Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It’s quite a machine, this a priori motorcycle. If you stop to think about it long enough you’ll see that it’s the main thing. The sense data confirm it but the sense data aren’t it. The motorcycle that I believe in an a priori way to be outside of myself is like the money I believe I have in the bank. If I were to go down to the bank and ask to see my money they would look at me a little peculiarly. They don’t have “my money” in any little drawer that they can pull open to show me. “My money” is nothing but some east-west and north-south magnetic domains in some iron oxide resting on a roll of tape in a computer storage bin. But I’m satisfied with this because I’ve faith that if I need the things that money enables, the bank will provide the means, through their checking system, of getting it. 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 achieving the things that substance is supposed to do, and that the sense data will continue to match the a priori motorcycle of my mind. I say for the sake of convenience that I’ve money in the bank and say for the sake of convenience that substances compose the cycle I’m riding on. The bulk of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is concerned with how this a priori knowledge is acquired and how it is employed.

Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a “Copernican revolution.” By this he referred to Copernicus’ statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out. The effect was overwhelming. It was the acceptance of the Copernican revolution that distinguishes modern man from his medieval predecessors.

What Copernicus did was take the existing a priori concept of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative a priori concept of the world, that it’s spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the a priori concepts fitted the existing sensory data.

Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics. If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a “blank tablet”, and truly turning this concept inside out. Kant and his millions of followers have maintained that as a result of this inversion you get a much more satisfying understanding of how we know things.

I’ve gone into this example in some detail, partly to show some of the high country in close perspective, but more to prepare for what Phædrus did later. He too performed a Copernican inversion and as a result of this inversion produced a resolution of the separate worlds of classical and romantic understanding. And it seems to me that as a result it is possible to again get a much more satisfying understanding of what the world is all about.

Kant’s metaphysics thrilled Phædrus at first, but later it dragged and he didn’t know exactly why. He thought about it and decided that maybe it was the Oriental experience. He had had the feeling of escape from a prison of intellect, and now this was just more of the prison again. He read Kant’s esthetics with disappointment and then anger. The ideas expressed about the “beautiful” were themselves ugly to him, and the ugliness was so deep and pervasive he hadn’t a clue as to where to begin to attack it or try to get around it. It seemed woven right into the whole fabric of Kant’s world so deeply there was no escape from it. It wasn’t just eighteenth-century ugliness or “technical” ugliness. All of the philosophers he was reading showed it. The whole university he was attending smelled of the same ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, 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.

At Cooke City John and Sylvia look and sound happier than I have seen them in years, and we whack into our hot beef sandwiches with great whacks. I’m happy to hear and see all their high-country exuberance but don’t comment much, just keep eating.

Outside the picture window across the road are huge pines. Many cars pass beneath them on their way to the park. We’re a long way down from the timberline now. Warmer here but covered over with an occasional low cloud ready to drop rain.

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, and as Sylvia herself once said, “I don’t like being an object!” So a lot of things we know about one another I’m simply not going into. Nothing bad, but not really relevant to the Chautauqua. That’s the way it should be with friends.

At the same time I think you can understand from the Chautauqua why I must always seem so reserved and remote to them. Once in a while they ask questions that seem to call for a statement of what the hell I’m always thinking about, but if I were to babble what’s really on my mind about, say, the a priori presumption of the continuity of a motorcycle from second to second and do this without benefit of the entire edifice of the Chautauqua, they’d just be startled and wonder what’s wrong. I really am interested in this continuity and the way we talk and think about it and so tend to get removed from the usual lunchtime situation and this gives an appearance of remoteness. It’s a problem.

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.

Chris seems to understand my remoteness better than they do, perhaps because he’s more used to it and his relationship to me is such that he has to be more concerned. In his face I sometimes see a look of worry, or at least anxiety, and wonder why, and then discover that I’m angry. If I hadn’t seen his expression, I might not have known it. Other times he’s running and jumping all over the place and I wonder why and discover that it’s because I’m in a good mood. Now I see he’s a little nervous and answering a question that John had evidently directed at me. It’s about the people we’ll be staying with tomorrow, the DeWeeses.

I’m not sure what the question was but add, “He’s a painter. He teaches fine arts at the college there, an abstract impressionist.”

They ask how I came to know him and I have to answer that I don’t remember which is a little evasive. I don’t remember anything about him except fragments. He and his wife were evidently friends of Phædrus’ friends, and he came to know them that way.

They wonder what an engineering writer like myself would have in common with an abstract painter and I have to say again that I don’t know. I mentally file through the fragments for an answer but none comes.

Their personalities were certainly different. Whereas photographs of Phædrus’ face during this period show alienation and aggression… a member of his department had half jokingly called it a “subversive” look… some photographs of DeWeese from the same period show a face that is quite passive, almost serene, except for a mild questioning expression.