Summary and Analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values: Based on the Book by Robert M. Pirsig
30
Summary and Analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values: Based on the Book by Robert M. Pirsig
30eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter overviews
- Cast of characters
- Themes and symbols
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is three books in one, including the author’s account of a transcontinental journey, his struggle to reconcile both halves of an identity fragmented by his own mental illness, and a rumination on Eastern versus Western philosophy.
Now, more than forty years since its original release, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has become a modern classic—the kind of book that challenges readers to step outside of their everyday thoughts and consider some of life’s most profound questions through the entertaining lens of a father-son trip.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504046411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| Sales rank: | 1,038,010 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Worth Books’ smart summaries get straight to the point and provide essential tools to help you be an informed reader in a busy world, whether you’re browsing for new discoveries, managing your to-read list for work or school, or simply deepening your knowledge. Available for fiction and nonfiction titles, these are the book summaries that are worth your time.
Read an Excerpt
Summary and Analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Based on the Book by Robert M. Pirsig
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4641-1
CHAPTER 1
Summary
PART I
1
The narrator and his son Chris are on a motorcycle trip across the Central and Great Plains, passing through Minnesota with friends John and Sylvia, who are on another motorcycle.
Traveling by motorcycle is completely different from traveling by car. On a bike, one becomes part of the landscape rather than viewing the world through a window. During this trip, the narrator wishes to offer the reader a series of Chautauquas — similar to the traveling educational assemblies that brought culture and entertainment to rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His first Chautauqua is to lament modern humanity's dependence on — and loathing of — technology. It's a destructive love-hate relationship. John and Sylvia despise technology even as they're addicted to it. There are instances of suppressed anger at the role technology plays in their lives, evidenced through anger at a leaky faucet and refusal to do their own motorcycle maintenance, but the narrator does not define them based solely on these feelings.
Need to Know: The narrator's view of motorcycle maintenance differs diametrically from John's view. The narrator does all maintenance himself — he knows his bike inside and out; no one will ever approach it with the same care he does. John staunchly believes it's better to take his bike to a dedicated mechanic. This difference will become a metaphor for their approaches to life.
2
The narrator, Chris, John, and Sylvia see a storm on the horizon as they approach the Dakotas.
The narrator recounts a previous trip during which he and Chris were caught in a terrible thunderstorm. Due to inexperience, they found themselves bogged down with too much baggage, and drenched, with lightning crashing around them. The motorcycle then quit, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. He assumed this was because of the storm, but he was just out of gas.
After getting the motorcycle home, the narrator took it to a shop, resulting in a series of costly repairs by incompetent or rushed mechanics. Because of these experiences, he now espouses the philosophy of thorough maintenance done personally: Know your bike. The narrator applies this experience to his life overall, too. He takes care in what he does and tries to be as knowledgeable as possible. This story really comes back to the adage "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."
Need to Know: The author wishes to explore the idea of taking time and paying attention to your task — doing whatever it is without allowing distractions. This is not yet discussed in detail, but it is one of the central tenets of Zen practice.
3
The group waits out a storm under a tree and eventually stops at a small-town motel.
Chris asks his father if he believes in ghosts. The narrator says no at first, but then he changes his answer. He says that we live in a world of ghosts, which can take the form of teachings and beliefs that no longer have relevance. If something exists only in people's heads, it is a "ghost."
He offers the example of the Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity. Before Newton, no one had conceived of gravity; it simply was. Science and the laws of nature and mathematics exist only in the mind.
The narrator is haunted by Phaedrus, a "ghost" that he recognizes as the consciousness that once occupied his body, a previous persona.
Need to Know: The narrator hints at a past that was drastically different from the life he's living now, begging the question of what happened to change him so profoundly.
4
The narrator provides a list of valuable things to take on motorcycling trips — "Clothing, Personal Stuff, Cooking and Camping Gear, and Motorcycle Stuff" — with brief explanations of why those things are important.
Each machine — each motorcycle — has its own personality, the accumulation of maintenance and experiences that can make two machines of the same model and year feel and behave very differently. The narrator calls these differences "the real object of motorcycle maintenance." With personal maintenance, the motorcycle becomes a "healthy, good-natured, long-lasting [friend]."
The next morning's ride is terribly cold, and they pull into the next town suffering from the beginnings of hypothermia. When the weather finally warms and they move on, John laments how difficult it is to photograph stunning natural vistas. Sylvia says that as a child, she once spent half a roll of film trying to photograph the scenery on a family trip. When she got the pictures back, she cried because "there wasn't anything there."
Photographs simply can't capture the beauty of the natural world because they put everything into frames. The narrator equates this to traveling by car, the windows of which automatically frame everything, narrowing our views.
Need to Know: Beauty is in the details: the details of the things carried, the details of each unique machine, the details of the trip.
5
Their journey continues across South Dakota.
In the past, John's handlebars had grown loose, and no amount of tightening would fix the problem. The narrator suggested using a beer can as a shim, but John balked at the idea of a simple beer can being used to fix his expensive BMW motorcycle. He was more worried about perception than efficacy.
For the narrator, this raises the idea of conflict between visions of reality. There are two realities: one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation.
Chris loses his appetite, suffering stomach pains, and exhibits behavioral problems. The narrator says it might be the beginning of mental illness, but he doesn't trust doctors and psychiatrists because they're not "kin." Chris doesn't need "emotional Band-Aids," he says.
The ghost of Phaedrus continues to bear down on the narrator's psyche.
Need to Know: Chapter by chapter, the narrator is building the idea of conflicting worldviews, the artistic and abstract versus the scientific and concrete. Chris's behavior might be tied into this conflict while also revealing the nature and history of "Phaedrus" one step at a time.
6
The narrator experiences a few snatches of memory from Phaedrus's experiences, but for the most part, Phaedrus's entire personality has been expunged somehow.
The conflicting world views above are labeled classical (the scientific, the rational, the reasoning) and the romantic (the artistic, intuitive, imaginative, the inspirational). Each view has its dark flip side: To a person of the classical side, the romantic side can seem frivolous, erratic, and untrustworthy. To a person of the romantic side, the classical can seem dull, oppressive, and over-regimented.
The motorcycle is a perfect example of the classical side, a collection of systems and sub-systems, the explanation of which is "duller than ditchwater." It does not take into account the humanity that must be present in order to operate one.
Need to Know: Phaedrus was a hyperrational genius of the classical side, a master of slicing ideas and systems apart to understand how they fit together. According to the narrator, he used this skill in a "bizarre, yet meaningful way," but ultimately, he ended up making himself a victim of his own methods.
7
The next stage of the trip is blistering hot, which starts to take a toll on the motorcycles.
Phaedrus's temperament made him uniquely skilled at using the "knife" of analysis to cut ideas and systems into infinitely smaller divisions, forever sorting and categorizing. But when "analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process." But something is always created, too, forming a kind of "death-birth community that is neither good nor bad, but just is." (Phaedrus was, in a sense, killed off and replaced by the narrator.)
At some point in the past, the narrator woke up as if from a significant loss of time. With no knowledge of why he was there, he awoke in the hospital. He was told that he had a new personality now. Phaedrus was dead, destroyed by shock treatments called "Annihilation ECS." But wisps of Phaedrus's memories remain, emerging now as the narrator travels west.
Need to Know: The narrator apparently underwent shock treatments in response to a severe episode of mental illness, and in the process, his previous personality, called Phaedrus, was destroyed.
PART II
8
In a small town in Montana, the narrator tunes up his motorcycle. The operation of an engine requires incredible precision, with parts fashioned down to the thousandth of an inch, but this kind of perfection can only ever be an ideal. True perfection is impossible. Maintenance of a motorcycle requires understanding of its hierarchy of systems and the structure.
Governments and institutions are also systems, but revolt against them is useless because systems are only symptoms of the underlying structure: systematic, rational thought. If a factory is torn down but the underlying rationality that built it is left in place, then someone will build a new factory. The systematic patterns must also be destroyed.
Need to Know: A motorcycle is an analogy for the systems of government and "the establishment" — a construct of rational systems, a hierarchy. But these things are illusions created by rational thought and epitomized by the scientific method.
9
The group follows the Yellowstone Valley into Montana and the narrator and his son are nearly killed by an oncoming car in their lane. In the aftermath of this close call, a cardboard carton flops around in the turbulence left by the car. Sylvia later says that she thought the cardboard was the narrator's motorcycle rolling over and over on the highway.
The scientific method is broken down into six steps: statement of the problem, hypothesis, experimentation, predicted results, observed results, and conclusions. This process is compared to the methods a mechanic uses to fix a motorcycle.
Need to Know: Sylvia's comment signifies just how fragile they all are compared to other traffic — and how fragile we all are in life.
The scientific method is not unlike motorcycle maintenance, which is why mechanics so often appear deep in thought.
10
Every discovery made via the scientific method creates more questions. But do those questions come from within the scientist or from outside? Phaedrus began to question the nature of scientific hypothesis itself. According to the narrator, he "became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves," which led him into a rabbit hole that eventually caused a breakdown. The more questions he answered, the more new questions were raised. This disproved the validity of the scientific method itself.
Scientific truths apparently possess a temporal condition. "Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth [is] not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal, quantitative entity that [can] be studied like anything else." This idea upset Phaedrus greatly.
Need to Know: The act of answering questions creates a multitude of new questions, increasing chaos rather than reducing it. Phaedrus believed that the current societal ills stemmed from the hollowness and spiritual emptiness of the rationality to which Western thought clings.
11
The motorcycle trip takes the group over the alpine tundra, crossing a stunning landscape above eleven thousand feet. In this high country, nothing but low-lying moss and tiny wildflowers can grow. It is an ecosystem unto itself.
This "high country" equates to the kind of intellectual region that Phaedrus threw himself into, a place where few people venture. Those who do, however, find no end of austere wonders to explore. This dogged intellectualism drew Phaedrus into the study of philosophy, called the greatest of intellectual disciplines by its adherents. It is the study of the boundaries between thought, existence, and substance. Until he discovered philosophy as a course of study, Phaedrus was intellectually adrift. The study of two Renaissance philosophers — the Scotsman David Hume and the German Immanuel Kant — forms the foundation of a breakthrough Phaedrus experiences later.
Hume posited that all knowledge and thought is derived exclusively from the senses, a philosophy known as "empiricism." Kant refuted this position by asserting that knowledge may start from the senses, but through experiences, we build mental constructs of things that continue to exist even if we are not actively perceiving those things at the moment.
In Hume's position, we reach an intellectual impasse, because our "reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of reason itself."
Kant refutes Hume's empiricism with the thesis that our thoughts are independent of sensory data and, in fact, screen and shape what we experience. He called this position a philosophical revolution comparable to Copernicus's view of the universe.
Phaedrus was thrilled with Kant's work at first, but it quickly began to feel ugly and repressive to him.
Need to Know: Just as the "Copernican revolution" forms a boundary that distinguishes modern thought from that of our medieval ancestors, Kant's work forms a sea change in metaphysics. Phaedrus lost himself in this "intellectual high country" for a long time, seeking what he did not know.
12
The group arrives at Yellowstone Park, a place that Phaedrus despised. They are to meet with some of Phaedrus's old friends, the DeWeeses. Mr. DeWeese is an impressionist painter, and he fascinated Phaedrus. The narrator explains, "Phaedrus had a high regard for DeWeese because he didn't understand him. For Phaedrus, failure to understand something created tremendous interest."
After studying Kant, Phaedrus moved to India to study Oriental philosophy. He studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism and decided their doctrinal differences were not remotely as deep and important as the differences between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Holy wars were not fought over Eastern religions. The Eastern religions all derive from the Sanskrit phrase Tat tvam asi, which means Thou are that. What you are and what you perceive are undivided.
After growing frustrated with Eastern philosophy, Phaedrus returned to the United States, where he got married, had two children, and pursued a career as a writer, allowing his intense philosophical questing to go into hibernation.
Need to Know: The narrator is, in many ways, retracing his steps to learn more about who Phaedrus was and what he did, like a quest for the specter of his past.
13
The more he delves into the life of Phaedrus, the more the narrator experiences great trepidation, like an archaeologist unsure of what he'll find.
In the 1950s, Phaedrus worked at a teaching college in Montana, the kind of institution where no academic research was done. The college entered a dispute with the right-wing governor and legislature, and Phaedrus found himself at the forefront of the struggle about what a university is meant to be.
He delivered a lecture to his students that he called the Church of Reason lecture, in which he explained that the University was an idea: a collective agreement that knowledge and truth must be pursued. Where there is no quest for truth and knowledge, there can be no University, only the hollow, deceptive shell of a collection of buildings.
Need to Know: Phaedrus's academic career was a tumultuous one, both as an academician and as an educator. His students found his classes to be too intense and avoided them. Unearthing old notes and memories makes the narrator feel like an archaeologist wondering "if some tombs are better left shut."
14
In present day, the group arrives at the home of the DeWeeses. Other friends of the hosts are also in attendance, and everyone shares in dinner and conversation. Moments of awkwardness come and go as the DeWeeses struggle with the difference between the man before them and the man they knew. The narrator and Chris apparently lived with the DeWeeses for some time.
The conversation turns to technical writing, and the narrator then takes it into the relationship between technology, art, and self.
Peace of mind "[is] the whole thing," he says, the ultimate goal, which relates back to mechanics. He suggests that a machine that runs smoothly does so because it was created and taken care of with "good maintenance." He goes on to say that the builder — the creator, the mechanic — brings his psyche into his work. If he is not working with peace of mind, his negativity will be transferred to the machine. He argues, "technology presumes there's just one right way to do things, and there never is." Though we might wish that there was a manual or guide to making choices, there is not, and we must consider not only ourselves in the actions we take, but also the world, because our choices do not exist in a vacuum.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Cast of Characters,
Themes and Symbols,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Robert M. Pirsig,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,
