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BOOK CLUB: Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part II (Patreon)

Published:
2022-06-15 16:25:57
Edited:
2023-04-09 16:55:27
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

[Pictured: Church of the Minorities by Lyonel Feininger]

The plot thickens... the philosophy drippens.... 

I will be responding to comments! 

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Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge (p.114)

Well, it isn't just art and technology. It's a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and heart. (p.168)

What he really thought was that the rule was pasted onto the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn't... But how're you to teach something that isn't premeditated? (p.176)

Quality. . . you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things *are* better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes *poof*! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really *does* exist. What else are the grades based on Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others. . . but what's the "betterness"? . . . So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What *is* it? (p.184)

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I think chapter 14 and the entire stay at DeWeese's is gorgeously written. I love the jumpscare moment when the character brings up the real ancient greek Phaedrus, then explains where the "book" exists in this universe, kind of turning around in the narrator's mind, and we're somehow... like... in it.... then basically meta-explaining why the book is constructed the way it is. Delicious moment, makes me feel like the author is thanking me for coming so far and promising me they're conscious of what they're doing.

We hit some hardcore Kantian philosophy, escalating plot tension, and a lot of Mountain of the Mind Lateral Drifting! So I'm sure there is plenty to discuss.

Articulate Analytic Thoughts and Intuitive Feelings down below, both essential components of reality!

Files

Comments

Chandler Sterling

Heyo, we're back at it again fixing up motorcycles, having crises of rationality, and whatnot. I loved this part, I think it did a really good job of carving room to grow moving forward. A nice mix of building on the ideas from part 1 while making it clear that moving forward, we'll probably be spending a lot more time bouncing between the past and present. Which means even more philosophy from a ghost. I think what's so powerful about this book for me is how well Pirsig uses his main analogy of maintaining a motorcycle for so many different ideas. "But if you tried to solve them all, you'd never get the machine fixed." (pg. 95) is just calling analysis paralysis well before technology would make it a nationally recognized pastime. See also, "There's no steel in nature... All nature has is a potential for steel." (pg. 99). This is a fine enough idea as it is, but it seems like the seed crystal for so much of what's to come. We've gotta remove the idea that reality is purely natural. Sometimes we have to see the thing for the idea it is and not the word we've prescribed for it in order to dig a bit deeper. Now that the Phaedrus reveal is out of the way, that ghost is popping up like crazy. I love the flow of so many chapters being such quick bursts of reality between long stretches of memory and philosophical quandaries. It has the impression of stream-of-consciousness that it gives even though I'm 99% certain it's entirely intentional and crafted. Speaks to the author's later idea that writing starts as throwing everything at the wall and then crafting the bits that didn't stick just right. The book feels like the first draft was definitely written in one big thought and then he cut it up with that knife he loves so much into little digestible bits in a nice and readable structure. Speaking of the ghost, I think I've seen enough of it to be sure that the narrator is masking Phaedrus in a very relatable way for me. I was diagnosed with ASD late in life which means that for most of my early development, I was being forced to mask without anyone fully understanding why it was taking so much effort. The way the narrator constantly polices the actions of Phaedrus as what was and wasn't acceptable feels a lot like the same internalized hate I got accustomed to for many years. When you spend so much of your life feeling completely isolated, it becomes easier to blame your old self for not giving enough effort to see the social conventions they were breaking. From the small moments where the narrator has been blacking out, I am hopeful that there is a unity of the narrator and Phaedrus coming soon. It feels like the only positive way to move forward. I'm still finding it hard to believe his assertion that classical and romantic minds are coming from two separate worlds. It seems to me that there is more crossover than he's allowed for so far, but I'm also not sure I've fully grasped the exact meanings of each. When he describes it as classical minds focus on parts and romantic minds focus on wholes, that seems to be mutually exclusive, but then I feel like there's a habit to just call logical thinking as classical and artistic thinking as romantic which doesn't gel for me in the same way. Gotta agree with everyone that the absolute best chapter in this part was 14, especially the rotisserie bit. The way he discusses how technology reduces options when it used to be so much more acceptable to do things whichever way worked for you is mind opening. It feels like that explains so much of the discourse between the generations, each group has a vastly different idea about how to approach a problem based on the methods that were available to them growing up. "Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is." (pg. 166) makes me think weirdly of how I never click past the first page on a google search. I just assume Google knows what I'm looking for, and if I don't find it on the first few links, I rewrite the query or give up. "What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that." (pg. 168) I'm just thinking about how many think-pieces there are about anonymity online making people far crueler than they could ever be in person. Also wondering if there's a way to make technology more real for our spirits without risking commodification like social media has leaned into. No ideas now, just a vague idea of how nice it is to chat with someone and then see them in reality for the first time. I'll leave this post with this wonderful quote about writing the book I'm reading now, "'You should do it anyway,' Gennie says. 'Without trying to get it perfect.'" (pg. 172)

saba

i agree with you chandler and past ellen, about the false dichotomy of the phaedrus/narrator and of romantic/classical. I am finding it hard to understand where the split actually is. It's obvious yes that the split is making it harder for him to connect with his son, so I do hope to see the two sides integrate. Chapter 14 was very good. And i cry now since i hadn't finished it before talking w a friend about this chapter. I am writing this on a bus ride from houston to dallas. and feel compelled to write in multiple comments. I will do this

saba

People keep asking me what i am reading and someone even asked me if I was reading a manual, which felt like a sick joke pirsig was making in the grave. "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’s 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” (pg 167). I just love this notion. It just resonates so fucking hard with me as an artist musician person, friend, human. It reminds me of my old band and choir days in highschool. Excusing the pun, in these classical music settings its very easy to get caught up in “classical” modes of thinking. We are expected to practice hard passages that are technical on our own time, and much of rehearsal time is talking about prescriptive technique. Be “on your breath “ sing with Tall vowels, relax your embouchre without tensing up your jaw, sit up straight, breathe from your diaphragm. But that is never EVER enough. And it was something that i found fucking revolutionary about my choir class vs. my band class. My band director was so very classical. And was one of the most productive rehearse-ers and directors I had ever seen. Any field trip we would take would be organized to the nines, and we would have very easy to follow instructions if we were ever to drive ourselves to places including instructions on parking and ways to navigate the school if the auditorium or football field was in a weird place. It was so very methodological by my senior year I Could guess what she was going to tell us, or whatever section she was rehearsing, or what part of the piece we were going to play/work on next. But for whatever reason, the music we were playing was never all that spectacular or life changing. In Choir, we would also have very intense and technical rehearsals, but maybe because of the nature of having our instrument being inside of us,god given, rather than an object which we bought or borrowed like in band, this was never enough. There was always a point in rehearsal where we would discuss prescriptive vocal pedagogy, try different vowels, we would even lift up chairs while singing to make sure our diaphragms were in fact engaged and we were singing to our fullest potential. At some point, we would have to reckon with ourselves about why the song wasn’t working, why it wasn’t singing. And time and time again, my professor would ask us variations on the same question: “Why are you afraid to sing?” “We have rehearsed this many times, Are you scared to disappoint me? Disappoint your friends? Do you sing here because you want to impress me? Impress yourself? Or do you sing because you love to sing? This always got to the meat of the issue. Our problem was not technical, nor was it classical. The song wasn’t in tune, or wasn’t “singing” not (purely) because this music was too hard or we were forgetting something. The problem was never in the music, or even in our vocal chords. It was within us. “ In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right. That means it isn't checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn't checked out is a `down' machine and can't be used even though it may work perfectly.” p.167 The times you have breakthroughs in performance, you are not worried that it isn’t right. It just happens. The advice of “be on your breath” doesn’t work unless you Know what being on your breath feels like. SO much of the prescriptive nonsense is only getting you a part of the way there, and it all makes much more sense in experience looking back. I think people or musicians think that practice is so you can literally memorize every single movement you must make to make the noise. I don’t think this is true. Yes, muscle memory is a thing, but a Big part of practice, for me, is to literally trick your brain into trusting your intuition. Its the whole a priori thing. Even so, the practice is not just with the music. A singer who is constantly afraid of sounding bad, or disappointing their teacher, isn’t going to sound good. And thats no matter what vocal training they have, or the thickness of their cords, OR the amount of practice they have. If you don’t think you deserve to feel good about yourself, or feel good about singing, or believe that you are incapable of making something beautiful, the problem is not in the music, or the art peice, or some techincal thing. The problem is in you. Even so, the problem isn’t inherent to you, the problem is your own philosophy about yourself and your art making. Which brings us back to Mr. Chase’s question : Do you sing here because you want to impress me? Impress yourself? Or do you sing because you love to sing? In this way technology, whether that be a motorcycle, or a piece of music, AND THE DISTINCTION IS QUITE ARBITRARY I AM FINDING WHICH IS SCARY, being a collection of concepts, when it doesn’t “Work” requires you to obtain the technical knowledge to fix it, and in the same way, if everything is checked and screwed in correctly, requires you to find knowledge about yourself in relation to it. “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” p167 That shit is so fucking humbling and is so real to me as an artist. This humbling towards the art and the music. Knowing when the material is right– it's just you who is wrong. My drawing professor says every mark an artist makes is to fix their last one, and the work is done once there is nothing left to fix. This is true, but what I find even more fascinating is the fact that sometimes the work is physically DONE. and all that is left to be fixed is something inside the artist. Which brings me to eva c’s remark of the amateur craftsman. {comment 1/3}

saba

{comment 4/3} while i am musing on pedagogy and art i also have to just put this meta comment here, the whole "write a 350 word essay answering the question what is quality in thought and statement?" feels intensely related to this book club. one can imagine alternate universe phaedrus the x making youtube videos and cj fakeLastName having a class about Quality. i dunno but im smiling thinking of these scenarios

Lucas Regis

Here I am, another lost soul in Time on the road to motorcycle maintenance (lol). I didn't write anything on Part 1 because I didn't feel like I had anything to add, but I have Thoughts™ on this Part which I want to write down before they are lost. In general I loved this one a lot more than Part 1. The philosophy was far more enlightening and the travel bits are bursting with beauty. <i>"The true system, the real system, is our present construction of a systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory."</i> Starting off Chapter 8 with a very Philosophy 101 quote, but so very true and made me extremely happy. This is imo the big defining struggle of critiquing capitalism and formulating alternatives to it, when our most well-worn modes of thought are defined by our capitalist material conditions. Chapter 10 by comparison was a lot weaker to me, mainly because I don't fully buy the concept that science is supposed to "eliminate the indeterminacy of thought and values". I have no doubt that is a presumption a lot of science-y people make, but I am just built different I guess (am stupid) <i>"Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!"</i> Would it though <i>"Scientifically produced antiscience - chaos."</i> By far the most interesting quote in Chapter 10. Makes me think of the many scientific articles funded by oil corporations to cast doubt on climate change. These are obviously not very credible to most environmental scientists, but they do work because they target that gap between public perception of science and what it actually is. They are not science, they are scientifically produced politics. It does make me wonder whether pop science is not itself antiscientific by definition. Chapter 11 and the whole Kant dump is where things get REALLY fun: <i>"What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses."</i> I might be misinterpreting here because I am not a big Kant fan, but it seems to me that he is implying these a priori concepts have origin outside the senses (in some abstract "human nature" predisposition I guess), and I'm not sure I buy that. It seems as likely if not more to me that these a priori concepts also have origin in the senses. Time may not exist in the actual sense data, but it exists in the relations between all the sense data we receive, and is therefore born of the senses. This just stinks of that ancient Plato vs Aristotle rift of whether forms come before things or things come before forms. But also tbf I don't understand the issue Pirsig has with Hume's blind widdle baby either. He says throwing out his conclusions was "necessary" but never really explains why. His statement that Hume meant to say <i>"the entire world is within one's own mind"</i> seems like a pretty blatant misinterpretation to me. Like confusing the representation with the real thing, the world with an atlas. The world exists regardless of the senses, it's our ideas about the world that are strange. <i>"Similarly, even though my sense data have never brought up anything that could be called 'substance' I'm satisfied that there's a capability within the sense data of acheiving the things that substance is supposed to do, and that the sense data will continue to match the a priori motorcycle of the mind."</i> LOVE this. Very pragmatism-core. The a priori motorcycle is True because it is Useful to believe in it. It also brings me to a lot of doomthinking around dissociating the a priori object from the sense object. To ignore the maintenance and yet still expect the motorcycle to remain stuck in time, to expect it to simply be and not <i>become</i>... Someone else here pointed out that a priori concepts being born out of intuition tie them pretty well to romantic thought, and Pirsig defines romantic thought as preoccupied with what things ARE. Put this way it seems our a priori concepts of things are particularly ill-suited to deal with the passage of time; they can never BECOME. Perhaps that's why classic thinking is necessary. Our a priori concepts need to be constantly broken and updated to find our time's new truths. <i>"The objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out."</i> Did it not change though? Technology made it possible to obtain better sense data. Copernicus didn't just rawdog heliocentrism with his eyes and hands alone, he developed <i>instruments</i>. <i>"You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow."</i> Wig: snatched! Probably the hardest truth in this book so far. Such a gut punch. <i>"Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is a good maintenace; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."</i> One of my biggest challenges this past year or so has been really internalizing this and attempting to cultivate peace of mind within myself. It's a difficult pill to swallow because our modern culture seems so indifferent to peace of mind. Things that are not immediately useful for survival or entertainment are usually ignored. We're supposed to put out good work consistently regardless of our spiritual ills. <i>"Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is."</i> Not only that, but I'd also call into question the hidden values behind those presumptions... As someone who gave up a computer science degree to pursue art, I'd say the entire tech field hides a lot of assumed values that are quite disgusting... The entire last few chapters in the cabin had me really excited even though I didn't really write a lot on them. I just sort of blanket agreed and related to a lot of it. They're really cozy. In particular, I feel Pirsig really got to the core of that feeling of dissociation between yourself and the images other people have built of you from different times in your life... The realization that him and DeWeese and Chris are working on different "time frames" is really powerful. I'm excited for the rest of the book, particularly on the subject of Quality which is a concept I find quite impenetrable and tend to lean more on the subjective side of it. The Phaedrus split is growing quite mysterious and it does make me wonder if there was some sort of dramatic event which lead to the "scientifically perfect operation". DeWeese being sort of offended at John's light ribbing was kind of played off as just him having a deep respect for his friend, but it did make me wonder initially if there was some sort of polemic that led to Phaedrus being institutionalized.

D.S Films

Wanting to be a teacher, the sections in the College discussing the purpose of being a teacher, and how easy it is to lose any coherence or confidence in what you are teaching when quality and reason come into question really resonated with me. The education system has a long way to go to be better, and its great to see such a nuanced critique that demonstrates how often schools and colleges get priorities wrong when it comes to education. I'm really enjoying the 'chautauqua's' as a whole, and find the discussions useful in providing me with a different outlook on life. I love the realisation that we are all viewing reality through different worldviews, as it makes me sympathise with people who have different opinions from me more, as having read this book I can understand it. I am finding it worthwhile categorising peoples trains of though into romantic and classical, and I'm glad this part further explained what is meant by this and what it implies about people's behaviour, and knowledge as a whole. I am very excited to see where this book is heading, and I hope our protagonist can find some answers as to what quality exactly is. Maybe the meaning of life is in our search, all reaching out from our own worldviews trying to connect and find the ultimate objective quality.

Silver

Part II lets go Liked it a lot more than part I The thing is, after a fairly large gap of barely reading any books (maybe 2 years) i am just now starting again and it has been slow and sluggish, more a fight against the pages instead of what it’s supposed to be. The first part and, lets say, the first half of the second part didn’t change that and then chapters 14 and 15 came along. Oh my god. I am actually excited to read on now like wtf I’ve missed this so much. To the part itself. The first few chapters were pretty satisfying to read as it went pretty deep into the limits of classical thought which was circling in my mind throughout the first part and which i wrote about last time. In general the narrator is still pretty unlikable sometimes but i agree with others that its not as bad as in the first part. I noticed that the chapters are often structured in a way where we start with the trip, smoothly move away from it into philosophical ramblings and at the very end one small paragraph of one or two sentenced thats basically ‘ uh yea and then we arrived at that town‘ or something to that effect. These ending paragraphs feel a bit odd to me. Either you transition as smoothly out of the philosophy as you transitioned into it or you just cut and let the next chapter begin. Now you have the cut but still add a small thing at the end which feels (to me) disconnected, out of place and irrelevant to what came before. Now some quotes and stuff. Didn’t have too many clever thoughts while reading and more just passages i thoughts were beautiful or smth. (Oh small disclaimer i forgot last time: i have a different edition than most of you so my page numbers are different and so are quite useless. But i will start stating the chapter each given quote originates from) “If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.“ (cp.8) The narrator treats this like this is a new or little understood idea but Marx knew and wrote about that from the start. Sadly i can’t remember the exact quote. I have to refresh my marx-reading. “Little pins of colored light shoot forth to me from a background of somber dark green and black“ (cp.11) I don’t know. I just like Impressionist nature descriptions and art in general. “It’s not the technology that’s scary. It’s what it does(…).“(cp.14) Someone here said something about the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent to this stream-of-consciousness-style of writing. Later in the chapter he hits the nail on the head with the „spirit and heart“ line that people have so wonderfully discussed before me. But here with this earlier thought i was taken aback. What is technology if not its effects and consequences for us. To differentiate that i found to be very misleading. Anyways i and many others loved cp.14 its just so well written the first 13 pale in comparison. And cp.15 was also incredible. It was very enlightening to read all of your thoughts on teaching here as someone who might very well end up teaching as well. The introduction of *Quality* i loved, though i would have found an exploration of Sarah valuable, as she is the one clearly guiding him on this path and she stays pretty mysterious so far. Now i adore this following paragraph just for the writing. I have no thoughts about it. “He would sit by the radiator with a stub of chalk in one hand and stare out the window at the mountains, interrupted, occasionally, by a student who asked,“ Do we have to do…?“ And he would turn and answer whatever thing it was and there was a oneness he had never known before. This was a place where he was *received*-as himself. Not as what he could be or should be but as himself. A place all receptive-listening. He gave everything to it. This wasn’t one room, this was a thousand rooms, changing each day with the storms and snows and patterns of clouds on the mountains, with each class, and even with each student. No two hours were ever alike, and it was always a mystery to him what the next one would bring…“(cp.15) No thoughts This is just beautiful

Lucas Regis

It's a re-read, but it feels more like a re-re-re-read. I'm constantly going back and forth between things, re-reading passages, combining them, weighing ideas out in my mind. This part is lateral. On first read, it's hard to understand the connection between the different sections, compelling as they may be. On second read, you realize the road is slightly inclined and you've been subtly climbing upwards the whole time. Will save any and all comments on academia and Quality and the romantic/classic mode to Part 4. I'm still climbing the mountain there. First time around I was really stumped by the section on Kant. It didn't feel right but I was by no means educated enough on Hume or Kant to say otherwise. That is still somwhat the case (I did not, in fact, binge the fuck out of Critique of Pure Reason just for this chapter) but this time I feel like I got a better handle on things. On first read, I thought that Pirsig was saying Kant believed in an ultimate source for knowledge other than the senses (a "human nature"), but that's not what came across to me this time at all. Instead it reads a split between whether ALL knowledge is born immediately from the senses, or whether there is knowledge that does not immediately come from the senses but is born out of the relation between different sense data, either implicitly (ie.: time) or rationally (ie.: science, language). This seems way more appropriate to me. Still, I'd say Hume gets a bit too much of a bad rep here, which is part of what made this section so confusing to me. Pirsig seems to place Hume in complete opposition to the a priori knowledge of Kant, when I don't really think that's the case? It doesn't seem like Hume's philosophy really contradicts Kant's here, he is simply wholly uninterested in the difference between immediate and a priori knowledge (to Hume, these are both equally born of the senses at the end of the day and the distinction is not at all important to the hypothetical he's raising). To put it in familiar terms, Hume is working in the high high country, whereas Kant is working closer to the low country. It's notable that the example we're given for Hume's philosophy is that of a baby born without their senses - invoking images of birth, primordiality, it's a very high country hypothetical - whereas the example for Kant is just literally the motorcycle. But I just cannot imagine explaining the a priori motorcycle to Hume and him responding with anything but "oh yeah that makes sense, don't care tho. what the fuck is a MOTORcycle??" - the concept is simply implicit in our very experience of reality itself. This raises the question of where this antagonism between the two actually comes from. At which point do Kant and Hume actually diverge? Based purely on ZMM, I'd answer "on the UTILITY of dividing knowledge into 'a priori' and 'a posteriori'." We need to ask ourselves what exactly we are trying to do here, when we use the knife (the classic mode) in this way. As stated in one of CJ's videos - I think it's the Stranger Things one? - one problem when we split things in two is that we are doing so to put one thing above the other. Phaedrus eventually sours out on Kant, and it is implicitly because of this - Kant is also an adept user of the knife. So what's the pragmatic utility of this concept for Kant? "But both in his normative works and in his foundational work, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes explicit that the supreme moral principle itself must be discovered a priori, through a method of pure moral philosophy. By “pure” or “a priori” moral philosophy, Kant has in mind a philosophy grounded exclusively on principles that are inherent in and revealed through the operations of reason. This sort of moral philosophy contrasts with empirical moral philosophy, which is grounded in a posteriori principles, principles inferred through observation or experience. While empirical moral philosophy, which Kant calls moral anthropology, can tell us how people do act, it cannot, Kant claims, tell us how we ought to act. And what we want to find, when we are seeking the supreme moral principle, is not a descriptive principle, but the most fundamental, authoritative normative principle. According to Kant, morality's commands are unconditional. We could never discover a principle that commands all rational beings with such absolute authority through a method of empirical moral philosophy; we must use the a priori method. Moreover, we must keep the pure and empirical parts of moral philosophy clearly distinguished, since if we do not we could find ourselves confusing conditional truths, such as what is prudentially good for certain individuals or species, with unconditional truths about fundamental moral requirement." (https://plato.stanford.edu/archIves/spr2010/entries/kant-hume-morality/) What a rationalist! Hume on the other hand: "Hume provides only a limited (though not unimportant) role to reason in ethics. The principal role that Hume gives to reason in ethics is one of helping agents see which actions and qualities are genuinely beneficial or efficacious. Hume denies that reason itself sets the standard of morality, or sets forth certain ends as morally to be promoted. Reason, according to Hume, is a faculty concerned with truth or falsehood, both demonstrably in the realm of relations of ideas, or empirically in the realm of matters of fact. Reason makes inferences, but neither sets ends, nor motivates action. Our ends depend on what we desire, which depends on what we feel (with respect to pleasure and pain). Once feeling has established utility as one of the primary objects of morality, reason is essential to determine which character traits or modes and conduct conduce to it. This task is especially difficult with regard to questions of artificial virtues, such as justice, since so many people are involved, and since the social benefits of these virtues can be expected only from (possibly tong-term) collective action." That is all to say, I think I'm with Hume on this one. I still love the a priori bike though! It's a wonderful pragmatic thought experiment that is particularly effective at breaking away from the "what if there is a demon intent on deceiving me" rationalist mind prison. On the other hand, it's interesting to see it in the larger context of the book, as a sort of foreshadowing for Phaedrus's "crisis of faith" in the classic mode. An idea that is immediately compelling but becomes uglier and uglier as he reads more. I'd say that moment of "ultimate ugliness" is the moment where the a priori concept has detached itself completely from the sense data, where our ideas of the world have failed in their quest to increase understanding and begin to hinder it. Scientifically produced anti-science that only makes sense in relation to itself.

phil e the theyby

Back in my time machine for Part 2! I liked the single quote approach, so here’s the one that spoke to me: “Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric…Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes. In Montana, however, it didn’t have this effect at all. It identified one, instead, as a stuck-up Eastern ass.” (183) I love the layers in this quote, highlighting how rules ostensibly reflect actual values (“kindness or decency or humanity”) but in practice often serve as class signifiers and, by extension, undermine their stated values. The idea of these sorts of technical rules distracting from the actual writing process feels deeply resonant to me. I supervise psychologists in training, and it’s so easy for them to fall back on “technique” or certain strategies when they struggle to connect with their clients. And I always have to emphasize: if you don’t know what to do, just be a real, validating human being with your clients. You can even be transparent that you don’t know what to do to address a specific problem. Just try to foster an authentic human connection first. “Technique” is never substitute for that; in many cases, it can be a distraction from it. That doesn’t mean technique is never valuable or helpful; it’s just that it’s ONLY helpful when it builds on top of a real human connection. Also, the teasers around Quality are delicious, especially because my lack of memory about the deeper layer of what Quality means is why I wanted to reread this book. Overall, these chapters were fabulous, and I’m reading it more and more ravenously. On to Part 3!

Meech

"The state of mind which enables a man to do religious work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or progress, but straight from the heart." Pg. 98, Chp. 10. My heart gushed when I read this line. Later, our post-Phaedrus narrator speaks with disdain over the gradual and unfortunate divorce of technology and art, and I couldn't agree more. In the first book of a classic occult text, Corpus Hermetica, it is said, "The student of pure philosophy studies the sciences, not as fanciful theories, but as devotion to Atum..." I think people envision certain personages when thinking in terms of divinatory practices. These people may be priests, spiritualists, astrologers, tarot readers, psychic mediums, but frankly I have seen the same remarkably beautiful, glassy-eyed wonder in organic chemists, astronomers, physicists when they talk about the intricacies of their fields of studies. All this to say, we have all our mediums through which we want to pursue the great mystery of this universe, the pursuit of Atum, but ideally this is done via the conduit of love. I think Greek agape love is applicable here. "The difference is that the classic reality is primarily theoretic, but has its own esthetics too. The romantic reality is primarily esthetic, but has its theory too." Pg. 108, Chp. 11. I sympathize with wanting things to fall neatly into binary categories, but that is ignoring a whole spectrum of invaluable greyness. There is a mathematical quality to say, poetry, and there is a mythic quality to chemistry. "We have in our minds an a priori motorcycle, which has continuity in time and space and is capable of changing appearance as one moves one's head and is therefore not contradicted by the sense data one is receiving." Pg. 118, Chp. 11. My main passion in life is astrology, specifically that grounded in the Hellenisitc Greek tradition, and a fundamental part of the philosophy of this school is understanding Plato's Forms. Plato posited that in this cosmos, there are ideas or Forms that are perfect in mental manifestation, but rarely, if ever, are manifested perfectly in reality. These Forms are embodied approximately and imperfectly. We can also think of them as archetypes, or the "Thingy-est" thing of something. Like, if I asked all of you to imagine a flower right now, I can pretty much guarantee that not all of the flowers pictured are the same. One of you will envision a rose, another a chrysanthemum. Myself? I picture a carnation, and the next person a calla lily. But that hardly means that none of these aren't exemplary examples of a perfect flower. All this to say, this passage and the whole concept of a priori reminds of these Forms, which are meant to be grounded in cosmic unity (whereas a priori in human nature). I just want to pause here and extend my gratitude to Pirsig for bringing my rage for Immanuel Kant to a simmer, at least for a little while. I wrote a rather scathing, if I do say so myself, essay in college in regards to Kant's Categorical Imperative and how its rigidity can be twisted by those in societal power to vilify certain groups of people (and this was before I found out he was racist!). At any rate, I've had a perpetual bone-picking session with him in my head, and I found myself having to agree with his assessment of a priori concepts, and that forms existing in the mind are of value and can fulfill the sensory data as well. Thank you, Pirsig! "Holy wars are not fought over them [doctrinal differences] because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself... Tat tvam asi, 'Thou art that,' which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom." Pg. 126, Chp. 12. This one makes my brain hurt a bit, lmao. Maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but this almost spits in the face of Descartes', "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am." But then again, maybe enlightenment isn't what Descartes was striving for in his doubt. "His lack of faith in reason was why he was so fanatically dedicated to it. You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow." Pg. 134, Chp. 13. I love this on so many levels. I remember an English teacher I had in the 10th grade relayed to us that she never wanted to be a teacher of English, not even a little bit. She excelled in math and planned on teaching that, but found that her natural talent for mathematics did not necessarily translate well to teaching. She was too adept at the topic to see how others could struggle with it. Meanwhile, she faced great difficulties in her English classes even in college, but that way was able to laboriously, and with love, learn how to teach it. I always found that admirable and have tried to carry that attitude with me into adulthood. This can be applicable to one's schooling, one's faith, one's management or coaching style, anything! Doubting and discovery is a love language for learning. "The Church attitude is that civilization, or 'the system' or 'society' or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men." Pg. 175, Chp. 16. Damn straight! "Grades really cover up a failure to teach... The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum." Pg. 179, Chp. 16. Loved this, too. I think a lot of incompotent teachers hide behind the security of doling out grades to justify their real lack of impact on their students. Being a teacher is not remotely for the faint of heart. Finally, in his commentary about the lack of quality creating a world that is dull and not worth living, I found it fascinating how he chose to subtract quality in his thought experiment. Initially, when he said that he would envision a world without quality, I personally imagined that it wouldn't be a lack of quality altogether, but that of good quality. Which is odd, because I do not recall a point in which he made a distinction between good or bad quality, just quality or non-quality. It reminds me quite a bit of how Epicurus subverted at least my understanding of happiness. He says that the absence of pain in itself is pleasure, and that the presence of pain determines absence of pleasure. It seems obvious once written, but I dunno. It almost seems like happiness should be elevated to a higher standard than just the absence of its opposite. And I guess in that same initial way, I figured that things of "bad" quality would worsen existence more so than lack of quality totally. This is definitely a half-baked thought.

haw

some loose thoughts: Pages 104-105, about hypothesises and how nothing can ever be non-refutable. The part abt the lifespan of scientific truths just becoming shorter and shorter sprained a part of my brain I think lol. the nihilism of that idea reminded me a lot of the short story division by zero by Ted Chiang. I see how this logical brist in the concept of Reason is needed to explain quality. When I read the first 100 pages, I was like ah okay the concept of quality is making something good by fulfilling every requirement in the classic approach, and when that’s done it will be romantic as well, bc every single component working to the best of its ability and interacting with every other component and making a cohesive system is what makes it beautiful. then he basically shits on that idea on page 159 and how classical reason does not accurately explain things like abstract art, or other real experiences. on page 195: A student can fulfill every formal requirement of a paper, but still not achieve quality. the concept of quality isnt consistent or replicable, which is what makes it so elusive. It doesnt follow the principles of reason, which is deeply embedded in the classical approach. Similarly, a romantic approach doesnt inherently produce quality, just because something is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing doesnt make it inhibit quality. But at the same time, he comes back to this idea in page 154-157. That a good craftsman doesnt follow instructions, but makes a series of decisions along the way based on knowledge and experience, and how that is art. He then goes on to say that the divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. But again, what he describes sounds an awful lot like reason! He resolves this by saying that reason cannot be abandoned all together, but needs to be expanded. Im so fascinated by this, as someone who writes/works/thinks alot about tech and how it impacts us. the idea of technological ugliness only being solved by expanding reason really articulates something that I have been struggling to pinpoint for a long time now. I think we definitely live in a topsy turvy time considering the prevalence of tech solutionism, and all the bullshit that that approach produces (surveillance capitalism, the erosion of peoples attention spans, insert any other bad thing here)

Organ

In this section the narrator spends a lot more attention on laying out the Chautauqua rather than in the moment, commenting on the day-by-day travel and actions of his companions. (He's a keen observer of social situations, though, a contrast to his occasional obliviousness in Part 1.) He comments on how this puts him at a remove from others ("reserved and remote," p. 136) and accepts that as a necessary cost of serious abstract intellectual work. To an extent, I buy that, as people with a partner or friend who creates or who create themself (using a broad understanding of "creates") knows that the demands of such work can be pretty hefty. In Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed," it's commented about one such partner that "like any man or woman who undertakes companionship of the creator spirit, [she] did not always have an easy time of it... The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model." (p. 188) At the same time, I don't feel that such work ever exempts someone from the need to honor their commitments to friends, family, community. Later in "The Dispossessed": "His sense of primary responsibility toward his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely." (334) In any case, the narrator came across to me in this section as more honest in general, and I think I liked him better for it. Perhaps it's because he's talking so much more about Phaedrus, and the gap between the two is getting smaller and smaller in various ways. That trajectory came to a head at the end here, but I think there's farther to go still—John and Sylvia are gone now, and it'll be just him and Chris. Lonelier, air thinner, walking up on shakier branches. I'm guessing it'll get tougher before it gets better, if it gets better at all.

Sammy Langit

cw: transphobia, familial abuse Once when I was twelve, shortly before my mom and stepdad broke up, he trapped us in the car on a 14 hour roadtrip with the audiobook of ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ and wouldn’t stop the tape or the car until my mom threatened to pee on the floor. Subsequently, I’ve developed a complicated relationship with the concept of rationality, and so it was a bit more of an uphill battle for me to read through this section than the previous. There were definitely still high points! When the narrator was describing how he mapped the scientific method onto diagnosing issues with the motorcycle, he kind of casually broke apart the idea that the scientific method is for formal, elite work only; I really like how he just applies the framework wherever it’s useful instead of worrying a lot about convention or institutional standards. However, that discomfort with the parts about logic didn’t go away for me. Whenever he was talking about ‘rational truth’ or abstract logic being a higher form of thinking, the only thing that conjured for me was a menacing word cloud of like Bill Maher, geometry proofs, bad dates with tech boys, and family members asking me to debate whether my partner is a woman or not. That’s why, when I got to the part where the narrator said ‘The whole university he was attending smelled of the same ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classrooms, in the textbooks. It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.’ I said ‘Oh, thank god’ out loud. Because thank god he said something, and thank god it’s not just me that feels that way about how rationality is used and interpreted (at least sometimes). It’s weird, because without the baggage of power and gender, I think I’d view stratified abstract logic as similar in purpose to high art, and be similarly at peace with it. Anyway, the rest of this section flew by. I connected to mostly the same parts as everyone else and really enjoyed this exploration near the end of the relationships from the narrator’s past versus his present. I’m really looking forward to the next section and if / how it will explore the frameworks and faults of a romantic worldview. :) Side note i should add: I don’t have any strong feelings about that anecdote at the beginning, it was weird at the time but now i think it’s just a funny story lol

Wilfred

yess chapter 14 was awesome , thank u for recommending this book i find myself thinking about it throughout the day

mouse

Page 121: "He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly." Do they say no because limiting the world down to 26 characters is too limiting of a perspective instead of being very definitive as Phaedrus thinks it is? I'm not sure I understood this, maybe someone else can explain it? Page 130: "An example of a priori knowledge is "time." You don't see time. Neither do you hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it. It isn't present in the sense data as they are received. Time is what Kant calls an "intuition," which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data." I like time being categorized as intuitive, since intuitive is categorized as romantic earlier in the book. Maybe it's not the same philosophically, but it rang a bell in my head. I recently read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and there was a lot of talk about the relativity of time when you're travelling at light speed, and I struggled a lot to understand it in a scientific sense lol. But I was reminded of it here, because there must be a weird kind of sadness when you've traveled far into space from Earth, which ends up actually being more a distance of time because of the relativity of time, even more than a distance of space. The people you left on Earth have lived multitudes of days and weeks and years longer than you have. There's something much scarier about losing years than miles I think. Especially when you get stuck in moments and relive them and relive them, or even imagining things that may happen and reliving THAT over and over, both of which are absolutely pointless anyway. So I thought it was interesting that the concept of time is called intuitive (or romantic) here. Time distance does feel very emotional to me. And I think it's emotional for Robert too, because he does spend a lot of energy ruminating and stressing about how to interact with DeWees, who knew him from a time distance that they've both left. Maybe time distance changes you more because it might feel less solid or touchable. Maybe that's why it's frightening? When Robert talks about the "stickiness" of John and DeWees talking together I felt it Viscerally lol. That's exactly the word when people know you from different sides of a life and aren't sure how to talk around it. I think a lot about lost time and how absolutely irreversible it is. For me, the distance in a year is incalculable even if you're measuring by a year, since you can't travel back along it the same way you could drive down a highway from one place to another and then back again. You can go back to a physical place but it'll never be the same because time has moved you and moved the place. And I'm thinking that maybe I'm missing the point, and the point was actually that the intuitiveness of time is simply because it's a sense that isn't physically sensory, and not really an emotional experience. I don't know, maybe that whole bit doesn't make sense and its just a ramble lol. I felt a little lost through these 100 pages (a lot of rereading and rereading), I usually have trouble with high mountain thinking, but I'm having a really good time reading everyone's thoughts!

mouse

I also liked that quote you posted CJ, about how technology isn't connected to matters of the spirit and heart. I had some kind of a thought about digital art and the ways we've constructed computer programs to be capable of some seriously beautiful work by talented humans (drawing programs as well as like 3D printers and music writing software etc), how maybe we've given technology a way to be full of heart and spiritual, and maybe even by the fact that its so easy to share with anyone at any time, but I don't think it went anywhere. I don't know if that's what he was going for with thay quote. I also wondered about how that quote goes with Robert's thoughts about the beauty of motorcycle machinery, but I don't know where that is going either lol. Does anyone have thoughts about that one?

Wilfred

“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’s doing even thought 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. “ Sounds like art. “ “ Well, it is art, “ ( pg 166 )

Beck

Patreon has now deleted my comment twice :( (unless CJ is censoring me) I wanted to draw out pages 170–171 as a focus: “We’re living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences.” Ever seen a book, movie, TV show, etc. actually capture what it feels like to be on the Internet (which feels like 90% lf our daily loved experience these days)? I haven’t. I go back to CJ’s video on transhumanism all the time in my head; it opened up new neural pathways for me to think about and articulate the disconnect. As difficult as it is for us to fathom what it would be like to have a brain chip and communicate with other people instantaneously, I feel like it’s equally difficult for current art forms to grasp what it means to be on the internet. The only pieces of media I’ve really seen attempt this are Eighth Grade and Inside (both Burnham) and We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, a recent movie that slapped. But even those mainly describe the effect of being on the internet, not necessarily the lived experience. So much of art these days is backwards-looking, reminding us of what it felt like when we all still lived in the real world. Like, even reading this book, I found myself going, wow, what must it have been like to not have Google Maps, to really be stuck in a town without being able to call your friend, and you just get there when you get there after having sent them a letter telling them you’d be in town? Then for everyone to sit around in a room having a conversation, because there’s nothing better to do—without even the promise of a Twitter escape in your pocket, or wanting to retreat to your room so you can watch YouTube videos for a little while. Different world, truly. “The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up… The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.” Are we in a New Renaissance, a new expansion of reason, or is the massive technological shift we’re all going through collectively breaking our brains because we no longer have the artistic/technical/rational tools to come to terms with it? Because it kind of feels like the latter. It kind of feels like we’re all waiting around for Something to happen that’s going to help us cope and make sense of Everything we’re experiencing All Of The Time. And I have no idea what it will look like or how to get there, because it isn’t a matter of specialty; it isn’t a matter of extending any one singular branch. It’s about ripping up something at the root, and that’s scary. “A really new exploration, one that would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus, would have to be in an entirely new direction.” “Like what?” “Like into realms beyond reason.” AAAAAAAA

myrto

Just a few thoughts I had during this section of the book: I have just completed my first year of teaching and prior to this year the main thing I thought I knew about myself was that I didn't want to be a teacher. The reason why I didn't want to do it was articulated in my head "I don't think I will be adequate enough or good enough for this and I feel like it's too high of a responsibility to not be the best possible, if not perfect, teacher". Getting to the quote "Are you teaching Quality to your students?" kind of sent me on my own existential crisis questioning path. I already knew that at least for this first year I was NOT teaching quality and going into it I kind of expected that anyway because who is “good enough” in their first try at something complex? But this part also made me realize that I have only this vague idea of what I think of as "good enough" or in this case of what Quality is but I can't define it in order to reach it. Part of what I would consider Quality I think comes from "experience" but there's an essential component of it that I can't articulate at all. On a different but kind of related note, I found it really interesting when he talked about the "inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences" and how his solution to that is that we need to expand to entirely new "realms of reason" and the suggestion that we are maybe already doing that since these patterns of change in thought processes cannot be observed at the moment they're occurring but only later and in hindsight. For example, in my own quest for Quality in teaching I think the leap to a new realm of reason is very necessary and the only way to possibly eventually achieve it. Somehow I cannot properly explain what I want to say so I’ll leave it at that but this part of the book especially since they arrived at DeWeese’s place made me think a lot about how these issues and these philosophies could be applied in my own life.

eva c

“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’s 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” (pg 167). This reminds me of a carpentry joke that my dad loves to insert into conversations about anything involving self-criticism towards things someone has created. He says that the difference between an amateur carpenter and an advanced one is that an amateur carpenter will point out the places where he messed up. This anecdote is so oft repeated in my household that now all he has to say when he wants to reassure someone about their creation (whatever it may be) is “don’t be an amateur carpenter”. Reading this chapter in particular added a layer of depth to my understanding of my dad’s joke. It’s not just about the mistake itself, it’s about the underlying assumptions that the act of defining something as a mistake uproot. The act of admitting a mistake implies that one’s actions betrayed a set of predetermined instructions. It’s like the age old idea of “coloring inside the lines”. That’s really what makes an amateur carpenter (or an amateur anything really). It’s not the act of revealing imperfections, it’s the act of revealing the confines that one presumes the thing was created within. When there is only one way to put something together, then there are infinite ways to mess it up. The advanced move is to realize that there are actually infinite ways to put something together, and every mistake is not a door closing, but a door opening. A friendly nudge onto an alternate path. This all sounds a little bit middle-school-art-teachery, but I think it gets at one of Pirsig’s conundrums. Like the idea of infinite hypotheses, admitting that there are infinite paths towards any act of creation has a paralyzing effect—how on earth do I determine which of the infinite paths is “best”? That’s the question of Quality and the reason why it sometimes seems impossible to act or even think while the very definition of Quality hangs in the balance.

Kylie

late to the party, but wanted to comment specifically on the example of an uninterested student in a university without grades. The example seems to prove we all search for quality in our own lives as a kind of necessary act, drawing meaning out of quality itself. Grades are a mark of quality, but have become an end in themselves rather than a means to the end of understanding or mastery of a subject. When freed from imitation and the stamp of grades, the unruly student follows their own laziness into an avenue of actual interest, which morphs into a fevered pursuit of quality for its own sake in his field of choice. It implies quality, where we are drawn to generate it, can supply the meaning we look for in careers, in learning, or more truthfully, in life.

Sam Jay

I'm also playing catchup, small collection of things that resonated with me: -Concepts of lateral truths and knowledge, introduced around pages 119/120; "Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one." -Analogy explaining that objective truths are often determined by people who have the time/energy/availability to define it, who are not often the same people who are actively developing those truths; "...I KNOW how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs the least, the biggest goof-off he's got, and whatever he tells you- that's the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he's too busy." (p. 165-166). Somewhat related to later discussions on writing, rhetoric and interpretation: I used to love the Percy Jackson series, and I owned a book of fan essays with a forward by Rick Riordan. He wrote that, whenever he spoke at a college, he was approached by English, literature, and classics professors with their "academic" readings of his books (ie with regards to symbolism, greater philosophical intent) that they would include in their curriculum. He would have to constantly break it to these professors that the books are based on bedtime stories that he made up for his mythology-obsessed children, and have no grand intent or meaning. In the context of ZMM, that's not to say that those professors are necessarily incorrect (as once art is put out into the world it will take on a life of its own regardless of original intent), but that "the next guy" of Rick Riordan was to busy actually creating the work to provide explicitly clear analysis. -Post hoc writing guidelines, which have already been discussed at length. I think that there's value in identifying common traits of "quality" (or at least, "conventional") work to use as a reference or starting point, but the further you get from purely technical writing, the less useful these traits become. Maybe this is why Bob ended up a technical writer; it let's him exercise his rationally-coded writing skill without opening the Pandora's box of creativity. -Kind of taking my words from last week's post out of my mouth, on the frustrating focus on technicalities/memorization over understanding in the sciences: "Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly had been done away with but was still around. This was the old slap-on-the-fingers-if-your-modifiers-were-caught-dangling stuff. CORRECT spelling, CORRECT punctuation, CORRECT grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about." (p. 183) I feel like one of the evolutionary advantages of the written word is the exportation of memory. Having recorded reference materials and tools free up your brain for thinking new thoughts. I can recognize value in mental exercises (especially for younger children), but most or all fields have at least one area of unnecessary rote memorization or adherence to a rubric.

pol

I missed the last couple weeks because my life has been chaos, but I finished the book this morning and I will catch up here in segments. PART 2: My dislike of the author, narrator, and Phaedrus intensifies. Same problem - they remind me of myself at my worst and I can't stand that guy. He was a terrible human (bad dad, bad partner, bad friend). I have a difficult time evaluating the ideas because in the process of mentally cleaning the pretentious bullshit off, I get all smelly and frustrated and then get so annoyed by the endeavor I have have nothing useful to say and should have just left it alone. The philosophy 101 stuff is fine. And I promised myself that I would try and stick to calling out only the the things I agree with, or found interesting, and not the things I disagree with, because I disagree with pretty much everything and nitpicking is tiresome. But the book maligns my good friend Science, and I cannot let that stand. Science does not "promise" anything. Science is a process, a methodology, which is at present the best method for accurately predicting how the universe works. It doesn't say "why" or whether or not it is capital-T truth, it just says that when we did the experiment, it worked a significnt number of times, and we made some math to model that, used it to predict a different set of things, and it worked. Is it right? Who the fuck knows. It works. Science, and scientific endeavor is an emergent system, it makes no promises, but it is effective. It works. It is better at some kinds of problems than others. It is only as effective as the humans who are using it. But (to repeat the obvious one more time), so far, the efficacy of the scientific method is the best we've got. And, Phaedrus, you are making yourself crazy for no reason. The more you learn ANYTHING, the more questions you are able to ask of it. This is not a problem of science, this is a feature of learning. It applies to anything that you study. As you find nuance, you can ask more questions. You don't get to a point where there are no more questions. You don't solve truth. This is my fundamental problem with this whole book, but maybe I can avoid going into it until the end. Also, as an aside, culture isn't "broken", there isn't a pat cause to our "current social crisis" (and there never has been, every generation complains about it), people just don't like change, it scares them. Culture is an emergent system, it is as it is. We are able to communicate with each other more than ever before in human history (and that was true during Persig's time as well). This increase in communications should accelerate emergent behaviors. Things will be changing faster than they used to be. But that's just reality. Technology isn't the problem, it's part of the fabric of human life. Damn, there I go again, ok, ok, the things I liked. The Scenery was lovely. I liked the bizarre nonsequitur where he is talking about lateral thinking and describes it with the simile "like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window". I cannot make heads or tails of this. Is it that he was asleep or dreaming? Or the sun coming in the window was the arrow? I read this a few times and it still just makes me laugh. Lateral thinking! YES, I can get behind this. I love lateral thinking, and it has been critical for my overall mental health. For me the concept is best encapsulated by "getting out of your own head". You need to get outside of your subjective lens to see things in a new way or to see how you see! Otherwise you can't perceive the effect that the lens is having on everything you think (and the ways you think about how you feel). So far, the only ways I know of to get outside your lens are: 1) psychadelics, 2) therapy, 3) meditation, 4) pilgrimmage (or similar physical endurance trial like sweats, fasting, etc), 5) crisis/epiphany. There are probably others. For Phaedrus it was time abroad and eating apples. The author says that this was sufficient for a lateral drift (lens replacement), but I don't buy it. I think he is still basically the same person as before. He just changed religions from Science to Philosophy (and the Church of Reason). There was a bit after he left india because his teacher held strong to their philosophy of maya even in the face of nuclear catastrophe when Phaedrus became a decent person! The author frames this as a failure. He had "given up". He was working a job, taking care of his family, put on some "middle age weight". As someone who is living this right now, it is not trivial shit. This is real hard work putting the needs of others before your own and setting aside your problems in favor of theirs. For sure it is not just a single paragraph's worth of content. I have learned SO MUCH from this. The fact that Phaedrus learned NOTHING is really telling. My personal philosophy is entirely derived from the fundamental conflicts inherent in being a good parent. What it means to BE a good parent. What Quality parenting is or looks like, to put it in the terms of the book. I guess I sholdn't find this too surprisng given how much of a garbage parent he is, but boy howdy, it is very disappointing. And maybe someone else can help me with this, but I have a very hard time understanding the reason given for Phaedrus going "back to the mountains." It doesn't parse for me (like the archer simile). The author "guesses" that Phaedrus is feeling some inner sense of failure, and that going back to the mountains "might take him back on the track again." Even those words are grammatically weird, right? "take him back on the track again". What track? Why is that track worth being on? And the final sentence is: "He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly" What does that mean? Being a good person made him get older faster? Why is maturity a consequence of the "abandonment of his inner goals"? It seems like the author is implying that Phaedrus turns into shitty husband/dad/teacher because of a hallucination of inner failure, and that hallucination is connected to a notion of "maturity". Halp, any ideas here? And we will end this part with the introduction of the thesis concept of Quality. A concept that I find impenetrable (as did Phaedrus). Perhaps Part III will make it clearer, lol..

Adison

hello! some initial thoughts: a lot of the tension i was feeling in part 1 seems to be slowly resolving itself. kind of. his descriptions of emotion and their tangible impacts shows me that he understands how important they are to understanding the reality he is so concerned with. “Ahead I see an elderly tourist take a movie of us, then smile. From under his shorts protrude white legs into street stockings and shoes. His wife, who watches approvingly, has identical legs. I wave to them as we go by and they wave back. It's a moment that will be preserved on film for years.” (chapter 12) something about the “identical legs” really does it for me here. it captures this fuzzy sense of sadness that hangs around this section. you feel the knobby knees and linty socks and feel deep despair and profound love at the same time. for me, this shows me someone who is deeply connected to their intuition and emotion. for all of the talk of rationality and quality, the moments that speak to me the most are these quiet moments of observation. i might not fully understand them, but i feel them. it seems to me that the narrator is deeply invested in figuring out himself and the world without realizing that he is already deeply connected to it. “It's a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. The lunchtime here-and-now stuff is a specialty too.” (chapter 12) “It's not the technology that's scary. It's what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that's scary.” (chapter 14) “We live in entirely different time structures.” (chapter 14) “When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.” (chapter 14) these quotes also give me that same sad fuzzy feeling. it creates this sense of urgency that he knows he and phcdrus both feel. they want to break down the barriers that make technology so isolating and “ugly” but in doing so they end up isolating themselves further. his prose reveals that he cares deeply about experiencing and honoring emotion, yet he often critiques his companions for experiencing similar things. is he deeply un empathetic or trying to make a point? all i know is that despite all the talk about rationality and kant and pistons, this book makes me feel things. excited to keep going.

annie liz

part 2! I still feel like I’m just a half step behind from what this book wants me to grasp, but I haven’t completely lost my way yet which I’m counting as a win.   He’s still pretty dogged on romantics which is interesting; he said in part 1 that they were a vital part of looking at the world, and later in the chapters he talks about how important reason and feeling are to each other, but no matter what he still refers to them as if they’re toddlers, immature, infantile. He defined the terms of classical and romantic so I guess I can’t really complain about his definition, but I find his syntax a little frustrating. this might come from a personal place though, so I’m working on accepting the existence of the bias and continuing to push deeper   “In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.” (p. 112) that’s a downright biblical reference holy shit I could analyze that one for a WHILE.    “A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity” this passage, and his later description of the high country in chapter 11, melted me and reminds me of Alaska. I’ve never felt more still than at the peak of a mountain there, feeling very tall and very small at the same time. Everything there is Big; the sky, the mountains, the clouds, the horizon... it's something I can't quite find anywhere else. it’s like the comment from Beck on the part 1 thread about the love of the prairie; there's a clarity that's unmatched in that silence.   Chapter 10 is very good. it is also where my brain gets fuzzier for the rest of part 2, but I did love how it buzzed thinking about his assertions. i’ll probably reread it (as well as all of part 2) a few more times. I felt some of the bezos/burnham video in it. I also see where we might be going in terms of finding Quality. If science is looking for the “best” truth, how do we determine what is best?   “When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” (p. 152). This argument logically made sense to me, but I don’t know if I fully agree with it. Passion only stemming from doubt and never from love seems empty to me.   The rotisserie instructional monologue in chapter 14 utilizes a lot of points and concepts from the previous chapters, like an unconventional final paragraph to several different theses. I enjoyed that approach; the tongue-in-cheek reference to “writing a book” about his thoughts was a nice touch as well.   “But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind.” (p. 168) very very strong connections to CJ’s most recent video; I really liked seeing the ties between evaluating WHAT MAKES or QUALIFIES art and EXPERIENCING art itself    “It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes.” This reminds me of a piece by S. Margot Finn on the social construction of taste in food, called “Can ‘Taste’ Be Separated from Social Class?” and it was one of the best articles I read throughout my time in undergrad.  I’ve thought about it a lot when considering taste in art, and it’s been a really fun juxtapositional idea when watching CJ’s videos.   Hopefully this wasn't too rambly; I deleted a lot of excess thoughts on different passages and tried to keep actual *Thoughts* instead of Reactions. I love finishing my conclusions/questions and then diving into everyone else's reactions, seeing what I missed or failed to articulate. Y’all are very smart

ellen

usually we orient ourselves through novels based on genre expectation/predictions, which is rather impossible to do here. zmm is a road trip story but there isn’t a destination. it’s a coming of age but the little boy comes of age offscreen, privately, and the narrator’s “coming of” is an attempt to outrun ego death. philosophic oration is the most fitting “genre” but even that doesn’t fit quite well bc the philosophy is being felt-through rather than explained clinically, and at many moments it contradicts itself and doubles back, or reframes itself suddenly based on some of the more tangential genre influences—key moments in the thesis heralded or propped up through developments in the road trip. none of this is a problem &tons of books do same or similar, but i felt those collisions very starkly in this section. meeting deweese, waving off john-sylvia, getting out first bite of the Quality thesis: “what’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart” (p168, 25th anniversary ed) & what’s not working for me in part2 is how disconnected all these pieces feel. complicating my dislike of that failure to mesh is also that the sharp edges between each part is what makes them so effective when put into conversation. by which I mean the narrator is desperately trying to connect with chris, afraid to admit that’s what he’s doing, trying to philosophise himself out of his own life, but that philosophising is only making everything more Real as he struggles intellectually back to his own body, and his body is this warzone where each new idea he spools out is helping phadreus breach containment, taking him closer to that very ego death, but chris LIKES phadreus more so this deliberate careful matrix of interior thought actually helps him connect to chris… and then he’s trying to tether himself to /any/ kind of permanence+material reality and just pointing to plants by the side of the highway like THOSE LOOK NICE! WOW THE SUNSET OVER THE MOUNTAINS! ISN’T EVERYONE HAVING A GOOD TIME? VERBALISED STATEMENTS ABOUT REALITY ARE NEVER PRESUMED TO BE REALITY ITSELSF! i strongly suspect pirsig is trying to genuinely, emotionally, describe beautiful vistas and warm moments between friends, but the prose is too clunky and obvious and detached for that to work for me, which fits better with my perception of who the narrator is, and thus the Quality that i perceive within it /feels/ inadvertent. it’s the inadvertence that irritates me, and the eye-rolling indifference i feel about the way pirsig tries to write the narrator and chris struggling towards each other, the sheer immensity of the mental burden the narrator and phadreus are revealed to be carrying in this section, irritates me because pirsig IS so capable of beautiful statements. my favourite idea in all this chapter is on page 170: "i think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world." it’s so simple but nuanced that it’s almost hard to look directly at. where was this light touch in all the passages that go [narrator expresses a feeling] [jarring paragraph describing a view that directly matches that feeling]!! connected, it felt like pirsig and I were making mutual narrowed eye contact (indescribable sexual tension between us) on page 135: “I suppose if I were a novelist rather than a chautauqua orator I’d try to ‘develop the characters’ of john and sylvia and chris with action packed scenes that would also reveal ‘inner meanings’ of Zen and maybe Art and maybe even Motorcycle Maintenance. that would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don’t feel quite up to it. they’re friends, not characters…” babygirl you’re at the intersection between real life privacy and the in-text Quality of your book, and im driving towards you in the car of inability to support the central thesis of that book while lampshading your responsibility to the Art to try slip away from developing the parts of it you’re not as interested in. &im not saying that to be down on people who do enjoy the prose and are really touched by the narrator’s articulations of feeling; obviously not. as I said, it also ended up working for me but through this sideways direction. it’s just that the quest for Quality is clearly what pirsig and the narrator both care the most about and the rest is secondary, a kind of meta addition meant to enhance the presentation of Quality, which I agree was a necessary attempt but don’t believe was executed as cleanly as the matrix of logic being slowly built up around Quality. it felt like a drapery of Style, the likes of which the narrator himself disavows. however! “the test of the [BOOK] is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the [BOOK] produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the [BOOK] or your mind is changed.” (p164) this was the part of zmm I liked the least but I did enjoy it overall &I hope I don’t come off too negative here :)