“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” --Aristotle

Author Robert Pirsig would agree with that statement, having been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia between 1961 and 1963. Bits of that portion of his life is revealed in slivers, but “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” while acknowledging that part of his past, concentrates on the author’s struggle to define Quality. The background of the story describes a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California that he took with his son Chris. It is almost as if Mr. Pirsig took two books and mixed them together, creating a thoughtful journal of a trip while addressing a philosophical question at the same time.

Somehow, it all works. I found myself fascinated with the relationships Mr. Pirsig had with son and friends, people who still worried that his moments of quiet thought might be harbingers of another schizophrenic period. This, of course, causes the reader to wonder the same thing, a potential situation Mr. Pirsig debates with himself throughout.

“Zen” is not a quick read. The author’s running discussion on philosophy and the question of Quality will cause you to have to engage your brain and think in order to follow what he is trying to say. This is not to imply that the book is boring or plodding, unless you have absolutely no desire to read one man’s philosophical thoughts; however, if you are interested in this sort of thing, the logical progression establishing his thesis is fascinating.

What was originally an opportunity to publish what Mr. Pirsig had created over the first part of his life turned into a bestseller. Though he passed away in April of 2017, the book still continues to sell, and deservedly so. Five stars.

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance



There are parts of this book, and parts of this type of book I really enjoy. But at the exact same time, this whole genre of book (see: Ken Wilber and his oeuvre, especially A Brief History of Everything) really grinds and irritates.* Don't get me wrong, I love Greek philosophy and Zen Buddhism as much as the next guy (or gal) on Goodreads. No serious. ON my FB page, I think I put my religion down as: γνῶσις-Mðrmon; 禪-Mormon. I'm all about the search for Truth. I want to pick and prune it where ever it grows (East or West). But these pop-Philosophy/pop-Zen/grand theory of everything books seem to promise yaw||way more than they deliver.

I DO get, however, how some people love it. I see it. I can feel it. It is seductive as hell for sure. And -- AND -- a part of me buys into a part of it. I just can't follow Pirsig all the way.

Anyway, I'm not sorry I read it, just like after finishing a Malcolm Gladwell bestseller doesn't leave me with any sorrow either. I just feel like I've been given a light mental laxitive. Everything moves easy, and nothing is too damaging. I just don't really want to double down and read Lila. The Pirsig motorcycle is garaged. The seventies are over. I want a different sort of quality I guess.


* given that statement, I'm not sure why I'm not as critical of Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Perhaps, it was the writing. Perhaps, it was less pop. But ye Gads, the mid-to-late 70s was a bumper crop for Zen Buddhist books in the US.
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This would have been a great book if it had just been a travelogue of his trip across the country with his son. That part was actually well written and entertaining. When it started drifting down the philosophical side road, though, the wheels started to come off quickly.

[Note: SPOILERS AHEAD, if you care]

Generally, when people object to the philosophy of this book, fans of the book think that it is because they didn't follow it. I followed it just fine. I followed it well enough, in fact, to notice every error in thinking that he made along the way.

He starts his treatise on "quality" with a faulty assumption: that quality can't be defined. This is based on the assumption that none of his students can define it. Wonderful leap of logic there: just because something hasn't been done, it can't be done. You need look no further than the entire history of science to prove that wrong.

I'll take a stab: quality is a measure of the degree to which something conforms to its purpose.

This simple definition solves his entire conundrum by avoiding his biggest misstep: attempting to define quality in the absence of context. Quality has no meaning in the absence of context, that's why he has trouble defining it. Something that is the pinnacle of quality in one context can be the exact opposite in another. I hammer is the of the highest quality if the context is "driving a nail", but not if the context is "removing a speck of dust from your eye".

He has another discourse where he attempts to demostrate that science is fundamentally flawed because, by introducing more questions as hypotheses are investigated, it actually moves us further away from truth, rather than closer to it. I sorry, but, no, it doesn't. He's confusing "dogma" or "belief" with "truth". You don't know any less when you discover more questions. You just have a better understanding of how much you didn't (and don't) know. You're still closer to knowing how things truly are (i.e. "truth").

The book is full of these sorts of philosophical missteps and illogical reasonings, so much so that it is a chore to get through. In truth, I'd probably have given up, but I found the travelogue portions interesting enough to plow through.

In the end, though, I was left longing for the book that might have been.

A previous reviewer (Rb1985) said "at around page 293 one looks for reviews online to confirm one's suspicion that one has been taken for a mug." I know this because about half way through I ran to Goodreads looking for what I was missing.

I bought the book recently not knowing what it was about but had always been intrigued by the title and recalled it's popularity while I was in high school and college shortly after it came out. Also, at 52 years of age, I bought a motorcycle for the first time and, hey, sounds like something I ought to read.

This was awful.

The story is really three separate narratives. First is a description of a cross country motorcycle trip, second is a philosophical discussion on "quality" and, third is the narrator's struggle with insanity.

The philosophical discussions are impossible to follow. That is not to say they are without merit or do not contain some thoughtful observations and interesting discourses, but as a whole it is incoherent blather. I am sure that supporters of the book have an out in that the narrator is insane, so of course, some of the discussion will reflect that insanity and be difficult to follow, obviously you just don't get the literary method the author is using. If that is the case, why put the reader through this torture. If the author had stuck with the motorcycle maintenance this could have been really good.

This strikes me as the type of book that gets a lot of interest because it is incomprehensible but, my goodness, it is just so darn DEEP that it has to mean something and I don't want to look like a total boob by saying I don't get it so I'll say it changed my life. I'm not falling for it. Yes, the discussion is deep but, ultimately, I found the well was empty.

This is a book worth reading. Particularly if you ride motorcycles. The author provides many practical insights into the peace that can come from riding and maintaining motorcycles. But the pointers on motorcycle maintenance are one small part of this ambitious book, which delves into communication, relationships, inner peace, and the very nature of reality.

Finished a reread, now twenty years after my first go. For all its faults, a tremendously praiseworthy book. I enjoyed it on many levels: the philosophical explorations paired with practical experience (Zen and the art of maintaining a motorcycle...), that the author respects the intelligence of the reader by not infantilizing the challenging subject matter. At times the author was able to elevate plot, elevate the intensity of the reading experience, through the protagonist's philosophical investigations--that's not easy to do (though I am biased, a lover of philosophy).

I could see very strong influence, if not direct plagiarism, in McCarthy's The Road and Blood Meridian. I know CM read Z&MM and that CM likes to borrow/twist/appropriate...

"If you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf." (Z&MM, 1974)

"When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf." (Blood Meridian, 1985).

A test of good writing, do you want to do the thing he is writing about? I got stoked wanting to work in my shop, fixing things well—Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. This book passed largely.

I strongly recommend this book to those who are intrigued by its premise, but especially to young men.

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Somehow this book, which I found really compelling ten years ago, seemed dead and uninspired on rereading it now. I found the philosophy tiresome and pointless, and honestly had a hard time forcing myself to slog my way through it. I think it had to do with the fact that the essential conflict of the book -- that between classic and romantic ways of thought (or science and art, rationality and emotion, function and form) -- is a non-issue to me, these days. Phaedrus drove himself insane seeking a synthesis between these two modes of thought, but it's a synthesis I achieved myself many years ago.

His over-simplification of the world, in which science is unable to recognize "quality" and art is unable to recognize function, just completely rubs me the wrong way. It's almost insulting, in fact, to someone who happens to be both a poet and an engineer; he seems to state that I must be able to do only one well. It has always been obvious to me that it is not a duality, but a continuum. Of course, I was never classically trained in philosophy, so I could be missing some subtleties to his arguments.

With such an intensely personal (in fact, autobiographical) book, it may be that you either relate to the narrator, in which case the story becomes very meaningful to you, or you don't. The ending was very abrupt; after so long spent building up to the climax, he just left the reader to attempt to figure out what the resolution was.

Overall, it seemed to me like a book written more for the author than for his readers. Partially, it seemed like he just wanted to exorcise his own demons. Also, he wanted to give a lecture on philosophy, wrapped up in the thin framework of a novel. It was neither entertaining nor enlightening.

I first read “ZAMM” 40 or so years ago, I was gobsmacked with wonder at its layers of erudition, a theoretical expounding into the realm of foundational philosophy from Greek antiquity. The Zen & Motorcycle Maintenance parts are peripheral digressions that run parallel to the “Chautauqua's” - deep philosophical rabbit holes of thought where “Phaedrus” the heretofore narrator and/or Pirsig himself work out the kinks of an expanding and revolutionary reset of Cartesian duality, debunked and replaced with a new hierarchy/synthesis where “Quality” becomes the all-pervading impetus to formed reality.

Pirsig/Phaedrus goes back to the pre-Socratics and follows their conceptions of excellence up to the break that occurs with Plato/Aristotle and as spoken through Socrates in the “Dialogues” where rationality usurps mythos as the lynchpin to the paradigm of mind/matter and TRUTH is derived from science going forward. There’s another duality that courses along this road trip saga, the father/son divide that Pirsig realizes is a vestige {hope of recognition} that both of them who are prone to mental disturbance in the form of schizophrenia, may emerge and find hold to sanity instead of no-thing-ness which took hold of Pirsig/Phaedrus in the precursor to the book. Pirsig underwent electro-convulsive shock therapy while under court ordered hold - (medications are not mentioned and to me is a real blank spot as Pirsig in “ZAMM” steadily recedes from his mental grip again as the story proceeds. Did he return to madness, reenter psychiatric treatment, rejigger his meds and/or?) He wrote a sequel about 17 years later titled “Lila” where he picks up his “Metaphysics of Quality” once again and adds to it aspects/nuances collected and refined.

BUT where in all of this is Nietzsche mentioned? He isn't; and that’s just wrong. Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy" lays out an eerily similar argument a century before, against the Apollonian vs Dionysian split which too cited reason/science as the superseding paradigm, and, "Will to Power" as his equivalent of Quality.

I think, or rather fantasize that: Pirsig's "Phaedrus" is really the ghost/spirit/avatar of Nietzsche/Zarathustra come hither into the mind/world again to pester the 20th Century's blinkered consciousness (and ours) overtaken with technology {{entertainment per DFW}} growing apace our ability to check, dragging the world/us into a course of oblivion be it us presumably who done it, now in sight. "Quality of Metaphysics" is a way towards a way back that shines forward on humanity away from the shackles of science/technology not aligned with art/aesthetic/spirit/soul/mythos which harmonizes all. Think about it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning did and said this:

"All beauties, whether in nature or art, in physics or morals, in composition or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections, visible in different distances under different positions, of one archetypal beauty."

Forty years/life and lots of reading brought a different reader to this book, no less curious, eager and engaging, yet still open to wonder at ought's, might's, and could-be's to the tune of excellence!

When I'm asked what is my favorite book, I often pause for a moment and reply, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." My reply always gets a laugh. Some people have heard of the book, and some have even tried reading it, but no one I've mentioned it to has expressed a similar level of admiration for it, and no one I've recommended it to has ever read it through to completion.

It's obviously not a book for everyone.

Why do I love it so much? Pirsig was trying to teach writing on a college level, and he struggled with traditional ways of teaching. One day the casual remark of an associate at the college---"I hope you are teaching Quality to your students"---sets off a train of thought that leads Pirsig to try some innovative methods of teaching in his classroom and eventually helps Pirsig form some new connections between two old systems of thought.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. 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 characteristic of quality.”

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

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. ”

“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.”

'You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.'

I started reading this book because i'd heard from a number of people, including comedian Tim Allen, that it was good. In fact i read an entire Tim Allen book ("I'm Not Really Here") which was kind of about his experience reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence. Tim Allen, although not exactly a respectable philosopher (maybe not even just respectable), had some of Robert Pirsig's philosophy without all his inane bullshit. At least Tim Allen's book was funny.

Admittedly, i enjoyed the book in the beginning. I could tell that the plot was going nowhere specific, but i like books like that. In fact i wrote one. But as i pressed on, page after page, chapter after chapter, i became first bored with it, then irritated. There are essentially three parts to this book, all of which are intertwined at irregular intervals:

1. The philosophy stuff. I really like this aspect of the book; all the time he spends talking about Phaedrus and Phaedrus's experiences was mostly fascinating to me. Phaedrus is the real star of the story and the only character i really liked.

2. The motorcycle maintainence stuff. Despite the fact that i had no idea what most of it meant, it's factual and to the point, and somehow intersted me just by the way it was written. At some point i even thought about buying a motorcycle, just from inspiration by this book.

3. The main story. It's a story about the narrator (Pirsig himself) and his son, Chris, on a motorcycle journey across the country with some friends. Chris is 11 or 12 and mostly just annoying, but the interactions between Pirsig and his son just make me think that Pirsig is a bad father. He always seems angry at Chris for no particular reason and Chris seems to cry a lot due to it. I wonder what Chris thought when he read this book. And it's no wonder to me that the guy's wife left him shortly after it was published (Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P...]).

The main thing that i think the book suffers from is the way he abruptly switches between the topics. I've no problem with a rapidly shifting story, if the transitions work. Here, Pirsig would get me going enthusiastically through a Phaedrus segment, and right at the climax...dump me back into him and Chris doing something boring. Then we'd trudge along through that for a while, and suddenly he'd see something that reminded him of Phaedrus, and we'd come to another Phaedrus segment which was not a continuation of the previous.

I gave up on the book shortly after the halfway point where Phaedrus began repeating everything over and over and going absolutely nowhere. Sure, i'd like to see what ultimately got him committed to an asylum, but i don't feel like reading any more of this repetitive and bland crap to get there. Ok, you can't put a definition on "quality," i get it, move on to something else. I feel like what Pirsig is saying to me is, "I've got a point...but i'll never tell you what it is!" and i hate being taunted. Especially while reading. If this were a movie, chances are i'd tough it out and wait for it to finish just because i know it'll be done soon. But reading, although often more enjoyable, is more time consuming and nobody can deny that. And after wasting weeks of my life reading Robert Jordan's "The Shadow Rising," i've learned my lesson. Life is too short to waste on crappy books. There's lots of good stuff out there, i'mma go get it.

Boring. I tried to read this ages ago. See also this review.

Read this years ago and loved it.