I really liked the beginning of this book, but got lost in the weeds towards the end. I expected this book to be an exploration of Buddhism for an American audience, but it turned out that the author had his own philosophical system to promote. It's funny. Read this passage from early in the book (page 7):
In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
Maybe Pirsig really believed he was embarking on an exploration of “what is best” with this book because it is ostensibly an exploration of the concept of quality. However, there is a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand at work here; the book actually contains a proposal for a new metaphysical framework centered around an undefinable thing called “Quality”, which could just as easily have been called “God”, “Arete” or anything else. I get the impression that the author (and his self-insert protagonist, Phaedrus) believe this metaphysics of quality represents a new contribution to philosophy, and a significant one. I wasn’t compelled by Phaedrus’ battle against academia to exalt his theory of Quality. In my view, the protagonist’s self-seriousness and ego were the cause of his mental health struggles throughout the book, but the narrative wants to convince the reader it’s because he suffers under the weight of this perfect revelation that nobody else seems to understand. For a book that uses zen in its title, this is ironic.
Still, I think the idea of a non-dual quality, inhering in the relationship between subject and object, belonging to neither, and preceding intellectual conceptualisation, is useful. And honestly I enjoyed this book, despite its flaws. It has some great passages. The writing is fun, and I like travel stories. The perspective shared on the anti-technological movement, the chapter on gumption traps, the discussion of Jules Henri Poincaré and Greek philosophy and many more parts made me very glad I read this book. The author’s philosophical agenda is a distraction from what is actually compelling in this book. If he had done what he said he would do in the beginning and stuck to deepening established channels of thought using the story of a motorcycle trip across America, I think the book would have been better off.
Some favourite passages
On value rigidity:
Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go.[…]The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It’s dualistically called a ‘discovery’ because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone’s awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.
pg. 293
On the physical results of ideas
Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It’s the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that’s fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.
pg. 90
On respecting technology
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
pg. 17
On the scientific method
A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature. The TV scientist who mutters sadly, ‘The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,’ is suffering mainly from a bad scriptwriter. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.
pg. 99