Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’s Quality: A Vindication of Reason and a Return to Relation

Almost half a century ago, a divided spirit set out to know two fundamental truths: who he was and how to live. He set the rubber of two tires to roads across America in pursuit of answers. The result is the one of the most widely read philosophical epics of all time: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (ZMM).

I first discovered this text in college. ZMM’s exposition of Quality, like any worthy concept, left me ruminating for years. But I admit I wouldn’t have been able to describe why. In January, I picked ZMM up again to re-examine this haunting concept, hoping a slow and focused pilgrimage among its pages would help me name the reason for its enduring influence.

In the first chapters Robert Pirsig, the author and narrator, seizes on the motive for his Chautauqua — a term used to describe events aimed at educating adults:

“‘What’s new’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but on which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like instead, to be concerned with the question, ‘What’s best?,’ a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ‘best’ was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”

ZMM’s mission is to therefore find and share how best to move along the spine of a real, engrossing, and value-driven existence.

Pirsig has company. He is joined by a couple for the first leg and his son, Chris, throughout the entire road trip. At first, these three are perceived as if through a looking glass; he examines them suspiciously, attempting to make sense of their values. We soon learn the reason for his apprehension: they know more about him than he knows himself. A slow, stealthy slide into insanity, cruel institutionalization, and disintegrating shock therapy have left Pirsig unable to recall much of his life. In quietly observing these strangers, he is attempting to find answers even as he shrouds any tells. He holds all the guilt, cunning, and reserve of an imposter.

Pirsig uses character development to describe the value dissonance he is set on resolving. He remarks on the couple’s fear of technology, their inability to harmonize the utility of classical reason with the beauty of romantic feeling. While Pirsig’s problem seems to be the reverse, studying them allows him to empathize with his tribe; he wishes to inspire an appreciation for classical reason so they may overcome their fear and hatred of technology. Part of his motive may be selfish: if their bikes break down, Pirsig’s trip will be derailed as well. But more importantly, he cares about reconciling classical and romantic perceptions of reality; this is why he desires to reveal a connection between the two.

Pirsig acknowledges that the cool reason of most technology has not been doing itself any favors as of late:

“What’s wrong with technology is that it is not connected to any real way with matters of the spirit and the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been for food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.”

Technology has thus arrived at being humanity’s black sheep: it is intimately related to our history, inspires disinterest in most lives, and is terribly troublesome to contend with when our mood is awry. We have all known the frustration of being pitted against an unthinking machine. Pirsig’s evolving arguments on technology and the narrow nature of rationality are convincing because they are grounded in personal and universal experience. As he notes:

“What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who’re solving it at a personal level by abandoning ‘square’ rationality altogether and going on feelings alone…And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I am trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that you expand on the nature of rationality so that it’s capable of coming up with a solution.”

The mammoth task of persuading reason to go beyond its present state is an effort to resolve a personal identity crisis. Pirsig must find a way to reinvent rationality and intellect if he is to save a significant part of himself: Phaedrus. This phantom is the narrator’s roving intellect, a devil summoned to help Pirsig make sense of himself. Therefore, in ZMM, the narrator must slay two dragons to come out victorious: find the source of value and reintegrate that part of himself that drove him into bleak isolation.

The result of his journey is Quality, an undomesticated concept which eludes definition. We cannot know Quality because it precedes awareness. It arrives before filters such as time, space, or ego make a mess of raw data. Quality flirts with our senses while perennially shifting out of our consciousness. It leaves as quickly as it arrives, leaving only iridescence in its wake. The winking glitter is all we have to investigate its nature. Therefore, even as Pirsig as describes Quality, he also admonishes: “If we do define it, we are defining something other than Quality itself.”

While this obstacle complicates the narrative, it also releases the author from calcifying a loose experience. And this flexibility, oddly enough, brings us closer to knowing Quality. As we consume each page of ZMM, we recognize it because we know it. People have been praising it since the dawn of time — primordial silence, synchronicity, relation, oneness, grace, unity, being, elegance, and on.

Here are a few ways Pirsig elucidates on the experience:

“At the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there no subject or object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical.”

“With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but those forms are capable of change.”

“Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live.”

“If the creator, owner or user have no sense of identity, there is no Quality.”

We know from the descriptions above that Quality is formless and whole. It comes before awareness and it inspires the preservation of awareness. Quality is what stirs our curiosity and sustains our commitment to be interested, active, and involved in knowing the world.

There can be no Quality when the self is absent. When we pour empathy and passion into doing or knowing — that is, when we care — Quality makes itself known. As Pirsig observes:

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

It’s worth adding one more poignant description by Henri Poincaré, a man who Phaedrus identifies as having arrived at the same discovery of Quality. Poincaré writes:

“In sum, the sole objective reality consists in the relation of things [i.e. sensations] whence results the universal harmony.”

Beauty, justice, reason, logic, form: these ideals point to how we attempt to create and enjoy the cosmological grace Poincaré describes.

By the standards of Occam’s razor, Quality is a valuable concept for discerning what is best:

“When Quality enters the picture as the third metaphysical entity, the preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary. The preselection of facts is not based on subjective capricious ‘whatever you like’ but on Quality, which is reality itself.”

If we are present, aware, and open then Quality is possible. Relation and caring make space for Quality to translate into value. This is why devoting ourselves to seeking art in mechanical maintenance is a sublime reconciliation of classical and romantic perception: to be successful we must feel as much as we reason. This fluidity is what makes the work of expert craftsmen so intimate, interesting, and valuable.

“The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he is doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.”

Quality rides on intense focus, a sincere desire to know what’s best so we may create value. This requires respect, devotion, and care for the ingredients before us, for knowing the world as it is and dedicating ourselves to move at the pace this relation sets.

Pirsig is tempting madness when he returns to the study of Quality. The pre-internment Phaedrus investigated reason, found Quality, and then succumbed to a brittle mental state that was treated with shock therapy. By revisiting the events the led to his internment, Pirsig confronts the wild, insatiable need to analyze that drove him mad.

Phaedrus reaches out as well: he makes some involuntary appearances during the road-trip that only Chris can remember. A relapse into severe mental tumult is ever lurking. His insanity is the axel around which the novel’s events turn. Therefore, is makes sense that it is what brings the novel to an end.

Throughout ZMM, we are told that Chris, Pirsig’s son, has been asking questions. He surfaces events Pirsig cannot remember — Phaedrus’ memories and actions. Therefore, even as Pirsig shares Phaedrus with us, he insists on hiding Phaedrus from his son. This guest is foreign and familiar, both needed and unwanted. Pirsig will either decide to knock Phaedrus out clean by requesting a lobotomy or he must find courage enough to integrate him.

At the end of the book, Chris asks whether his father was really insane when he was committed. He is forcing Pirsig to verbally refuse the existence of Phaedrus. The backdrop to this question is that Pirsig has been noticing that inviting Phaedrus back into his mind has been dangerous. He is increasingly less able to maintain a façade of sanity. He has resolved to recommit himself and shut away Phaedrus once and for all.

But then looking on at the distress he has caused in his son, the tone shifts.

Through a change of font, we see that it is Phaedrus who responds to Chris’ question. He assures Chris that he wasn’t insane. Here, at last, Phaedrus is on public display. Chris replies: “I knew it.”

Pirsig’s care for Chris inspires him to give into the mystic relation that recovers his identity. He says:

“We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the hospital. To have him grow up along would have been really wrong. In the dream too he was the one who was trying to open the door.”

This last is a reoccurring dream in which Chris desperately cried out, begging his father to come back. Pirsig eventually finds that the dreamer watching the scene was Phaedrus. He knows he must shed the disguise and let Phaedrus back in.

In this moment, Pirsig realizes that his son, hoping for the return of a lost spirit, has preserved the chance that he may be himself again:

“I haven’t been carrying him all along, he has been carrying me!”

“‘I knew it,’ he said. It keeps tugging on the line, saying my big problem may not be as big as I think it is, because the answer is right in front of me. For God’s sake relieve him of his burden! Be one person again!”

Speaking as Phaedrus to Pirsig, the narrator challenges the latter to make amends. He is begging Pirsig to reconcile himself with intellect/reason so he may finally resolve the disintegration of his spirit and free Chris of his burden.

The resolution of his dual identity is fundamental for Quality to make itself known. Pirsig had noted earlier on that because Quality quickens within:

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

In answering “What’s best?” and landing on Quality, Pirsig sees a slant of promising light. But it’s the relationship with his son that permits him to glow again. Chris had been impatiently waiting for his father to finally allow himself to experience what’s best: caring for another.

Rebecca Solnit, a worthy wordsmith, notes in one of her essays on Thoreau that the word free comes from the same Indo-Aryan root as priya which means beloved, dear. She concludes that to be free once meant to have ties. Given this, it makes sense that Pirsig’s relationship with his son is what finally frees him from the reclusiveness of his mind.

ZMM contains a difficult question, a suspenseful pursuit, and a brilliant answer. It awakens its readers to the possibility of a reality that wonderfully refuses the traditional subject/object, classical/rational, fact/feeling dialectical split in favor of plain, hearty, awe-inspiring, and value-driven existence.

Pirsig isn’t unearthing anything new; rather, he is describing a personal process to discover reality. The book’s success derives from the narrator’s commitment to vulgarize & thus democratize an experience that has grown a thick and strange under a daunting layer of academic and intellectual ivy. By muscling away the greedy, suffocating strands, he is able to harvest the generous simplicity of experience and gift it anew.