absolutely not

“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

Robert M. Pirsig’s brilliant 1974 novel about a father and son motorcycle ride across the west, from Minnesota to California is also a journey for the reader. We examine this “fictionalized autobiography” in terms of relationships, unreliable narrators, delusions, mental illness, and ultimately about trueness with one’s self.

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

This is also about quality and what that means. Pirsig’s meandering quest for quality, and / or Tau, or Buddhism, is central to his narrative and is a focus for his thoughts on truth.

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

The book explores the narrator’s relationship with his son, as well as his contacts with other people, but this is also about his reconciliation with his own past and how he can be the man he is now while understanding who he was and how he came to be where he is.

This is one of, if not the, best-selling philosophy books of all time and was a treasure, if not an easy book, to read.

“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”

*** 2025 reread -

A fascinating philosophy book with a good story mixed in.

This time around I noticed the personality of the author shining through and this was a better story than I realized. Before I thought of this mainly as a book of philosophy, and it is with long sections taken up with erudite philosophical musings, but the surface story of a father rediscovering himself has more depth and charm than I realized the first time I read it.

That said, it can be a dry book and while there are sections that demonstrate excellent writing, there are other parts that lagged badly and maybe this has not aged as well as I earlier thought.

Still a damn fine work and worth the time to explore or reread.

If, like Robert Pirsig and me, you've found on your rude awakening from the Sleep of Innocence down many a subtle corridor of life's nightmare "to an overwhelming conclusion," that living is not at all what it once seemed, this Incredible Handbook will be Required Reading for you.

I just can't put it any more simply!

But I’ll try again, by fleshing in some of the details… you see, Robert took his young son on a cross-country trek many years ago.

Heavily influenced by America’s restless Beat Generation, Robert was - of course - very mechanically-minded and practical, but he sensed deep down that Modern America is LOST.

And, as he and his son motored in their trek out West, Paul Simon was singing:

And a moon rose over an open field -
I'm lost, I said. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why -
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike -
They've ALL come to look for America!

So, in an important segue from his prized motorbike and its constantly watchful maintenance, he strives to arrive at the ROOT of his generation’s anxiety over our current drift into meaninglessness.

He delves into much fecund source material for his musings, ancient and modern, and then - as if we’re there in his head, watching his thoughts arise and vanish like so many clouds in the sky - it HITS him!

We have lost ALL CONCEPT OF TRUE VALUE!

Wow. So true.

But this one pivotal thought for him - as Auden said so wisely - “opens a lane to the Land of the Dead.”

Yes, dark thoughts indeed. And they will have severe repercussions for both him and his young son.

Writing this book, in fact, politely roto-tilled the marrow of his soul - and, as Auden this time more incautiously muttered (and later rescinded), will “harrow the House of The Dead."

And if these Undead Souls haunt you forever after reading it, don't blame those who warned you.

For your Quest for Peace will henceforth be like a wrestling match with an Angel, as with Jacob, onward to your long ever-afterwards disabled sojourn on our weary planet.

Fight or Flight - and we MUST choose to Fight.

For we must not be cowed, as Pirsig - alas! - seems to have been.

But WAS his Spirit in fact conquered?

No!

It was merely SLEEPING in its legacy to his son, who then musta vowed to NEVER rest until, Youthful Bodhisvatta that he then became, he had saved all beings from a similar confusion over life's meaning.

He was at that time studying Zen meditation at the SF Zen Centre.

You've GOT to bite off MUCH more of life than you can chew, Robert seems to have said to him in His brain.

And when you have chewed and digested it, Roar like a Lion -

As you gratefully await your own peaceful destiny, joining the running stream of humanity -

And then, if you truly Value your fellow sojourners only for themselves - in the Spirit of Love - you will be Freed At Last from Samsara’s Tinselly Valuelessness…

“Gone, gone, gone BEYOND,” as the great Sutra says - into pure Eternity.

I just re-read this book and HAD to annotate it because it sent my head swimming. I'd studied quite a lot of philosophy since I read it a year and a half ago and so the philosophies didn't go over my head this time.

First, I must say if you find the narrator off-putting, rest assured that the protagonist is NOT the narrator. The narrator is the nemesis who has eclipsed the protagonist; the story reveals their struggle. The introduction of my edition hints at this, but apparently some people haven't gotten that as I've read comments of several people complaining about the narrator.

Robert Pirsig’s genius in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is to insert classical forms of thought into the backdrop of a cross-country motorcycle trip. He piques our interest by waxing philosophical in an effort to get to the root of the ghost story haunting him. He succeeds in creating the quintessential philosophy book of the 20th Century.

It turns out that the motorcycle is a symbol of the soul.

A brief summary of Pirsig’s “chautauquas” follows, but bear in mind that this list is informational, whereas his book is spirited and transformational. (Chautauqua means “talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.” p. 15)

There are two ways of experiencing a motorcycle:
1.tRomantically—riding a cycle down a mountain road, invigorated by the wind rushing past
2.tClassically—familiarizing yourself with the working parts of the machine, developing a feel for how tight to secure the bolts.

Romantic experience is “in the moment.”

Classical experience connects the past to the future, allowing us to build on previous knowledge:
1.tSystems of Components and Functions—physical working parts which we come to know either:
a.tEmpirically—knowledge gained by the senses
b.ta priori—knowledge gained intuitively (known without prior experience)
2.tConcepts—Ideas with the potential to be realized (the thought precedes the creation of the physical object).
a.tInductive ideas start with observing specific examples and end with a general conclusion.
b.tDeductive ideas start with general knowledge used to predict specific observations.
Connecting the Romantic to the Classical is Quality. To care about something will increase its quality.

Pirsig creates an analogy comparing knowledge to a railroad train that is always going somewhere:
•tClassic Knowledge is the engine and the cars.
•tRomantic reality adds the dimension of time—it is the cutting edge of the experience, the moment in time.
•tTraditional knowledge is the body of classic knowledge plus the history of where the train has been.
•tQuality is the track—the “preintellectual reality” or “the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place” (p. 247). What carries the train forward is a sense of what is good. It is understood intuitively and enhanced by skill and experience.
•tIf your train gets stuck, understand two things:
otBeing stuck eventually produces real understanding as you look for the solution in your train of knowledge. (A classical experience)
otDon’t be afraid to stop and analyze—you can see in patterns not only the physical object but the idea or function of the object. Eventually you will be able to break through barriers.

Creative energy is “gumption” or enthusiasm (enthousiasmos means literally “filled with theos” or God—appropriate since God is the inspiration of creativity).
Gumption Traps (“An examination of affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks in the perception of Quality” p. 305) :
1.tExternal (Setbacks)
2.tInternal (Hangups)
a.tInability to learn new facts—slow down and decide if the things you thought were important are really important or if the things you thought were insignificant are more important than you thought.
b.tEgo (falsely inflated self-image)—let your work struggles teach you to be quiet and modest.
c.tAnxiety (opposite of Ego; you’re afraid you won’t get it right so you freeze up or don’t try)—“work out your anxieties on paper” (p. 315) Read about the topic, organize your thoughts on paper; remember even the best make plenty of mistakes.
d.tBoredom—take a break, rest, or clean out your space.
e.tImpatience (results from an “underestimation of the amount of time the job will take” p. 317)—allow yourself plenty of time to finish the job, break the job down into smaller goals.

Quality is understood in Western Culture as arête/excellence.
Quality is understood in Eastern Culture as dharma/”duty to self”.

Early cultures used Rhetoric to teach Quality in terms of virtue, but after some time the technique of rhetoric was corrupted by the Sophists as ethical relativism. (pp. 376-77) Socrates took issue with the Sophists and established dialogues—or the Dialectic (discussions through which the Truth can be arrived at). Excellence became subordinate to Truth. Rhetoric fell from its supreme position of Excellence (Quality) to teaching mannerisms and forms of writing and speaking.

Quality, Pirsig discovers, is "the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything." (p. 254)

I hated this book. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated it. I'm sad no stars is not actually a rating. This is my least favorite book ever. And I've done a lot of reading.

The problem is that it is written by some guy who apparently thinks he is God's gift to philosophy. And if you don't agree with him, well, you're clearly an idiot. This is not a constructive discussion about ideas, this is a presentation of why Pirsig is right, which, because this is a discussion on philosophy, is debatable. (Except, as far as Pirsig is concerned, it isn't.)

I actually kind of enjoyed the story about the main character's family, especially his son Chris. The problem is that the story is interrupted by many, many pages of what I only can describe as pretentious psychobabble. I can see how this book would be an enjoyable, ego-inflating journey for someone with the exact same views as Pirsig. How very nice for you. But if you are looking for a philosophical discussion with arguments beyond something like "I'm right because I said so," this isn't it.

Brilliant! Pirsig might be something of an American Montaigne, producing readable philosophy with a minimum of abtractions. That’s a gift. After undergoing electro-convulsive therapy 28 times, Pirsig, in this book, gives his formerly insane self a doppelgänger-like alter-ego, Phaedrus, and bravely tries to piece together that formerly insane self’s thought in order to learn from it. This alone is fascinating. At the same time Pirsig is reviewing aspects of eastern and western philosophical thought.

I need books that make philosophy comprehensible. All too often I find the great geniuses incoherent amid their heaped abstractions. Another recent philosophy-decrypting book I found helpful was Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, in which the author lays bare the foundations of phenomenology and existentialism. Another was Walter Kaufman’s Nietsche: Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist. But while those books are, in the first case, explications of two related schools of philosophy, and in the second, of a particular philosopher’s thought and how it was abused by fascists, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a forensic reconstruction of a philosophy which sent its author to the nut house.

In that respect alone, the book represents an astonishing act of bravery in the face of unimaginable suffering. Quality is explained as part of a trinity not equivalent to mind and matter, but anterior to it. Quality is the proto-reality that exists before our minds can hitch analogues to sensed perceptions. I didn’t quite understand it at first either. Probably because these were the arguments that led Phaedrus to 28 electro-convulsive therapies and a long hospitalization. He “...felt something let go” and was overwhelmed with a “whole new flood of philosophical associations.” He pulls out his copy of the Tao Te Ching and there it is, his idea of Quality, as revealed by the mystic Lao Tzu 2,400 years ago. Insanity.

But then slowly, under the patient questioning of the recovered post-treatment Pirsig, the argument begins to coalesce. We are then introduced to Jules Henri Poincaré and learn of the crisis in the exact sciences of his day. Poincaré goes on to discover the subjectivity of systems, his point of departure being Euclid’s troublesome Fifth Postulate. Poincaré determines that it is facts which are infinite and it is up to the human mind to select subliminal factual harmonies—the mathematicians’s beautiful proof, for example—which rises to consciousness seemingly unbidden in the form of eureka moments. Thereby, says Poincaré, are systems devised and they are legion. In coming to this conclusion, it turns out, Poincaré long ago built a back channel to the idea of Quality Phaedrus would develop.

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad mechanic, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. It’s long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are “observed.” I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn’t destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice. (p.288)

I have neglected to mention the alternative narrative with which all this woolgathering is contrasted—Moby-Dick-style—and that is the cross country motorcycle trip the author takes through Montana and Idaho and Oregon and California with his son, Chris. That storyline ties in with the philosophy in a subtle mutually supporting way that’s a joy to read.

I enjoyed the attack on Aristotle, whom I’ve always found unreadable. But how Pirsig can make sitting through doctoral seminars so riveting is something to be pondered. It helps, I suppose, if one's teachers are complete assholes, as they are here. The haymaker Phaedrus delivers to the glass jaw of the Great Books curriculum at the University of Chicago is enormous fun to read about. Phaedrus attends a course on rhetoric there that is—by Pirsig's later definition—insane. Pirsig claims that everything not on the metaphorical train of Quality is by definition insanity. That’s why he can’t leave the train, no one can. I look forward to reading this one again. A Great Book in itself perhaps. Recommended with alacrity.

OK, maybe I'm being a little too harsh. I actually enjoyed the idea of the cross-country motorcycle ride, the details about motorcycle mechanics, and especially the portrayal of the narrator's relationship with his son. The son was the best part of the whole book. Unfortunately, there wasn't much space for sonny, because dad was too busy advertising the author's brilliant philisophical insights. Even more unfortunately, the insights weren't brilliant, and consumed hundreds of tedious pages. It occured to me to wonder whether the author was trying to make the point that the narrator was a pompous idiot; however, the intent seemed to be for the reader to be blown away by the brilliance of the narrator's philosophical insights, and hence by the brilliance of the author who conceived of the narrator and the philosophical insights. I can't believe I made it through 380 pages of this.

Fuck! I hate this. I give up. I can't anymore. The last page I actually read was 217, so I didn't officially "finish" this book, but it will go into my finished pile. I need all the help I can get. My goal was 50 books this year, and Im 8 books behind. I will count this book as read no matter what you say.

You know when you start a roadtrip and everything is awesome and a breath of fresh air in the beginning, but then you're at each other's throats towards the middle? That's what this book was. It started off slow and boring. Like a lazy canoe trip through the Everglades. It was a nice change of pace from the bombastic stuff I was reading, but then you bash into a wall. The boring stuff is interlaced with more boring stuff. I know I sound like a monkey now. I know I sound uneducated as shit, but those philosophy lessons embedded into the narrative were soo boring. The book is a great example of the archethypical "journey story" that turns sucky. At first, you're jiving with everything, you get into some cool conversations, but after a few days, ... everyone stinks. Everyone is tired and have bags under their eyes. The vaginas smell like old tuna and the penises smell like rotting bacon (I made that up I never smelled crusty penis). Everything sucks. Thats what this booj turned into. Plus, the author is a douchebag. He's boring me. I'm supposed to believe he was formerly known as Phaedrus, and he thought himself into insanity on the quest of finding out the meaning of quality and rationality? Im not exaggerating that. Early in the book he describes how he got electro fucking shock therapy for this.

Really!! You fucking drove yourself literally insane thinking about that??? You really thought yourself into that black a hole? Fucking get a life! Who does that?

At that moment, my credibility for the author (who is thinly veiled as the protagonist in this stupid story) flew out the window. You have a kid dude!! Get it together. It doesn't help that he's such an asshole to that kid. All in the name of making him grow up to be a great man. Really? Fucking feed that kid, and dont make him climb a stupid mountain because of your own ridiculous ambition.

Maybe this book does a 180 degree turn in the final half and becomes really evocative AND entertaining, but I just dont care anymore. I hate giving books this low a rating. Its evidence that I wasted my time.

No more. There are too many awesome books out there I should spend my finite time on.

I'm well aware I'm probably going to send the cat among the pigeons here. One star, indeed. Just to show that I felt quite deceived after having read this cult book. I had expected so much, but instead it gave me the cold shoulder.
For starters, Pirsig's writing style is very rudimentary and dry. The final chapter for instance is the kind of writing you only expect from a college boy or girl. I must acknowledge that his technique of using a motorcyling journey to ease the heaviness of the philosophical parts, works quite well, but I haven't the slightest interest in motorcycles.

Now, as to the philosophy behind the book. Pirsig offers a critical view on the western way of coping with reality (the divide between object and subject, the rational method to dissect reality, etc). Nothing really new, here. Plato and Aristotle are his culprits and the Greek sofists (of whom we know practically nothing) are his heroes, which is a very strange reading of the classics. Pirsig (or better, the mysterious alter ego Phaedrus) introduces a third way of coping with reality, next to the classical and romantic way, by focussing on the notion of "Quality". Unfortunately, he does not succeed in making clear what he means by this. He refers to "excellence", "thoughtfulness", and "accuracy", all very ambiguous notions. Apparantly, he opens up to the eastern way of coping with reality. The word "Zen" in the title of the book seems to confirm that, but in reality, there's is only one short piece in the book, with a citation of Lao Tse.

The best element to substantiate my critical remarks, is to look at the way Pirsig in the novel relates to his own son. Throughout the whole journey the 11 year old Chris is sitting behind him on the motorcycle. But Pirsig treats him in a demeaning and disdaining way, really horrible, not quite the way you would expect from someone who values 'Quality' so much. That opened my eyes: Pirsig's view only relates to things, both concrete (motorcycles) and abstract (the universe, life, philosophy). Now, if there's one thing I've learned in my personal quest, it's that life isn't about knowledge (in the broad sense of the word), but about relating to other people, interacting, bonding, caring, listening, loving... That's the only thing that really counts. But I have the impression Mr. Pirsig remains blind to this essential aspect of life. Instead, we are offered a much too long introduction (500 pages) into the presumed unique philosophy of a certain Phaedrus (Pirsig's former, genial self, before his insanity period and electroshock-therapy), an at times arrogantly formulated quest, without any suspense. So, I'm puzzled why so many people admire this book. My bad?

In the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, author Robert M. Pirsig admits to a major and a minor error in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What's the minor mistake? Only the misnaming of the ostensible "hero" of the tale, thus rendering the character's supposed symbolism null. And the major mistake? Failure to give the reader a clear indication of just which character is speaking at the conclusion of the book. Only that. Merely that.

His confession also follows an author's note confessing to precious little accuracy about Zen Buddhism and even less useful information about motorcycles.

After all that, is is any wonder that I fail to grasp what the author presents as his obvious superiority as a thinker? He expects to be taken seriously as a philosopher? He thinks he has created an unassailable answer to Aristotle, a Unified Field Theory of the Mind, when he can't even get his character's name straight? Please.

A scene at the University of Chicago, in which the author breathlessly describes his own intellectual knockout punch to a comic foil of a professor (whose major crime was presuming to teach the already all-knowing author) reads like low comedy, and as painfully lacking in self-awareness as the author is, at least this portion of the book has a little zing. Most of the narrator's tedious exposition drags along like the 900-pound sloth it is.

The tale of the motorcycle trip, minimalist to begin with, lingers lovingly only on descriptions of toolkits and oil changes. The father-son interactions are limited to monosyllabic exchanges of uninformative dialogue. The protagonist is a self-absorbed asshole and his submerged, electroshocked personality is an even worse jackpot of a person.

Pirsig also fails in his choice of the word "quality" to signify the ineffable something that hangs over all existence like an unseen yet benevolent mist. For it becomes obvious early on in the interminable text that he means "high quality" or "top quality," and there are so many other, better words to convey this simple concept. Despite the author's pedantic insistence that his "quality" is no synonym for "goodness" or "God," scores of reviewers have no trouble equating the terms.

This book, surpassed in solipsistic wankage only by the works of Ayn Rand, enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1970s, the "Me Decade." How fitting that its Transcendental Narcissism captured the zeitgeist. I place blame for all the cultural and spiritual rot that followed in Reagan's 1980s at the motorcycle- and jack-booted feet of megalomaniacs like Pirsig and Rand.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of the impulse that makes an old man want to re-read a book read for the first time in adolescence. Maybe it's not so much the experience of the book that seeks to be recaptured but the experience of being young and reading a book with the same excitement of discovery, of sensing you've come across someone saying what you feel, but couldn't express, as well. I am happy to say that there are still many things I don't understand about this book now as then. The father-son relationship of the two motorcycle travelers seems more important now than it did then. The description of the landscape and how it complements the thoughts and moods of the travelers has acquired new significance. I understood a little bit better the "peace of mind" that precedes and is a part of the appreciation and the creation of Quality. I felt a deep connection to the "insanity" of one of the characters. I saw the book as more whole and less anti-reason and anti-establishment as I did when I was eighteen. But so much of what the book said about living with Quality still eludes my understanding even as I recognize its truth at some deep beyond-words level. There is more sadness too. There is a painfully honest portrayal of pretentiousness and a hardness-of-heart in the narrator, which is impossible not to recognize in the self of the reader. Back then it was easy to believe I could do better - not so much anymore. Still, there is some peace and maybe a little Quality in this realization as well.

Actually, I am listening to a free MP3 version of this book which was available through The Guardian newspaper web site until Feb. 5th.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is on my short list of the most influential books I've ever read. This is my third read and I am listening to an audio version this time. My wife picked it for the book club and since it's been twenty years since I read it, I am looking forward to it. An audio read is an interesting choice since Pirsig patterned this work after the Chautauqua, a old-time series of oral presentation designed to both educate and entertain.

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So I finished it today. How does it stand up after twenty years from my last reading and almost forty years from its first publication? Marvelously well, I think. Although I wonder how an younger audience would accept this work. ZATAOMM's popularity had a lot to do with its timing. Many of us were unimpressed by the American dream of material success yet disillusioned by the 60s hippie dream of "love, peace and flowers." Pirsig writes about finding and defining "quality". Yet to him, quality is a illusive entity not well defined by either the Romantic mind (the artistic) or the Classical mind (the scientific). The author's success in defining quality is only partially successful yet this partial success resonated with my generation.

But ZATAOMM is also a personal journey as Pirsig examines his own past in which he deals with his mental illness and a current journey in which he travels cross country on a motorcycle with his son who is developing similar mental issues. This is what turns this work into something besides a dry intellectual exercise. Pirsig expertly blends his thoughts, his philosophy, and his emotions into this philosophical travelogue so that we can take this information and transfer what we find helpful into our own lives.

I know a number of Philosophy professionals, and armchair experts, who deride this book as trite. I do not pretend to know enough philosophy to give expert judgement although what I know fits comfortably with Pirsig's Chautauqua. More importantly, the author does an excellent job in immersing the reader into his tale and gives us pause to think about the meaning of quality and how that can give us a more worthwhile life for ourselves and those who we care about.