I wrote this originally as a message to a friend as a discussion on Facebook, so forgive me if things are a little disjointed or repetitive. I'm just looking for other people's thoughts on the book or feedback to mine. I'm not a Philosophy major either, so some of the stuff he referenced (though not all) went over my head.

Let's see... it feels like there's a lot to cover in ZAMM. Mostly I've been able to follow it all, except for when he started talking about Hume and Kant and "a priori" experience in the high altitudes of abstract philosophy. But other than that it's gone pretty well. The thing I was surprised to learn (at least according to Wikipedia) is that this story is autobiographical; you can see pictures of the road trip that he took in 1968, pictures of him and Chris and John and Sylvia. Even the stuff about Phaedrus (though maybe not by that name) is true, as far as I can tell. This book seems to be sort of like "A Beautiful Mind", except with philosophy instead of mathematics.


Overall I'm following the path of his thoughts, and I appreciated his division of people into classicists and romanticists. I think the words I learned for it are analytical and global, though - they sound pretty similar. Oddly enough, despite the fact that I don't know anything about it, the illustrations with motorcycle maintenance help because I'm familiar enough with the concept that it still makes sense.

There's a couple quotes I want to pick out. Here's the first one:

"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." This one makes a lot of sense to me; it's why we talk about changing hearts and minds in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. If we just changed the regime there and left, they would end up with just another government largely in the same vein as the first one. It's also why it's so hard to combat corruption and graft in the quasi-democratic government they do have, because the idea of bribes is so ingrained in their culture, I think. We saw the same thing when reading Fate of Africa - no matter how different the governments claimed or aspired to be, for a long time at least, they all boiled down to greedy despots. Maybe that's changing today.

Here's another: "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." Hmm. I'm just going to leave that one by itself...

There was a third thing that struck me, but it was too long to boil down to just one quote. It was Phaedrus' attempt to advance Quality by not grading his students. He stopped telling one class their grades, and what he found was that overall, the class' level of achievement rose as students became motivated by interest in the topic or to ensure that they did do well, while only the D- and F-level students remained at the bottom. I have to admit though, that it's hard not to draw a parallel between that system and the system I am currently stuck in; a system that must quantify and evaluate and judge everything at every single point, and it kills (in me, at least) much desire to do anything beyond go to work and go home. I mean, don't get me wrong - my leadership is good people, by and large, but they're just tiny cogs in the much vaster machine that is the federal government. If a motorcycle is one tiny expression of that vast "death force" he talks about, the United States Federal Government could be one whole face of that inimitable death force.

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Like I said, overall I really clicked with this book and I've been able to track pretty well everything he says. There's just two main areas that I haven't been able to follow. The first one was in Chapter 11, where he talks about the far heights of philosophy, and Kant and Hume. He talks about whether or not reality exists outside our senses, and "a priori" experience, and I just sort of lost track after a while. I'm not sure at this point if I could rephrase where I got lost, even. It just seems irrelevant whether or not sense data is real because there isn't any alternative to it except suicide.

The second area was in his discussion of aesthetics - Quality. I understood it pretty well, especially as it related to his class, but when he started responding to his fellow professors and claiming that Quality was the absolute nature of reality (or something like it, as far as I could tell), then he lost me, and what little I understood, I disagreed with. It seemed like his time in India influenced him there.

Things calmed down after that though, and I had a great deal of appreciation for his Chautauqua on gumption. I mean, it doesn't just apply to motorcycles, it applies to any task at all. The specifics might be different, but the fundamental psychology of it is the same. Shoot, I would love to take his "Gumptionology 101" course.

Those are the main ideas I've picked out off the top of my head:

1) "Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster." (From the end of Ch. 17). I actually disagreed with this quote. In the context of Chris' YMCA camp it makes some sense, because the element of competitiveness with other boys makes achievement... I don't know... I don't want to say meaningless, but less valuable maybe. But to me, self-glorification (as I understand the term, without the egotistical connotation) is highly motivating. Remember the snowshoe trek we did from Northway? The fact that I made it there and back again, frostbite aside, blew me away and was a huge boost to my self-confidence. I definitely glorified myself (in a non-egotistical way, I hope) because I met a challenge and overcame it. Pirsig says that if you climb a mountain to prove how big you are, it is a hollow victory. I submit that climbing a mountain successfully is a statement of character and proves that you are, in fact, big. Maybe I'm misunderstanding his choice of words, and I imagine it's possible to be an empty, hollow, person constantly seeking approval by achievement, but in that case you have bigger issues than reaching the summit.

2) "These estheticians think their subject is some kind of peppermint bonbon..." (From the beginning of Ch. 1. That whole quote, that idea, is juvenile to me. It seems pretty arrogant to think that everyone who has come before you and spent lifetimes studying and thinking and working in that field is completely wrong and has nothing of value to add (while you do) is pretty egotistical. Bashing someone else's idea is easy, any fool can do it. Rebuilding that idea in a meaningful way is highly difficult, and requires that you engage with the problems or questions in a meaningful way, and is infinitely more difficult to do. The same idea applies to complaining in general. Quit whining until you have a suggestion at least to solve the problem.

3) "A thing exists if a world without it can't function normally." (From a couple pages later). Excellent definition and very succinct. I like it, though it is a little... generalized and may not apply to things that are sold on television.

4) "[John's style] was, in the argot of the sixties, "hip", mine was "square". (Ch. 18 still). An easier way to define these terms would be rational vs. emotional. How do you understand classically something as freeform and non-classical as jazz music, for instance?

5) The idea of reading to a child a few sentences at a time and allow for discussion - excellent and I would love to try it.

6)"I think metaphysics is good if it improves every day life; otherwise forget it." (Ch. 20). Yes. To me this is the key quote of the whole book.


7) "Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." (Ch. 22) I liked this because I understood that stuff like high school geometry only works on flat surfaces or planes, whereas non-Euclidean geometry turns those rules on their collective head when they are applied to non-flat surfaces. Parallel lines on a sphere will intersect, after all.

8 ) "Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight." (Ch. 24). Heh. Cute

Those are the items I have marked out in the margins. The only other thing I would add is the rising level of tension throughout the book between Chris and his father, which really adds a sense of... urgency, or desperation, or something. I REALLY want to know how it is resolved, if at all. It seems like Chris loved his father as Phaedrus better, and can't understand how to act now that his father is... "cured", and is trying to reconnect with him (or with him as Phaedrus). At the same time, his father cannot revert to the Phaedrus personality because a) it is gone and b) he probably wouldn't even if he could; the Phaedrus persona was unstable or unhealthy or something.

Did you feel the tension at all between the father and son? Do you think your relationship with your dad affected your view or feelings about the Chris/Father relationship? How do daughters' relationships with their fathers differ from sons'? We always hear about mamas' boys and daddy's girls, but not so much about father's sons or mama's girls (not in the same sense, at least, of having an unusually strong relationship.) Anyway, those are just musings for now.

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Hmm. I have to admit... after the last letter, I felt like I was on the home stretch and so I skimmed and glazed maybe a bit more than I should have. He kept on going on about Quality in Aristotle and Plato, and... it hadn't really hooked me before so I didn't really see a reason to really follow it much more. To me, the key quote out of the whole book is one I picked out before, about how metaphysics is BS unless it changes your daily life. The way I looked at it, this book was about 20% BS, and 80% worthwhile - which is still a pretty good ratio. I'm happy I read it and I did learn a few good things, a different perspective on life. The two things I would take issue with were the issue of the validity of sense data and a priori data, and the whole mess with Quality. I did not understand how it came to be the substance of the universe. There was one part in that whole last section that I did appreciate though; where he talks about the Greek concept of arete, of excellence. Phaedrus used it as a synonym for Quality, which makes... sense, I guess. To me, (though I'm not sure how valid analyzing the English translation of a Greek word is) excellence is a superlative word, a word that only has meaning in terms of comparison. That is to say, there is good, there is better, then there is excellent. Excellence has no meaning without the first two. Perhaps that is also how we can tell Quality, by how it compares to things like it. (Though one would still have to analyze by what criteria one judges something to be better than another.) Anyway. Arete - good stuff.

Another way the key quote applies is in the life of Phaedrus. Maybe I said it before (as I've been discussing this book with Kelly and Krista as well) that the biography of Phaedrus is sort of like "A Beautiful Mind" but with philosophy instead of math. The narrator sets it up at the beginning that Phaedrus was crazy smart to the point of social ineptitude, if not Rain Man status. Parallel-wise, the best way to refute any argument is to take it to its absurd conclusion, which Phaedrus did. He drove himself nuts, literally, trying to seek the answers to Life's Great Questions, and all it got him was electroshock therapy. He drove his family away, passed on his traits to his son, and peed his pants for Poincare and Aristotle. Philosophy didn't improve his life at all - it only worsened it. Now, to be fair, most people don't pursue it as far as Phaedrus did, but do their lives improve by it? Possibly. Pirsig's ideas about engaging the "technological death force" with a classicist point of view have some value, even if they are dated. There can be elegance and harmony, even in the cold circuits of a computer. But ultimately, for Phaedrus and the narrator both, it doesn't seem that knowing or pursuing philosophy helped their lives in in any meaningful way.

Finally, I found the climax to the tension between Chris and his father. The resolution was... I'm not sure. The resurfacing of the Phaedrus persona? Didn't that cause all the problems in the first place? I mean... sure, it's nice that Chris Can Love His Father Again, but it seems like the father simply indulged in the fantasy that he had been living in before his therapy. It was intellectually honest and satisfying, but... Phaedrus peed his pants. Maybe that was an acceptable tradeoff to him, but not to me.

Overall, while I enjoyed and benefitted from the book, I found that its subtitle, "An Inquiry Into Values" proved little more than that - an inquiry with no ultimate answers. Did I enjoy the book? Yes. Would I purchase and/or recommend the book? Yes. Did it change my life? No. So... there you go. What did you think of it?