I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, on April 15th.
And this was an amazing book. I clipped pages all through the book and then compiled my notes. I thought about writing an essay, but my time is too limited for that endeavor so I decided just to post my notes here, such as they are – a record for myself. I’m trying to log my books in an effort to retain memory of them in the future. I read so many books that sometimes I have difficulty recalling any of them. And that just disturbs me. 🙂
So for what it’s worth: Notes on the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (and it’s rather lengthy):
Pages 87-88
Regarding a system – founded upon such structural conceptual relationships (as in a motorcycle), where certain government and establishment institutions are concerned:
“They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.”
“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government [or repair of a motorcycle] because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system… is our present constructions of systematic thought itself … and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply product another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.”
[To attack a SYSTEM rather than the CAUSES that created the system; i.e., we need to change our systems of THOUGHT in order to make material changes that have any effect.]
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Page 102
Regarding science – “scientifically produced anti-science – CHAOS” –
“Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is — emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty.”
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Page 134
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
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Page 210
“…if the inevitable conclusions from a set of premises are absurd then it follows logically that at least one of the premises that produced them is absurd.”
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Pages 230 – 232
Re: Quality / the Tao, talking about –
“…a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational…. [and that the] … overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation [is what] creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century [and 21st?].”
Then he talks about the “unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified…. Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.” He goes on to say that it is well-established that “Art is high-quality endeavor.” Religion, he says needs to be dealt with later, but that for now it should be noted that “the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical.” As for Science, he says “the dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are ‘value free,’ that is, ‘quality free,’ has got to go. It’s the ‘value freedom’ that underlines the death-force effect…” that he’s referred to earlier on.
He then refers to someone I am curious about: “an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician and philosopher all in one“: Jules Henri Poincaré.
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Pages 255-256
“Value… is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. … Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived. One’s rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it… Reality isn’t static anymore. It’s not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It’s made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. …
… If you want to build a factory… or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work … have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward.” He mentions Harry Truman’s words: “We’ll just try them… and if they don’t work…why then we’ll just try something else. The reality of the American government isn’t static, he said, it’s dynamic. If we don’t like it we’ll get something better.”
“Some may argue that the underlying form of the American government is stuck, is incapable of change in response to Quality, but that argument is not to the point. The point is that the President and everyone else… agree that the government should change in response to Quality, even if it doesn’t.”
Then he talks about getting stuck – when your mind is empty of solutions. He says that in this case you may be much better off then when loaded with ideas. Basically, I think it is that when you get stuck and let go of it (for lack of a clue), your mind freely wheels around to come up with some solution that you would never have thought of earlier.
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Pages 262 & 263
Re: Quality – what we have here is a pretty obvious lack of “quality” which I find myself complaining about these days. He talks about…
“…an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive… just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children… You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. … Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
And how true is this now when everything we get is cheap crap made in China???
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Page 264
To continue…
“The answer is… that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. … It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by re- assimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.”
And perhaps some of this HAS changed as our awareness of things have changed in the last few decades. There is more attention paid these days to “aesthetics” than there was previously. But there is still a basic lack of quality and in most everything.
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Page 267
And here he describes how to create quality:
“… the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. …Peace of mind produced right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and … produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
… I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature… or with programs full of things for other people to do [which he says is starting at the end and presuming it as the beginning – end products of social quality]. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands…”
This is good – this is like that website where I met the guy and ordered T-shirts from him that say “Change yourself, change the world.” Some of us are figuring it out.
This part also reminded me of that book “FLOW” that I read. It is about the same thing.
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Pages 281 & 285
Here he talks about how we get into “value rigidity” – when we can only see things a certain way and so we’re stuck, unable to see anything else. You’ve got to slow down and just sort of live with things for awhile. And eventually your mind will open up and start to see things you hadn’t seen before and solutions start to come clear. I think this is kind of like when you decide to let it go and just “sleep on it” and then amazingly, the next morning you will have insights. We get so stuck on the way we view or perceive something and sometimes we just aren’t looking at things the right way. “Value Rigidity.”
Then he goes on to talk about how it is when we just get completely bored of something. It’s like you look at something so long you can’t see it anymore. So what you need to do is just STOP. Go do something else. Sleep. Come back later when you have your “gumption” back.
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Pages 288-289
Here he talks about “mu“ answers – when the answer is neither yes or no, but something else. Definition: a Japanese word alleged to mean “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions.” 无
And which, with his discussion of such, reminds me of what has become known about Quantum Mechanics and the idea that much of reality seems to depend on how we think about it. (Think “What the Bleep.”)
I truly believe that how we perceive something, and how we feel about it, affects the reality of what it is.
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Pages 325-326
At this point, he starts to talk about how things got to be the way they are in our society and our non-quality ways of thinking and doing. Going back to Aristotle, always concerned with naming and classifying things, trying to reduce everything to a ‘rational system of order’ –
“… a prototype for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things. Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles” and study “methods” and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries – the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.”
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Pages 340-345
He then goes back to the ancient Greeks. And what they were about was not duty, but ‘excellence’ – duty towards self and what can be compared to the Sanskrit word ‘dharma‘, which is defined as behaviors that are considered to be in accord that which makes life and universe possible; cosmic law and order; the right way of living. So before all of our thinking about mind and matter, about substance and form, there had been Quality. The Greek’s word for ‘excellence’ (that we define as ‘virtue’) is ‘aretê.’ The Wikipedia definition says “aretê in its basic sense, means “excellence of any kind.”
“Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency — or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, and efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.”
So, the bottom line here is that Quality came first and he now sees the…
“unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, [has] lost. [We have] built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth – but for this [we have] exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.”
And so-
“… forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are [our] primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations as ‘the system’.” And he talks about rhetoric. “Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row ‘readers,’ mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A’s while those who possess the real aretê sit silently in back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.
…And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: ‘What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren’t objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your min. Ha-ha, ha-ha.”
… and what they [the Ancients] said turned to dust… and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states — buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done…”
And all I can say is WOW. And I get it. I totally get it. This feels close to the bone with me and for my whole life. It is exactly why I have always had a hard time earning enough money. Because I haven’t been willing to sacrifice the Quality. And I never have known how to explain myself. Robert Pirsig does it well. 🙂