I Was So Much Older Then

A book by an unknown author became very popular in 1974, the year I graduated high school and traveled all over the United States on Greyhound buses. It is still in print in 2022, and clearly one of the great publishing successes ever. You have probably read this book, a touchstone of my generation, but until now, I have not. At the urging of a great friend, who graduated in 1975, I have started to read it. I mentioned it to other friends, and they agreed it had influenced them, sometimes profoundly. This post is based on my thoughts as I consider for the first time, at the age of 65, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig.

The title of this post is part of the refrain from the Bob Dylan song, My Back Pages, which Dylan released in 1964. I feel I am young enough now to read this book with an open spirit and get from it what I can value, while not becoming too distracted by elements I may be offended by or disagree with. I’m not sure why I resisted reading it when it was popular. Maybe I saw some irony in reading a book about some kind of nonconformity when everyone was reading it. Also, I have never been especially interested in motorcycles, and only slightly interested in Zen. It seemed like mysticism akin to transcendental meditation and Hare Krishna.

The Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition contains a mild spoiler for those rare people who, like me, had not already read the book. It led me to be a little more suspicious of the narrator voice. He is unnamed but presumably represents the author somewhat directly. They both take their son Chris on a motorcycle trips, and both have a lot to say about values.

There was little in the popular culture of the early 1970s about plant-based eating. Still, I was surprised that a book that purports to be about Zen, at least a little, should not mention body-spirit integrity as well as mind-spirit integrity. I think of Zen as including a Buddhist vegetarianism or macrobiotic diet, which is associated with Zen Buddhism and dates back to the 1930s. When specific foods are mentioned in ZMM, they are steaks, hamburgers, bacon and eggs, hotcakes with eggs and sausage, chocolate malteds, and chili con carne. There are a lot of cigarettes and no vegetables at all. It’s not a big deal. I’m not projecting my values back in time. I was seventeen in 1974, and that kind of road-trip food would have sounded great to me, except for the smoking. But it wouldn’t have sounded like Zen.

Here is a little publishing context. The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise was published in 1979. It describes a program for improving health that severely reduced consumption of animal foods, but did not rule them out entirely. I acquired a copy around 2010. Its system feels overly complex, but it certainly broke ground in the results it gave.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, was published in 1970, and was a publishing phenomenon presaging that of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It covers some of the same ground in a reportorial mode. Toffler and Pirsig were both welders in their early years.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, is a favorite book of mine. It was published in 1979. Among many subjects, it also discourses on Zen and Zen koans. Both books make much of the Zen koan in which a yes-or-no question is answered with the word “mu,” which means to unask the question. I wonder if Hofstadter was influenced by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. GEB inspired my lifelong interest in artificial intelligence and its relation to consciousness.

In addition to the above mentioned books, in the 1970s and 1980s I was reading the essays and other writings of Ayn Rand. It was through her filter that I learned about Aristotle, whom she revered, and Kant, whom she despised. Ayn Rand called her school of philosophy Objectivism, and claimed to derive it from a single axiom, “Existence Exists.” In numerous books of collected essays, she developed it into a body of thought that is clearer and more consistent than those of most other philosophers I have encountered. In spite of this, many people interpret her differently than I do. Some of her modern adherents espouse beliefs that I am sure she would have found repugnant. I suppose I should mention that her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, were publishing phenomena in their day, were highly influential and remain in print, albeit misunderstood and often disparaged.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance explores the concept of “visions of reality”: groove (subjective) vs. rational (objective). Classic mode is analytic and deals with underlying form, while romantic mode is about immediate appearance. In contrast to this, Rand considered herself Romantic, selectively depicting what should be, as contrasted with Naturalist, depicting what is.

Things are not their description. Reality may not match a useful mathematical model beyond a certain point. Scientific method is the formalization of rationality. I note that a lot of modern physicists seem to have forgotten that their models are based on convenient assumptions, to make the math tractable. They confuse the models with reality. When economists do this, markets crash and other disasters ensue.

There is a lot about scientific method, and how the formation of hypotheses is mysterious, infinite, and generated by doing science. There is no mention of Karl Popper’s (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published in English in 1959) main point, that experiments can falsify a theory but can never confirm one. This gives Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the feel of a science fiction book, in which if the reader just accepts one artistically justified assumption (like faster-than-light travel, or the technology to transfer consciousness into a machine), an exciting story full of newly provoked ideas arises naturally. In quite a twist, it’s philosophy of science, not science fiction. Pirsig asserts, “…the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.” This is the artfully concealed assumption. The goal of the scientific method is not to establish proven knowledge, as Popper explains. It is to refine the best current theories continually by eliminating what is known to be false. The conflict that drives Phaedrus mad, apparently, is contrived for the purpose of this book. Except that Pirsig claims it is essentially fact, and the events described do seem to parallel his life. It’s entirely possible that at age 17, I would have just gone along for the ride, feeling this idea that science inherently contradicts itself to be a brilliant insight.

Lines quoted from Goethe foreshadow the death of the son. Ironically, that does not occur in the book, but came to pass years after publication, when Chris was murdered at age 22.

This book reads like the story of a motorcycle trip punctuated with undergraduate philosophy lectures, or perhaps the other way around. It has one great literary conceit, which is (spoiler alert) that the first-person narrator describes the experiences and philosophy of another character in the third person, but that person is the narrator earlier in his life, before a number of traumatic events.

We could draw many analogies between software debugging and Pirsig’s presentation of motorcycle maintenance. Both can at times be kinds of experimental science. The pull-quote on the back cover of my paperback is something I have said, in my own words, about bugs many times. “The solutions all are simple… after you’ve already arrived at them. But they’re only simple when you already know what they are.” I would go so far as to say that, having fixed a mysterious bug, it is often difficult even to describe it in a way that captures how mysterious it seemed to be at first.

Pirsig tries to convey his sense of the concept Quality. His sense of it is that it cannot be defined, but we all know it for ourselves. I don’t understand it. He uses it in different ways throughout the book, and some of them contradict others. And he seems to be aware of this and never really explains how he resolves it. Usually, Quality is a value judgment. Things like college essays and motorcycle repairs can have Quality, meaning they are good, or poor Quality, meaning they are inferior. But he also says Quality is Reality, or the source of Reality, and exists prior to any possible evaluation.

I don’t object to leaving Quality undefined, so long as it is used consistently. Popper states that definitions are not needed if we all agree we are talking about the same thing. Rand talks about “ostensive” definitions, in which one points and says, “I’m talking about that.” She also references “axiomatic concepts,” which one cannot even deny without invoking them. But one needs to be able to ask questions about this idea of Quality, until one is satisfied that one understands it.

Pirsig also rails against academic politics and other academic bullshit, but necessarily invokes a lot of philosophical jargon. He explains it, but an intimidated reader could think, “I don’t understand this, so it must be brilliant.” I’m just baffled by how all this could have happened. Pirsig is, or was, brilliant, but he let a philosophical conundrum force him into some truly horrific life events, including severe treatment for serious mental illness, loss of career, and divorce. He survived and reconciled with his son, but it all seems so avoidable.

I think Pirsig, Rand, and I might agree, if I could resurrect them and catch them in a good mood, that one makes the meaning of life for oneself. Let me throw in Martin Luther King, Jr. too, and add that it does not matter what pursuit one follows so much as matters the attitude one takes toward it, whether it be sweeping streets or grilling hamburgers. Care about the Quality of your work.

I will have to read the sequel, Lila, an Inquiry into Morals. I’ll get back to you on that.