Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry into Values

Robert M. Pirsig, 1974

(September 2013)

One of things I find myself doing, as a result of blogging about every book I read, is picking out quotations I think I could use here. It’s not obsessive, but every so often something will jump out at me as illustrative, or just interesting, and I’ll put it in the final post. After about five pages of Zen… I noticed one. Then after a few more pages another presented itself, then after a few more pages another, and another, and another.

Quite a quotable book then, and definitely relevant to our (by which I mean my) areas of interest. But there are just too many of the damn things. It’s packed too tight to unwrap in a single blogpost and the connections to other stuff I think and have thought shoot out like a web spun by a spider on speed. So I’m not going to quote anything from the book at all. No. I’m going to quote Donald Rumsfeld instead.

“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.”

In 2003 the Plain English Campaign gave this their award for most baffling comment by a public figure. Now, I’m certainly no fan of Mr Rumsfeld – I think he’s undeniably been a force for ill in the world and I’d struggle to care if bad things happened to him – but calling this baffling is just unfair. This is actually a concise, lucid, and indeed useful summation of almost the entire fields of ontology and epistemology. The only thing missing is a consideration of unknown knowns; those things we know but don’t know we know.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Robert Pirsig’s attempt to get his head round both the unknown unknowns and, more importantly, those unknown knowns, through the invocation of Quality. I’m not convinced it all hangs together, but then I’m not convinced it matters all that much if it does or not. He’s trying, at least in one aspect of this book, to present a coherent and unified theory of being, so full marks for ambition. But it’s something that has taxed the finest minds since the dawn of civilization and it’s no surprise that this too falls a little short.

The real value of this book is not, necessarily, in its ability to present a watertight theory of everything, but in its ability to make you think about its component parts (the motorcycle metaphor is very apt in this respect). Every chapter contains two or three ideas that vibrate your web of ideas so strongly that you’ve no choice but to race out from the centre to see what manner of fly you might have caught.

Yeah, the motorcycle metaphor is better, isn’t it? Let’s just put it like this: this book’s value perhaps lies less in the ideas it actually contains, and more in the ideas it forces you to consider for yourself.

That said, I’m not sure (again – frankly I could write that at the start of every paragraph) about the overarching frame story either. It’s clearly allegorical, and it’s clearly meant to act as more than just a more traditional narrative device to provide an emotional hook for those of us lacking the intellectual fortitude to wade through the more densely philosophical stuff. And yet this edition contains an introduction by the author written for the book’s 25^th anniversary in which he spoilers his own sodding book. Ding ding! The narrator is unreliable! Ding ding! Pheadrus is the real ‘hero’! Ding ding! Nobody understands me.

Slightly hollow complaint that, coming as it does from someone who used to teach rhetoric. Coming as it does from the creator of a narrator who is, in all fairness and over an extended period of time, something of a prick to his obviously alienated adolescent son. Phaedrus doesn’t come out much better, either, dragging his family hither and yon in pursuit of ever finer whetstones on which to grind his own philosophical axe.

See what I mean about creating an emotional hook for us dummies at the back? And in truth I don’t think we’re really meant to sympathise with either of the narrator’s two personalities. They’re both flawed but, crucially, they’re both also and obviously meant as more than just enabling devices for the harder stuff, and so the reader’s reaction to them matters. Why bother explaining/giving away the ending otherwise?

I’m probably dwelling on this aspect of the book because it’s the easiest to grasp, at least so soon after reading. Everything else will take a while to swill around and will come dribbling out in its customary manner as and when; that’s just how my mind works, unfortunately. But this is one of those books which keeps the parts ticking over and in good working order, so I should offer a tip of the hat to both Chris and Will for prompting me to look at it. Cheers guys, very useful mental maintenance work done here. It’s shit in-flight reading material though…