In this fictionalized account of a real two-week motorcycle trip that Robert Pirsig took with his son Christopher and two friends, Pirsig explores a number of philosophical themes through informal observations that he calls “Chautauquas.”
At the start of the story Pirsig sets up a conflict between two mindsets, the Romantic and the Classical. The romantic mindset is emotional and expressive. The classical mindset is analytical and practical.
Pirsig goes to great lengths to show how the Classical mindset is superior to the Romantic. When you are climbing the Rocky Mountains on a fully loaded Honda CB77 and your engine starts losing power, the Romantic mindset will do you no good. Instead you need to analyze the situation, realize that the lack of oxygen at the higher elevation is starving the engine, and you need to install new jets in the carburetors.
But this sets Pirsig up for a dramatic conflict with his earlier self, a self that had been wiped out by shock treatments. This self, whom he calls “Phaedrus”, taught a class in rhetoric and discovered that quality in a student’s writing couldn’t be determined by analysis. It could, however, be felt.
This set up the possibility that Quality exists in a different reality than the one we experience every day. Something like the real world outside of Plato’s cave. One cannot get at the essence of Quality with a Classical approach.
The rest of the book is Pirsig seeking a way to reconcile the gulf between the Classical and the Romantic, a quest that eventually drove him mad and had him institutionalized.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
Also on Wild Rye
“Just fixin'” is the Mechanic’s Way of Buddha from page 303
