A cultural touchstone of the Seventies, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM) is a smorgasbord, equal parts autobiographical novel, travelogue, and collection of philosophical essays.
The book features a two-track structure. The first track, told in the present tense, follows an unnamed narrator (whom Shortform, because of the numerous parallels between the narrator and the real-life Robert Pirsig, has chosen to call “Pirsig”) and his 11-year-old son Chris on a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. This track features the vivid descriptive language, dialogue, plot, and character development typical of a realist novel.
The second track consists of a series of philosophical and autobiographical discourses. Pirsig calls these discourses “Chautauquas.” (In the 19th century, Chautauquas were traveling tent shows that featured lectures from religious and intellectual figures.) Pirsig’s primary concerns in these Chautauquas are three:
When the book begins, Pirsig and Chris have just left Minneapolis on motorcycles. They are accompanied by John and Sylvia Sutherland, friends of Pirsig, who are riding with the Pirsigs as far as Bozeman, Montana. Whereas Pirsig is an editor of technical manuals, John is a drummer, and their differing attitudes toward motorcycle maintenance provide the impetus for Pirsig’s early Chautauquas on technology.
As the riders make their way west, the Pirsigs’ backstory is slowly revealed. The key plot points are as follows:
Some years before the ride, Pirsig suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized. He was treated with electroshock therapy, which caused him to forget who he was before the treatment. Through occasional fragments of memory and his own research, he’s been able to get a sense of the person he was before. He calls this person Phaedrus.
Phaedrus was a gifted child who enrolled in college at 15 to study science. He found himself haunted by philosophical questions and eventually flunked out. After a stint in the army, he returned to college to study philosophy.
After graduating, again consumed by existential questions, Phaedrus spent years in India studying philosophy. He found Eastern philosophy equally as unsatisfying as Western philosophy and returned to the States. He earned a graduate degree in journalism and wound up teaching rhetoric and composition at Montana State University in Bozeman.
His experience teaching led him to the discovery of “Quality,” an indefinable philosophical concept from which (he thought) sprung all of human experience and endeavor. Both for professional and intellectual reasons, he decided to continue researching “Quality” in an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Chicago. It was while he was living and studying in Chicago that he suffered his breakdown.
Chris has been causing trouble at home lately. He also suffers from chronic stomach aches, but no doctor has been able to find a physical cause. His caretakers fear he’s at risk of a breakdown as well.
In Bozeman, the group stays with an old colleague of Phaedrus named DeWeese. After a few days, the Sutherlands return to Minnesota, and the Pirsigs press on to California. As they near their destination, Pirsig fears that Phaedrus is reviving in his mind and another breakdown is imminent.
When the Pirsigs reach California, Chris’s mood is at its nadir. Pirsig feels compelled to have a frank talk with him. He tells Chris that he, Pirsig, was once insane, and that the doctors fear Chris will end up insane as well. (Shortform note: The terminology and overall depiction of mental disorders in the book is dated.) In response, Chris descends into a wailing fit. As Chris rocks and cries, Phaedrus speaks through Pirsig, and Chris responds favorably. When Chris asks if Pirsig was really insane, Phaedrus, through Pirsig, says no. Chris suddenly brightens, and the book ends with the Pirsigs cruising along the Pacific coast, reconciled.
Pirsig’s discourses on technology are a response to the “Beat” and “Hippie” cultural movements, which equated “technology”—machinery, engineering, physical science—with either soulless consumption or catastrophic innovations like the hydrogen bomb. Drawing on Phaedrus’s thought, Pirsig divides humanity into two kinds of thinkers:
John Sutherland is Pirsig’s prime example of a romantic thinker. Sutherland refuses to learn how to maintain his motorcycle because it’s “square”—it smacks of cold, procedural knowledge that runs counter to the “grooviness” and spontaneous creativity he prizes. Pirsig, meanwhile, a self-anointed classical thinker, relishes knowing how his motorcycle functions and being able to repair it if something goes wrong.
Pirsig’s Chautauquas on technology aim to show that technological work is creative (or, at least, can be). It’s all a matter of the mindset we bring to it. If we approach technology as though it’s something alien to us, something we can handle only with detailed instructions, then it will appear lifeless and intimidating. But if we approach it as the product of human intuition—which it was, of course, when it was invented or first constructed—we are better able to use our own intuition to engage with it. That is, when working with technology, Pirsig urges us to experiment, to try something that hasn’t been vetted by the experts, to innovate.
When we approach technology in this fashion, we’re no longer prisoner to the classical/romantic binary. We’re wedding the two by being attuned to a rarely remarked facet of our day-to-day experience. We’re attending to Quality.
The central theme of the second half of ZAMM, “Quality” was Phaedrus’s intellectual obsession and constitutes the origin of Pirsig’s musings on the classical/romantic divide.
Quality is...hard to define, especially given the fact that Phaedrus makes clear that to define Quality is to misunderstand it. Nevertheless, Phaedrus does give us some leads:
Quality includes its colloquial sense. Although Quality has a highly technical philosophical significance (more just below), it also means “value” or “goodness.” (The subtitle of ZAMM is “An Inquiry Into Values.”) Phaedrus begins thinking about Quality in the first place because his students, without prompting, can tell the difference between a quality essay and one that lacks quality.
Quality also includes everything else. Phaedrus’s concept of Quality placed it at the very beginning of human knowledge and experience—in fact, Phaedrus believed that Quality was the source of that knowledge and experience. Imagine the most primitive human picking up a sharp stone and using it to dig a hole. This human has no language to describe the stone or its possible uses, hasn’t been taught that sharp stones are good for digging—this human might not even fully comprehend the stone as a separate being. Nevertheless, something about the stone has drawn the human to it and caused him to pick it up and use it—that something is Quality.
Quality is transcendent. The closest analogue Phaedrus provides for Quality is the Tao (“Path” or “Way”) as described in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, a foundational text in Chinese philosophy and religion. The Tao is a mystical entity impossible to name or adequately express, yet it generates and directs the universe. One can “know” the Tao not through words but through outlook and experience.
Pirsig devotes dozens of pages to narrating Phaedrus’s explorations of Quality. Because Quality touches all aspects of human experience, from the metaphysical to the mundane, Pirsig is able use Quality as a springboard to discuss almost anything. Over the course of 200+ pages, Pirsig covers Montana state politics, the academic discipline of rhetoric, Eastern philosophy, 19th-century mathematics, and ancient Greek philosophy, among other topics.
But it’s when Pirsig turns to the practical task of repairing a motorcycle that the power of Quality-thinking becomes clear. Essentially, to be attuned to Quality, we must cultivate a “beginner’s mindset”—we must forget what we know (or think we know) and simply meditate on the task in front of us. This is why it’s Pirsig’s firm belief that to be “stuck”—on a work or creative project, on making a life decision—is actually, counter-intuitively, the best place to be. It’s at that moment, when our go-to intellectual or emotional strategies fail us, that we begin to hook into Quality, the metaphysical something that will always lead us to a solution.
In the final 100 pages of the book, Pirsig spends about 25 talking about gumption—which, in the ZAMM context, we can think of as “enthusiasm for the task at hand.”
Say you notice a loose doorknob. You’ve fixed doorknobs in the past, and you know exactly how to fix this one—in fact, you’re already imagining the satisfaction of getting down to work on that doorknob and repairing it without breaking a sweat. At this moment, you’re filled with gumption.
But then let’s say you can’t find the right tool—the tool you imagined wielding so skillfully—and you realize you won’t be able to fix the doorknob. Suddenly all that gumption goes up in smoke. You’ve hit a gumption trap.
Pirsig believes gumption to be both effect and promoter of Quality-thinking. If you’ve gotten stuck on a project or task, and overcome that stuckness by dint of your “beginner’s mindset,” you’re going to be brimming with gumption the next time you get stuck. And that gumption will lead you again to find novel solutions and innovative ideas (i.e., Quality).
Although Pirsig’s long list of gumption traps and workarounds is largely motorcycle-specific, there is one group of traps—“hang-ups,” or internal gumption traps—that can hamper any effort. Among these hang-ups are traits like ego (which prevents us from acknowledging stuckness and opening ourselves to Quality) and impatience (which causes us to rush into a non-Quality solution just to get something done). Pirsig’s descriptions of and recommendations for these gumption traps can be found in Chapter 9 of the full summary.
Throughout the book, in both the Chautauquas and the narrative, Pirsig suggests that his and Chris’s road trip isn’t about arriving at any particular destination—rather, it’s about the traveling itself. All too often we become consumed with ends—a job, a promotion, a purchase—and forget to appreciate the means by which we arrive at those ends. Pirsig’s entire book, which meanders and digresses and takes its time, can be seen as a testament to the principle that “sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM) is a challenging book, covering a wide range of ideas and interweaving philosophy with story. To aid your understanding, we’ve crafted our summary to highlight the main points.
The published text of ZAMM is divided into four parts and 32 chapters. Because the summary features highly condensed versions of individual narrative episodes and Chautauquas, we’ve reorganized into fewer chapters to be coherent.
Although ZAMM has been categorized as a self-help or advice text, the reading experience it provides is closer to that of a novel: Both in the story and the Chautauquas, Pirsig uses techniques like flashback, inner monologue, and physical description that are fiction writers’ stock in trade.
As the story progresses, Pirsig constantly alternates between the events the travelers are experiencing and the Chautauquas. We’ve attempted to preserve the “feel” or “rhythm” of the text by offsetting the Chautauquas, but presenting them in the context in which they appear in the book.
Pirsig’s writing style is lyrical and a joy to read. Our language is more straightforward, and if you enjoy the ideas in this summary, we highly recommend reading the book for Pirsig’s narrative voice alone.
Previous readers of ZAMM may notice that certain events from the story have been condensed or omitted completely. Though these events serve certain functions in the text—to flesh out the Sutherlands and DeWeeses as human beings, for example—they have little bearing on the text’s central themes.
We have also attempted to distill the Chautauquas to their essential points. In doing so, we’ve omitted repetitions of ideas and unessential analogies or metaphors. We have, however, preserved Pirsig’s analyses of individual philosophers, even when the connection between these philosophers and Phaedrus’s ideas is tenuous.
The book opens in the height of summer with Pirsig on his motorcycle, his son, Chris, seated behind him. They’re riding from Minneapolis to Montana alongside Pirsig’s friends, John and Sylvia Sutherland; when we join the travelers, they’re on a two-lane road somewhere in western Minnesota. Pirsig catches sight of a red-winged blackbird taking flight and points it out enthusiastically to Chris, but Chris, who’s 11, isn’t very impressed. Pirsig theorizes that the reason he’s so taken with the surroundings is because they’re bound up with his memories, memories Chris doesn’t have.
Chautauqua: Motorcycle > Car
Pirsig follows a description of his memories—of the sights, sounds, and smells of the cold Midwest mornings of his past—with a riff on the superiority of motorcycling to car driving.
In a car, we see the world through the frame of the windows. We’re sealed off from the scene around us, and we watch the passing signs much like we watch TV: passively, comfortably, disinterestedly.
On a motorcycle, however, we are in the scene: the road in all its solidity rushes by just a foot beneath us; the wind whips us; the sound of the engine is loud in our ears. Whereas riding in a car separates us from the world, traveling on a motorcycle is holistic—it places us in immediate contact with the world.
Chautauqua: Making Good Time vs. Making Good Time
Although the final destination is Montana, Pirsig tells us that he and his compatriots are traveling more or less for travel’s sake. Thus, rather than ride on freeways, they try whenever possible to stay on local roads. Pirsig calls this making good time—that is, relishing the experience of traveling no matter how long the journey takes (as opposed to making good time—that is, reaching your destination as quickly as possible). The difference in emphasis—on the quality of the time spent rather than its quantity—is what Pirsig wants to highlight.
Chautauqua: Why Chautauqua?
Pirsig chooses to call his ruminations in the book a Chautauqua, which refers to a traveling tent show popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that featured an array of speakers and exhibits. Not only does this reference call to mind a bygone era, when knowledge circulated more slowly and deliberately (see “Chautauqua: Making Good Time vs. Making Good Time”), it also highlights the fact that Pirsig’s narrative has moral as well as entertainment value.
Shortform note: Pirsig uses the term “Chautauqua” in two distinct senses throughout the book. Sometimes he uses it as a catchall term for his philosophical project—in other words, he considers all his discourses combined a “Chautauqua”—and other times he uses it to denote specific discourses on specific topics. To keep consistent, we’ve decided to use the term in the latter sense. When we refer to more than one discourse, we use the plural: Chautauquas.
The group pulls over at a rest stop to stretch their legs, and Sylvia, recalling the cars they’d passed going in the opposite direction, comments on how sad their drivers looked; she even compares the stream of cars to a funeral procession. Pirsig replies they were just normal people on their way to work on a Monday morning.
The conversation then turns to the natural wonders Pirsig was picking out as they rode, the blackbirds in particular. John returns from pumping water and begins rummaging through the saddlebags attached to his motorcycle. Removing a random assortment of objects—rope, matches, shoelaces—he’s exasperated at how much they’ve packed and wonders aloud if they’ll ever actually need shoelaces. Pirsig deadpans that shoelaces can break at any time. The group saddles up and rides off.
Chautauqua: The Sutherlands and Technology
On the road again, Pirsig reveals that John and Sylvia are having some issues in their marriage, and that this “disharmony” is the impetus for Pirsig’s Chautauquas. Though Pirsig doesn’t know exactly what’s eating them, his theory is that their troubles have something to do with their difficult relationship to technology. Pirsig uses several examples to illustrate this troubled relationship:
* Whereas Pirsig believes that a motorcyclist should be prepared to fix his or her motorcycle on the fly, John believes that repairs should be left to a professional mechanic. This position has gotten John into some messes on past rides: Pirsig relates an anecdote wherein John’s motorcycle refuses to start twice (for reasons relatively obvious to Pirsig), leading John to fits of frustration.
When a faucet begins dripping at the Sutherlands’ house, John makes a cursory stab at fixing it, then just lets it drip. On a day when Pirsig is over, Sylvia, who speaks softly, is trying to make herself heard over the dripping when her kids enter noisily. She blows up at the kids for interrupting her but doesn’t acknowledge that her anger was primed by the dripping.
The Sutherlands often talk about how there’s no escape from “it,” “it all,” “the whole organized bit,” and “the system.” Pirsig realizes that the Sutherlands are referring to a kind of dark force that gives rise to, and is epitomized by, technology. To the Sutherlands, this force is monstrous and unintelligible—inhuman.
Of course, the Sutherlands aren’t alone in resisting technology—at the time Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was being written, an anti-technological movement, embodied by so-called “beatniks” and “hippies,” was well established. (Shortform note: Though Pirsig dubs the Sutherlands’ nemesis “technology,” it overlaps with counterculture enemies like “mass culture,” “materialism,” and “conformism.”)
Pirsig, however, though he feels sympathy with the Sutherlands’ position, is neither intimidated by nor fearful of technology. This is because the spiritual entities that hippies praise—the Buddha, for example—when understood correctly, are as present in a complex machine as they are in the natural world.
As the travelers continue on their journey, crossing from the tree-populated Central Plains to the grasslands of the Great Plains, Pirsig begins to feel a sense of apprehension about the road they’re on, though he’s unsure why. Remarking its flatness, Pirsig recalls a discussion he and the Sutherlands had before setting off on the trip. John was worried that Sylvia wouldn’t be able to handle the monotony of Great Plains travel and suggested Sylvia fly to Billings and meet them, but Sylvia and Pirsig convinced John she would be fine.
Chautauqua: Discomfort Is Relative
Pirsig’s argument for Sylvia’s joining them is that discomfort matters “only when the mood is wrong.” That is, if you’re already out of sorts—perhaps because you don’t want to be traveling—then discomfort assumes outsize importance. But if you’re happy to be traveling, whether because of the scenery or the company, then discomfort doesn’t bother so much.
Presently Pirsig spots a storm on the horizon. If it’s a cold front, the storm will be intense but short; if it’s a warm front, the bad weather could last for days.
Chautauqua: Be Careful of Assumptions
Pirsig recalls a past motorcycle trip—to Canada—with Chris when they endured a warm front. After a soggy night, during which water leaked into their tent and soaked their sleeping bags, they get caught in a particularly dangerous storm. With lightning striking around them, their motorcycle suddenly stops working. They sputter into a gas station, and Pirsig tries to diagnose the problem (at the time, he was like John—ignorant of motorcycle maintenance). He sees gas sloshing around, checks the engine parts—all looks good—but the motorcycle still won’t run. Eventually he’s forced to abandon the trip, much to Chris’s disappointment. Two weeks later, Pirsig has another look at the motorcycle to figure out what went wrong. He discovers the tank was out of gas—the sloshing he heard was the reserve tank, which he’d never turned on. He still kicks himself for this oversight.
John signs for Pirsig to stop and informs him that they’ve missed their turn. Rather than double back, they decide to press on. Once they’re back on the road, Pirsig’s anxiety ratchets up—he doesn’t know how he missed the turn, and he’s also forgotten to tell John and Sylvia about the storm. In preparation for what’s on the horizon—literally—Pirsig checks his motorcycle’s engine temperature with his hand.
Chautauqua: Care for What You Do
Pirsig’s motorcycle, which is air-cooled, has a history of “seizing”—this is when the pistons expand from too much heat and lock the engine, sending the cycle into a skid. He reveals that the cycle he’s riding has seized three times before.
The first time the cycle seized, he brought it to a mechanic, thinking (at the time) that it wasn’t worth the investment and effort to learn what was wrong and repair it himself. The shop, in which a radio was playing loudly, was staffed by young men who seemed more interested in socializing with each other than paying attention to Pirsig. Finally a mechanic noticed him and took a look at Pirsig’s cycle. After only the most cursory analysis, he diagnosed the problem as the cycle’s tappets (which Pirsig knew was wrong).
Two weeks later Pirsig pays their hefty bill and has his cycle back. On his first ride it seizes again. When he brings it back to the mechanic, they accuse him of not wearing it in properly. The mechanics take the cycle back, fix it, and wear it in themselves. It seizes on them this time.
The mechanics decide to replace many of the core components of the engine, and when Pirsig returns to pick the cycle up, it’s covered in grease and doesn’t start. Pirsig discovers the plugs are disconnected; he connects them and now the tappets are making noise. When Pirsig points this out, a mechanic comes over and proceeds to ruin the tappet covers. Then, as the mechanic tries to remove the ruined tappet covers with a hammer and chisel, he further damages the engine. Finally Pirsig has had enough: “Just stop,” he says, and takes the bike as is.
On the road, the cycle vibrates violently at speeds over 20 mph. Pirsig pulls over and discovers that the mechanics had forgotten to bolt the engine in completely. It was attached by only one bolt.
A few weeks later he discovers what was causing the engine to seize: a sheared pin in the cycle’s oil-delivery system. The shear, Pirsig notes, was also caused by a mechanic, one that worked on the cycle before he bought it.
Why did the young mechanics butcher Pirsig’s motorcycle? Pirsig has three theses:
The radio. You can’t do thoughtful work while you’re listening to the radio. You can turn wrenches with the radio on, but you can’t think deeply about what you’re doing.
The speed. The mechanics were working too quickly. More customers means more money, so they were doing slapdash work on Pirsig’s cycle to make room for the next repair.
The (spectator) attitude. The mechanics were friendly, relaxed, cheerful—and entirely uninvested in what they were doing. They didn’t identify with their work, they just did it. Pirsig, who edits technical manuals for a living, sees the same thing in the texts he corrects—a kind of carelessness. Pirsig calls this approach to one’s work the spectator attitude. When we perceive our work like it’s alien to us, like it’s an entity isolated in time and space from ourselves and others, we can’t help but treat it superficially. Pirsig aims to explore the sources of the spectator attitude in his ruminations throughout his trip.
The travelers are in the Red River Valley, not far from the Dakotas, when the storm reaches them. They’ve already decided to ride until they can’t anymore, and Pirsig signals to John that they had better get a move on. He and John press the throttle on their cycles, accelerating up to almost 100 mph, as it gets dark from the storm clouds. Suddenly there’s a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, then another, and Pirsig realizes “he” has been on this road before. Pirsig begins slowing down, even as Chris urges him to speed up and the Sutherlands disappear into the distance. Eventually Pirsig and Chris arrive at the town Pirsig says, somehow, he knew would be there.
Pirsig and Chris reconvene with the Sutherlands under a tree at the outskirts of town. John reports there’s a motel at the other end of town, but Pirsig directs them to a “better” one. When they arrive, John sees that it is indeed superior to the motel he’d suggested and asks Pirsig when he was last in the town. Pirsig says he doesn’t remember. Sylvia, who has been watching Pirsig closely, comments that Pirsig looks like he’s seen a ghost.
The group waits out the rain in their rooms. Once it stops, they venture into town for supper, then gather in the motel courtyard to drink whiskey and decompress. Chris, who’s bored, suggests they tell ghost stories. He starts the group off with some stories he’s learned at camp, and when he’s finished, he asks if Pirsig knows some. Pirsig says he doesn’t remember any. Chris then asks if Pirsig believes in ghosts.
Chautauqua: Mind vs. Reality
Chris’s question prompts Pirsig to extemporize on the nature of reality. Because ghosts are immaterial—they contain neither energy nor matter—they only exist in people’s minds (at least according to the laws of science). But, Pirsig points out, the laws of science too are immaterial—they contain no energy or matter and only exist in human minds as well. Thus Pirsig concludes that one should believe in neither ghosts nor the laws of science.
Unsurprisingly, this conclusion causes some confusion among the group. Chris says a friend of his at camp believes in ghosts. When the adults ask about his friend, he indicates that his friend is American Indian. (Shortform note: The text’s representation of American Indians in this section is dated, and modern readers may find Pirsig’s characterizations distasteful, if not offensive.) The adults laugh, and Pirsig says that he was talking about European ghosts. This answer doesn’t satisfy Chris: he doesn’t understand the difference between Indian and European ghosts.
Suddenly Pirsig reverses himself and says he does believe in ghosts. His reasoning is:
- American Indians and medieval Europeans weren’t any less intelligent or perceptive than modern humans. Rather it was the context in which they lived that caused them to believe in ghosts. To them, ghosts and spirits were as real as subatomic particles are to us.
- Modern humans, scientific advances notwithstanding, have their own ghosts: scientific laws, the number system, algebra. These entities don’t appear in nature; they appear real to us because we believe they’re real.
When John objects, Pirsig offers a further example:
* Did gravity exist before Newton discovered it? We’re naturally inclined to say “Yes, of course,” but Pirsig muddies the water. He asks John if the law existed before our galaxy formed, planets came into being, our earth and human beings appeared. When John demurs, Pirsig asserts that this argument, taken to its logical extreme, illustrates that the law doesn’t—can’t—exist without a human mind to create and understand it. And not only the law: gravity itself doesn’t exist before Newton.
What Pirsig is driving at is the primacy of mind in humans’ relation to the world. Mathematics, the laws of logic and physics, historical progress—all are human inventions designed to order and explain the world to us. In a very real sense, the “world has no existence outside the human imagination.” When we look at the world, we’re seeing it through the eyes of ghosts: Moses, Christ, the Buddha, Plato, Descartes, Jefferson, Einstein—the philosophers, sages, and scientists whose ideas about the world we accept as true.
The Sutherlands are dumbfounded by Pirsig’s theorizing, and, after a pregnant pause, the conversation turns to safer topics.
Later that night, as Pirsig and Chris lie in their beds, Chris asks his father for a “real” ghost story. Pirsig attempts to avoid the topic—to no avail. After some back and forth, Chris asks Pirsig if he’s ever known a ghost. Pirsig, against his better judgment, says he once knew someone who spent his whole life hunting for a ghost. This, of course, piques Chris’s interest. When Chris asks what the man did when he found the ghost, Pirsig replies, “He thrashed him good…then he became a ghost himself.” Chris begs for the ghost’s name—Phaedrus, Pirsig finally tells him—then asks if Pirsig saw Phaedrus in the lightning storm. Pirsig doesn’t answer and tells Chris to go to sleep.
Pirsig lies awake after Chris has fallen asleep. Thinking over the day’s events, he confirms to himself that Phaedrus has seen the town they’re in and traveled the route they’re taking. Not only: He asserts that Phaedrus is watching them now, that he’s with them. He admits that his ideas—about technology and caring, ghosts and the mind—are all Phaedrus’s. He hopes that his confession will satisfy Phaedrus and let him sleep.
Apply the concepts of “Making Good Time” and the “spectator attitude” with these exercises.
Think about the last trip you took. Were you more concerned with arriving at your destination or enjoying the act of traveling itself? Considering Pirsig’s ideas about “making good time” and overcoming discomfort, what are some ways that you can make your next travel experience more fulfilling?
Pirsig blames the “spectator attitude” for the mechanics’ malpractice on his motorcycle. Describe the “spectator attitude” in your own words, and jot down some ways you can avoid the “spectator attitude” in your own work.
The next morning, Pirsig is up before the rest of the group. To kill time, he decides to tell us what to pack for a motorcycle trip across the Dakotas. He divides the list into four categories: clothing, personal stuff, camping equipment, and motorcycle stuff.
Along with the essentials for any long-distance riding trip—durable gloves, rain gear, and spare parts—Pirsig also brings books. On this trip, he’s brought three: his cycle’s shop manual, Chilton’s Motorcycle Troubleshooting Guide, and Thoreau’s Walden.
He’s brought Walden for Chris’s benefit. He errs on the side of too-sophisticated when he considers books to share with Chris, because then the book becomes a spur to conversation. He’ll read a sentence, Chris’ll ask a series of questions, then he’ll read another sentence. They can pass a whole evening reading and talking in this way.
Pirsig also notes that he hasn’t brought shoelaces.
At last Pirsig decides to rouse the group. They pack up and hit the road toward Ellendale, where they’ll have breakfast. It’s cold out, but the scenery is beautiful: dawn light, sparkling dew and mist in the fields. Pirsig looks fondly at his old gloves, which are frosty from the cold.
Chautauqua: Love Your Stuff
Even though he bought his gloves for a measly three dollars, Pirsig has had them repaired so many times they’re nearly disintegrating. This is because they are bound up with Pirsig’s memories, good and bad, of traveling; they have a memory of their own.
Pirsig feels the same way about his motorcycle. Even though it’s getting long in the tooth—27,000 miles on the odometer makes it a well-used cycle—he has a certain affinity for it. It has a personality, which is the product of what Pirsig knows and feels about it.
Developing a motorcycle’s personality is the point of motorcycle maintenance. New motorcycles, though nice-looking, appear to their riders as strangers, and they can quickly turn nasty if poorly cared for. A cycle that is attended to—loved—on the other hand, can turn into a lifelong friend. Even though Pirsig’s motorcycle was nearly ruined by the spectator mechanics, it has recovered and bothers Pirsig less and less as time goes on.
The travelers reach Ellendale and dismount their cycles. When Pirsig tries to engage in some banter with the Sutherlands about the cold ride, they give him the silent treatment. Finally, once breakfast is over, John speaks. He says they’re not going anywhere until it warms up. While John, Sylvia, and Chris take shelter in a hotel lobby next door to the restaurant, Pirsig takes a walk. Discovering a quaint but uneventful town, Pirsig returns to the restaurant parking lot and sits on a bench beside his cycle.
Chautauqua: The Sutherlands and Technology II
If the Sutherlands can’t handle physical discomfort, and they also can’t stand technology, where does that leave them? They condemn technology even as they depend on it—it’s the dependence that irks them.
A trio of farmers, breezing into town in a brand-new pickup, illustrates the irony. As Pirsig watches them, he opines that those farmers would know how to fix that pickup (among a host of other machines) if it broke down. The farmers value and understand technology—this, despite the fact that they depend on it far less than the Sutherlands (or Pirsig, for that matter). If all technology ceased to function, the farmers could get by, whereas Pirsig and the Sutherlands would perish in no time. The Sutherlands, Pirsig decides, are ungrateful for technology.
The temperature has risen a bit, so Pirsig enters the hotel. He finds his compatriots in an empty dining room, their spirits a bit higher. John reports that he’s going to put on as many layers as he can before hitting the road, and some hilarity ensues when he bounces around the dining room in his long underwear.
On the highway again, Pirsig finds the weather is much more pleasant. The surroundings are still magnificent. When they stop for a breather, John takes out his camera to photograph the prairie around them. Soon enough he gives up—he realizes that it’s impossible to recreate the experience of that environment through a lens. Pirsig notes that seeing the world through a camera is like watching it go by through a car window (see Chautauqua: Motorcycle > Car in Chapter 1). Chris lets it be known that he wants to camp out that night, and after some hesitation, Pirsig relents. But they still have more riding to do before they stop for the day.
A change in the topography—the flatness of the prairie gives way to hills—tells Pirsig they’re nearing the High Plains. The dilapidation of the towns in which they stop and the rolling hills lets Pirsig know they’re officially in the West. Sweeping up and down the grades, Pirsig realizes that if his cycle breaks down now he’s in big trouble—there isn’t a mechanic for miles. Reflexively he checks the engine temperature; it’s fine. There’s a rattling sound, but he knows that’s normal for his cycle.
Chautauqua: Underlying Scientific Explanation vs. Immediate Artistic Appearance
Reflecting on the “nickels-and-dimes” sound of his engine, Pirsig recalls that he once tried to interest John in that sound to no avail. John simply refuses to think about anything mechanical.
Pirsig thinks of another example of John’s stubbornness. When John’s handlebars were slipping some time ago, Pirsig diagnosed the problem and suggested John use a particular tool—a shim (Shortform note: a thin piece of metal that helps align or reduce wear on parts). John asked where he could buy one, and Pirsig held up his beer can: the aluminum in the can was perfect for the job John needed done. But instead of seeing the cleverness or resourcefulness of Pirsig’s solution, John was offended. How dare Pirsig suggest fixing an expensive BMW motorcycle with a beer can!
After some further rumination, Pirsig realizes that John wasn’t just being snobbish. Rather, his and John’s differing views of the beer-can solution say something profound about their respective visions of reality:
- Pirsig is a rationalist, a scientist, whose view of the beer can was informed by his knowledge of the can’s material properties. He was concerned with what the shim meant—its underlying form, its potential to solve problems—and so had no objection to using a beer can as a substitute as long as it worked. His vision of reality is informed by underlying scientific explanation.
- John, however, is an artist—quite literally: Pirsig reveals John is a musician—and thus he evaluates the world immediately and intuitively, according to appearances. In the case of the beer-can shim, John could only see what it was—a junky piece of metal that had no business fixing his precision machine. His view of reality is informed by immediate artistic appearance.
Pirsig traces the tension between his and John’s views of reality to the legacy of the Sixties. John resides in the groovy dimension, where machines should always work as advertised and scientific knowledge is “square.” When his motorcycle doesn’t work, it shatters his carefree outlook on life; he resists learning about technology because he wants to float above it. By the same logic, scientists might object to something like abstract art, because it resists procedural scientific analysis—it demands an intuitive response.
The riders pull over at a roadside grocery store. Fatigue is affecting them all, especially Chris, whose mood has taken a turn for the worse. After another tiring stretch on the road, they reach a town called Lemmon, where they aim to camp. At the campsite, Pirsig asks Chris to help move some gear; Chris refuses and walks toward a nearby reservoir.
Exhausted, the adults struggle to locate firewood, start a fire, and begin cooking dinner (Chris has taken the flashlight, which adds to their difficulties). They manage to light a fire, but the wind keeps the flame from reaching their steaks and the meat turns out tough; Pirsig has to use a hunting knife cut his. Chris asks for the knife, and, as he reaches for it, dumps his meal onto the tarp they’re sitting on. He then throws a tantrum—he doesn’t like the food and doesn’t want to be camping (even though it was he who begged to camp earlier). Before an adult has a chance to get angry with him, he says his stomach hurts and he walks off into the darkness.
The adults finish eating and discuss Chris. Sylvia asks if Pirsig thinks Chris’s stomach really hurts. Pirsig replies in the affirmative, then elaborates: Chris has been having stomach pains for some time, but when he’s examined, the doctors don’t find anything. Finally, in the spring, the Pirsigs received a diagnosis: early mental illness. (This explains for the Sutherlands why Pirsig brought Chris on the trip rather than his wife.) Sylvia asks about the cause of Chris’s illness, and Pirsig replies that, when it comes to mental illness, causes and effects don’t seem to apply—cause and effect imply thought, and illness occurs prior to thought. Pirsig also confesses that he has stopped bringing Chris to psychiatrists.
Chautauqua: Kindness in the Modern World
Initially, Pirsig says that his reason for ending Chris’s psychiatric treatment is a “mental block.” When the Sutherlands press him, he says, surprising himself, that the doctors aren’t “kin.” This prompts a riff on the etymology of kin, which shares a root with “kindness.”
Pirsig finds modern kindness—the kindness practiced by doctors, teachers on the first day of class, etc.—phony. It doesn’t substitute for the care and attention a family member can provide.
Pirsig’s riff on kindness summons some fragments of a German poem. It’s by Goethe, and it tells the story of a man riding a horse on a beach at night, his son in his arms. The son is pale; when his father asks why, the son says, “Father, don’t you see the ghost?” The father realizes the son is afraid of the fog on the beach and tries to reassure him, but the son insists there’s a ghost. Even though the father sees no ghost, he speeds his horse ever faster. The poem ends with the death of the son.
The adults smoke their last cigarettes and retire to their sleeping bags. After a while, Chris arrives at the clearing where Pirsig has set up their camp and pesters his father with questions. His patience exhausted, Pirsig snaps at Chris to go to sleep. Chris cries quietly.
Even though Pirsig is dog tired, he sleeps fitfully. At some point in the night, delirious with fatigue and “semisleep,” he imagines he’s riding a horse beside a bank of fog and Chris is with him. In the fog, Pirsig notices, is the outline of a man. Although he doesn’t acknowledge him, Pirsig knows it is Phaedrus, and he suspects the ghost is calling Chris.
Think about the objects that mean something to you.
Write down a possession of yours that you’ve held onto longer than you probably should. What about it keeps you coming back to it? What kind of “personality” does it have?
Now think about a possession that you threw away but wish you hadn’t. Why do you regret discarding it? What are some strategies you can use to avoid the same mishap in the future?
Pirsig rises at 9:00 am; it’s already too hot to sleep. Licking his wounds from the hard ride the day before, Pirsig walks among the surrounding pines lost in thought. He admits that, as he pursued his Chautauquas, he’d hoped he would only have to refer to Phaedrus’s ideas and not the man himself. It’s clear to him now, however, that he cannot avoid talking about Phaedrus personally any longer. He recalls Chris’s American-Indian friend, whose grandmother said ghosts appear only when someone hasn’t been buried correctly. And that’s the problem: Phaedrus wasn’t buried right.
Presently John and Sylvia rise, and the adults begin packing up and cooking breakfast. Pirsig wakes a resistant Chris by yanking his sleeping bag right out from under him. The adults eat their eggs and bacon; Chris takes one bit of food then says his stomach hurts.
Breakfast over, the adults finish breaking down camp. As Pirsig loads the last of his gear onto his cycle’s luggage rack, he notices his rear tire is surprisingly worn down. There’s a problem with the chain as well, and he unpacks his tools to make the necessary adjustment. As John watches Pirsig loosen and tighten the axle, he expresses amazement; he says he wouldn’t even know where to start with an adjustment like the one Pirsig is making. Pirsig, exasperatedly, thinks that that is the whole reason for the Chautauquas, but he tells himself to stay patient—that John is worth teaching. Soon enough the group is on the road again. It’s a picturesque day, and Pirsig has ample time to return to the Chautauquas.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and the Classical/Romantic Dichotomy
Phaedrus, Pirsig finally tells us, was a misunderstood and now-forgotten philosopher. In an ideal world, Phaedrus would stay forgotten, but Pirsig believes he must address Phaedrus head on to exorcise and bury him forever.
Unlike the Sutherlands—and much like Pirsig himself—Phaedrus viewed the world entirely in terms of its underlying form. To properly illustrate the qualities of this particular worldview, Pirsig deploys an admittedly broad but useful dichotomy:
* Classical Understanding. A person of classical understanding is rational, scientific, unemotional, cerebral, and technologically savvy. She is more concerned with the underlying form of things than the appearance of things—that is, she cares more about how a thing works than how it looks. Motorcycle maintenance, for example, is classical all the way.
* Romantic Understanding. A romantic, oppositely, is intuitive, emotional, creative, and artistically inclined. He is more concerned with immediate appearances than underlying forms—he values aesthetics over utility. Motorcycle riding, for example, is romantic.
Each mode of understanding features in the other. For example, a romantic sees the classical mode of understanding as boring, robotic, overly deliberative—oppressive. A classic, meanwhile, sees the romantic mode as silly, impetuous, irrational—dangerous.
The two modes are, by all appearances, irreconcilable; and Pirsig traces the tumult of the Sixties to the deep antagonism between the classical (“square”) and the romantic (“hip”).
Phaedrus’s ideas concerned this perennial divide, but he was ignored, then dismissed, and eventually considered insane. Pirsig opines the insanity was real but caused by people’s opinion of Phaedrus and his ideas rather than an illness. Phaedrus’s end came in the form of an arrest and the permanent removal from society.
The riders stop for gas, and Chris says he’s hungry. Pirsig tells him he either eats with everyone else or not at all. Soon enough they’re back on their cycles. The road they’re traveling is in disrepair and there’s traffic; the sun is bright and the weather sweltering. Pirsig escapes the rough riding by meditating further on the classical world of Phaedrus.
Chautauqua: Analytic Description
The classical mode of understanding that Phaedrus subscribed to produces “analytic” descriptions—characterizations and categorizations of things by virtue of their component parts and relationships. For example, take a motorcycle; a motorcycle, at its most basic level, can be divided into two assemblies:
A running assembly
A power assembly
The power assembly can be divided further, into:
The power-delivery system
The engine
The engine can then be subdivided, into:
The power train
The fuel-air system
The ignition system
The feedback system
The lubrication system
And so on, until all components are accounted for.
(A “functional” division of the motorcycle is possible as well, beginning with “normal running functions” and “special, operator-controlled functions.”)
There are several qualities to notice about this mode of analysis (beyond the fact that, by Pirsig’s own admission, it’s tremendously dull):
A description like this is only helpful if you already know how a motorcycle works. In other words, if you’d never seen an assembled motorcycle or watched it move, this description would seem like nonsense.
There’s no observer involved. That is, the components and operations described are independent of a particular person’s consciousness—they simply exist.
- Value judgments are absent. The description consists in pure facts, without indication whether certain components are “good” or “bad.”
- The description is a product of a particular method of division—an analytic “knife.” Although the division sampled above consists in pure facts, it’s also only one way to analyze a motorcycle. That is, another person, wielding a different analytic “knife,” might cut up and relate the component parts of a motorcycle differently. (Shortform note: Pirsig doesn’t seem to recognize any contradiction between #2 and #4. It would stand to reason that if an analytic description can differ from person to person, then a given description isn’t independent of an observer—rather, it’s the explicit product of a particular observer.)
According to Pirsig, Phaedrus was brilliant with his analytic knife—he was able to break down and systematize the whole world. But it isn’t his immense analytic ability that makes Phaedrus interesting: rather it’s the ambitious and idiosyncratic way he chose to use this skill.
The heat continues to punish the riders. They arrive in a town called Bowman; although the adults are stupefied by the temperature, Chris appears revived and eats two helpings at lunch. Back on the road the heat is nearly unbearable. Pirsig, to cope, resumes his meditation on Phaedrus.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s Knife
It’s important to note that philosophers aren’t the only people to “cut up” the world to make sense of it—everyday human beings are constantly selecting and discarding elements of their experience. Think about how many things there are to notice on a simple walk around your neighborhood. How many of those things do you actually notice? And how many of those things are you even capable of noticing?
Even if we don’t consciously register everything there is to notice on our walk, we’re still aware of many of those things. Pirsig offers an analogy: Awareness is like an immense landscape, and consciousness is but a handful of sand. That handful of sand, Pirsig says, is the world. (That is, what we think of as “the world” is as limited as our consciousness is.)
Within that world, we use our knives to draw distinctions and note similarities—we begin to classify the objects of our experience. People inclined to classical understanding concern themselves with these classifications; romantic people, meanwhile, concern themselves with the world as a whole.
Phaedrus’s quest was to unite these two understandings. His belief was that a combination of the two would allow him to analyze not just the handful of sand we call the world, but the landscape in its totality: the metaphysical world as well as the physical world, the world of the Buddha as well as the world of the scientist.
Of course, Phaedrus was deemed mentally disordered. But Pirsig believes that we must try to understand why Phaedrus tried to unite the two understandings in order to rescue his wisdom.
That why is that Phaedrus, a classical thinker through and through, discovered that classical rationality was a sham—a ghost.
As Pirsig meditates, the riders pass into Montana. He notes that this is where Phaedrus lived.
Figure out how you view the world.
Are you a classical or romantic thinker? Why? Write down an example or two that illustrates what kind of thinker you are.
What are the advantages to being your kind of thinker? Looking at your examples above, how did your particular mode of thinking help you accomplish your goals?
Now consider the disadvantages to your mode of thinking. Describe an example of when your mode of thinking failed to deliver. Why didn’t it?
The riders stop in a town called Baker. Pirsig’s motorcycle is piping hot—it’s 108 degrees out—and there are some mechanical issues. He tends to them as best as he can. As they eat lunch, Pirsig recommends that neither he nor John drive faster than 55 mph—given the air temperature, the motorcycles are in danger of overheating and the tires might blow out.
Back on the road, John speeds ahead while Pirsig slows to 55. Pirsig, resigned to whatever may happen, returns to Phaedrus.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus the Individual
Although Pirsig believes Phaedrus’s ideas are the most important thing about him—more important than his personal history or physical appearance—there are some aspects of him as an individual that are essential.
He had an exceptionally high IQ. On the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which evaluates a person’s analytic ability, he scored a 170. Only 1 person in every 50,000 scores this highly.
He was focused. Phaedrus’s intellect was like a laser beam: intense, far-reaching, and highly precise.
He was isolated. He had no close friends and traveled alone; and, although he had a wife and children, they couldn’t get through to him.
He was courageous. Although he was systematic in his thinking, he was also dogged. He was willing to sacrifice his physical and mental well-being in the pursuit of truth.
Acknowledging that his account of Phaedrus has, up to this point, been abstract and otherworldly, Pirsig finally decides to come clean about his relationship with Phaedrus. He does this obliquely, by telling a story.
One evening many years ago, after a productive Friday at work, Pirsig went to a party. He had too much to drink and lay down in a back room to recover. He ended up falling asleep, and when he woke up, he was in a hospital.
The party, it turned out, was a dream. Pirsig had been committed to an institution, and, by court order, subjected to electroshock treatment. He was told that he now had a new personality—which immediately prompted questions about the old one the treatment had eradicated.
That old personality, about which Pirsig continues to learn as he lives his new life, Pirsig has dubbed Phaedrus.
The riders pull over at a roadside stop in a canyon. The Sutherlands are angry at Pirsig’s slowness, but he shrugs them off. He tends to the progressing mechanical issues on his bike and they get on the road again. It’s still dangerously hot out.
But soon enough the road begins to slope upward and switch back, and the riders rise out of the barren landscape into green meadows with trees. A cloud appears above them, and a cool wind begins blowing. Suddenly there’s rain. It passes quickly, leaving its coolness behind. The riders reach the top of the climb and look out over a valley and river. After a trying ride, they’ve finally arrived in Montana.
The travelers check into a hotel in Miles City, Montana. While Sylvia and Chris do the group’s laundry, and John seeks a duckbill for his motorcycle helmet, Pirsig looks over his cycle to see if anything needs tuning up—he’d heard what he thought was a tappet noise when they rolled into town.
Chautauqua: Hierarchy: The Basis of Rationality
As Pirsig begins his review of his cycle, he notes that a motorcyclist doesn’t need any special talent to maintain the machine. A motorcycle adheres to the laws of reason, and so any person, if he or she can think rationally, can recognize, diagnose, and repair mechanical problems.
The basis of rational thinking is the structuring of concepts and objects into hierarchies. When Pirsig used his analytical knife to subdivide his motorcycle into different assemblies, he was creating a hierarchy. We find hierarchies everywhere: in businesses, governments, armies, computers, and scientific disciplines, among many others. Each of these entities features numerous interrelated hierarchies—for example, in government, there are hierarchies within different branches and agencies. A term for an interrelated set of hierarchies is a system.
So, when the Sutherlands express their distaste for the “system,” they’re speaking accurately—society, as an interlocking set of hierarchies, is indeed a system. But where they go wrong is thinking of that system as something alien to or outside of themselves. Systems are simply the real-world manifestations of the way we think: they’re reflections of our rationality. Thus to “overthrow the system,” as the Sutherlands might wish to, is futile. No real revolution is possible unless human beings radically reorder their patterns of thought.
This helps explain Pirsig’s ghost story (see Chapter 1). Our world is entirely a product of our minds. Even a motorcycle—which, to John, appears like an alien and unknowable system—is composed of human concepts, only these concepts are expressed in steel and rubber rather than language.
As Pirsig progresses through his diagnostic checklist, he discovers a loose tappet and tightens it. There are still some issues, however, that Pirsig can’t address without additional parts, so he mounts the cycle and heads in the direction of a local cycle shop.
The shop’s proprietor isn’t present, but the shop is open, and Pirsig takes a look around. The shop is a mess, but Pirsig thinks the mechanic might have a “photographic mind”—that is, he knows where everything is, even if a stranger doesn’t.
Presently the owner arrives and sells Pirsig some, but not all, of the parts he needs. He heads back to the hotel, where the rest of the group is just beginning to load out. They pack up the motorcycles and head to a restaurant for lunch before they leave town.
At the restaurant, John relates a conversation he overhead about Bozeman, their final destination. Apparently some years ago Montana’s governor decided to fire 50 radical professors teaching at the college there, but he died in a plane crash before he could do it. Pirsig replies that that was a long time ago, then says that if there were 50 names on the list, his was surely one. The Sutherlands are surprised, but Pirsig calms them down by explaining that a “radical” in Gallatin County, Montana, might not be considered a radical anywhere else. (Shortform note: Pirsig leaves it ambiguous here whether the Sutherlands are surprised at Pirsig’s radicalism or the fact he was a college professor.)
As the group rides out of town, Pirsig suddenly recognizes a city park. He remembers that Phaedrus slept on a bench there on his way to Bozeman.
The travelers move west across Montana. The scenery changes rapidly, from brush to fields and back again. Pirsig returns to his Chautauquas, picking up where he left off: with rationality.
Chautauqua: Logic: The Path Through Hierarchies
Once a hierarchy is established, we navigate its levels by virtue of logic. Pirsig notes that logic comes in two forms: inductive and deductive.
Inductive Reasoning
- Example: If every time you hit a bump on your motorcycle the engine misfires, but the engine never misfires on level ground, you’re likely to conclude that the bumps are causing the misfires.
- Definition: Induction proceeds from specific instances to general conclusions.
Deductive Reasoning
- Example: A mechanic, having read a motorcycle’s manual, knows that the cycle’s horn is powered by the motorcycle’s battery. If the horn isn’t functioning, he can infer that there’s something wrong with the battery.
- Definition: Deduction proceeds from general knowledge to a particular conclusion.
The scientific method—that is, the procedure for designing experiments to test hypotheses—comprises a mix of inductive and deductive reasoning. Although few motorcycle malfunctions require the full-scale scientific method, some do, and so it pays to be familiar with each of its steps.
Statement of the Problem
- The key here is to approach the problem as specifically as possible without assuming too much in advance. For example, beginning with a question like Why is my cycle malfunctioning? is better than beginning with Why are the valves causing my cycle to malfunction? because, at least at the outset, you may not be sure the valves are the problem.
Statement of the Hypothesis
- Here is where you can home in on a specific culprit for the malfunction: “Hypothesis: Valves are causing the malfunction.” You may also include any other hypotheses you want to test.
Design of Experiment
- In this step, you design a particular experiment (or experiments) that will determine whether the valves are responsible for the malfunction. It’s important to note that the only “failed experiment” is one that doesn’t provide information about a hypothesis. If your experiment proves your hypothesis incorrect—i.e., that the valves aren’t the problem—that’s a successful experiment. If your experiment proves that the valves or several other components could be the cause of the malfunction, then that’s a poorly designed experiment.
Predicted Results of Experiment
- Your experiment’s predicted results are a kind of check on the design of your experiment. If your predicted results involve valve function, but your experiment produces feedback from the pistons or some other component, then that’s a clue your experimental design was flawed.
Observed Results of Experiment
- This step is fairly self-explanatory, but make sure to record the results of your experiment, as well as the experiment’s design. If you need to tinker with the experiment to produce further results, you’ll want to have that record to refresh your memory of what you’ve already done.
6 Conclusions from the Results of the Experiment
- As with Step #1, the key here is not to draw conclusions unsupported by the experiment’s results. For example, if your original problem was that your motorcycle was malfunctioning, your hypothesis was that the valves were the culprit, and your experiment showed that the valves are indeed faulty, you haven’t necessarily solved your problem. Why not? Because your motorcycle’s malfunction could be caused by multiple factors, only one of which is valve trouble.
As we move through these steps, we’re constantly combining deductive and inductive reasoning. When we design our experiment to test the valves, we might be thinking about the valvetrain system (deductive) or a malfunction in the past when the valves proved to be the issue (induction). When we execute our experiment, we’re using observed results to draw a conclusion (induction); and when we tinker with the experiment to produce new results, we’re drawing on our conceptual knowledge of related components’ functions (deduction).
The story picks up just as Pirsig nearly crashes head-on into a car passing in the opposite lane. The riders stop in a town shortly thereafter for lunch; Sylvia is still shaken up by the incident. Back on the road, Pirsig tells us we’re at the point where he can speak about Phaedrus’s abandonment of rationality in pursuit of the core of rationality itself.
The scientific method can be applied broadly. Use these exercises to explore its uses in your own life.
Think of a problem, whether at work or in your personal life, that you seem to encounter again and again. Write it down.
Now, in the box below, propose a hypothesis for why this problem recurs. (For example, if your problem is, “I keep getting passed over for a promotion,” your hypothesis might be “My boss doesn’t like me.” If your problem is, “My partner and I can’t stop fighting,” your hypothesis might be, “My partner doesn’t respect my space.”)
Now, propose an “experiment” that might help you determine if your hypothesis is correct. (In the promotion example, your “experiment” might be to have a conversation with your boss about your working relationship. In the relationship example, you might have a conversation with your partner about needing more space and implementing a new understanding in your relationship.)
Once you’ve conducted your experiment, record your results below. Your results may call to mind further hypotheses; feel free to consider further experiments here as well.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s Discovery
Phaedrus was fond of a particular speech Einstein gave in 1918. In the speech, Einstein described “science” as a temple with many mansions and many inhabitants. Some take to science because they’re smart and ambitious, others for practical, problem-solving reasons. If you remove these two types of inhabitants from the temple, you’ll nearly clear it out. But only nearly—there will remain those who pursue science as an escape from the everyday world, who pursue science for its own sake. Phaedrus was this kind of scientist.
He completed his first year of college-level science at age 15. He was already a biochemist, specializing in molecular biology. But his rare devotion to science for its own sake led him to question the very foundations of science, in particular the development of hypotheses.
Over and over in the lab, as Phaedrus ran experiments to test hypotheses, new hypotheses would occur to him; in fact, as he ticked off hypotheses proven or disproven by his experiments, the number of possible hypotheses would grow rather than shrink. At first he found this phenomenon comforting—given a particular problem, there was always something new to test. But soon enough he realized what this phenomenon signified: that the scientific method could never account for every hypothesis, meaning the knowledge it produced was always inconclusive.
Einstein had recognized this problem as well, and his answer was that, at any particular time, one hypothesis always seems a cut above the rest. Phaedrus found this “answer” insufficient, for it meant that what we understand as “true” isn’t true for all time.
As Phaedrus thought further about the history of science, he realized that the more people “did science,” the more quickly scientific truths were proven untrue—that is, the more widespread the scientific method became, the less stable were the truths it uncovered. And the reason these “truths” were proven untrue was the proliferation of hypotheses caused by the scientific method. He concluded that, rather than moving us toward final, everlasting truths, the scientific method was actually moving us away from them.
Although this discovery is firmly rooted in classical thinking, its general features are also recognized by romantics like John and Sylvia Sutherland. The rapid changes scientific advance causes in our lives—through new technology, medicines, and products—can seem chaotic and bewildering. That’s because, according to Phaedrus, they are chaotic. They must be, because the scientific method doesn’t produce static truth but provisional and relative truths.
Thus Phaedrus and the Sutherlands—the classic and the romantics—are reacting to the same problem from different ends. They both recognize the endlessness and ultimate meaninglessness of classical thinking. But while the Sutherlands simply resist it, Phaedrus attempted to find a structuring principle different from it. In doing so, he alienated his peers and retreated into himself. Two years after completing his first year of college-level science, he flunked out of school.
The riders stop overnight in Laurel, within sight of the Rockies. In the morning, Pirsig thrills to the crisp mountain air and brilliant sunshine. Sylvia joins Pirsig and Chris for breakfast even though she’s eaten already (John is out walking). As they dine, Sylvia reports that a townsperson has suggested a particular route to Bozeman. Pirsig knows the road and warns that, because it lies above the timberline, it’ll be cold but magnificent. When they meet John they decide to take the road.
Riding up into the mountains, Pirsig recognizes the route as one Phaedrus would take regularly. Phaedrus used the road for backpacking trips; he would ride into the country, then hike into the woods for days on end. Phaedrus needed absolute stillness to conduct his mental investigations. As he isolated himself, he began to consider his expulsion from college earlier a blessing; he’d decided that the institutions that guide our behavior—schools, religions, governments—all trafficked in the kind of classical thinking he was trying to avoid.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s Drift
One way Phaedrus attempted to escape the classical mode of understanding was to think laterally. When we identify a problem and propose a hypothesis, we’re thinking directly—that is, we’re homing in on a specific answer to a specific question using a specific method. Lateral thinking tries to escape this sequence by avoiding known procedures and looking in unexpected directions.
Lateral thinking, from the outside, can look a lot like drifting. And Phaedrus did drift. He went into the Army, which sent him to Korea. Pirsig still recalls some fragments from this time:
- There’s an image of a wall seen from the prow of a ship across a harbor. The wall shines brilliantly. The memory is intense, and although Pirsig doesn’t know what it means, he believes it must symbolize something important for Phaedrus, perhaps a turning point.
- Phaedrus befriends some Korean laborers who speak a little English and want to learn more. At a picnic lunch overlooking the sea, Phaedrus marvels that with the mere 26 letters in the English alphabet one can express anything in the universe. His Korean compatriots politely nod “Yes” while saying “No.”
- In the final fragment, Phaedrus is in a bunk on an Army ship, heading home. The ship is rising and falling with the waves; Pirsig’s stomach is rising and falling also. He’s reading the hardest book he’s ever read, a work of Far Eastern philosophy. (Shortform note: Pirsig here uses the now offensive term “Oriental.”) The book, The Meeting of East and West by F.S.C. Northrop, argues that man’s existence has two components: a Western theoretical component and a Far Eastern aesthetic component. These would seem to correspond to the classical and romantic modes of understanding, but there’s a difference: Whereas the division between the classical and romantic modes is absolute, the division between the theoretic and aesthetic is porous. That is, the theoretic and aesthetic lie at opposite ends of a continuum, and each is present in the other.
Phaedrus lands in Seattle, the book still on his mind. He locks himself in a hotel room for two weeks, eating apples and thinking. When he emerges, he returns to the university he failed out of—to study philosophy. He’s realized that science can’t answer questions about its own procedures. Only philosophy can.
As the travelers approach the town of Red Lodge, which is located at the base of the mountains they’re about to traverse, the air turns noticeably colder. They stop in Red Lodge and put on warm clothing. Then they’re riding up the mountain, enjoying the switchback turns of the route.
Soon they’re way above the timberline, in the High Country. The landscape is defined by meadows dotted with wildflowers. Once the road turns inward, away from the mountain edge, they find snowfields. The farther they go, the more snow they find; snow plows have pushed the snow into high banks along the road. At the summit Pirsig tunes up his cycle: It has been backfiring from the altitude. After taking some pictures for posterity, they begin their descent.
Chautauqua: The High Country of the Mind
When Phaedrus turned to philosophy, he did so because he was at pains to answer the most fundamental questions of human existence: What is truth? What is knowledge? Why are we here? These questions lie at the very top of the hierarchy of knowledge—in the high country of the mind.
To answer these questions, Phaedrus read widely, including in his studies lesser known thinkers alongside people like Aristotle and Einstein. By academic standards he was doing subpar work, but he was making original discoveries, even if he didn’t know it yet. The problem, however, was his approach: He read each thinker he encountered brutally, trying to find the flaws and inconsistencies in their thought.
Pirsig recalls Phaedrus’s study of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Although Phaedrus didn’t agree with Kant, he respected the care with which Kant formulated his arguments, and his thought was integral to Phaedrus’s later resolution of the classical/romantic divide.
To understand Kant, however, one must begin with the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume is an empiricist—that is, one who believes knowledge depends on the senses. Imagine a human being born without any of the five senses and nourished intravenously for the first ten years of its life: Does this person think? Has this person ever had a thought? Hume would say no.
Empiricism is not very different from what we think of as “common sense.” For our entire lives, the sun has risen every morning, so it’s common sense to expect it to rise tomorrow as well. We base this assumption on our empirical—sensory—knowledge of the world.
There are problems with empiricism, however, that show its shortcomings as a philosophical approach:
- The question of “substance.” If all knowledge is derived from sensory data, how can we know what is producing (or “giving off”) that data? Consider a motorcycle. If we’re asked what it’s made of, we can answer steel (among other metals and materials). But what’s steel? Using our senses, we can tell that steel is hard, cold, and a host of other things, but all we’ve done is describe the data our senses are giving to us—we haven’t actually said what steel is.
- The question of causation. Sensory knowledge also doesn’t explain causality. For example, when the sun rises, nothing in our senses tells us why or how it rises. Because of this fact, based purely on our sensory knowledge, we can never be absolutely certain the sun will indeed rise tomorrow.
The consequence of empiricism is that it yields a world whose existence is entirely in the mind: Since we can’t know anything beyond what we sense, it’s always possible that our senses are being tricked. This result wouldn’t do for Kant, but he also couldn’t dismiss Hume altogether—empirical knowledge was too valuable. The Critique of Pure Reason was his attempt to reconcile Hume’s empiricism with the certainty that a world outside the mind existed.
Kant’s solution was to suggest that there is knowledge of reality not dependent on the senses. He called this a priori knowledge. An example is our sense of time: How do we know what time is if we can’t feel or see it (much less taste or smell it)? Kant believed the mind itself provides our sense of time as we encounter other sense data.
Consider a motorcycle again. If we accept Hume’s position—that our knowledge of the motorcycle is entirely dependent on sense data—we would have to accept a number of clear absurdities, including, for example, that any time we changed our physical position in relation to the motorcycle, the motorcycle would also change. Kant solves this problem by saying we have an a priori motorcycle in our minds, one constructed from sense data accumulated over a life of experience. This motorcycle is consistent no matter what our sense data tells us.
Although Phaedrus was initially thrilled by this revolution in philosophical thought, he later became disenchanted with it. One reason was his experience in Korea, which had shown him a mode of understanding different from the classical. To Phaedrus, Kant’s philosophy—in fact, all of Western philosophy—was too staid and technical. He found it ugly.
In Cooke City, the riders stop for lunch, and Pirsig discovers that the Sutherlands are as happy as he’s seen them. He acknowledges that he must seem distant to them, given the Chautauquas he’s been conducting while they all ride together. Chris, naturally, understands Pirsig’s introversion better, but even he worries sometimes.
The Sutherlands ask Pirsig how he met the family they’ll be staying with in Bozeman, the DeWeeses. Pirsig has to admit that he doesn’t remember. The DeWeeses are friends of Phaedrus’s friends—the husband, Bob, whom Pirsig refers to as DeWeese, is an abstract painter who teaches at the college in Bozeman—and Pirsig tells us that he hasn’t seen them since Phaedrus was erased.
Pirsig’s memories of Phaedrus’s relationship with DeWeese are fragmentary, but he knows that Phaedrus was fond of DeWeese. His fondness stemmed from the fact that DeWeese continuously surprised Phaedrus: When Phaedrus expected one reaction from DeWeese, DeWeese would often produce the exact opposite reaction.
DeWeese’s curious responses led Phaedrus to believe DeWeese possessed some deep knowledge that could help Phaedrus. And DeWeese, Phaedrus later discovered, felt a similar curiosity about him.
Test out your own ability to think laterally with these prompts.
Revisit the problem you analyzed using the Scientific Method. In the space provided, brainstorm some out-of-the-box remedies you might try. Don’t edit yourself; just let the ideas flow.
Pick one possibility from your list above and try to describe how it occurred to you. What connections did you make? And how might you recreate this sort of freethinking in the future?
The riders arrive at the gates of Yellowstone Park and pay their fee to enter. Pirsig recalls that Phaedrus rarely visited the park even though he lived close to it when he was in Bozeman—it was too stagey for him.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus in India
Before Phaedrus wound up in Bozeman, however, Pirsig informs us he spent years studying Eastern philosophy at Benares Hindu University in India.
The experience wasn’t revolutionary for Phaedrus, at least not at the time. He was, however, exposed to a great deal of information that would influence his later thought.
One such influence was the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Phaedrus discovered that the differences among these religions were minor compared to the tensions among the major Western religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism). The core tenet of the Eastern religions he studied was Tat tvan asi—Sanskrit for “Thou are that.” Tat tvan asi means that there is no division between who we are and what we perceive. Once a human being realizes that he is one with everything around him, it says, he has reached enlightenment.
The best way to recognize our oneness with the world is stillness—meditation. Phaedrus resisted meditating, however—he was still at the time a committed classical thinker, and there was nothing rational about meditation.
When his Indian philosophy professor, lecturing on the illusory nature of reality, asserted that the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki too were illusory, Phaedrus left India wholly disenchanted. He renounced his study of philosophy and earned a degree in journalism instead. He took a sequence of writing jobs, started a family, and settled into middle-class life.
The travelers leave the park at a town called Gardiner, where they decide to spend the night. The next morning, Pirsig finds it hard to eat—they will arrive at the university where Phaedrus taught in a matter of hours, and he’s nervous.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and the University
Pirsig remembers that Phaedrus hated to teach, mostly because he suffered from severe stage fright (he would often vomit before his classes). He didn’t appear nervous to his students, however; rather, his anxiety manifested itself as a strange, sometimes disturbing intensity. He had a reputation, and not a particularly good one, among the student body.
The college where he taught was a teaching-focused, rather than research-focused, school. Phaedrus hated that his teaching load didn’t allow time for contemplation and forced him to repeat his lessons year after year, but he nevertheless believed in the higher purpose of the university. In fact, he thought of his university as the “Church of Reason.”
His rosy view of the school had a lot to do with the politics of Montana at the time. The government was dominated by ultra-right-wing politicians who were attacking the traditions and standards of institutions of higher learning. They infringed on the free-speech rights of the university’s faculty, abolished admissions and grading standards, and cut the university’s funding. The funding cuts were felt especially in the English Department, Phaedrus’s home department, which had been leading the fight against the government’s meddling.
Phaedrus himself was a visible figure in the department’s resistance to the government. One day a student questioned him about his efforts to get the school’s accreditation revoked (Phaedrus had notified the school’s accrediting association of the government’s activities). It quickly became clear the students misunderstood the nature of accreditation: They thought that if the school lost its accreditation it would shut down.
The next day Phaedrus delivered a prepared lecture, a rarity. He told his students that the school’s losing its accreditation was similar to excommunication in Catholicism: Although the school would continue to operate much as it did before—enrolling students, arranging classes—it would lose its status as a real university. By “real university,” Phaedrus meant a state of mind, passed down through the centuries, that commits itself to the exercise of reason. The university’s accreditation affirmed that it was partaking in this tradition.
Phaedrus hypothesized that the students’ confusion stemmed from their mistaking the real university with the physical and legal institution that plays host to it (the “second university”). But the second university is just the setting for the cultivation of reason that comprises the real university. And the goal of that cultivation is the pursuit of truth.
So, when stakeholders in the second university—trustees and legislators, say—decide that they don’t like what professors are saying or doing, it’s the professors’ duty to resist these influences. The real university’s mission is not to placate the community but to pursue truth.
In his lecture, Phaedrus likened the university’s physical structures to a church building and its faculty to ministers. A church building isn’t sacred for its own sake—it’s made holy by its parishioners and their faith. And a minister’s primary goal isn’t to serve his community but to serve God (and thereby, in the long run, to do right by his congregation). Hence Phaedrus’s alternative name for the real university: the “Church of Reason.”
But why, when Phaedrus had already lost his own faith in rational thought’s ability to find truth, did he defend its free exercise so zealously?
Pirsig believes Phaedrus’s crisis of confidence drove him to defend the Church of Reason. We’re never fanatical about something we’re sure of—no one devotes themselves to convincing others that water will run downhill. Rather, we give ourselves to causes when they’re in doubt.
Phaedrus’s militancy took place in the late 1950s, before the rise of the hippies and the resistance to classical understanding as embodied by the Sutherlands. But he seemed to have a clairvoyant sense that the legitimacy of reason would soon come under fierce attack.
The riders reach Bozeman. Pirsig has a vague recollection of the town’s main street, but his predominant feeling is that of a tourist. At first he has some difficulty getting in touch with the DeWeeses, but he calls the college’s art department and gets directions to their home. They live at the base of the mountains outside of town; the road that leads to their house is made of deep gravel and is treacherous. The riders turn a corner and come upon a large house with an abstract iron sculpture attached to it. DeWeese is sitting under the statue, entertaining a couple.
Introductions are made all around—DeWeese already has guests over, a new art instructor at the school and his wife—and the group sits. Presently John engages DeWeese and his guest in conversation, and Pirsig zones out. Although the conversation is for the most part agreeable, Pirsig begins to notice some awkwardness developing between John and DeWeese. It concerns their respective attitudes toward Pirsig: Whereas DeWeese is gentle, John is sarcastic and teasing. The awkwardness comes to a head when John says Pirsig must have been “really crazy” to leave such a beautiful place as Bozeman. DeWeese is appalled, then angry, but Pirsig calms him with a hand gesture.
The tension stems from the contexts in which DeWeese and John know Pirsig. To John, Pirsig is just an average middle-class person with whom he drinks and rides motorcycles; to DeWeese, however, Pirsig is a serious philosopher and intellectual. What DeWeese doesn’t know is that the Pirsig he knows—Phaedrus—is no more.
(Shortform note: Up to this point, the narrative has been ambiguous with regard to how much Pirsig’s friends know about his institutionalization and treatment. For example, it isn’t clear whether John knows that Pirsig was hospitalized, and so his comments about Pirsig’s “craziness” could either be understood as obliviousness or a joke in poor taste. DeWeese, however, doesn’t know why Pirsig/Phaedrus left Bozeman, so his anger at John can’t be about John’s making light of Pirsig’s illness. Rather, DeWeese is angry because John isn’t giving Pirsig the deference he deserves.)
As the sun begins to set, the temperature drops, and DeWeese’s wife suggests the riders unpack. Once everyone is situated, dinner is served in the living room. A hard, cold wind blows outside.
After dinner, more people arrive. Eventually the topic of technical writing comes up—DeWeese is frustrated with the manual for a rotisserie he’s purchased—and Pirsig recites a favorite line from a Japanese bicycle’s assembly instructions. The instructions begin by telling their reader that assembly requires “great peace of mind.”
Pirsig notes that, unexpected as this sentiment is, it’s actually quite wise: Peace of mind and a well-maintained machine go hand in hand. When the group expresses skepticism, Pirsig elaborates.
Chautauqua: The Art of Technology
Contrary to what we might think, a machine can’t be right or wrong—rather, it either satisfies or it doesn’t. If a machine gives us peace of mind, then it’s correctly assembled and maintained, no matter what the instructions say; if it doesn’t, then either the machine needs to be repaired or we need to change our minds.
In the case of the rotisserie, DeWeese’s misgivings stem from his fear that he may not have understood the instructions completely—even if the machine functions perfectly, it may not “check out” with regard to the instructions. This matter of following the instructions exactly is bogus, because despite what we might think, there’s an infinite number of ways to assemble any machine.
What Pirsig’s listeners seem not to be aware of is that technological knowhow is inherently creative. When there are an infinite number of ways to put a machine together, then choosing one of those ways becomes an expressive and personal act. Pirsig asks us to imagine two craftsmen at work: a novice with poor skills and a master. The master is wholly concentrated on his craft, improvising at will because he is an expert in his materials, whereas the novice must constantly refer to instructions. A master craftsman, or mechanic for that matter, works like an artist—he follows no plan, and his work is completed when it matches the idea of the machine in his mind.
And so, Pirsig concludes, when DeWeese was building his rotisserie, he was actually building a sculpture. His listeners, who are all conventional artists, find this idea absurd and laugh it off.
Later, after the guests have left and Chris and the Sutherlands have gone to sleep, Pirsig and the DeWeeses return to their discussion of art and technology. What’s eating Pirsig (and spurring his Chautauquas) is the reactionary distaste for technology currently in vogue. For centuries, technology was the best means for providing human beings with some level of security—by feeding, clothing, and sheltering us more effectively and efficiently. But now that, thanks to technology, these basic human needs are assured, humans have decided that technology is soulless and ugly. From back-to-the-earth communes to environmentalism, there is a national crisis with regard to technology.
Pirsig isn’t content simply to defend technology, for he acknowledges that technology doesn’t connect with matters of the heart the way, for example, art does. (Shortform note: Pirsig’s concession here that technology is indeed the opposite of art contradicts his earlier arguments concerning technological knowledge’s inherent artistry.) What he believes is necessary, rather, is a new form of thought that transcends the binaries—art/technology, classical/romantic, reason/feeling—that set off the crisis in the first place. What he wants to create is a new form of reason.
When the DeWeeses comment that he should write his musings down, he replies that he’s been contemplating a series of talks—Chautauquas.
Pirsig, Chris, and the Sutherlands spend the next two days relaxing around the DeWeeses’. Then it’s time for the Sutherlands to head back to Minnesota. After one last round of beers in Bozeman, they say their goodbyes. Pirsig and Chris wander aimlessly around town; eventually Pirsig suggests they walk up to the university.
As they work their way toward their destination, Pirsig remembers many of the streets. When he asks Chris if he remembers, Chris recalls that he and his mother would drive around looking for Pirsig. If they found him, Pirsig would simply get in the back of the car without saying a word. Pirsig’s excuse is that he was “thinking hard.”
At the time, Pirsig tells us, Phaedrus was struggling with the subject he was teaching: rhetoric. Like his skepticism of the classical mode of understanding, he was also skeptical of the rules of composition. These rules, he decided, were based on certain writers’ habits and developed after the fact—that is, they didn’t even guide the writers who served as their best examples. The rules were also so vulnerable to exceptions and qualifications that they barely functioned as rules at all.
Pirsig and Chris head directly to the building where Pirsig used to teach. He feels the same old anxiety as they approach. They enter the building. It’s deserted. Chris gets scared and, when Pirsig refuses to leave, runs back outside.
After Chris goes, Pirsig discovers he’s having an intense flashback. He seems to have become Phaedrus. He enters Phaedrus’s old classroom and finds the room unchanged. He is staring out the window, lost in thought, when someone turns the knob behind him. It’s a woman he doesn’t recognize; but after a moment she recognizes him.
She asks to sit and contemplates Pirsig. They make small talk—she seems to be a former student or colleague of Phaedrus—and eventually she admits knowing he was in the hospital. When Pirsig tells her he’s no longer teaching, she expresses complete disbelief, then leaves abruptly.
As Pirsig is about to exit the building, he opens another door on a whim. A painting on the wall shocks him: He recognizes it immediately: It’s a painting, or rather a print, that Phaedrus bought. Pirsig realizes he’s in Phaedrus’s old office.
Suddenly he’s consumed by powerful memories of his time teaching at the college. And he remembers precisely what set Phaedrus on the path to insanity. It was his colleague’s asking him, in a singsong voice, whether he was teaching “Quality.” At first Phaedrus treated her question like the mere politeness it was. But when she mentioned it again, and then a third time, Phaedrus found himself meditating for hours on end, neglecting his work and his family. He became obsessed with “Quality”: How can human beings tell when something is “Quality”? What is “Quality”?
Use these exercises to get yourself thinking like an artist.
What are you best at? In the box below, describe the facet of your life where you excel the most and list 3–5 reasons why you excel.
Now, in the box below, describe a part of your life where you feel you don’t excel. List 3–5 reasons why you think this particular part of your life gives you trouble.
Now revisit your list of reasons from Question #1 and think about your answer to Question #2. Are there ways to apply your strengths to the facet of your life where you can improve? Be creative!
The morning after Pirsig’s flashback, he and Chris pack their backpacks and hike into the mountains behind the DeWeeses’. Pirsig notes that mountains appear in every major religion as metaphors, especially for a spiritual obstacle that prevents the soul from reaching its highest goal.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s Inquiry into Quality
Phaedrus saw his inquiry into Quality as an attempt to find a new path up the mountain of existential meaning. His ascent can be divided into two phases: a creative, unsystematic phase, which Phaedrus found enjoyable; and a rigorous, hierarchical phase, which Phaedrus thought resulted in a new conception of human existence but came at the cost of his family and freedom.
Pirsig believes that a new theory of the meaning of existence—a new path up the mountain—is needed now more than ever. Many modern people still follow the precepts of Jesus and Moses, but if those figures were to appear today and start spreading their message, they wouldn’t be taken seriously. This isn’t because their ideas aren’t wise or true, but rather because the historical context has changed—a reference to “Heaven above,” in an age when we can see into distant space, prompts questions about where exactly Heaven is located.
Although Phaedrus believed he’d found a new route up the mountain, Pirsig is less certain, primarily because his knowledge of Phaedrus’s system is incomplete. Pirsig admits that, at first, he hesitated to research Phaedrus’s ideas for fear he would descend into madness as Phaedrus had. But even when he convinced himself he wasn’t in danger, he had to reconstruct Phaedrus’s ideas from scattered notes and fragments of memory. He acknowledges there are errors and ambiguities in his account of Phaedrus’s thought, but he affirms that these are likely a product of Pirsig’s reconstruction rather than the thought itself.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The First Phase
Phaedrus’s initial ideas about Quality emerged from his teaching of rhetoric. One of his students, a dutiful but not especially bright young woman, was having tremendous difficulty writing an essay. She initially wanted to write on the US, but Phaedrus recommended she narrow her focus to Bozeman, then the main street of Bozeman, and finally the front of the Bozeman Opera House, starting with a single brick. It wasn’t until she wrote about the front of the Opera House that she discovered she had something to say, and she produced 10x the words she was required to.
The student was blocked because she was trying to repeat things she’d been taught. When the topic was too broad—the US, or even Bozeman’s main street—she assumed there was something she’d learned already that could guide her, and when she couldn’t identify it she became paralyzed. When she was forced to focus on something miniscule, however, she knew nothing she’d been taught would be useful and thus resorted to her own intellectual resources.
Imitation, Phaedrus decided, was the enemy. And grades, which signified how well a student had learned to imitate what he or she had been taught, were imitation’s enabler.
So Phaedrus decided to eliminate grades.
Pirsig and Chris see the snowline—their destination—in the distance. It’s three to four days’ hike away. They stop for a rest, and Pirsig asks Chris to cut down two Aspens with Pirsig’s machete to make walking sticks. Chris declines. Pirsig does the cutting himself, thinking that Chris’s attitude could become an issue later given the demands of the terrain.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The First Phase (cont’d)
Inspired by a student’s paper on the viability of a gradeless-degreeless system, Phaedrus developed his own “demonstrator”—a piece of persuasive writing that he drafted in real time with his students as commentators—that argued for the abolition of grades.
His central point was that the grading system had produced a “mule mentality” in students. Grades were both carrot and stick, and if neither was in play, the typical student wouldn’t work. This situation wasn’t only distressing to teachers; it was detrimental to society. A civilization can’t be pulled along by mules—it can only advance by the original thought of free people.
Phaedrus’s theory was that the abolition of grades would result in students’ attending class and working hard for the sake of learning itself rather than a stamp of approval. It would also encourage students to think originally rather than imitatively.
In the same quarter that he drafted his “demonstrator,” he told his students that he would not be grading any of their assignments (he did grade them, only he kept the grades to himself). What he found heartened him: The students, though resistant and wary at first, ended up flourishing in the gradeless environment, participating more in class and relating to each other collegially rather than competitively. He also discovered that the better the student, the less the student cared about the grade: His “A” students voted 2 to 1 in favor of keeping the gradeless system, whereas the poorer students unanimously wanted the grade system back.
The hikers are in deep wilderness. Pirsig notes that the route he’s chosen will take them near a road on the second day in case anything goes wrong. Soon, the trail they’re following just about disappears.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The First Phase (cont’d)
Phaedrus’s aim in abolishing grades was to force his students to think creatively and originally rather than imitatively. He wanted to them to discover what good writing was by looking within themselves, without his having to unilaterally tell them. But, the experiment over, Phaedrus realized there was a glaring contradiction in his thought: If the students already knew what good writing was, they wouldn’t be in the class in the first place!
Thus Phaedrus was stumped. The students couldn’t figure out what good writing was on their own, and Phaedrus was both unable and unwilling to tell them. Despondently, he returned to graded, unilateral teaching and retreated further into himself.
The hikers are stopped. Chris, exhausted and surly, is resting under a tree. Pirsig intuits that Chris is afraid he doesn’t have the strength or willpower to make it up the mountain. To distract him, Pirsig tells a story about encountering a bull moose while on a hike with Chris’s mother. It cheers Chris up enough to make him communicative. Pirsig urges him to take it slower from here on out because the slope is getting steeper. To climb a mountain, Pirsig tells us, one must live in the present and take it one step at a time.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The First Phase (cont’d)
After his colleague Sarah had started Pirsig’s gears turning about Quality, he’d assigned his class an essay: “What is quality in thought and statement?” The topic met with fierce resistance and frustration. When the students asked him for the answer, he confessed he didn’t know and was assigning the essay in the hope someone could help him. This, too, caused an outcry.
A few classes later he put an internally contradictory definition of Quality—really, no definition at all—on the board. He then asserted that even if no one in the room could define Quality, everyone knew what it was. To prove it, he presented the class with two student compositions, one poorly realized, the other exceptional. All but two students found the exceptional composition better.
In subsequent classes he went further, presenting the students with four papers and asking them to rank them. Invariably their rankings would match, or nearly match, his own.
So the students could recognize Quality when they encountered it. But how could they produce it themselves?
Phaedrus found himself returning to the rules of rhetoric he’d discarded. Suddenly he saw them in a new light. They were no longer rules to be memorized for their own sake; rather they were a means to an end: Quality.
And, by virtue of his ranking exercises, he was able to deflect questions about how to accomplish a particular assignment. He could just point to the fact that the students already knew what a quality essay was, and thus they had the tools to decide on their own whether their work was satisfactory.
Thus, through the concept of Quality, Phaedrus was able simultaneously to escape rote instruction and encourage student creativity. His lessons on specific writing techniques became suggestions for increasing Quality; and, as they wrote, his students were using their own judgment to decide if what they were creating was indeed Quality.
What continued to bother Phaedrus, however, was his solution’s irrationality (he was still a classical thinker at heart). It was irrational because no one could say for certain what Quality was, and yet everyone could recognize it and many could achieve it.
He suspected that the indefinability of Quality linked up somehow with his earlier questions about rationality. This is what led him to the second phase of his inquiry.
Chris is really struggling—rather than push branches to the side he stumbles through them. Pirsig blames the YMCA summer camp Chris attended before they set out on their road trip. The camp portrayed outdoors skills as an indicator of manhood, which Pirsig believes, in the mountain-climbing context, to be utterly counterproductive. To summit a mountain, a climber must leave ego behind. An ego-climber is always unhappy and constantly looking ahead, never stopping to appreciate what’s around him in the present. This, unfortunately, is Chris’s approach at the moment.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The Second Phase
Phaedrus’s second phase began with his considering Quality outside the discipline of rhetoric. One casualty of his ideas about Quality was the entire branch of philosophy known as aesthetics—the study of beauty. Because, if Quality—which Phaedrus equated with beauty—was by definition indefinable, then defining beauty was impossible, too.
But if Quality was indefinable, how could Phaedrus be sure it existed? To answer this question, he used an approach that originated in the philosophical school of realism. Philosophical realists argued that an entity exists if, when that entity is subtracted from the world, the world can no longer function normally.
Phaedrus discovered that a world without Quality was a severely diminished one. There were no fine arts (because street noise was just as good as a symphony), no comedy (because humor depends on Quality), no sports (because the scores would be meaningless), no flavorful foods (because anything would taste like anything else), and no entertainment at all (because no one would be able to tell the difference between fun and boredom).
(Shortform note: Some of Phaedrus’s examples show circular reasoning. For example, ”the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.”)
Phaedrus’s conclusion was that a world could function without Quality, but it would certainly not function normally. Thus Phaedrus had proved, at least as far as the philosophical realists were concerned, that Quality existed.
In the course of his thought experiment, Phaedrus discovered that there were historical analogues to the Qualityless world he’d imagined: ancient Sparta and the totalitarian states of communist China and Russia. A Qualityless world was a utilitarian one, organized exclusively according to the laws of reason.
A Qualityless world, Phaedrus realized, was a square one.
Phaedrus decided that Quality was a powerful analytical instrument. It cleaved the world cleanly in half: on one side, the terms defined by an inability to recognize Quality unless its meaning was already clear (square, classical, technological); on the other, the terms defined by their ability to recognize Quality whether its meaning was clear or not (hip, romantic, humanistic). Pirsig calls this Phaedrus’s “first wave of crystallization.”
Pirsig turns to find Chris lagging far behind. When Pirsig yells for him to catch up, he collapses in a heap. He claims he’s turned his ankle, but Pirsig knows he’s just making an excuse to cover his exhaustion. Pirsig decides to relay his and Chris’s packs to lighten Chris’s load.
The going is slow, but they advance. They come to a small stream, and Pirsig sends Chris to gather water for cooking. When he returns, he and Pirsig have an argument—Chris doesn’t seem to understand that Pirsig is exerting himself more than necessary carrying both packs—and Chris refuses lunch, saying his stomach hurts. Chris moves off a short distance to cry, and Pirsig eats and falls asleep. When he wakes, Chris is still crying.
Pirsig attempts to make amends, but Chris remains upset. Pirsig decides to shift all the heavy items they’ve brought into his backpack and pack the light ones in Chris’s. This solution lifts Chris’s spirits.
They reach an extremely steep stretch and move even more slowly than before. The Aspen staves Pirsig cut earlier help keep them on their feet.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The Second Phase (cont’d)
The classical—or “square”—mode of understanding analyzes the world by slicing it up into pieces and then organizing those pieces into hierarchical structures. Quality, by virtue of its indefinability, eludes this procedure—it cannot be satisfactorily placed in any hierarchy.
Phaedrus believed that this aspect of Quality would lead him to a better understanding of the ghost that continued to haunt him: the ghost of rationality. It was his work in this vein that eventually caused him to lose his mind.
Pirsig, however, has his own philosophical goals in his Chautauquas. Although Phaedrus was aware of the classical and romantic divide, he didn’t pay much attention to it, whereas Pirsig believes this division to be of utmost importance. And he believes Quality, as the term that splits the modes of understanding, also has the ability to unite them.
The hikers are high up on one side of a canyon. Chris’s mood has improved, enough so that Pirsig is afraid he’s getting overconfident. Once they reach a level spot, around three in the afternoon, Pirsig calls a halt for the day (he’s feeling fatigued). Clouds begin to form, and they barely pitch their tents and take cover before the rain starts. Pirsig takes out Walden, but he and Chris realize Thoreau’s writing doesn’t quite fit with the surroundings, and they end up just watching the rain.
Presently Pirsig cooks their dinner, and as they eat, Chris asks what Pirsig is thinking about all the time. Pirsig replies that he’s thinking about what the world will be like when Chris grows up.
As Pirsig awakens the following morning, he recalls the dream he was having. He was in a white room with a glass door, and on the other side of the door was Chris, Chris’s brother, and Pirsig’s wife. His wife was visibly upset; Chris was smiling and waving, but Pirsig could tell Chris was fearful and only pretending to be happy. As Pirsig approached the door, Chris became enthusiastic for real, but when Pirsig failed to open the door, Chris’s fear returned. Pirsig has had the dream before, and now he knows what it means: Chris is trying to become closer with Pirsig and he’s afraid he won’t be able to.
When Chris wakes, he accuses Pirsig of keeping him up all night. He says that Pirsig, sounding drunk, was talking until all hours about the top of the mountain. He’d told Chris that he’d meet Chris there. Pirsig deduces Chris has been dreaming as well.
They pack their bags and continue their trek up the ridge. The terrain isn’t as steep, and the going is easier.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The Second Phase (cont’d)
Phaedrus’s second wave of crystallization took him into the metaphysical realm. The impetus for the second wave was his colleagues in the English department, who asked him whether Quality was an objective aspect of the things we observe or a subjective aspect existing in the observer.
Phaedrus recognized this question as a dilemma (Greek for “two premises”). If Quality inhered in the object, then it should be detectable by some sort of scientific instrument. If Quality inhered in the observer, then it could be whatever anyone wanted it to be.
Phaedrus’s training in logic and philosophy provided him with a variety of responses to the dilemma, the best of which, in Pirsig’s estimation, was simply to refuse to accept the premises of the question: If Quality is undefinable, it’s impossible to classify as either objective or subjective. Pirsig sees this as the mystical option.
But this wasn’t the option Phaedrus chose, at least not initially. Instead, he decided to try to counter his colleagues through logic. Pirsig attributes this choice—which would prove disastrous—to two factors: one, Phaedrus’s enduring commitment to the Church of Reason, whose foundations lay not in mysticism but rational argument; and two, Phaedrus’s ego.
Phaedrus’s first move was to try to beat the dilemma on the objective side. But he quickly ran aground: Quality wasn’t a physical property and could not be measured by scientific instruments. So he tried the subjective—and found himself getting angry.
What bothered him was the way his colleagues had framed the question. They’d said that if Quality was subjective, it was “just what you like.” Phaedrus’s problem was with the “just”—it made the thing you liked seem petty or unserious. Phaedrus decided to cut out that “just,” and suddenly he had a simple truism: “Quality is what you like.”
He wasn’t quite finished with “just,” however. He realized that when people tell you “don’t do just what you like,” what they’re really saying is, “do just what I like.” The prohibition on doing just what you like is intended to make you do what others like. And these others, usually, are authority figures—parents, bosses, teachers, policemen.
So, by not doing “just what we like,” we’re bowing to authority and conforming to its view of society. But Phaedrus realized that conformity isn’t the only effect of the prohibition. It also diminishes the importance of our subjective emotions and tastes.
The argument against valuing our emotions and preferences—which are often deemed “irrational” or “personal”—stems from two different but related philosophical traditions: Scientific Materialism and Classic Formalism.
- According to Scientific Materialism, things are real only if they’re made from matter and energy and can be measured by scientific instruments. Because our preferences can’t be measured by any known device, they’re “unreal” (or, at least, unimportant).
- According to Classic Formalism, a thing which can’t be understood intellectually—i.e., logically or rationally—can’t be understood at all. Thus “what we like,” because it’s emotional and often inexplicable, isn’t worth wasting time on.
Phaedrus was able to refute the Scientific Materialist position by employing a reductio ad absurdum, a form of argument that proves propositions wrong by showing that they produce absurd conclusions. Phaedrus’s first example was the number zero, which has neither matter nor energy and, by definition, can’t be measured, but is nevertheless taken for granted in science.
The Classic Formalist objection, however, proved more difficult to refute. A Classic Formalist would say that immediate emotional response (“just what you like”) should be subordinated to rational consideration (“what this means/entails”). The Classic Formalist position, like Phaedrus himself, favors underlying form over romantic appearance.
Phaedrus was unable to refute this objection because Classic Formalists were indeed recognizing Quality, though a Quality different in kind from the one his students recognized. Thus Phaedrus was left with the unacceptable conclusion that there were (at least) two different types of Quality: classic Quality, to which classical thinkers respond; and romantic Quality, to which romantics do.
But Phaedrus still believed that Quality was a means to unifying classic and romantic thinking. In fact, he believed Quality transcended the classical/romantic binary and thus couldn’t be analyzed using either mode of understanding.
So he opted for a third way: Quality was neither objective nor subjective. It was its own irreducible entity. The world, he decided, was composed of subjects (people), objects (things), and Quality.
Although trinities in metaphysics aren’t entirely original, they are uncommon, and they raise the question of the relationship among the three terms. Phaedrus quickly realized that Quality couldn’t be related to the other two terms in isolation from each other. Rather, Quality could only be found in the relationship between subject and object. That’s when he had his breakthrough: Quality didn’t spring from subject and object—no, subject and object spring from it! Quality, Phaedrus realized, is an event rather than an entity, and subjects and objects—people and things—are effects of the Quality event. In other words, Quality creates our existence.
The deep forest through which Chris and Pirsig have been hiking begins to thin, and they see they’re near the top of the canyon. They race to the top, and even though Chris is behind at first, he wins. Exhilarated, they ditch their gear and lie against some rocks to rest. The view is magnificent.
They fall asleep, and when Pirsig wakes, he thinks about the dream Chris had. He starts to get a bad feeling.
Chris wakes up, and the two have lunch. When Chris asks what Pirsig is thinking about, Pirsig admits he’s wondering why he told Chris he’d meet him at the top of the mountain. Chris then clarifies something he said earlier: Pirsig didn’t sound drunk when he was talking to him; rather, he sounded like he “used to,” when they lived in Bozeman.
They pack up and move off to find water. As they near a ravine they hear the sound of a rockslide. Pirsig explains that rock slides are a sign that the mountain is wearing down, and that there are forces beneath the surface of a mountain that can tear it apart. He recalls for Chris a horrible accident, when 19 hikers were buried in a rockslide.
After they hear another rockslide as they continue to search for water, Pirsig suggests that they delay their attempt to summit the mountain until next year. Chris is disappointed, so Pirsig says they’ll think about it and when they get water they can decide. It’s not just the rockslides that are bothering Pirsig, however. He’s spooked; he’s afraid of seeing Phaedrus at the top of the mountain. He starts sprinting down the ridge without realizing it, until Chris screams to wait up.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus and Quality: The Second Phase (cont’d)
As Pirsig descends from the ridge, he also abruptly says he’s going to put Phaedrus’s story to bed to concentrate on his own ideas.
Phaedrus’s epiphany about Quality—that it was an event that preceded the distinction between subject and object—led him to his third wave of crystallization: the mystical.
Before he reached the mystical, however, he explored further what he meant by the Quality event. He saw the event as comprising a preconscious awareness of a given object. For example, between the moment you see a tree and register that it actually is a tree, there’s a time lag in which you’re simply aware of something—that time lag, which lasts only an instant, is when you see Quality.
Different types of people have different attunements to Quality. Intellectuals, unsurprisingly, have the most difficulty apprehending Quality, because they’re so quick to classify every experience according to hierarchical structures of knowledge. Young children, on the other hand, are the most sensitive to Quality, because their structures of knowledge are far more limited than intellectuals’. In other words, the more experience we have, the less able we are to see Quality.
Now Phaedrus had his answer to why people saw Quality differently—why, for example, classical thinkers saw Quality in underlying form while romantic thinkers saw it in immediate experience. Each person brings to Quality a unique breadth of experience, which provides analogues for the Quality event. Thus the more alike people’s experience is, the more likely they are to see the same kind of Quality. This explained why Phaedrus’s composition class (mostly) agreed on which papers were Quality—they all had similar backgrounds to each other.
He was finally ready to respond formally to the objections of his colleagues. He sat down and wrote out his conclusions, which went as follows:
- Quality cannot be explained by virtue of philosophy, for philosophical explanation, which distinguishes between subjects and objects, comes after the immediate, preconscious awareness of Quality.
- The simplest way to think about Quality is as an organism’s response to its environment. We respond to our environment is all sorts of ways, by attempting to master it through technology and industry or represent it through the arts. But prior to these material responses, and what causes them, is our sense of Quality.
- Quality cannot be defined because it transcends and gives rise to any possible definition itself. To define Quality is to mistake it.
When he finished, he realized that he’d changed his position yet again: it wasn’t a trinity he was describing, but a monism (that is, a single entity, like God, that gives rise to everything there is).
He remembered that Hegel, a German philosopher, dealt with a monism called Absolute Mind. Then he recalled that Hegel was sometimes treated as a bridge between the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. He went to his bookshelf and picked up a book he’d hand-copied years before: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Almost as soon as he began reading he knew: The Tao (Chinese for “Way”)—the mystical generating force for all there is in the universe—was exactly what he meant by Quality!
But this new awareness came at a cost. As he read, his thoughts came like a rockslide and he found himself losing control.
His discovery was too much for his mind to bear.
The hikers have stopped at a water source and are eating lunch. They’re descending the ridge along a different trail, into a different canyon. Although Chris is disappointed that they won’t be summiting the mountain, he offers to carry some of the heavy stuff Pirsig transferred to his pack.
Back on the trail, the going is relatively rough—the slope is steep, and Pirsig has to hack through the overgrown brush with his machete—but eventually the hikers make it to a road. Some fellow campers give them a ride back into Bozeman; it’s late by the time they arrive, and Pirsig decides to check them into a hotel rather than wake the DeWeeses. They’re asleep almost as soon as they lie down.
In the morning, Pirsig and Chris return to the DeWeeses’ to say their goodbyes, then they’re back on Pirsig’s cycle, heading West.
Chautauqua: Coming Down the Mountain
Pirsig wants to effect a change in emphasis, from the abstract to the practical. His final judgment is mixed on whether Phaedrus advanced human knowledge either of the Tao or Quality, but what he did achieve was an expansion of our notion of reason. Although he was a dyed-in-the-wool classical thinker, Phaedrus used the tools of rational argument to reach beyond what we typically consider rational or logical.
The first step down from Phaedrus’s abstraction to Pirsig’s practical use is to recognize that if Quality is indeed the Buddha (or the Tao)—the entity from which all other entities spring—then it unites three key areas of human experience: Art, Religion, and Science.
Quality’s relation to Science is Pirsig’s primary concern, and he begins his discussion with the 19th-century French scientist and philosopher Jules Henri Poincaré—who, in his scientific researches, reached the same impasse that Phaedrus did.
Poincaré was active during a time of crisis in the physical sciences, one wrought by the appearance of the Theory of Relativity, which undermined the laws of physics as they’d been understood for years. The seeds for this crisis, as Poincaré showed in his book Foundations of Science, were actually sewn decades earlier, when mathematicians were able to propose internally consistent geometries that were incompatible both with Euclidean geometry (the standard) and each other. What this meant was that a canny mathematician could create geometries that were equally as accurate and logically sound as the one taken for granted as “true.”
The riders coast through a series of towns—Butte, Anaconda, Phillipsburg—and eventually stop at church to take a rest. Pirsig notes how lonely it is on the road without the Sutherlands. He returns to the Chautauqua to occupy his mind.
Chautauqua: Poincaré’s Truth
Poincaré’s analysis of non-Euclidean geometries yielded this insight: that a given geometry was simply a set of conventions that was either more or less convenient for a given task; that is, no particular geometry was true but rather advantageous.
This observation led Poincaré to critique further foundational scientific concepts, space and time in particular. He found again that there is no “true” measure for space or time, only more or less useful conventions created by human beings.
The usefulness of a given convention is decided by the “facts”—observable objects and phenomena. But what Poincaré realized is that there are simply too many facts to choose from. For example, if one wants to study human life, where does one start? With the “fact” of human consciousness? The “fact” of the nervous system? The “fact” of DNA?
Poincaré sketched how a typical scientist chooses facts to concentrate on. The most important trait of a fact was its generality. If the study of a particular fact would yield knowledge of an array of related facts, then that was a better fact to explore than one that would only yield knowledge of itself.
But how can one know, before one begins experimenting, which facts are general and which are specific? Poincaré examined his own mathematical process and found that his breakthroughs came to him suddenly and inexplicably, as if out of thin air. His conclusion was that a “subliminal self” selects the proper facts based on their “beauty” and “harmony” with preexisting facts—in short, that facts are selected by an aesthetic sense rather than a strictly scientific one.
(Shortform note: In his exposition of Poincaré, Pirsig at times conflates two distinct senses of the word “fact.” Sometimes he uses “fact” to mean “observable phenomena”; other times, he uses it to denote a “true statement” or “rule.”)
Poincaré’s ideas, like Phaedrus’s, met with stout resistance. He, like Phaedrus, was accused of touting a radical subjectivism, a theory that turned scientific facts into “just what you like.” Poincaré didn’t refute this possibility. But what he didn’t consider was the existence of a third entity that preceded the encounter of the scientist with the fact and that drew the scientist to the fact: Quality.
When Pirsig discovered the writings of Poincaré, he became emotional, because it was clear that Phaedrus and Poincaré were struggling with the same troubling questions and coming up with similar answers. (Poincaré’s “subliminal self” corresponded with Phaedrus’s “preconscious awareness,” and the “harmony” of Poincaré’s system resembled Quality.) Phaedrus, however, went one step further than Poincaré. He proposed an all-encompassing force that organized scientists’ choices. Scientists weren’t selecting facts willy-nilly; they were being guided by a sense of Quality.
After gassing up in Missoula, Pirsig and Chris ride out of town to the southwest. Pirsig recalls that the road they’re on, when Phaedrus lived in Montana, was unpaved and squiggly; now it’s paved and features wide turns. The two stop for lunch at Lolo Pass, then ride up into the mountains on a logging road to find a place to camp.
They find an abandoned side road with a felled tree and decide to pitch camp there. The surroundings are awe-inspiring, and Chris goes off exploring by himself. When he returns, he reveals to Pirsig that he’s accidentally soiled himself. The two wash Chris’s underwear in a stream, and on the way back to camp, Chris asks Pirsig what he should be when he grows up. Pirsig answers, “Honest.”
That night, Pirsig has his recurring dream with the glass door, only he realizes he isn’t in a room—he’s in a coffin, and his family outside is paying their last respects. He tries to push open the door but a shadowy figure prevents him. Pirsig yells to Chris that he’ll see him some time in the future and the shadowy figure moves closer to Pirsig menacingly. Chris answers “Where?” just before the figure pulls a curtain over the door. Pirsig tells Chris he’ll see him at the bottom of the ocean, but he suddenly finds himself in an abandoned city, alone.
In the morning, Pirsig is awake before Chris. The weather is brisk but clear, and Pirsig does some jogging to warm up. He packs the motorcycle with everything but Chris’s sleeping bag, then gently nudges Chris awake. On the road, the weather is pristine.
The riders stop for breakfast at lodge, and Chris tells Pirsig he wants to write a letter to his mother. He begins, but gets stuck immediately after addressing the letter. Pirsig tells him he’ll help after they finish eating. When they return their attention to the letter, Pirsig tells Chris that he’s stuck because he’s thinking about too many things at once: he’s thinking simultaneously about what to say and what to say first. Pirsig’s solution is to list everything Chris wants to tell his mother, and then later they’ll pick the best ones and decide on an order.
Chautauqua: Stuckness and Its Remedy
Pirsig informs us that he’s been looking forward to this particular Chautauqua for some time, because it returns us to the practical situation Pirsig began with—the maintenance of a motorcycle. He wants to show how a knowledge of Quality can help a rider better care for his cycle.
He begins with a condition universal to scientists, artists, children writing to their mothers, and amateur motorcycle mechanics—stuckness. His example concerns a cyclist attempting to remove a stuck screw from his cycle’s side panel. The cyclist chooses the wrong technique and ends up stripping the screw. Now he’s completely at a loss for how to move forward. The scientific method doesn’t help him, because he doesn’t have any hypotheses to begin with.
Counter-intuitively, Pirsig thinks this is the best place for the mechanic to be, because it forces the mechanic to rely not on predetermined structures of knowledge (classical thinking) but his innate sense of Quality—which can be thought of, in this case, as the value of any given action or entity communicated to us by our “subliminal self” (Poincaré) or “preconscious awareness” (Phaedrus). Perhaps the mechanic decides to research motorcycle-specific tools and discovers a more effective technique for removing the screw. Or maybe he starts thinking about the individual aspects of the screw—its head, its thread—and develops a novel solution based on a new understanding of the screw and the tools at hand.
In short, being attuned to Quality rather than rehearsing traditional patterns of thought allows human beings to think outside the box: it allows us to innovate.
And, says Pirsig, being attuned to Quality is nothing more or less than having a sense of what’s good.
The riders are cruising through Idaho; now that they’re used to being on the cycle for long stretches, they’re able to ride for many miles without taking breaks. Their route takes them from the top of a ridge down thousands of feet into a valley along hairpin turns. Even Chris is excited by the experience.
Chautauqua: The Ugliness of Technology
The Sutherlands and their fellow romantics’ distaste for technology actually has little to do with the technology itself (its materials of manufacture or appearance, for example). Rather, it’s a byproduct of the way modern humans both create and use technology. Neither party identifies with the technology—it appears as an inert object created to be consumed. Pirsig compares modern technologies—plastics, say—with the wall Phaedrus saw in Korea. The wall was a transcendent act of human ingenuity, not unlike flight or walking on the moon. The problem is that triumphs like the wall or walking on the moon overshadow the transcendent examples of technology in our everyday lives.
The key to appreciating those everyday miracles of technology is engaging with technology using both classical and romantic thinking—in fact, engaging with the world using both styles of thinking—for that is when Quality reveals itself. And the best way to activate and unify both the classical and romantic modes of our understanding is to achieve peace of mind in whatever task we’re attempting to accomplish.
As we work, rather than burden our consciousnesses with precise instructions or fear of failure, we must quiet our minds and simply attend to our tasks. When someone says of us, “You look lost in your work,” then we know we’re relating to our work in a profound and personal way. If we’re completely immersed in our fixing a motorcycle, for example, we’ve dissolved the boundary between subject and object—between person and thing—and hooked into the mystical world of Quality.
After many miles, the road finally rises out of the canyon into cool pine forests, but just as quickly the riders return to a desert landscape. The setting sun puts Pirsig in a melancholic mood.
The riders stop for the evening in a town called Cambridge. They pitch camp in a nearby campground. There’s no one there but them. Pirsig tells Chris they’ll be going into Oregon tomorrow, and soon enough Chris is asleep. Lying awake, Pirsig worries about his relationship with Chris: Sometimes he feels close to Chris, other times he feels like Chris is utterly alien to him.
Quality can be a difficult concept to grasp. Try these exercises to train yourself to recognize Quality.
Think of the last time you were “stuck,” whether at work or in your personal life. What strategies did you use to get “unstuck”? Or, if you’re still stuck, list some reasons why you think you might still be stuck.
Write down a problem you’re currently stuck on (it can be anything). Take a fifteen-minute break—get up from the chair; take a walk; grab a cup of coffee; watch something on TV—and then sit down and think about the problem again. Write down any possible solutions that come to your head, even if they seem silly or outlandish (don’t censor yourself).
Take a look at the most unexpected solution you listed. List 3–5 further ideas based on that one. (Again, don’t censor yourself—you’re just thinking out loud.)
In the morning, Pirsig packs everything up before waking Chris. Made mischievous by the coldness of the morning, Pirsig screams “Wake!” to rouse him and immediately starts reciting Persian poetry (which Chris, in his half-awake state, doesn’t appreciate).
Soon they’re on the road again. As they cross into Oregon, Pirsig is still reciting verses from The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám to himself. Chris yells to Pirsig that he has diarrhea again, breaking Pirsig’s reverie. They pull over at a stream, and Chris hops off to clean himself.
Chautauqua: On Gumption
In the process of attending to our task with a calm mind, there’s always the possibility that unforeseen problems may arise. Pirsig calls these annoyances “gumption traps,” for they siphon off the initial enthusiasm—the gumption—we feel as we become attuned to Quality and immersed in our work.
Although there are likely an infinite number of gumption traps, Pirsig narrows the field to two main types: Setbacks, which are external circumstances that divert us from the Quality path; and Hang-Ups, which are internal circumstances that do.
An all-too-common setback is the “leftover part” setback. Say, for example, you’re assembling an engine and nearly have it completed...when you discover not only that you’ve forgotten an essential part but also that you have to reassemble the whole thing! A setback like this can absolutely drain your gumption reservoir.
Pirsig offers two techniques to reduce the effects of this particular setback:
Take Disassembly Notes
- As you disassemble, make note of any particulars that you think might give you trouble as you reassemble.
Lay Parts Down in Order
- Pirsig spreads newspaper on the floor of his garage and lays the parts down left-to-right, top-to-bottom in order of disassembly. When you begin to reassemble, you can pick up the parts in reverse order.
A second common setback is the “intermittent failure” setback. This is a malfunction that seems to fix itself right as you begin to repair it, then later crops up again (typically at the worst possible time). Intermittent failures are a gumption trap because you’re constantly being waylaid for a problem you think you’ve solved.
Make Note of Correlations
- Pirsig’s solution to intermittent failures is to pay close attention to what else is going on with the cycle when the failure occurs. Is the road bumpy? Are you making a turn? These correlations can help guide you as you develop hypotheses.
The third most common setback is the “parts” setback. This setback encapsulates a number of challenges involving parts: one, needing them in the first place; two, finding them at a reasonable price; and three, discovering the part you’ve purchased doesn’t fit.
Befriend Your Local Parts Supplier
- If there’s more than one parts store in your area, choose the one with the most helpful staff and get to know them. They can be a vital resource for advice (and deals!).
Don’t Sleep on Wholesalers
- Dealerships and dedicated cycle shops will occasionally jack up prices on individual parts to compensate for low motorcycle-purchase costs. It can be worth your while to check out chain auto stores or wholesalers, which stock common parts at more reasonable prices.
Do It Yourself
- If you have ample time and money, you might investigate machining your own parts. Pirsig uses a 6” x 18” lathe with a milling attachment and welding tools. This solution is doubly beneficial because it’s gumption boosting—nothing speaks Quality like a motorcycle running on parts you’ve created yourself.
As for hang-ups—the internal gumption traps—a major type is the “value” hang-up, which typically manifests itself as value rigidity. This hang-up appears when you diagnose a problem prematurely and discover your solution, based on false premises, doesn’t work. Suddenly your gumption goes out the window—the thing you were positive of has proven untrue.
If you’re too rigid in your values—if you insist that your original idea has to be true—then you’re bound to get nowhere. The solution to this gumption trap is simple.
Slow Down
- If you’re moving too quickly—racing to the manual, racking your brain for whatever mechanical knowledge you already possess, trying something new without thinking it over—you won’t be receptive to the Quality inhering in the situation.
Stare at the Problem
- Part and parcel of slowing down is just sitting with the problem. Rather than scurrying for a solution, try to clear your mind and open yourself to a number of possible solutions, from the easy to the impractical.
Observe the Facts
- As you meditate on your problem, as a fisherman does his line, possibilities—facts—will emerge. They might not be useful ones for this particular task, but they might have value in their own right. You might even find yourself more interested in these ideas than the problem you set out to solve. This is how you know you’re keyed into the Quality of the motorcycle.
The riders stop in Prairie City for lunch, and Chris continues working on his letter to his mother. Pirsig thinks that he might have some value rigidity of his own that’s preventing him from fully understanding his son. Chris’s trouble arises when he tries to imitate Pirsig; he wants to please Pirsig more than anyone else. Pirsig remembers his recurring dream: there’s a barrier between them that prevents them from communicating.
Chautauqua: On Gumption (cont’d)
Pirsig considers further hang-ups:
Ego
- A common cause of value rigidity, ego prevents us from acknowledging when we’re at a loss. If we refuse to recognize new facts, either because we’re overly sure of ourselves or afraid of looking silly, we can never access Quality, and our share of gumption is always in danger.
- If humility isn’t our default, we can always pretend to be humble. That way, if our solution doesn’t pan out, we get a gumption boost from being proven right. And eventually we’re bound to come to a set of facts that proves us wrong.
Anxiety
- This is the near-opposite of ego: We’re so worked up over getting a repair right, we either fail to start at all or fuss so much over it we end up making the problem worse.
- One way to beat this gumption trap is to study up on the repair. Read everything you can and take notes, then diagram your project on paper. The actual repair, then, becomes a matter of just following your own instructions.
- It might also be comforting to remember that even the most skilled mechanics mess up every once in a while.
Boredom
- Boredom often comes along with ego. It means you already know (or think you know) everything you need to to maintain your cycle, and now you’re just going through the motions. You’ve lost the ability to see your cycle anew and be attuned to Quality, which is the wellspring for original ideas.
- The best thing to do when boredom strikes is to stop work immediately and do a palette cleanse for your mind. Watch TV, walk around town, even take a nap—these activities can allow you to bring renewed interest to your task.
- Another possibility, if you hate doing rote work like cleaning the motorcycle, is to make a ritual out of it. Treat it like a weekly appointment that you have to keep.
Impatience
- Few situations sap gumption like underestimating the amount of time a project is going to take. And when you get impatient, the risk of making a major mistake increases, putting you in danger of a gumption blowout.
- You have a few choices to avoid this gumption trap. Allotting an indefinite amount of time for a particularly complex project is one; giving yourself double the amount of time you estimate for a project or scaling down your goals for the project are others.
Pirsig classifies all of these hang-ups as value traps; but there are other classes of hang-ups: truth traps and muscle traps.
The principal truth trap is the “yes-no logic” trap. An outgrowth of the classical mode of understanding, yes-no logic misleads us into thinking that for any hypothesis there’s only one of two possible answers. Pirsig, however, introduces a third term: mu.
Mu, Japanese for “nothing” or “the negative,” is a vital term in Zen Buddhism. It intimates that, for a given hypothesis, a yes-or-no answer may not be appropriate—it points us outside the yes-no binary.
In practical terms, mu answers indicate that there’s something in the context of our problem that makes our hypothesis insufficient. For example, if we design an experiment to test a particular motorcycle malfunction and we don’t achieve a clear result, there’s no reason to get frustrated. The likelihood is that our experiment was misdirected given the problem at hand—the context of the problem was larger than we understood when we designed the experiment. In short, mu answers can increase knowledge as much as or more than yes-no answers can.
As for muscle (or psychomotor) traps, the worst is the “inadequate tools” trap—gumption suffers when your tool joins your bike in a state of disrepair. A useful strategy is to buy the most durable and effective tools you can afford, even if you have to get them secondhand. Good tools don’t wear out, so you’re better off buying a reputable used tool than a second-rate new one.
Some muscle traps—like low-lit and uncomfortable working environments—are easily avoidable; but muscle insensitivity—essentially klutziness—is less so. A motorcycle consists of a variety of parts forged from a variety of materials, and each part and material has its own toughness or delicacy. The key is to cultivate a “mechanic’s feel” by staying aware at all times of which parts of the motorcycle you’re working with. If you’re working with the exterior of the cycle, you have a bit more leeway to bang things around; if you’re working with the precision parts of the engine, you need to treat those parts with care (also with softer tools like brass or rubber hammers).
Of course, even if we account for each of these traps, there are still any number that might arise in the course of a repair. Which is why Pirsig says we must live right, too. If we’re falling into gumption traps all the time in our everyday lives and then trying to shape up to maintain our motorcycles, we’ll never succeed. Our external work is a reflection of our internal condition, and so the “cycle” we should always be working on is ourselves.
After a taxing stretch of road that took the riders through desert country, they arrive in Prineville Junction just as evening is coming on. They stop for gas, and Pirsig is so exhausted he plops onto a curb to just sit. Observing the drivers of the cars passing by, Pirsig remembers the biggest gumption trap of all: the self-absorption that comes with the American brand of self-reliance and ambition.
A bit further south, the riders find a forest that has been divided into lots for a development. They pick a lot distant from the road and lie down for the night.
Use these exercises to make sure you keep your gumption levels high.
Which of Pirsig’s gumption traps is your kryptonite? Write it down and include what activities cause it. (If you have several, feel free to list them.)
Now review Pirsig’s suggestions for beating that gumption trap. Write down some ways you can apply his principles about motorcycle maintenance to your own problem.
Pirsig has his recurring dream, except this time he’s more interested in the shadowy figure than Chris. He interrogates the figure; the figure seems to cower in fear as Pirsig approaches it. Suddenly Pirsig lunges for the shadow’s neck—it writhes like a snake—but just as Pirsig is about to see its face he’s awakened by Chris’s cries.
As he calms Chris down, he tells Chris he saw the figure’s face: it was his own. Pirsig realizes that the shrouded figure in the dream is him—and the dreamer, the person trying to get through the glass door to Chris, is Phaedrus. This epiphany leaves Pirsig despondent. He believes Phaedrus is trying to reassert himself in Pirsig’s mind.
Pirsig has a flashback to a winter’s day when Chris was six. Phaedrus and Chris were in the car, but Phaedrus didn’t know where they were going or where in town they were. Chris had to remind him they were going to buy a bunk bed. Eventually Chris had to get out of the car to ask people for directions. They managed to find their way home, where Chris’s mother was irate that they weren’t able to find the bunk-bed store.
Haunted by this incident, Pirsig contemplates heading to San Francisco, putting Chris on a bus home, and checking into a hospital.
When Pirsig awakes again, it’s freezing out. He puts on long underwear, then jogs to warm up. Chris is still asleep, and Pirsig lets him alone—they won’t be able to ride in the cold anyway. To kill time, Pirsig decides to tune the cycle. The tools are cold in his hands.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End
Given Phaedrus’s reappearance in Pirsig’s psyche, Pirsig feels obliged to complete Phaedrus’s story. (Shortform note: Pirsig doesn’t specify whether the following takes place before or after Phaedrus’s discovery of the Tao Te Ching.)
As Phaedrus continued to investigate Quality, a sequence of coincidences suggested to him that ancient Greek philosophy might help answer some of his questions. He also needed a Ph.D. if he wanted to continue teaching at the university level, and he was intrigued by an interdisciplinary program (a “committee”) at the University of Chicago whose faculty included a specialist in ancient Greek as well as professors of English, philosophy, and Chinese.
Pirsig wakes Chris and they hit the road. At a restaurant in La Pine, while Chris orders their breakfast, Pirsig changes the oil on the cycle. As the two settle down to eat, Chris asks why they’re riding. Pirsig says that they’re on vacation, seeing the country, but Chris doesn’t seem convinced by this response. He says they just keep riding and riding. And Pirsig doesn’t really have a good reason why.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End (cont’d)
Phaedrus was admitted to the University of Chicago by an assistant chairman of the committee acting on the real Chairman’s behalf. The real Chairman, however, was less impressed with Phaedrus’s accomplishments. When he asked Phaedrus what his “substantive” field was, Phaedrus had no choice but to answer “English composition.” According to the Chairman, this wasn’t a “substantive” field but a “methodological” one. The interview ended, and Phaedrus returned to Bozeman to think about Quality and substantive and methodological fields.
Substance and method, Phaedrus quickly realized, are products of classical thinking—which means that Quality, the thing he really wanted to study, couldn’t be encapsulated either by a substantive or a methodological field.
Frustrated by the disciplinary barriers imposed by the Chairman, Phaedrus reread the brochures about the committee to see if he’d misunderstood its mission. What he discovered, both in the descriptions of the committee and the Chairman’s own writing, was a kind of awkwardness—it seemed like the committee was guarding a secret. When Phaedrus returned to Chicago, he mentioned to the acting chairman that Aristotle had been omitted from the committee’s description. This comment elicited shock, then a guilty laugh from the assistant chairman.
What Phaedrus didn’t know at the time was that he’d raised the spectre of a conflict that had riven academia. In the Thirties, a group of four University of Chicago administrators and professors had attempted to remake their university in an Aristotelian image. Their position was that human wisdom had reached its pinnacle in ancient Greek philosophy and Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of that philosophy. They believed that, rather than emphasize the modern, empirical sciences, a university should place the teaching of good values at its core. These values, of course, were embodied in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Aquinas.
Although the emphasis on values pleased Phaedrus—Quality was value, after all—the Aristotelian orientation of the committee didn’t. And so Phaedrus wrote a letter to the Chairman explaining that, though he’d realized his substantive subject was philosophy, his area of study—Quality—couldn’t be analyzed using the dualistic concepts of Aristotle. Phaedrus argued that Quality was both anterior and superior to any dualistic notion of the world, and he asserted (conceitedly) that his work on Quality would unite Eastern and Western philosophy and transcend Aristotle.
The Chairman, as Phaedrus expected, was unmoved, and he suggested that Phaedrus apply to the philosophy department, from which he was summarily rejected. But Phaedrus had already been admitted to the Chairman’s committee, and so he decided to matriculate despite the Chairman’s dislike of him.
Phaedrus and his family moved into an apartment near the University of Chicago, and Phaedrus, who had no scholarship, began teaching composition at the University of Illinois to finance his studies. As he immersed himself in ancient Greek thought, he became incensed—not because the Greeks were antiquated and irrelevant, but rather because he believed their writings’ influence had done untold damage to the world.
The problem originated with the pre-philosophical myths (mythos) that gave rise to Greek logic (logos). (The idea that the myths of prehistory determine the science of ancient history is called the “mythos over logos” idea.) These myths, because of the structure of Greek grammar, featured solid divisions between subject and object, and so any culture determined by these myths was defined by these same divisions. (Chinese myths, on the contrary, due to the structure of Chinese grammar, don’t feature the same rigid division.)
Thus the myths of ancient Greece, coupled with the sacred texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition—which also feature strict subject-object division—constitute Western culture’s intellectual heritage. Phaedrus was steeped in that heritage, but his discovery of Quality, which lay outside the subject-object binary, necessitated his thinking outside the binary. The problem is, when one abandons an entire culture’s collective understanding of rationality, one becomes, by any external measure, insane.
The Pirsigs are riding through a verdant fir forest. They descend into a valley that Pirsig can’t help exclaiming over. How can he be insane, he thinks, if he can appreciate such natural beauty!
As they reach Grants Pass, Oregon, the motorcycle’s chain guard gets caught in the chain. Pirsig opts to stop for the evening and replace the part the following day, even though the trouble isn’t serious enough to keep the motorcycle from running. Pirsig checks them into a hotel, their first since Bozeman, and they’re grateful for beds, clean sheets, and a shower.
In the morning Pirsig unloads and assesses all of their gear. It’s a mess—greasy, oily, wrinkled—and Pirsig wakes Chris to help him get started on doing laundry. Pirsig tracks down the rest of the items he realizes they need—all except the chain guard, which the parts store in town doesn’t have.
Pirsig finds a welder’s shop in town and, after he and Chris have breakfast, they return to the shop with the chain guard. Although the welder is fussy—his shop is immaculate, and he complains that the guard has grease on it—he does a masterful job on the repair.
Chautauqua: Modern Loneliness
At the restaurant in Grant’s Pass where Pirsig and Chris had breakfast, he noticed certain look in the waitress’s eye, and he saw the same look in the mechanic’s eye. It’s loneliness, and Pirsig has noticed more of it here, in more densely populated communities, than in the small towns of the Plains.
The easy culprit is modern technology: television, automobiles—all the isolating aspects of living in a bustling city. But Pirsig lays the blame not on technology itself but on the objectification that comes with an ignorance of Quality. The modern attitude all too frequently objectifies the world: everything outside of us becomes a means to an end, whether greater wealth or pleasure or convenience. But when we start thinking about Quality—about making the people and things around us better—we suddenly seem a lot less lonely.
Let’s say you have a boring job. If you just go through the motions at work, you’ll never find your job fulfilling, and your colleagues—who may also be phoning it in—will treat you like you treat your work: as just another dull part of the job. But if you try to find Quality in your work, whether through a new technique or just your rededication to your job’s foundational mission, that Quality will spread, building bonds and increasing the complement of Quality in world overall.
Pirsig believes everyday people can improve themselves and their communities simply by attending to Quality in their everyday lives: Quality emerges from individuals making Quality choices. This, it bears noting, wasn’t Phaedrus’s position. Phaedrus believed that to cure loneliness—among many other modern ills—those schooled in Western modes of thought need an entirely new notion of rationality. Because of the Western intellectual heritage, Westerners all too often do what’s “reasonable” rather than what’s “good.” The solution for Phaedrus was what seems like an oxymoron in the Western tradition: a spiritual rationality.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End (cont’d)
Phaedrus’s first class in graduate school, fittingly, was rhetoric, and his first reading assignment was Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
Aristotle analyzed rhetoric systematically and hierarchically (much like Pirsig does motorcycle assemblies). Phaedrus was disgusted—the naming and classifying of every aspect of rhetoric omitted the necessary creative element in any piece of writing. Aristotle’s approach also, of course, suppressed any natural inclination toward Quality.
Phaedrus prepared a rebuttal to Aristotle and entered class one day ready to deliver it to his professor. But he didn’t get a chance: the professor tore apart one of his classmates when he raised an objection, and Phaedrus realized that critical thinking wasn’t welcome in the seminar.
Under rainy skies, the riders arrive in Crescent City, California. From the road they can see the ocean. This, the ocean, Pirsig tells us, was the riders’ goal. They eat at an expensive restaurant and then get back on the road, heading south.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End (cont’d)
After the professor’s rebuke of Phaedrus’s classmate, the classroom atmosphere in subsequent classes was tense. No one spoke but the professor; and the professor was on edge himself, because he knew he would get no courtesy from his students if he were to make a mistake.
What made the professor especially edgy was the topic of “dialectic.” Phaedrus had encountered the word in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and been mystified by it, and when a student asked for it to be defined, the professor cast a fearful glance at Phaedrus. Phaedrus’s interest was piqued.
Dialectic at its most basic level is a conversation—a dialogue—that works its way toward a truth. Plato’s dialogues, in which he records Socrates’s conversations, are a clear example of dialectic in action.
Plato, channeling Socrates, believed that dialectic was the only way to reach truth. Aristotle, however, thought dialectic produced only one kind of truth.
In his philosophical system, Aristotle differentiated between forms, which are the metaphysical and eternal facts of reality, and substances, which are the physical and changeable facts of reality. Whereas Aristotle acknowledged that dialectic was a suitable means to discovering the truth of forms, he believed that science, or observation, was the only way to discover the truth of substances. Plato argued that dialectic could arrive at the truth about both.
As luck would have it, Plato was the next thinker on the Phaedrus’s syllabus. But as Phaedrus delved into Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, which finds Socrates making mincemeat of the practice of rhetoric, Phaedrus became as disenchanted with Plato as he was with Aristotle. He couldn’t accept a thinker who thought so little of rhetoric, the field which had led him to Quality.
After a traumatic class on Gorgias, during which Phaedrus engaged in an internal dialectic that led him to question his own deepest motives and philosophical positions, he immersed himself in the thinkers who practiced the rhetoric Plato so hated: the Sophists. His hunch was that Plato had treated the Sophists unfairly.
What he discovered was that Plato’s antagonism to the Sophists had its origins in the thought of the earliest Greek philosophers (the “presocratics”). These philosophers first proposed the divisions—form/substance, mind/matter, subject/object—that both Plato and Aristotle took for granted. The presocratics believed that there was an “Immortal Principle”—a singular truth—underlying the world around us, and it was philosophy’s duty to uncover that truth. (Shortform note: Given what follows, it’s clear that Pirsig dismisses the possibility that the Immortal Principle could be Quality.)
But thinking and speaking at the same time as these philosophers were the Sophists, a group of teachers and rhetoricians, who believed that there was no Immortal Principle. They argued instead that truths are made by people and are thus relative—that there is no truth independent of people’s opinions of what’s true. Given that he believed that every question had only one true answer, Plato had to oppose them.
Phaedrus saw in the Sophists kindred spirits: Not only were they rhetoricians like he, but they also recognized the importance of the individual in creating the world we live in. They didn’t search for a truth behind appearances; rather, they sought to improve the lives of men through recognition of the Good—that is, Quality.
There was one aspect of the Sophists’ thought that Phaedrus couldn’t reconcile, however: the notion of “virtue.” How can one teach virtue when values are constantly in flux?
He found his answer in an analysis of ancient Greeks’ conception of heroism, included in a book by H.D.F. Kitto called The Greeks. Kitto writes that Greek heroes performed heroic deeds not out of duty to others, but out of duty to themselves: they were in pursuit of aretê, which translates as “excellence.” For the Greeks, excellence meant broad physical and intellectual accomplishment—well-roundedness rather than specialization.
The lightbulb went on in Phaedrus’s head. Aretê was Quality! And it had been present in the Western world all along.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End (cont’d)
Phaedrus returned to his study of Plato and Aristotle with renewed interest. He now wondered why Plato had spurned the Sophists and their teaching of aretê. But it turned out Plato hadn’t done away with aretê, or at least not completely. What he’d done was transmute it into an entity called the “Good,” which Plato considered the highest goal of human life except for Truth. The problem with Plato’s “Good” was that it was eternal and unchangeable—exactly the opposite of the Sophists’ aretê, which adapted to people’s beliefs and historical contexts.
Phaedrus guessed that Plato reinterpreted aretê to keep immutable Truth at the top of his hierarchical system. Because, if for every question there is but one true answer, then there must be only one true definition of aretê.
This demotion of aretê in favor of Truth left the door open for a philosopher like Aristotle, who sidelined aretê even more in favor of the kind of scientific inquiry, based on empirical observation, that we would find familiar today. In Aristotle’s system, which formed the basis of not only the University of Chicago’s educational approach but also most American universities’, science and logic become the gold standard of knowledge, and the Good is relegated to the subfield of philosophy known as ethics.
(Shortform note: Pirsig’s characterization here of Plato and Aristotle’s influence on university education differs significantly from the one he offers earlier, when he discusses the Aristotelian revolution that overtook the University of Chicago some years before he enrolled.)
After a miserable drive through the dark and rain, the riders arrive in Arcata. They stop for a bite to eat, then hit the road again. Pirsig wants to get within a day’s ride of San Francisco before they pack it in for the day.
Chautauqua: Phaedrus’s End (cont’d)
Phaedrus had little opportunity to share his new findings in the near term—his rhetoric seminar was cancelled several weeks in a row due to the professor being ill. Despite the cancelled classes, the students had been assigned a new dialogue: Plato’s Phaedrus.
The title meant nothing to Phaedrus at the time, since he wasn’t known by that name then. And the dialogue itself didn’t do much for him: Plato had clearly depicted Phaedrus in such a way as to make Socrates look exceptional by comparison. Nevertheless, there were aspects of the text that Phaedrus enjoyed, including Phaedrus’s personality. Phaedrus, in Greek, means “wolf,” and the Phaedrus of the dialogue is an excitable and aggressive loner.
On the fourth week after Phaedrus discovered the Sophists, his rhetoric class was finally held—but with the Chairman of the committee as the professor. It was clear to Phaedrus that the Chairman was there to berate him for his philosophical positions and embarrass him.
Because the Chairman already knew Phaedrus (the dialogue), he opened the discussion by asking the class questions to see if they’d understood Plato’s message. The class, including Phaedrus, failed to satisfy him, so he began to lecture on Plato’s true meaning himself.
But when the Chairman got to a certain part of the dialogue, Phaedrus recognized that he was skirting a vital issue. Phaedrus raised his hand to object, knowing that by challenging the Chairman he was asking to be expelled. Phaedrus made his point and was obviously correct. The Chairman was stunned into silence.
Eventually the Chairman recovered and pressed on, but later in the class Phaedrus ambushed him again and was correct again.
After the class, walking home, Phaedrus was buoyant. Fancying himself a kind of intellectual wolf, he embraced the name Phaedrus. He’d come to the realization that his notion of Quality would never be accepted at the University of Chicago, and he would have to pursue it without the help of committee’s faculty.
Phaedrus’s teaching at the time, unlike his coursework, was going exceptionally. His students at the University of Illinois were intrigued by him; he’d grown a beard and appeared to them as a mountain man from Montana, talking about a strange thing called Quality. But then something happened: One day he fell completely silent and sat at the front of his classes without saying a word. In the following days he roamed the streets, having barely slept, his mind a whirl. He feared that by engaging in all the intellectual sparring with the faculty of the committee, he’d inadvertently begun to define Quality, when, for it to maintain its significance, it had to remain undefined.
Eventually Phaedrus confined himself to a bedroom in his apartment. He told his wife he wanted to separate and spent days on end sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. During this time, he allowed cigarettes to burn down to his fingers and he urinated on the floor. When his wife discovered these symptoms, she called for help. But it was too late: Phaedrus’s consciousness had completely disintegrated.
It’s pitch black out, and the rain is coming down hard; the cycle’s headlight barely reaches the road. Pirsig regrets having ridden on from Arcata. They pull off the freeway onto a dangerous gravel road, and Pirsig has to slow down to keep them upright. They come upon a gas station and use its phone to make a motel reservation.
The room is depressing, but it’s dry and warm. Pirsig and Chris sit in front of the heater, and Chris asks when they’re going home. He’s upset that all they do is ride around without a clear destination. He says that he liked being with Pirsig more when he was little. Soon, he’s crying and rocking back and forth in a way that concerns Pirsig—it reminds him of something he saw in the hospital when he was Phaedrus.
Later, when they’re in their beds, Pirsig asks Chris if things were better when they were in Chicago. Chris replies that they were, that Pirsig used to play games with him. It becomes clear to Pirsig that Chris has mistaken Phaedrus’s mental decline: Chris thinks Phaedrus was just pretending to be confused. Chris keeps saying Pirsig doesn’t do anything anymore.
In the morning Pirsig is up first. Chris is in a terrible mood—surly and silent. After breakfast, they ride into a heavy fog and the temperature drops, and when the fog lifts, they’re on a cliff and can see the ocean. They pull over to put on warm-weather gear. As Pirsig gets into his jacket, he sees Chris get much too close to the cliff’s edge. When he yells, Chris doesn’t answer. He rushes over and pulls Chris back by his shirt.
Then Chris refuses to put on his layers. Pirsig tries to wait him out. Eventually Chris says he wants to “go back.” Pirsig explains it’s too far, but Chris persists, causing Pirsig to lose his temper. Chris relents and they continue riding south. Pirsig admits that, for all the suggestions he’s made to eliminate the division between subject and object, he hasn’t confronted the division between him and his son.
The riders reach Mendocino County. The surroundings are lush and open. The road descends from a cliff to a beach, where Pirsig pulls over to rest. Chris wants to press on—he’s still upset from the morning—but Pirsig ignores him and explores the beach. Back on the cycle, Pirsig realizes that Chris is like Phaedrus—full of questions, stubborn, itching for a fight.
They arrive in a town that’s covered in haze, giving everything a nostalgic aura. They go to a restaurant, but Chris says he isn’t hungry—his stomach hurts. Pirsig proceeds to order lunch for himself and eat; presently he realizes Chris is crying. Chris says he’s sorry he came on the trip, that it isn’t fun and he hates everything. It’s then that Pirsig confesses to Chris that he’s been thinking of putting him on a bus home once they get to San Francisco.
To Pirsig’s surprise, Chris gets even more upset. He doesn’t want to stay with any of the people Pirsig names—Pirsig reveals that guests are currently staying at their house—and breaks down in tears again. Pirsig suggests they go for a walk. They end up back on the cycle, looking for a peaceful place to chat. The road takes them to an ocean overlook, but, at the moment, fog obscures the water.
They sit, and Pirsig confesses to Chris that he was once insane and is moving in that direction again. He says that he’s sending Chris home because he’s not sure he can take care of him anymore. He also tells Chris that the doctors fear Chris may also be troubled—that his stomach aches are psychosomatic, and that his misbehavior at home has worried all of the authority figures around him except Pirsig. In response to this, Chris lets out a terrible wail and falls to the ground in the fetal position. Pirsig screams at him to get up, but he won’t listen.
And then, suddenly, he does listen. A voice—Phaedrus’s—has spoken through Pirsig and told Chris that he hasn’t forgotten him and that they’ll be together now. Chris sits up and allows Pirsig to put his jacket around him. Through Chris’s questions, it’s revealed that Pirsig’s recurring dream with the glass door actually happened—the glass door was in the hospital, and it was, in fact, the last time Phaedrus saw his family before his personality was erased.
The fog lifts, and the riders put on their helmets to mount the cycle. Chris, who’s starting to come around, asks Pirsig if he really was insane. Pirsig/Phaedrus denies it, and Chris says he knew it all along.
They ride along the coast, the landscape full of flowers and the air perfumed. Pirsig begins to feel sleepy and stops at a turnoff with a picnic table. They take a nap, and when they wake, they stow their jackets and helmets and ride without them. As they bank into the road’s turns, Chris stands on the foot pegs behind Pirsig. He exclaims at the beauty of their surroundings; he says that before he wasn’t able to see over Pirsig’s shoulders.
Then he asks if he can get a motorcycle when he grows up. Pirsig consents, but only if Chris agrees to take care of it. When Chris asks if it’s hard to maintain a motorcycle, Pirsig replies that, whereas repairing the motorcycle isn’t so hard, having the right attitudes is. When Chris asks whether he’ll have the right attitudes when he grows up, Pirsig tells him he has no doubt he will.