Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

http://hn-books.com/Books/Zen-And-The-Art-Of-Motorcycle-Maintenance.htm

by DanielBMarkham • 15 years ago

102 77 15 years ago

andrewce2• 15 years ago

The schism between classicism and romanticism, as presented in "Zen", changed the way I view the world. I've been slowly teaching myself to see both, and to switch between those views at will, though it's occasionally unsettling to do so.

prospero2• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.

chanakya• 15 years ago

I had read some philosophy before reading ZAMM, but it didn't seem connected to my everyday life. It seemed to be about abstruse, academic arguments that had been going on for centuries about things which really didn't seem very important to my life.

This book put philosophy at the right place in my life - or me in the right place to understand philosophy.

andrewce2• 15 years ago

Had I not been a writing teacher when I read this book, I would not have appreciated it as much as I did. In particular, the "Itty-bitty rules for itty-bitty people" line (while he is at the U of Chicago) resonated with me.

You're right in that not much was particularly revelatory, as all of the discussed elements are discussed in multiple other places, often with greater depth.

But it's rare to see it all come together in a way that is almost immediately pragmatic and sensible.

alexophile4• 15 years ago

If you come from a solid grounding in (specifically Greek) philosophy, the concepts and questions Pirsig raises are familiar, but for me the way he addressed them seemed much less self-indulgent.

Greek philosophers were public intellectuals and, for me at least, reading their texts was somewhat off-putting because of the level of... grandstanding for lack of a better word. ZAMM seems so much more honest. It's framed as a man attempting to pass on actionable wisdom to his son that will make him a better person.

The questions are the same questions people have been asking for thousands of years: what is good? (and derivitives thereof) but Pirsig frames his answers with a very appealing humility.

Having lived off of my writing for a spell, I struggled deeply with the problem of metaphysical quality and no amount of classical philosophy ever brought me the admittedly limited clarity I felt like a got out of ZAMM. YMMV, though.

neutronicus7• 15 years ago

MMV, indeed.

I found ZAMM irritatingly condescending.

steveklabnik4• 15 years ago

> grandstanding for lack of a better word.

This is really interesting to me. I've recently started reading more political philosophy, and a few weeks ago, dug into "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit (the one about hawks and lambs), all I could think was "this sounds like /b/" or "I bet he was just trolling for pageviews, given that he's writing this in 1887 Germany"...

tibbon2• 15 years ago

There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too.

I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful.

Oddly, I like philosophy and I ride motorcycles too.

My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.

neutronicus7• 15 years ago

> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.

Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games.

I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category.

An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.

Gilpo3• 15 years ago

Pirsig and Rand both embed their philosophy within fiction, thus leaving you befuddled and oddly unsatisfied: "Did I just read a philosophical treatise or fiction?"

prospero2• 15 years ago

I think Ayn Rand is writing to an audience who already fundamentally agrees with her ideas. A lot of her writing strikes me as clarification of her philosophy, rather than a justification of it.

I didn't get that same sense from Pirsig, but while the ideas he presented were interesting, I didn't feel I was getting a novel perspective on them.

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

I would be curious as to what you thought of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, if you looked at that.

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

I think the more common reaction is the other way around. The book was revelatory when I read it (as a young teen), but when I returned to it years later, after studying philosophy, I was surprised by how shallow it really was.

I think that books like this are life-changing if and only if they connect with you at the right time. Put another way, the number of life-changing books one reads tapers off quite quickly after, say, 30.

wiredfool2• 15 years ago

I think that this book, like Atlas Shrugged, is one of those that can lead to a mental confirmation that what a teenager thinks is the whole truth and everyone else who doesn't understand is just plain wrong. Doesn't happen with every reader, but a higher than normal proportion read it and then turn into single topic lecturers for a while. Hopefully they grow out of it. (I hope I did).

barce• 15 years ago

There's a difference between a work being a result of philosophical genius and a work producing in the reader a philosophical experience.

As someone who studied philosophy, I felt that his proof for the existence of quality lacking. He appealed to a small sample, his class, in order to ground the existence of quality which is simply a hasty generalization.

However, I did feel something of a philosophical experience when he raised the issue of classic vs. romantic. He took pains to give examples and I feel that we all have to figure out this problem.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Yes. It should be said that this is not a philosophical book. It is a book about a man struggling with his sanity and parenthood and he does that in terms of his philosophy.

Because of this struggle, and because of the personal and warm way he does it, this book has a philosophical impact: it makes you think about philosophy and understand how philosophy affects people. But it's not a philosophical text by any means.

snissn• 15 years ago

Very wordy review of a very good book.

My favorite take-aways from the book are that 'Good is a noun' and the concept that not all questions may actually be formed properly and thus may not deserve an answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Cultural_referenc...

john2x• 15 years ago

I failed at my first attempt to read this. I'll have to try again someday.

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

I'm about halfway through, and it's taken 5 months to get there. Although I got through the first section in a week or so.

klbarry• 15 years ago

This book did not appear to have value for me when I attempted to read it.

neutronicus7• 15 years ago

I completely agree - I put it down in irritation after ~100 pages.

kalak451• 15 years ago

I had to read this as part of my Rhetoric class my freshman year of college. I hated just about every minute of it, very hard to absorb, more than a big long winded in places. It also didn't help that my TA for the class was convinced that the book was written about him (not really, but every other class was a discussion about how what was happening in the book was related to his life.) However, attempting to deal with, understand, classify, define "quality" is one of the few explicit activities I did for a college class that I spend any time reflecting on today.

Gilpo3• 15 years ago

The cornerstone of originality within this book is how Pirsig introduces his philosophy of Quality. Yet, if you read ZAMM carefully, he never defines this term. Overall, a frustrating and thought-provoking read.

wiredfool2• 15 years ago

Well, that's sort of the point.

psedo-qq/ Quality is that which is good, but if you try to put your finger on it, it sort of squishes out and you end up with empty platitudes and tautologies. / (my apologies, it's been 10 years since I've read it, and my copy isn't here)

He goes into it in the class, teaching it but refusing to define it, and one level higher, does it with the book.

praptak• 15 years ago

This is similar to the "quality without a name" as described by Christopher Alexander. Btw, his seminal book on patterns is totally worth reading - the GoF patterns seem bland and uninteresting in comparison.

browningstreet• 15 years ago

i read this entire book outloud to my girlfriend in college. we loved it.

pirsig_fan• 15 years ago

It never ceases to amaze me how often technical people in general and computer programmers in particular read this book and can't see the point, which is that your values can't be deduced by logic.

unoti• 15 years ago

Here are some thought provoking ideas for computer hackers that he discusses at some length: * Is it a good idea or bad idea to listen to music while working? Why? * Do machines have souls, and can they? * Why do machines frustrate me so much? What happens when I get frustrated? What role does frame-of-mind play in productivity, and how do you control it?

A lot of the negative comments I see here are perhaps expecting too much from the book. It's not like God wrote it and provided all the answers to life. (And even if that did happen, probably a lot of people would hate it.) It's just a very interesting and thought provoking book.

And with regard to the comparisons to Ayn Rand, it's nowhere near that level. The book is very short compared to what Ayn Rand writes. It's not preachy at all like her stuff. It's also far more practical. Ayn Rand writes about how civilization as a whole should live. This book is far more personal and contemplative, and not preachy at all. Ayn Rand might talk for 45 pages about how socialized medicine is a parasite on the productive people. Persig might talk for 3 pages about how if you keep working on the machine when you feel frustrated, you're just building your frustration into the machine and making it part of it. Totally different in scale and practicality.

mista_x• 15 years ago

How about a computer hacker break into Cuban internet users with the news with what happened in Egypt.

wisty• 15 years ago

I saw the point was something like this: you can deduce all of some values by logic, and you can some of all vaules by logic, but you can't deduce all of all values by logic.

It also had a nice, short, well written take on a lot of philosophy by a fairly smart guy who geeks tend to identify with.

briandoll• 15 years ago

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals is Pirsig's second book which is described as the defining work of the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ).

I loved ZAMM, but Lila is a much better book and even more though-provoking. I've read it 4 times through, and I still don't think I could write a complete review of it.

So if you liked ZAMM, definitely pick up Lila.

JoelMcCracken• 15 years ago

Interesting, because I really did like ZAMM, but I've never heard of Lila. I'll check it out.

wildster• 15 years ago

I agree, I think I read Lila first then went back to ZAMM and was not that impressed by it. I then went and read Lila another 3 three times.

tjic2• 15 years ago

I loved ZAMM, and have read it a few times (in college at age 20, then a decade later at age 30, and then once more in my mid-30s).

I tried Lila once in college and found it muddled and self-congratulatory, and gave up on it after just a few chapters.

davidmathers7• 15 years ago

There's a great portrait of hacker vs non-hacker mentalities which I think is on pages 15 and 16. I just went to Google Books to see if I could pull a quote from it but those 2 pages are missing.

tjic2• 15 years ago

Agreed; that's a choice bit. It was the first time I realized how sad and constrained the world-views of non-hacker types were.

...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!

davidmathers7• 15 years ago

That's it. The bit about the shim is what I was specifically thinking of.

pavelludiq• 15 years ago

I loved this book when i read it. I liked it mostly because it was able to explain to me what i already "knew" but couldn't explain. I now had the vocabulary and a road map to figure myself out. Its not so much that the ideas in the book were life changing, they were interesting to think about, but what i got out of it is that the book sparked a process in my mind to turn myself from a depressed cynical high-schooler, into a pragmatic adult, who enjoys his work, his studies, and his art, yet is not blinded by idealism or plagued by cynicism.

I guess its a lot about timing, had i read it at any other point in my life, i might have not liked it.

crcarlson• 15 years ago

I recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality.

When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice to get out of slumps: usually) actively recharge with rest/sleep, when under the gun) coffee.

chwahoo2• 15 years ago

ZAMM and the follow-on Lila are both worthwhile reads. However, I was uncomfortable with Persig's (pervasive) discussion of insanity.

He defines insanity as, roughly, holding beliefs that differ widely from those held by an overwhelming majority of society. There seems to be an explicit avoidance of physical causes for mental illness to the point of rejecting the idea that mental illness is an "illness" to be treated. His "insanity" is a natural result of pursuing complex paths of thought to their logical end (beyond where most people take them).

Can anyone shed light about the current (medical) take on mental illness and whether it jives with what Persig has to say?

TWAndrews• 15 years ago

I don't think his account ever claimed to be a factual, science-based analysis of mental illness, but rather a subjective account from someone who is/was mentally ill.

chwahoo2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by that. A major theme in the books is reconciling science with subjective experience, but he doesn't advocate doing so by ignoring factual things. I would have a hard time believing that he intentionally treated mental illness that way.

mitko• 15 years ago

I've read the book twice once at age of 17-ish and once at 22. I got very different things from it each time. I don't think that I learned some specific knowledge or skill from the book. Rather it provoked me to look differently on many things that surround me. What I found works best for me is to read few pages, select the most important thesis he is making (because he states a lot of things all over) and to write a short essay on the topic. However, at some point I got lazier, and the book became more narrative, so I switched to reading the book.

antihero• 15 years ago

Well I've ordered it.

Herald_MJ• 15 years ago

I like the big "works best on kindle" advert on the right, despite the fact that ZAMM isn't available in Kindle (or any ebook) format.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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