Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Part 1

• “But now in July…everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.”
• “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’”
• On the topic of the new faster-paced radio, tv, and movies, “Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.”
• “‘What’s new?’ is a broadening and eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow…’What is best?’…cuts deep rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.”
• “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose…and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfilment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”
• “What you see in the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs is not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes.”
• “I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then the physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”
  • When we’re unsatisfied with where we find ourselves, we blame our pain for the dissatisfaction so we can escape. We don’t blame the dissatisfaction itself, or where we find ourselves. If you can foster a healthy relationship with the here and now—where you find yourself—you’ll tolerate the pain.
• Talking about his old crusty riding gloves, “[They are] impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole things with gloves or with anything else.”
  • Utility isn’t everything.
• “He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are.”
• Human understanding can be divided into two kinds: classical and romantic. Classical sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. Romantic sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
• A romantic may see a blueprint as dull, just a list of names and lines and numbers. A classical may be fascinated, seeing that the lines and shapes and symbols represent a tremendous richness of underlying form
• Romantic is inspirational, imaginative, creative, and intuitive, not governed by immediate reason or intelligible laws; classical (economic, unemotional, straightforward) proceeds by reason and laws, dominated by fields of medicine, law, and science. Motorcycle riding is romantic; motorcycle maintenance is classic.
• Classical understanding’s purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known
• Classical understanding is what births the industrial death force. Overbearing and oppressive. Romantic, however, seems frivolous, pleasure-seeking, shallow, no substance. “Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society.”
  • Apollo versus Dionysus
• With a classical approach you can break down the motorcycle into parts and functions, describing “what” a motorcycle is, and the “how”, that is, how the “whats” come together and produce “it.”
• This classical breakdown reveals the following: 1) these understandings are subject-less. We care only about objects which are independent of any observer. 2) With no observer, these objects are value-free. Notions of “good” and “bad” are absent. 3) Objects depend on a knife, how we divide them up. “You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves.”
• “From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.”
• Then the mutated world of which we are conscious is further discriminated with the knife, dividing into this and that.
• We hold a pile of sand that looks uniform but can find differences and endlessly sort each grain by feature similarities. “Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.”
  • Reductionist versus holistic thought
• Talks of the necessity to unite these two modes of understanding without diminishing either, rejecting neither sand-sorting nor contemplation of unsorted sand. Instead, attention must be directed to the endless landscape from which the handful of sand is scooped.
• “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
  • Every revelation is the hiding of something else
• When something is killed, something else is created. This process of death-birth continuity is neither good nor bad, it just is.
• “This is the ghost of normal everyday assumption which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer.”
• “They must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.”

  Part 2

• “A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”
• “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.”
• Finding one’s way through systemic hierarchies and understanding them is through logic
• Logic can be inductive or deductive. Induction starts top down, observing some pattern and implying causality due to that pattern. Deduction is bottom up, looking at the hierarchy of facts and asking what they produce in a given situation. The scientific method is the interweaving of induction and deduction to further understanding of a system
• “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t led you into thinking you know something that you don’t actually know.”
• If a man conducts an elaborate gee-whiz science experiment but knows beforehand what the outcome will be, it is not science. It is an artistic rendition of what gives rise to scientific discovery, however without discovery—without learning—it is not science.
• The paradox of scientific truth: the lifespan of a scientific truth is inversely proportional to the amount of scientific activity surrounding that truth. More activity reveals a new truth, which reveals more ignorance, which reveals more truths, which brings us further from an unchanging, universal Truth—to instead a dynamic, chaotic series of perishable truths.
• “The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths…Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories, and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones…Science produces antiscience—chaos.”
• When raising this question to peers, he was met with dismissive disinterest, “the scientific method is valid, why question it?” And because he wasn’t a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, this just stopped him completely.
• “He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
  • Like the individual cells composing a multicellular organism
• “There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through [the high country of the mind], yet like the high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of travelling through it seem worthwhile.”
• “In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of the questions asked and the proposed answers.”
• All knowledge comes from sensory impressions, not the raw sensory data itself.
• “A priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.” When we blink, our sense data momentarily tells us the world disappeared, but a priori experience tells us the world is continuous and filters the data.
  • Embedded in our biological organisation is the memory of past spatial and temporal experience. Patterns of space and time are conserved by our body, and those conserved, perpetuated patterns (intuitions) paint how we come to understand the world
• When I look at a motorcycle from one angle, the sensory information of components and material tell me it’s a motorcycle, but if I look at it from another angle, the sensory data tells me they’re a motorcycle, but not necessarily the same motorcycle. What unifies these two views? What maintains this continuity? Intuition. History. Time and space.
• “…the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.”
• He calls the university the Church of Reason. Citizens who build a religious church and pay for it probably have in mind that they’re doing this for the community. However, a priest’s primary goal is to serve God, not his community. Normally there’s no conflict, but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister’s sermons and threaten reduction of funds. Like the priest, a professor’s primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth—not his community. Normally this goal does not diminish local citizenry, but occasionally conflict arises (as in the case of Socrates), where trustees and legislators who’ve contributed to the university take points of view in opposition to the professor’s lectures. They can then lean on administrators by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don’t say what they want to hear.
• Despite his lack in faith in scientific reason, he had a fanatic faith towards it. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one fanatically shouts that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow.” When we’re fanatically dedicated to religious or political faiths or dogmas or goals, it’s because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
• In doubt by whom? He’s in doubt, so he chases certainty. But some people seem so certain of their faith. Their fanaticism seems to be brought by the doubt of outsiders, not their own. It feels like a fanatical reaction to preserve a dogma, rather than a reaction that their dogma may not be true. Perhaps threats open a realization of doubt that we frantically want to close. But do we want to close the hole of doubt in others (their lack in faith), or ourselves (our lack in faith)?
• “It’s not technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that’s scary.”
  • An expanding interconnection that brings nodes farther apart. Work from home technology expands, reaches out. But it creates distance between coworkers. Scary. Bizarre. Isolating.
• “The beer and sun begin to toast my head like a marshmallow. Very nice.”
• “The glow of fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish…”
• “Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and [Art] works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bit and pieces presumed.”
  • Science breaks things up, emphasizing the parts, and assumes they connect. Further analysis need not be done on the continuity, because of course there’s continuity. Art emphasizes the connections, the continuity, and assumes the parts need no further analysis, because they’re just parts! The whole deserves the attention!
• “If you don’t have [serenity] when you start and maintain [your material object, e.g., bicycle] while you’re working, you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself…the material object…can’t be right or wrong…they don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you.”
• “Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is…but if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need peace of mind.”
• Art manifests in the bringing to order an infinitude of possibilities. Subject bleeds into object in this ordering. Object bleeds into subject. The subject has feelings that can distort the object, but the object can’t reciprocate…there’s an imbalance there.
• “Prints are of art and not art themselves.”
  • AI art will follow suit
• What is quality? What makes something better? Where does this sense of betterness come from?

  Part 3

• “Most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”
• College demands imitation and stifles originality. This imitation is sophisticated—the safest bet is to imitate the professor while trying to convince them you’re not imitating, carrying the essence of the instruction on your own. That got you A’s. Originality is less incentivized; carrying your own essence is risky and can get you an A or F
• Universities have a tendency to imitate education, “glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on.”
• “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow…But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.”
• The man who climbs the mountain for ego fulfillment is never in the here and now, and thus missteps, stumbles. His mind is forever elsewhere, distant. He rejects the here and now, and wants to be farther up trail, but when he arrives he will be just as unhappy because it (his goal) will be here.
• “When an ego-climber has an image of himself to protect he naturally lies to protect this image.”
• Does Quality lie in the object? Or is it subjective? Quality (goodness) isn’t measurable by scientific instruments, so if it rests in the object it can’t be detected. If it’s subjective, it can be whatever the subject wants it to be, yet most people can agree and point to Quality.
• The author argues that Quality doesn’t rest in relationship with solely object or subject. It can be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. Quality is not a thing, it is an event. Subject cannot exist without object since objects create a subject’s relationship with himself. Quality is the event where awareness of both subject and object is made possible.
• The Quality event causes both subject and object, a gravity that interlinks them and sparks awareness. Quality is not an effect of subject or object. It is the cause.
• “The silence allows you to do each thing right.”
• Romantic quality correlates with instantaneous impressions; classic quality with multiple considerations over time. Romantic quality is about the here and now; classic quality about the relation of the present thing to its past and future. A romantic might say, if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? A classic would consider the neglect of past or future as bad Quality; the bike may be working now, but how’s its oil level?
• “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”
• Technological hopelessness is caused by the lack of care—the absence of the perception of quality, both from technologists and anti technologists.
• “By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again”
• “Our structured reality is preselected in the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.”
• “And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change.”
• Quality leads us from what things are to what they do and why they do it, a melting of static division into continuous process.
• “Nature has a non-Euclidean geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.”
  • The sagging of straight lines, the soft weathering of once uniform paint, the sprouts of greenery from cracks in concrete.
• Technology is the making of things, which can’t be ugly in itself because the making of things can produce beautiful art. Actually, the Greek root of technology, techno, means art. In Ancient Greece, art and the making of things (manufacture) were inseparable
• “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 even told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style.”
• “When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working one, then one can be said to ‘care’ about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”
• “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.”
• Political programs are end products of social quality, built from social values that are built from individual values. We need to get the individual values right to make meaningful change in the right direction. “Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value.”
• The Greek word enthousiasmos means filled with theos, or God, or Quality.
• “To run a cycle with parts in it you’ve made yourself gives you a special feeling you can’t possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.”
  • When you can function clear-headed without the help of store-bought supplements. Or when you’ve cultivated a unique way of thought by studying material you’re drawn to, not that someone programs to you. When you’ve created and cared for the raw material that supports you, you feel more at home with yourself.
• “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 precious values…You must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible…If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts.”
• “Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you love, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it.”
• The South Indian monkey trap: a coconut filled with rice is chained to a stake. The coconut has an opening large enough for a hand but small enough to stop a fist. When a monkey tries to take a handful of rice, his fisted hand gets stuck, and villagers swarm him. He rigidly values the rice over his freedom, and this rigidity masks the facts made available to him. We hold on to certain facts, and in certain contexts we’d be wise to reevaluate and open ourselves to more perspectives.
• “If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality.”
• When we inflate the self, what we’re working on doesn’t see that inflation, it sees the real self. This leads to the inevitable reflection of our underwhelming self in our product, leading to discouragement and disappointment
• Science grows by “maybe” more than yes or no answers. Yes or no confirms hypotheses, maybe says the answer is beyond the hypotheses. “Maybe” inspires scientific enquiry in the first place!
• “You want to know how to make the perfect painting? It’s easy. Just make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”
• The drivers of cars, driving the maximum they can get away with, are trapped into thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. With this mindset, they never arrive.

  Part 4

• “The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it’s a good hurt. It’s real, not imaginary, and it’s here, absolutely, in my hand.”
• “Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.”
• “I have no resentment at [tourist attractions], just a feeling that it’s all unreal and the quality of the [attraction] is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something having Quality and the Quality tends to go away.”
• “Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are.”
  • Sure, men create myths and stories and rituals. But why do they create them? Quality guides our creations, sourcing our creative energy.
• “People who can’t stand Aristotle’s endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato’s soaring generalities. People who can’t stand the eternal loft idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.”
• “…Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians (those who try to persuade others towards something better) was a part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians (those who logically decompose things via analysis), were engage in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.”
• Nous in Greek or Latin means “mind”, or “intelligence.”
• “Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealist and materialists would say…He is a participant in the creation of all things.”
• ‘Virtue’, at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence…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, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself. - quote by Kitto