Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values

Phædrus decided to commit intellectual hari kari by writing a letter to the chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods stating that he was changing his substantive field to philosophy, not English composition.
In addition he proclaimed that as the committee was based on the Aristotelian division of form and substance, and as form and substance in reality were identical, his thesis of Quality as a unification of form and substance was anti-Aristotelian which contradicted the stance of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods...and therefore his thesis on Quality was just what they needed as they were "in a rut."
He was presenting them with a major breakthrough in Western philosophy which would elevate the university on a national level.

They threw him out.

But Phædrus played a wild card. He claimed that since he had already been admitted, they couldn't throw him out.
He showed up near the University of Chicago and took a job at the University of Illinois at the Navy Pier teaching rhetoric, "the art or study of using language effectively and persuasively".

He then began an intense study of the Classic Greeks and Aristotle.

 

The ancient Greek language was made up of subject and predicate, that is object and that which tells us about the object. Thus the culture had a distinctive subject object duality. In the Chinese language the subject and predicate are not so clearly defined hence the Chinese have a less dualistic culture. The subject object relationship defines the mythos, or pattern of beliefs within a culture.

Phædrus' Quality lies outside the mythos of Western culture.

Quality exists before any description of it can exist and once you experience it the only way to describe it is through what you already know. The only way to describe the continuing experience of Quality is through analogy. This new experience of Quality that I am experiencing now is like this or that thing, that I have experience before.

But which one is insane in reality? Phædrus or the mythos he was trapped in? The answer came suddenly.

 

In retrospect Pirsig thinks Phædrus was wrong, Aristotle's thought doesn't lead to Western dualism, his thought is just boring and disorganized.

Aristotle thought that rhetoric could be reduced to a rational system of order.
He read:

A very dry and technical stunt of naming and classifying everything. His class on Aristotle was boring and he finally asked if questions were permitted. He was told only if you read the material. He sensed a trap and began a thorough study before he asked any questions.

He raised his hand to ask a question but another student spoke first asking about "dubious statements." After chastising the student the professor asked him, "According to Aristotle: What are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?"
The student didn't know.
The professor then turned on Phædrus, "You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?"
Calmly Phædrus answered, "Forensic, deliberative and epideictic."
"What are the epideictic techniques?"
"The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification."
"Yaaas—" says the Professor of Philosophy slowly.

A battle is about to begin.

 

The professor now realized that Phædrus is a worthy opponent. He can't be dismissed by an offhand remark or a question aimed at showing his ignorance, he must use exact terms and ideas, while Phædrus can remain silent waiting his turn.

The professor continued to lecture but seemed to avoid the the subject of "dialectic," or two party discussions aimed at finding truth. A dialectic conversation takes place between two individuals with differing views abut unlike a debate emotional appeal is not involved.

Aristotle thought the Dialectic method was only good for finding out about men’s beliefs, other truths would be found by using the Physical method, which observes facts and facts only. Thus the division between subjective truth found by the Dialectic method and objective truth found by the Physical method.

A study of Plato was needed to clear all this up.

 

The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods now begins to study the Gorgias.
The Gorgias is a dialogue between Socrates and a Sophist named Gorgias who is an expert in rhetoric.
Socrates asks Gorgias with what rhetoric is concerned.
Gorgias replies it is concerned with discourse, its end is to persuade, it concerns the law, and its subject is the just and the unjust.
Socrates has forced Gorgias to admit that rhetoric is an object consisting of many parts and those parts are all related to each other.

At this point the professor decides to ask Phædrus a question. In the dialogue of Gorgias Socrates has just demonstrated to Gorgias that rhetoric and cooking are branches of pandering as they appeal to emotions rather than knowledge. So he asks Phædrus what he thinks of cookery.
Phædrus gives the same answer as Socrates.

Phædrus asks if he wants his personal opinion to which the professor answers yes.
Phædrus doesn't answer as his mind starts to consider all the possible answers, traps, and permutations of the question. Eventually the professor gets tired of waiting and moves on. The class ends, everyone leaves, but Phædrus remains sitting alone.

 

The next day Phædrus begins an intense study of Socrates and finds that many have suggested that Plato put his own words into the mouth of Socrates just as Aristotle stated. He begins to look at those who came before Plato and finds that Plato despised those who came before called the Sophists. The Sophists taught "virtue" or "excellence" through rhetoric but came to be regarded as lacking real merit, a mere practical discipline. Where did this hatred of the Sophists come from?

Before the Greeks mankind had existed in a civilized state for thousands of years, but no written record remains from that time. Those early Greeks and others had myths, which were imperishable in the form of the anthropomorphic Gods. The Gods and all of their activities were immortal, they were permanent. There was no subject and object, no no concept of an external and internal world. Truth resided in what was revealed by the Gods, not the mind of man.
But in ancient Greece a change was taking place, man began to look for truth in Immortal Principles, not Immortal Gods.
Thales of Miletus was the first to investigate the origin of matter and claimed that water was the source.
Anaximenes claimed it was air, the Pythagoreans claimed it was number, Heraclitus called it fire and claimed that change was an inherit conflict between opposites. He claimed that there is a one and a many and the one is "immanent in all things".
Anaxagoras called it nous, or mind.
Parmenides of Elea proclaimed that "the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God", was a separate thing from subjective opinion.

Before this time there was no subject and object, no form and substance, they didn't exist as separate entities.

These men are called the Cosmologists because they believed that the Truth existed not internally or in the Gods, but in the cosmos or world around them.

 

While the Cosmologists all agreed that Truth was to be found in the world around them, they disagreed as to where and how.
Remember that Heraclitus called it fire and claimed that change was inherit.
But along came Zeno of Elea who developed several paradoxes which seemed to prove that change and motion were impossible.

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The argument of the Cosmologists was countered by another group.

Socrates was in the middle of a battle between the Cosmologists, who felt that all Truth was absolute, and the Sophists, who thought that all Truth was relative; and the Sophists were the enemy.
Plato and Socrates were in war to prove that Truth is absolute.
Phædrus sides with the Sophists.

But something is wrong. If the Sophists taught "virtue" and virtue implies an ethical absolute; everyone must know what virtue is, then how can you teach virtue if someone's idea of virtue changes when his relationship with the world changes? How can virtue change from day to day? And how can rhetoric teach virtue?
He finds the answer in a fifty cent paperback that speaks of "the very soul of the Homeric hero."
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In the book The Greeks; The Iliad, the story of the siege of Troy, is discussed by the author Kitto.
There is a section in which the wife of Hector warns him that his strength will be his ruin. Hector replies that, in essence, he must do what he must for himself, for virtue.

To Phædrus areté is Quality.

Areté, translated in English as virtue, in Greek is excellence! Suddenly it dawned on him.

 

Areté implies being part of the world, not separate from it. It seeks a wholeness of life, not a compartmentalization of it into specialties aimed at manipulating a world separate from oneself.
Plato had taken the flowing ever changing areté and made it permanent, he had made areté the unmoving Good.

Plato had attempted to combine two previous ideas.
The first was the conflict between Heraclitus' idea that Truth is change and Parmenides' view that Truth is changeless.
Plato claims that there is a concept of "Horse", which never changes as per Parmenides, and an actual horse which does change and eventually dies as per Heraclitus.

The second conflict was between Ideas and Appearance.
Aristotle felt that the horse that lives and changes is not just an appearance of a horse, not just something that appears to be like the concept of a "Horse" and changes over time, it was made of unchanging substance. The universal all encompassing areté has been reduced to form and substance. Areté as the only "Good" has been replaced by substance and all that remains of its Good is now merely the field of ethics. Everything is made of substance, not "the Good" and the task of man is to find this substance and divide it up into countless things.
And Rhetoric, which had once been used to teach the Good, Truth, and Virtue was changed....

 

In the dialogue of Plato called Phædrus there appears a man named Phædrus. Phædrus is a foil for Socrates. Phædrus asks questions and Socrates answers them. In Greek Phædrus means wolf and in this dialogue the wolf is tamed by Socrates.

Meanwhile the professor of philosophy has disappeared and in his place the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago has taken over the class. It appears our Phædrus is going to get the ax.

The chairman asks our Phædrus about the dialogue. Our Phædrus replies that Phædrus, in Greek, means wolf, the chairman is surprised that he knows this and our Phædrus then proceeds to describe the dialogue but the chairman stops him claiming he is describing the plot not the dialogue.

But he has left out the part where Socrates describes the One.

Our Phædrus raises his hand:

Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0.

 

Everything is an analogy.
We can only know things by comparing them to something we already know; by analogy.
As a Sophist our Phædrus has pointed this out and as analogy is all there is the dialectical method of finding Truth has been demolished. Socartes himself has admitted that everything is analogy. The Truth is analogy. Where does that leave the dialectic?
In answer to our question another student in the class asks the chairman, "What is dialectic?
The Chairman turns to our Phædrus and asks him,"What is dialectic?
Phædrus asks if he wants his personal opinion and the chairman says no I want Aristotle's opinion.
He is setting Phædrus up for disgrace by showing how little he knows about Aristotle as his knowledge is vastly superior.
But Phædrus answers with something he remembers from the chairman's own writings,

Phædrus has realized that once the question, what is dialectic, is asked it becomes itself a subject of the dialectic method. Questions can be asked about it which in turn generate answers.

The class ends and Phædrus, the wolf, walks back to his apartment.

 

Phædrus abandons the class.
Meanwhile the classes he is teaching at Navy Pier are going well, except for Phædrus who is beginning to feel the strain of constant lecturing.
One day he enters the classroom and doesn't speak for the entire hour. Then he goes to his next class, and the next, and the next, never speaking at all.
He isn't sleeping at night, he has abondoned the study of Aristotelian rhetoric, he is walking the streets. He looses the sense of time.

He had sought to keep Quality undefined, but he now sees that he has made statements about it, and in making those statements he has been defining it. In speaking about Quality he has been destroying that very thing he calls Quality as it can't be described. All his efforts have been in vain.

He is committed to a hospital.

I have ignored the parts of the book that describe his relationship with his son, Chris, who took the motorcycle trip with him.

Chris is dead, he was murdered by two robbers two weeks before his twenty-third birthday.

"Where did he go?"
Chris was a pattern, not just a thing. And the pattern still exists, but it is larger now.

Then unexpectedly Pirsig's wife became expectant.
This time Chris is a girl named Nell.

This was written by Nell as she banged on Pirsig's computer:

- 30 -​

 

Any comments?
Revelations, sticking points, questions, or observations?

 

But isn't the exercise of logic a dialectic practice?

 

Logic is either the act of finding what is known about a large set and then applying that knowledge in a consistent manner to any member of that set.
And/or the act of finding what is known about a specific incidence or object and applying that knowledge in a consistent manner to form a general conclusion.
It's purpose is to discover what can be known or inferred about the universe, not encompass the entire universe.

Nothing is its own entity. Nothing exists on its on.

 

I agree. But only if we conclude that each and every instance of our perception is a completely separate"thing" from the rest of reality.

If something has a connection to something else it is dependent on that other thing as the connection means that the two are in a connected relationship. For example if I look at my keyboard as I type, it seems to be a separate independent object. I can even pick it up and carry it about with me to another spot. But looking closer I see it is made up of various pieces of plastic, copper, rubber, steel, aluminum, and so on. It is dependent on these various materials. Further if I disconnect it from my computer tower, is it a keyboard any longer? In other words what good is a keyboard without a computer tower to interface with? The keyboard, and in fact even the concept "keyboard" relies on the interface it has as an input device with a computer. Going even deeper, I see it depends on the raw materials needed to construct it, the natural forces that produced those raw materials in antiquity, the labors needed to mine those raw material, the factory it was produced in, the workers in the factory, the parents of those workers, etc.

You and I are self aware. You don't feel your self awareness has any connection to the circumstances of your existence? The circumstances of the meeting and union of your mother and father has no bearing on your self awareness? You would remain self aware if the oxygen was removed from the atmosphere?

You must define how you are using the word "thing".