Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values

Rating:
Summary: A Readable and Enchanting Novel Invoking Philosophical Ideas
Review: A Japanese biologist wrote about this book in a Japanese magazine as
follows: Many years ago when she was studying in England and going to
buy a motorcycle, one of her colleagues recommended her to read this
book, but it was not really a book on motorcycle maintenance but a
book that taught philosophy in a simple manner. She liked this book
and read it repeatedly.

Reading this story and finding that the
twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this book was published in
paperback, I bought a copy and began to read it by expecting to learn
something about philosophy or the history of philosophy. To some
extent, this expectation made me read the book quickly in an effort to
get to possible chapters where the teaching of philosophy might be
fully given. Even without such a motivation, however, one could read
this book speedily, because the story magically enchants the reader
and because the style of Pirsig's writing is very readable even to the
non-native speaker of English who, like me, has read only a small
number of novels in English.

Surely, descriptions of classical
philosophies and contemporary philosophical problems are given in
parallel with the story of motorcycle traveling, I have found that
this is essentially a novel, which invokes ideas about the
reunification of art and technology and about the quality of life. The
great point of the book is that it can also be enjoyed as a book
on philosophy, though descriptions of ancient Greek philosophies in
later chapters are not very understandable. In the last chapters the
story of a relation between a father and his son reaches a moving
climax.


Rating:
Summary: An Exhilarating Ride Well Worth Taking!
Review: I first read this book in 1975. I particularly appreciated then the concrete illustrations used in the development of Pirsig's philosophy. However, I was not prepared at that time to follow the details of the logic used to develop his main point, namely, that in ancient Greece rationality had unfairly toppled mysticism as a valid source of knowledge.

I always intended to read the book again and finally last month I found an open week, bought a copy of the new 25th anniversary edition, and went at it. The text is unchanged in content but the print is larger and much easier to read than in my old paperback edition. The margins are wider and allow more annotations. It is well worth getting this Anniversary edition.

This time I got much deeper into Pirsig's main premise--the one noted above. Pirsig believes Quality to be the missing element in today's culture, but he says it must be kept undefined so that rationality will not be able to kill it again as it did thousands of years ago.

My major satisfaction from this novel still comes from the unusually perceptive and cleverly-wrought metaphors that Pirsig presents to advance his philosophical arguments. I have so many favorite ones it is difficult to choose among them. For instance, he labels the University as "Church of Reason," indicating it fanatical devotion to rationality at the expense of other values not approachable through rational means. No wonder professors of philosophy feel threatened. Rationality is their bread and butter!

Other illustrations: He compares the experience of looking out of a framed car window with the frameless view you get riding a motorcycle and uses this as an example of breaking down the subject/object boundary. He indicates that his objective is not to deal with "the 'news,' the silt of tomorrow" which accumulates when the river of culture bends, but to try to deepen the channels of "the best" that lies ahead along the river's future course. He likes to follow "an arrow that enlarges sideways in flight" rather then tracking its forward path in order to find "lateral truths" that point to falseness of axioms which prevent hitting the target. He points out that "institutions such as schools, churches, government, and political organizations of every sort all tend to direct thought for ends other than truth, namely, for the perpetuation of their own functions." I have often pondered this telling truth.

Ultimately, he finds Quality to be the uppermost element of the triad of truth--the creator of both subject and object, residing in the interface between the two. His comparison of Quality with the ancient text of the Tao is exhilarating!

The Quality of this novel is extraordinary for me. It exhibits many of the aspects of Quality in writing such as integrity, imagination, flux, continuity, suspense, insight, pathos, and allegory as it attempts to find the missing element in today's technology-dominated world. It is one of the five formative books in my life, and has a place on my "favorites" bookshelf next to Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and the poems and essays of D.H. Lawrence.

Rating:
Summary: ADD and the art of motorcycle maintenance
Review: Ugh. This book can't decide what it wants to be. Every time you get interested in a topic (and this book does contain some interesting topics from the travel narrative to some of the ideas expressed) it switches over to another topic before resolving anything. This is incredibly frustrating from the point of view of entertainment. Does this book want to be a novel and flow like one, or a middle-brow discussion of contemporary worldviews, or a amateur philosophy thesis? It suceeds only in being a very long and slow 400+ pages of several seperate books thrown together with minimal integration.