like… “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. While learning these activities, the good sense of the phrase emerges in different ways. With the bike, taking time to learn how to operate the clutch; how to smoothly change gears, how to be in control and attentive without being over-stimulated is a better done at slow speeds…and over time. With Tai Chi, learning to move slowly, how to be in control of my breathing and movements without over-stimulating is just as challenging.
I don’t regret deferring the experience of riding a motorcycle until I was in my mid-forties. I’d long out-grown any dangerously immature cravings for speed that I may have had as a younger person. And I now know that I needed the opportunity to step out of a state of mind that didn’t leave room for me to be an eager and joyful beginner. In a way, deferring the pleasure of riding until my forties and the pleasure of learning tai chi until my fifties have been much-needed opportunities to rearrange and enhance my sense of identity and my ability to cope with significant forces and events in my life over which I have little to no control.
Deciding to be a beginner is what has allowed a Zensylvania state of mind to exist.
Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a series of essay examinations (also available as an audio podcast) of Robert Pirsig’s famous 1974 book.
Original Essay
See Also
References & Notes
External Links
1966 Honda Super Hawk.
Original Essay
I’m no longer completely certain when or how I first became aware of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceBy Robert Pirsig. I do know that it was never on the reading list for any high-school or university courses that I took during my academic days in the 1980’s and early 90’s. It seems probable that I came across references to it in some of the car and motorcycle magazines that I seemed to be continuously buying during early decades of my life. It is my certain memory that my first attempt to read the book occurred in that same period. The first copy that I picked-up had a pink cover with the wrench-as-lotus flower logo perched atop the book’s title which was printed in a bold black font. I recall that as clearly as I recall that I abandoned the book part-way through as a waste of time and energy. I had no use for whatever the guy was on about. It took perhaps another six to ten years to pass before I was ready to try it a second time.
What I want to do now is try to share some of the reasons that I enjoy the book so much as well as the ways that I think Zen and the Art is a much more sophisticated and accomplished book than it is often given credit for. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book “of Zen”, “of philosophy” and “of motorcycling”. And in this essay, I’m going to start right at the beginning with the title to demonstrate some of my points.
Over the course of several readings since March 2014, the date of my second attempt to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it has become one of my favorite books. It has also been the launching-point for several personally-meaningful literary and philosophical inquiries. Before we go any further, let’s give the book its complete title and deal with the matter of repeating that title. The full title is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. In this essay and other places, I expect to contract that rather large mouthful toZAMM. That contraction is not my creation but it is extremely convenient. Upon occasion. I may also say simply Zen and the Art.
Why do I enjoy this book so much? Perhaps, its arrival in my attention on that second go-round was ideally timed to my needs and to issues that seemed to be playing a big part in my life. Some might argue that I was just looking for the opportunity to indulge in some faux intellectualization and lifestyle-posing. I’m not going to quibble over the extent that such an argument might true. Let the critics have their fun. That’s the pose that they prefer to strike.
Instead, after considerable self-examination, I’m going to say that I think I enjoy Zen and the Artbecause of how accomplished the book is in its design and intent. And also how effective and evocative the book’s metaphors are. As a piece of literature, Zen and the Art seems capable of being linked to and celebrated with many of the English language’s literary classics. But I’m already leaping far ahead of where I really want to be. It’s also pretty fun to explore motorcycles, zen and philosophy.
Given how frequently the book has been ignored, rejected and scorned by critics of various types; and, given the significant amount of time that has passed since its publication – an admission of affection for the book could be considered something of a sidelining move. Does anybody take the book seriously? Almost certainly not in academia. I am aware of only a tiny handful of efforts to address Pirsig’s work by serious academics in the decades since it was first published. Most of those have focussed on the philosophical content and nature of the book rather than any literary merits it may have. When I say this, I’m referring almost wholly to Dr. Anthony McWatt’s academic thesis work and to Ronald DiSanto and Thomas J. Steele’sGuidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorycle Maintenance and the online MOQ.org pages devoted to developing Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Pirsig is just about as completely ignored by serious academic philosophy departments as he is by serious literature departments. I really have no idea whether serious Zen scholars or practitioners may be similarly disinterested.
And yet, there’s never seemed to be a shortage of people who are interested in the book and its ideas. Search the internet and there seems to be a substantial and growing number of articles, reviews, videos and indeed podcasts which engage with the book, the author and the philosophy.
That Pirsig’s philosophy is largely ignored or dismissed was not only anticipated by Pirsig, he covered it within the book. In fact, academic scorn (and, by the way, scorn for academia) are central considerations of Zen And The Art (ZAMM), so maybe this is all entirely appropriate to my state of affairs in deciding to devote so much time to it.
So what is ZAMM? There are plenty of resources that provide a brief plot summary or philosophical synopsis of the book. These resources will advise that ZAMM is a semi-fictional narrative about a cross-country father/son motorcycle vacation; that it is a critique of the human condition contemporary to the second half of the twentieth century. Some will suggest that it is a cultural exploration and a work of philosophy. Not manyof these sources will will suggest that it is actually a book of Zen nor that it is an attempt by a serious intellectual to develop an original metaphysical philosophy. Fewer still will mention that ZAMM is a critique of both Eastern and European Philosophy and Academia. Almost nobody talks about ZAMM as a critique of religion – particularly messianic religion. I haven’t seen anyone call ZAMM an epic monster story or supernatural thriller. It is rarely, if ever, declared a tightly-connected literary work. I would content that it is all of these things.
Many first-time readers find the book frustrating, challenging, annoying, offensive, dated or boring and the narrator to be frequently un-appealing. Perspectives of this type are likely to increase as time passes and we get further from the times in which Pirsig lived.
While many first time readers (myself included) are alienated by the book, many others have found it uniquely compelling. Millions of copies of the book have been sold since it was first published in 1974. Brand new copies may still be purchased at most bookstores on any day you may visit. More than forty -five years later. Pirsig and others will claim that there isn’t another book of philosophy that has been published in larger numbers. I’m not sure that this claim entirely holds-up. It seems to be a kind of superlative that suits marketing purposes. But then again, I haven’t yet seen anybody demonstrate the claim to be false.
Another thing that causes first-time readers concern (particularly reader in the twenty-first century) is the relative un-likeability of the book’s central character. ZAMM’s central character seems to be Robert Pirsig. The book seems to be a personal memoir of a particular motorcycle journey that Pirsig took with his son, Chris. Simultaneously it appears to be a memoir of Pirsig’s intellectual development over the first couple of decades of his adult life. But those perspectives may only be partially true. There’s every reason to believe its a bad idea to over-simplify what the book is.
It is probably more accurate to say that Pirsig used ZAMM to float a mythologized version of himself at different stages of live as a depiction of some ideas the wanted to showcase. I think of the book this way: Robert Pirsig was the actual author who cast an un-named narrator to tell the story of a mythologized earlier self. The mythologized earlier self is named Phaedrus – a name borrowed from the writings of Plato.
It should not go un-noticed or un-mentioned that the story’s narrator is never directly named. It is the narrator who takes pains to identify the earlier self as “Phaedrus”. It seems entirely likely that Pirsig was demonstrating some very Zen-consistent notions about the concept of “self” while also signaling that the narrator is not quite Robert Pirsig.
The narrator that conveys the story via a series of what he calls Chautauqua meditations. In contemporary internet-based culture, you can find any number of people that post “video blogs” (VLOGs) of their own Chautauqua’s as they ride their motorcycles.
The narrator remains un-named throughout the story and may be considered to be significantly closer to non-existence. It is an interesting entrée to Pirsig’s approach to consider what Pirsig may have been attempting to convey in this method of presenting and portraying identity. Which bring us back to the relative unlike-ability of the central character. It seems extremely unlikely that Pirsig, the real life author, was unaware of how off-putting the character is. Let’s pack that away for another day’s deeper consideration – but I want to suggest that there’s more to it than a lack of self-awareness on Pirsig’s part; let me also suggest that when a reader gets stuck on whether they “like’ a book’s narrator or for that matter, the earlier Phaedrus persona, this may result in a failure to proceed to a demonstrated point about the nature of persona. Perhaps also a demonstrated point about whether likability is a valid pre-requisite to insight or wisdom.
Despite anything nay-sayers may argue about ZAMM, it is an extraordinarily subtle and integrated creation from cover to cover. I would argue that it is too subtle to fully catch everything the book has to offer the first time through. At least, that has been my experience.
So let us begin before the beginning of the story with the title and author’s note of the book. It seems to me that, before the Chautauqua’s have even begun, this small collection of words provides a kind of lens or filter for approaching the book.
One of the classic images of Robert Pirsig, one of the classic ZAMM book covers and his Honda CB77 Super Hawk
The full title isZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Immediately, the juxtaposition of two different and disconnected themes is set out. These are “Zen’ on the one side and “motorcycle maintenance” on the other. But it is important to note that Pirsig did not put the two terms in opposition to each other. He joined them by using the word “and”. It is Zen AND the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In needs to be clear that Pirsig’s use of the word “and” is not solely a bit of connect grammar. Certainly the word “and” is a necessary linguistic feature. It is a conjunction which helps us to understand that “Zen” is somehow distinct from “The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
But the word “and” is also a logical term. An “AND gate” is a basic digital logic feature which allows that a specific output is only allowed when multiple specific inputs are provided. In other words, Pirsig’s title allows placement of “Zen” as one input and “the art of motorcycle maintenance” as another at the front end of logic gate. The two are brought together for an output. They are synthesized.
By viewing the words, “Zen AND the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in mathematical terms, there is an interesting and elegant demonstration of the kind of inquiry that takes place in the book. A central theme of Zen philosophy is a rejection of dualism. It is reasonable in Zen to argue that “Zen” and “The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” are not separate and distinct from each other. Viewing the title as an “AND gate”, as a synthesis makes this point explicitly. You just have to be familiar with the language and be open to reconsidering your perspective.
This type of layered language carries on throughout the book. It is fundamental to Pirsig’s philosophical and rhetorical approach. For readers who are not comfortable with juggling a variety of conceptual notions while following a narrative process, this ought to be taken as a warning that things may be more complex than they may initially seem.
But let’s take a step back from logic gates and get back to those two initial themes.
In 19874, when the book was published, Zen was still a very new and mysterious topic in North America. Consider that Bruce Lee, who did so much to familiarize North America with Kung Fu and some basic Eastern Philosophy concepts had died in 1973. Similarly the book Zen Mind Beginners Mind, a collection of teachings of Shunryu Suzuki had been published in 1970. Zen Mind Beginners Mind is one of the earliest books published about Zen for the American market and is considered a classic.
In using “zen” in the title of his book, Pirsig was, essentially, an avant garde writer who was citing trends and information that was, too his initial audience, still foreign and rather mysterious.
Even now, some (rounded) fifty years later, mentioning Zen is marginally less exotic to a great many people on the American continents. In North America, perhaps 1% of the population may be identified as Buddhist and certainly not all of those are “Zen” Buddhists. While Zen may now be more familiar to Western culture than it was in the middle of the last century, if you mention Zen to most people, several stereotypical connotations may come up in conversation. Nature and peaceful, relaxed environments, such as Zen gardens. Perhaps minimalist home design, meditation and strangely paradoxical puzzle-stories. Contemplation. Further conversation may yield the question “Is Zen a religion or a practice?” (Yes.) And the Zen enthusiast? Maybe someone wearing pajamas or a robe sitting in meditation or telling paradox puzzle-stories with gnomish humour. Pristine, clean and sipping green tea.
As we’ve already noted, juxtaposed to the Zen is motorcycle maintenance. Chemicals, wrenches, oil & grease, noisy machines, stinky exhaust. A motorcyclist? OK let’s re-phrase that….a “biker”? Wild. Unpredictable. Violent. The most likely interaction scenario probably involves a fear of physical or verbal assault. Unkempt and barbarian-like, a biker will probably be described as wearing some combination of denim and leather; the biker, so the stereotype will go, guzzles beer (at least). While they may not be real any longer, these conceptions do need to be noted. Not long ago, one of North American televisions most popular shows exploited exactly these stereotypes.
The commonplace ideas of Zen and the commonplace ideas of motorcycles seem to be opposites to each other. They don’t seem to be the kind of things that one would require as simultaneous inputs to an “AND gate” philosophy.
But then again, Pirsig took pains to show off his Honda CB77 Super Hawk in publicity photos, even though the specific model of his bike wasn’t actually mentioned in the story. It’s a nice-looking bike. The CB77 was manufactured from 1961 through to 1967 with a 305cc parallel twin engine which produced just under thirty horsepower. Pirsig’s was all chrome and black and he considered it a highway machine. It was, compared to other Japanese bikes of the day, relatively small. Today, the bike would be considered rather small. The choice of a chrome and black bike Japanese bike doesn’t seem like an uncalculated decision.
In 1966 Honda had a popular advertising campaign built around the slogan “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda”. This wasn’t the veterans of World War II who established the biker image with Harley Davidsons and Indians. This was a shiny little Japanese bike. A friendly and engaging bike. To extend the point I’m trying to make in literary terms, Robert Pirsig’s generation and ethos should not b confused with Jack Kerouac and the bohemian hedonism of the beat generation…though they may have, metaphorically speaking, travelled some similar roads. At the time the book was presented, Pirsig was a 40-something year old father with a job and short vacation. He presents himself as a former academic and a middle-aged man with the challenges and pre-occupations that this implies. He presents himself as an educated everyman.
It also doesn’t hurt that his bike, like his Zen comes from Japan.
This difference is as essential to placing Pirsig in North American literation as is Pirsig’s AND gate juxtapositioning of seemingly separate things. To read ZAMM, you must be prepared to attempt to reconcile and synthesize concepts which you may have previously considered mutually exclusive. The book is anti-dogmatic, in its own way. Already in the title, there is a lesson in its philosophy. The title warns that the reader should be thinking about and through a Zen-like perspective. But also about and through a modern scientific, technological perspective.
Alexander Langland’s Craeft: Not the only book to follow ZAMM in investigation of the relationship of the individual to technology in modern society.
However, even in the simple matter of the book ‘s title Pirsig is still not quite done. Right in the middle of the title, Pirsig used the term “art” to foreshadow investigation of concepts from European Philosophy. Particularly Plato and Aristotle. He uses the word “art” as we might currently use the word “craft”. Art in this title and the book is not a throw-away word. It is a functioning and significant philosophical term. It establishes that the book will consider the matter of craftsmanship and aesthetics in a philosophical and practical context.
Considering Pirsig’s use of the word “art” brings to mind Alexander Langlands’ book Craeft: On How Traditional Crafts Are About More than Just Making, which explores several related concepts and reaches many similar conclusions. For that matter, ZAMM also came decades before a number of other books which either follow it’s formula or several of its themes. To list a few: RIchard Sennet’s The Craftsman, Matthew Crawford‘s Shop Class as Soul Craft, Alexander Langlands Craeft, Aaron James Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into the Meaning of Life, John Kaag’s Hiking with Neitzche: On Becoming Who You Are.
But we’re not done exploring the layers of the book’s title.
The subtitle is “An Inquiry into Values”. This subtitle’s use of the term “Inquiry” establishes ZAMM as a philosophical exploration while “values” sets the book within a particular area of philosophy dealing with ethics and aesthetics. So what is ZAMM? According to the title, it is a philosophical inquiry into values.
This is an important observation of the inclusion of the explanatory subtitle. Pirsig and the publishers did not set the book as a work of narrative fiction. Nor as an adventure travel book. Nor as a memoir. It was to be taken primarily as a work of philosophy.
With all of this happening on title page, the first thing one finds inside the book is an Author’s Note:
Author’s Note: What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.
As with the title page, every sentence and phrase here requires attention that can help the diligent reader to understand and follow the book. I contend that this author’s note is a kind of Zen koan (those paradoxical puzzles) for the reader.
A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality – Arguably, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism is the setting for Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality”
That this passage is called the “author’s note” hints at one of the challenging features of the book: identity. Over the course of ZAMM, the main character of the book is never explicitly named or referenced as “Robert Pirsig”. In most discussions of ZAMM, there is reference to “the narrator” and to “Pheadrus”. Through the course of the book, Phaedrus is revealed as younger and different version of the narrator. Generally, it is presumed that Robert Pirsig (the author) is both the narrator and Phaedrus. However, with the book’s inherent emphasis of separate identities, it cannot be assumed that the characters in the book are genuine depictions of Robert Pirsig and his friends and family.
The author’s note states that the events of the book are based on actual occurrences. So we can be reasonably confident that Robert Pirsig took a motorcycle trip with his son, Chris and a few friends. Indeed there are readily-available photographs of the trips as well as external interviews of people upon-whom characters in the book are based. Interestingly and tellingly, the term “actual occurrences” is strikingly similar to Alfred North Whitehead’s term“actual entities” from a book that is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and dense books of twentieth-centurty European philosophy, Process and Reality. Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” (what resulted in at least one recognized philosophical offshoot called Process Theology) is deeply embedded in Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Pirsig mentions Whitehead in ZAMM, though the reference is brief and may not at first be noted as a significant clue to Pirsig’s philosophy.
Another great classic ZAMM cover, you can almost miss “An Inquiry into Values”.
The author’s note states that the events have been altered for rhetorical purposes, but are basically true. Pirsig spends considerable time defending rhetoric in ZAMM. In reading ZAMM, it isn’t unreasonable to consider it a work of rhetorical argument. That this term is included in the author’s note is another hint of things to expect in the book.
Pirsig then ends by commenting that the book is not to be confused with an explanation of Zen or Motorcycles. Pirsig is playing a bit of a game here. ZAMM does not spend much time in explaining or analyze these things. Instead ZAMM demonstrates them in action. If meditation is Buddhism in practice, Pirsig presents motorcycling as an alternate practical form of Zen.
When discussing ZAMM it is difficult to avoid talking about one part of the book without also talking about other parts, as I have been trying to do. But I will break with my attempt to mention that Pirsig has used the idea of a “motorcycle” as a metaphor of the self. So when you read just about any passage that talks about motorcycles, you need to be simultaneously thinking about how those concepts relate to the self. So “the art of motorcycle maintenance” may be literally true about motorcycles but Pirsig is also exploring how the concepts and realities are also true of “the art of self maintenance.” With that bit of information, the title, “Zen and the Art of Self Care” might seem to be a more direct way to convey the subject. But that wouldn’t really have been in the spirit of Zen…and it wouldn’t have been as iconic as a title. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is memorable. Zen and the art of Self Care is forgettable.
Pirsig positioned ZAMM such that it should not be considered as fiction nor as non-fiction. As occurs frequently in ZAMM, Pirsig demonstrates a rejection of dualism in preference to synthesis. The book is neither fiction nor is it non-fiction. Like any mythology, it is both. He placed the book as a book of philosophy that depicts, rather than explains its philosophy.
At the beginning of this article, I argued that ZAMM is a book “of philosophy” and “of Zen”. I used that phrasing to indicate that the book is a product of those traditions and perspective. It is an outcome. It is a rhetorical depiction. It is an effect of those causes. It is the other side of the “AND gate”.
Even if I am correct about my interpretations of ZAMM as a book, none of that gives any good reason to take it seriously some fifty years after its publication. Certainly there has been much change in society that could displace any relevance that it might have had. But I think that ZAMM still has something to teach about our current times, even if those teachings are not always wholly correct or reliable. But then, isn’t that reasonably true about any philosophy or perspective that you care to mention? Primarily, I think the world needs much more ” AND gate”, synthesis-oriented thinking. I think Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality and its connection to Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism have insights that are needed by the world today. And, though it may not be very factual about them…the bits about Zen and motorcycles are fun too.
In many ways, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a much better book than many of its academic and non-academic critics, whether literary or philosophic give it credit for. If you haven’t read it – and if anything in this brief introduction tweaks your interest, maybe you should give it a try. Maybe you’ll find some unexpected insights that help you to live the kind of life you want to live and be the kind of person you want to be.
See Also
Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 2
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This essay was originally drafted as a reaction to Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s 2008 book What Makes You Not a Buddhist. I did not enjoy the book the first time I read it. Probably, I wanted it to be something other than it is. Now, a few years later, I appreciate it significantly more by taking an altered perspective. While I still don’t agree with or support what seem to be Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s motives in publishing the book nor some of his insights, the author does a reasonably good job of explaining the the “four seals” for a non-Buddhist to consider. There may be better and/or more authoritative books on Buddhism, but it is a place to start.
Khyentse suggests a number of ways that a person may not be a Buddhist but the main theme of the book is that affirmation of the “four seals” is the fundamental and essential gatekeeper. According to Khyentse, if you don’t endorse the fundamental doctrine, that makes you not a Buddhist.
“Four Seals” is another way of saying “four central doctrine” or “four dogmatic beliefs”. So what are they?
All compounded things are impermanent.
All emotions are pain.
All things have not inherent existence.
Nirvana is beyond concepts
Khyentse spends 125 pages explaining these doctrines and how they might apply to various aspects of contemporary human experience. As with my inquiry into the Lee Family Philosophy, this is not a book-review and I do not intend to reproduce the book in encapsulated form. This is an inquiry into the “four seals”.
Herman Hesse
Early in the book Khyentse suggests that these doctrine should be taken in a literal way rather than a metaphorical or mystical way. If one accepts that the authoritative definition of a Buddhist is a person who believes (affirms, acknowledges, supports or whatever term one might prefer) these four doctrine on a literal level, then I am certainly not a Buddhist. Mind you, there’s no particular reason to expect me to be a Buddhist. I didn’t grow up in a Buddhist culture or home. I’ve had relatively limited exposure to Buddhist practices (diverse as they certainly are). Even my literary and philosophical investigation of Buddhist-oriented literature is extremely narrow. I don’t even have an active ambition to prove myself to be any particular “ist”. But I have an active and respectful interest in Buddhist perspectives which has occupied a fractional part of my attention over several decades. Initially this interest began as a literary interest stimulated by Robert Pirsig’s books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila) on the one hand and Herman Hesse’s books ( Siddharta, Magister Ludi, Der Steppenwolf, etc) on the other. Perhaps it also comes of growing up during the 1970’s.
So the four seals.
What makes me not a Buddhist (per Khyentse) is that I can’t give all four of the doctrine a full and complete literal pass. That is to say, if we are to set metaphorical, mystical, rhetorical and other referential “truth perspectives” aside, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to affirm these doctrine. Two of the doctrine don’t provide reliable information while a third requires some grudging qualification of the terminology.
Terminoloy is a significant factor. There’s no certainty that the specific phrasing of the “seals” that Khyentse’s book presents is adequate to whatever may be intended of the concepts. Certainly, one may wonder, as with any text, whether the particular words, as rendered in one’s contemporary language contain the same meanings as in some other language and/or time. What if its just a bad translation? What if Khyentse’s definition of “emotion” or “pain” is different than mine? All philosophy must, tediously, begin with a definition of terms. However, given the assertion that the doctrine be taken literally, it must be assumed that some significant care was taken in word choice when the book was published.
Tentatively, however, moving forward with a generous (and perhaps mistaken) assumption that the language is precise, accurate, authoritative and may be taken literally, let’s have a look.
All Compounded Things Are Impermanent
This doctrine is, in my opinion, the most concrete and supportable of the four truths. The two sides of the equation that one has to deal with are “compounded things” and “impermanent”. It may be a quirk of my own that I find the most certainty in a doctrine which focuses on physics. Here we have space, matter, processes and time.
A.N. Whitehead
In Process and Reality, A.N. Whitehead used the term “actual entity” as a rough equivalent to “all compounded things”. Physics, specifically particle physics, shows how our reality of matter, space and process are composed of interactions and combinations of particles. This is “compounding”. Particle and interaction. Matter and process. Two particles combine or repel and there is a result. The result is a compound thing (entity). That compound thing may then further compound to result in an even more compound thing. Particle. Atom. Element. Molecule. Organism. Consciousness. Society.
Whitehead called his philosophy a “Philosophy of Organism”. This seems to be a philosophy of the doctrine that “all compounded things are impermanent” where the term “organism” may be roughly equated to “compounded things.”
The second factor in the term is more easily dealt with. Time. Duration. Buddhism, Whitehead and Physics all seem to be on the same page. Things that exist (compounded things, actual entities) are not timeless. They are not infinite. They have a quality of duration. They are “of time”. I would further suggest that time is equally “of compound things”. They are inseparable and inherent qualities of the same thing.
Score: If the “four seals” are considered each to be of equal value, I would rank my acceptance of “all compounded things are impermanent”, as so far explored, to be a full twenty-five out of twenty-five points.
All Emotions are Pain
This doctrine is, in my opinion, one that is least defensible as a literal statement. The terms “emotion” and “pain”, while occupying adjacent conceptual space to one another, do not necessarily refer to the same things.
Emotions include happiness, sadness, anger and other familiar concepts, but emotion also includes more complicated concepts such as curiosity. It seems simple to reconcile some of the more familiar emotions with pain, but there are a variety of emotional concepts which cannot readily be reduced to “pain”.
So what is “pain”. Physically pain is a kind of negatively experienced sensory input suggesting harm or potential harm to the organism within-which the pain is experienced. It is a neurological warning signal recommending aversive action. There are a variety of ways that the term “pain” is extended from this neurological-based definition to include other negative experiences. Whether it is appropriate and correct to lump all negatively-perceived experiences as pain or not may well be “to the point” of this doctrine. I tend to think this becomes an over-simplification.
For purposes of this doctrine, it also seems to be an over-simplification to suggest that all emotions are a warning of coming “pain”. It is an unreasonable extension. “Sooner or later you’ll suffer” or even the ability to extrapolate future suffering from the limited duration of pleasure is not the same thing.
It would seem to be more precise and accurate to articulate the doctrine as “all emotions eventually result in pain”, “all emotions lead to suffering” or even “ all emotional states should be perceived as a reminder of coming pain and suffering”. But that is not the doctrine, as typically rendered.
Note that I have used the term “suffering” but the doctrine does not. Pain and suffering are adjacent but separate concepts. Suffering is an emotion. To suggest that all emotions lead to the emotion of suffering is not as indefensible as all emotions are pain.
Score: “All emotions are pain” can’t earn a full twenty five points. There’s too much that requires qualification and/or re-definition of the concepts. That being said, some of these qualifications provide a valuable window to view human existence and experience. Provisional as any scoring might be, I’ll give this maxim ten out of twenty-five.
All Things Have No Inherent Existence
This doctrine seems to be a corollary of “All compounded things are impermanent”, or at least dealing with the same physics. The two factors are “things” and “inherent existence”.
Monism: one substance or two?
This statement of reality breaks down, as many things do, at the subatomic level. There is a suggestion here of monism – that everything is really a single substance. It is this single originating substance that has been compounded in different ways to result in the appearance of diverse substances. This hinges on explaining what “things” means.
A.N. Whitehead used the term “entity” and “actual entity”. If “all things” means there is nothing that isn’t compounded, there is the problem of how to categorize the pre-compounded monist substance. If the definition of “thing” excludes this substance, then that is a convenient way to validate this doctrine. Whitehead describes a primordial entity as an allowance.
Similarly, if existence is taken to mean “truly is”, it is paradoxical, at best, to argue for a monism where something both does exist and does not exist. Buddhist philosophy isn’t uncomfortable with paradox.
Score: as with the previous maxim, a problem I have with “All things have no inherent existence” is the absolute scale of the statement. I am able to full-on accept “all compounded things are impermanent” based on the qualification that the statement covers only “compounded things“. Still, this doctrine is largely, if not wholly, a corollary of the first. Fifteen points out of twenty-five.
Nirvana is Beyond Concepts
This is also a difficult doctrine as a statement of reality. “Nirvana” is a concept. It could be argued that “nirvana is a concept of that which is beyond concepts”. Khyentse’s urging that the doctrine be taken literally runs afoul of a doctrine which refutes that it can be taken literally.
Here it is almost impossible not toreference Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Philosophicus argument that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If one describes “nirvana” as a state of being, it is within conceptualization. And it also becomes fair game to examine. But all of mysticism hinges on some element being placed outside of understanding or comprehension.
Score: Buddhism, Zen and a variety of mystical fields often derive their attraction from their paradoxical-seeming principles. A suggestion that “human language is not adequate” should , in most cases, be modified to say “human language is not yet adequate”. That any given speaker or listener isn’t competent to explain at a certain point in time, does not mean there will never be competent speakers and listeners. Additionally, I don’t think this version of the doctrine is well-phrased by what may be intended by the doctrine. “Nirvana is beyond concepts” ranks lower than other versions of this doctrine that I’ve seen. If the doctrine were “Nirvana needs to be experienced, not explained”, then it would rank much more highly with me. As currently expressed, five out of twenty five.
Provisional Summary
Clearly, I am not an expert in Buddhist philosophy nor of the religions and practices that have been built upon it. I doubt that it is common practice to rank one’s relation to the doctrine as a percentage-score. But I like to quantify things, including the degree to which I am likely to integrate ideas into my thinking. That I agree with about fifty-five percent of these doctrine is interesting information.
It is also interesting to observe that if the “four seals” are taken to be the absolute foundation upon-which all the rest of reality is built, then there remains a great deal to be reconciled in the provided “literal statements”. I do not assert that these doctrine are “wrong” nor that those who may uphold them to be accurate literal statements of fact are in error. However, as statements of literal truth (fact), I find that they do not convince me beyond a generously weighted 55%. As predicted by the book title, I am not a Buddhist.
However, as cultural, metaphorical, rhetorical, mystical or referential statements, these doctrine are interesting and offer a particular kind of window to introspection – not to exclude the fact that some Buddhist practices upon which these doctrine are founded (eg. meditation) are extremely beneficial and worth exploration quite apart from the doctrine.
None of my reluctance to fully affirm the four seals as accurate, factual statements takes away from these statements as extremely helpful in an investigation of reality and existence. Quite the opposite – I recommend serious consideration of these assertions as a useful metaphysical starting point.
Engaging with ideas and ideals that may be different from your own may be a thing that needs to be done over the course of several discrete and separate exposures. In this way, it is possible to see how an idea different than you’re own may have applications that you can appreciate and understand.
As a happy coincidence to my decision to practice of Tai Chi, I stumbled-upon Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee at my local public library. The book clearly acts as much as a bridge to Shannon Lee’s podcast as it does the Lee family’s legacy and philosophy. Naturally, all of these things are interconnected. This broader connectedness led me to title this essay as An inquiry into the Lee Family Philosophy (LFP).
It is the rare person that does not have at least a passing awareness of Bruce Lee, the martial artist and cultural icon. Notwithstanding a general awareness of Bruce Lee and his family, I have completed no other study of Bruce Lee or his ideas as they may have been originally documented or expressed. Shannon Lee’s book serves, therefore, as the initial and primary conduit to whatever I may learn of (or through) Bruce Lee and the LFP.
This outlook is not intended as neither a slight to Bruce Lee nor a particular compliment to Shannon Lee. Clearly the book identifies Bruce Lee as the primary source and inspiration of its themes and ideas. Equally clearly, Shannon Lee is the book’s author and the current curator of the ideas it contains. It is an acknowledgement of their several roles and contributions to suggest that the book is a king of collaboration between these two Lee family members. Collaborated may seem an odd term to use given that Shannon Lee did not have the opportunity to discuss these ideas with a father who died in 1973. It is however, the best term to convey a unique intimacy of ideas as they have eddied through a family over the course of multiple generations.I feel justified in this approach given that Shannon Lee wrote in the introduction of the book, “It might surprise you that I am not that precious about the material. I’m not a Bruce Lee purest about anything other than his energy. I do not practice an academic exactitude with his words. Where I have found it useful to illustrate what I want to say, I have combined quotes and edited quotes to make them more digestible.” (pg. 7) More on this a bit later, but I am pleased to follow a similarly non-academic position.
As mentioned, I decided to read Be Water, My Friend as an extension of a personal objective to learn and practice Tai Chi. Bruce Lee is famous for having practiced and trained in Kung Fug as well as for developing his own martial arts system, Jeet Kune Do (JKD). Be Water, My Friend, is not a book which explicitly promotes JKD, nor is it a deeply detailed book about the martial arts. For me this is fortunate, as I am almost wholly devoid of interest in physical combat. Excepting where LFP utilizes physical combat as an operative metaphor, there seems to be little reason to spend much effort to maintain JKD as an irreplaceable element of LFP. The book does argue that there is Importance in having a physical manifestation of one’s philosophy. For Bruce Lee, that was JKD. For others , something else may be more appropriate.
The book would comfortably be considered a “self-help” genre book. It is about a particular perspective of life and living. Shannon Lee seems to have ambitions that Be Water, My Friend be considered a book of philosophy. Such an ambition may or may not be a reasonable desire, depending upon what a person considers “philosophy”. That is a genuine consideration. There are professional philosophers who reject popular and non-academic approaches. However, if one considers the attributed writing of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius (the Stoics) to be books of philosophy, then there’s good reason to label Shannon Lee’s book the same way.
LFP concepts, ideas and expressions are frequently similar to ideas I have encountered or investigated elsewhere, even if not (yet) documented on this website. What Shannon Lee has done in Be Water, My Friend is to collect and re-present her family’s interpretation of these ideas that anyone may find with a certain degree of investigation. It is a curated and customized collection of wisdom.
I do not intend to try to reproduce every salient point of Shannon Lee’s book nor will I pretend to present all that there may be within the Lee Family Philosophy. This isn’t a recitation of someone else’s ideas nor is this a book review. This essay is an interpretation of what one person has found in the LFP and how it connects with related notions and inquiries. These are footnotes.
The LFP Foundational Maxim
Following the handful of nearly-blank title pages that sits at the beginning of most books, Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee begins with an exhortation, presumably written by (but not expressly attributed to) Bruce Lee. The exhortation functions as a foundational maxim of the Lee Family Philosophy:
“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. You put it into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. Now water can flow, or it can crash! Be water, my friend.”
As printed in the book, the above exhortation appears as lines of a poem might. In this essay, I have reformatted the exhortation as a paragraph because it seems to suit the exhortation better than the format I found in the boo
Does the form of this small passage matter? It does and it doesn’t.
It may be reasonable for the passage to be considered a poem given that it uses imagery-laden language and metaphor to convey a particular message or meaning. The words also seem to have been chosen with some care to be evocative and memorable. There is a rhythm. However the reach me like a prose paragraph. As a poem, I would not be satisfied.
The passage feels like a technical instruction. There is a linearity to the communication that is not as playful and exploratory as a poem ought to be. I appreciate the explanation that water may take on the shapes of the containers it is poured into. I consider the ways that this applies to my practice of Tai Chi or my way of experiencing and living.
However, it does not matter how the words are conveyed on paper. The words are only a stand-in for a view of reality that is being described. The poetry or prose doesn’t matter…it’s an understanding of the need for fluidity that is important. As will be explored later, the words are just a finger pointing to the moon. To get caught up in the gesture of the hand misses the point.
This difference of possible presentations – poetry versus prose helps to feature a difference between Tai Chi and other martial arts. I would say that Tai Chi is a poetry of martial arts where Jeet Kune Do, karate and many others are the practical prose of martial arts.
Tai Chi is a formal system and collection of movements that serve as a metaphor of combat; many other martial arts are combat.
Be Water
Clearly, the central Lee metaphor is to “be water”. The introductory exhortation is a call to the audience to personify the flexibility of water as it responds to its environment. The depictions of water within various vessels is to suggest that people should adapt to the circumstances within which they may find themselves. It is an exhortation against inflexibility and rigidity.
In Philosophy for Polar Explorers, Erling Kagge re-tells what he calls a “Classic Zen Buddhist pilgrim’s tale” about a wrestler named O-Nami. You may currently find a version of the story on“The Liar” blog. The tale describes a wrestler who visits a Zen teacher where he learns to meditate and overcome personal obstacles. O-nami, which means “Great Waves” was given a similar message to “be waves”. The similarity of LFP’s “Be Water” and O-Nami’s “be waves” is to establish that each is a particular version of a metaphor within a larger archetype.
Empty Your Mind
The entreaty to ”empty your mind”, is a familiar refrain from Buddhism, meditation and other methods or philosophies. It is a requirement to adopt an attitude of openness, or a beginner’s mind. The concept that “emptying” of one’s mind of pre-conceived notions, judgments and expectations is requisite to progress is not unique to LFP. Nor exclusive to Asian philosophies. Certainly Rene Descartes required this at the beginning of Meditations on First Philosophy.
“Some years ago I was struck by how many false things I had believed, and by how doubtful was the structure of beliefs that I had based on them. I realized that if I wanted to establish anything in the sciences that was stable and likely to last, I needed—just once in my life—to demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations.“
There is a similar requirement for receptivity, though expressed in very different terms, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria:
“it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith“
Daoism, Zen, Buddhism
LFP is clearly linked to Daoist Philosophy through Bruce Lee’s teacher, Yip Man. This connection is clearly demonstrated in the exhortation to “be whole”. This is a reference to ideas of the completeness of yin and yang.
The second chapter of Be Water, My friend is largely devoted to the requirement to empty one’s mind. There seems also to be a strong connection to Zen concepts. Shannon Lee also states that her father followed (Jiddu?) Krishnamurti.
On page 43, Lee writes “There is only ever the right here and the right now.” As a stand-alone statement, I orient this as LFP but heavily drawn from Daoism and Buddhism.
LFP as a Process Philosophy
According to Bruce Lee, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” (pg. 8). This position recalls various perspectives of reality and even tends to suggest the notion of being as “becoming”. In this, I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’sProcess and Reality. A thorough review of that book is currently beyond the scope of these brief notes. For now, I will merely observe that “life is a process” is not inconsistent with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.
In Be Water, My Friend, LFP asserts that a physical practice, or implementation, is essential to any philosophy of living. As a martial artist, Bruce Lee’s physical implementation was Jeet Kune Do; for Robert Pirsig, the practice of riding a motorcycle was the manifestation; for another person, it may be painting, sitting in Zazen, practicing Tai Chi or some other process. The reality is the physical practice, the process.
Flow
In the book and on the podcast, Shannon Lee spends considerable time on “flow”. In my investigations of this concept, I found psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’sFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which he seems to have been promoting in an academic environment since the 1970s. Certainly contemporary to Bruce Lee’s practical approach to the same subject matter. With the rather rigorous investigations of flow as part of physical, and by this I may actually emphasize athletic, experience, it is no surprise that the concept is found in LFP, which emphasizes a need for a physical enactment of the philosophy.
LFP as Metaphorical Expression of Life
The configuration of the LFP within a set of metaphors is not novel nor are its individual precepts entirely unique. That really isn’t the point. The LFP is a particular tributary of larger bodies of thought.
A personal philosophy (and one may almost interchangeably use the term “personal mythology“) functions, for the individual adherent, as a lake fed by the tributaries of concurrent and previous iterations of the philosophy. In turn, the personal philosophy may function as an estuary to a larger sea of cultural mythologies and ultimately the global oceans of universal human mythologies. This reminds me of an essay by Umberto Eco titled The Liquid Society. Eco had drawn the term, Liquid Society, from Zygmont Bauman as a depiction of contemporary society. The essay is work reading.
Shannon Lee argues that “martial arts is a perfect metaphor for life. There are few disciplines where the stakes are so personal and so high as in a fight…..the threat of physical harm.” (pg. 11). While I do not fully agree with this position, it is a compelling argument. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig uses motorcycling as a metaphor for living – emphasizing motorcycling’s inherent dangers as the symbols of life as inherently dangerous. Similarly, Jules Evans published Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations in 2012. There is something odd about this trend to view life and living as inherently dangerous, or in the case of LFP as inherently a situation of competition and conflict.
When Shannon Lee suggests that martial arts is a perfect metaphor for life, or when Robert Pirsig does the same with the motorcycle as a metaphor of the person, they are offering a lens through which they believe insights may be gained.
Lee’s depiction of the martial artist as an ”artist of movement, expressing yourself powerfully in the immediate, unfolding present with absolute freedom and certainty” is romantic and, perhaps exciting but nothing about this passage suggests that competition and conflict is necessary. It could as readily refer to a figure skater or a Tai Chi practitioner.
Translating philosophy from ideas to action.Avatars not metaphors.
There is, however, a parallel communication, and that is the LFP as avatar of Bruce and Shannon Lee and “the metaphysics of quality” as avatar of Robert Pirsig. These philosophies “are” Bruce Lee and Robert Pirsig. When Shannon Lee states that she is a purist of her father’s energy, she is talking about the avatar of Bruce Lee. The philosophies are informational artifacts of the person. They remain in the place of the people after they are gone. In a note that Pirsig wrote about his books Lila and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he described a “pattern” of people after they had died – in his case, he was describing his reactions to his son’s death. The pattern he described is that avatar that I describe and the “energy” that Shannon Lee is a purist of.
Certainly other kinds of avatars can and do exist. Some people leave a great many avatars, others none or almost none. Any artifact may be an avatar. In the case of Bruce Lee, his films are an avatar. How he moved and acted on the screen, embodying his martial arts is translation of his ideas into action. Robert Pirsig’s Honda CB77 Superhawk is an avatar. It’s functioning as a machine is a translation of his ideas into action. Any crafted thing, and here I include written documents and poetry (especially poetry), is a translation of ideas into action.
ProvisionalSummary
The LFP contains several deeply-embedded cultural sources, but attempts to set itself apart. Shannon Lee shares a story of Bruce Lee’s early attempts to share and teach a modified version of Wing Chun Kung Fu. He wanted to shake off what he called a “Classical Mess” to include his own innovations. In this sense, Bruce Lee was a modernist.
Bruce Lee brought Asian martial arts to North America but also sought to innovate within those traditions. Lee studied philosophy at the University of Washington to help him to “infuse the spirit of philosophy into martial arts.” Lee had a drive to connect the physical practice of his life. The process of his life with a coherent philosophy. Shannon Lee helps to communicate that drive (albeit, using terminology from Czikmentmihalyi) when she wrote “This state of constant independent inquiry that leads to new discoveries will be the means by which we uncover our potential and thus find our flow”
For LFP, the literal translation of Kung Fu as a skill achieved through hard work and discipline connects to another exhortation to “be yourself”. The specific metaphor….motorycles, JKD, Tai Chi, or whatever it may be is not the essential thing. “Man the living creature , the creating individual, is always more important than the established style or system.”
Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind 