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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 25th Anniversary Edition Review

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Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a great read. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a non-fiction philosophical novel.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an autobiography, allowing Pirsig to narrate his own life experiences. Along with sharing his motorcycle trip with his son Chris and some friends, he mainly focuses on what quality is. What is quality and how do you define it? He believes that it doesn’t exist. In this certain area of the book it is harder to comprehend, but he does prove a good point that I agree with. He goes into great detail explaining his belief that quality is something made up, and he actually gets pretty emotional about it as he struggles to find the truth. On top of all of this, Robert Pirsig is schizophrenic, dealing with his battling alternate personality, Phaedrus.
Some weaknesses I found include going into too much detail about some ideas; they seemed unnecessary. He drifted into too much detail about some philosophical ideas and terms that the reader wouldn’t be prepared for and didn’t explain them well enough. Also, at the end of the book, his Phaedrus personality actually takes over; however, throughout the book he reflects back on how he was a student in India and his experience there, but that was his alternate personality. Since he went through electroshock therapy, there is no way he could have remembered any experiences Phaedrus went through.
Though he couldn’t have remembered these things as Phaedrus, Pirsig does do a good job at helping the reader understand what he’s going through as he battles his alternate personality. As mentioned before, he reflects on his experiences in India and has multiple dreams about those experiences. Though he wants to deny it, his son Chris also struggles as he tries to figure out if there is something wrong with his dad; asking questions and reflecting on good times in the past with his father makes his dad realize that it was Phaedrus that experienced those good times. Along with this, the reader is able to understand how Chris feels about the whole situation: he wants his dad back, you know, the dad that he has great times with and loves so much . . . Phaedrus.
This book really makes the reader think about how to find truth and if quality actually exists. It also lets the reader take an adventure inside the narrator’s mind as he battles against his schizophrenia disease. I recommend this book to anyone who loves to think. As Pirsig himself writes, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there”.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 25th Anniversary Edition Overview

The narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son becomes a text which speaks directly to the confusions and agonies of existence, detailing a personal, philosophical odyssey.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 25th Anniversary Edition Specifications

In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts.

Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details–be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.

In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century–why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can’t define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator’s claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor’s Edge and Sophie’s World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into “the high country of the mind” and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. –Brian Bruya

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