Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Why are we doing this?”

“What?”

“Just riding all the time.”

“Just to see the country — vacation.”

The answer doesn’t seem to satisfy him. But he can’t seem to say what’s wrong with it.

A sudden despair wave hits, like that at dawn. I lie to him. That’s what’s wrong.

“We just keep going and going”, he says.

“Sure. What would you rather do?”

He has no answer.

I don’t either.

On the road an answer comes that we’re doing the highest Quality thing I can think of right now, but that wouldn’t satisfy him any more than what I told him. I don’t know what else I could have said. Sooner or later, before we say goodbye, if that’s how it goes, we’ll have to do some talking. Shielding him like this from the past may be doing him more harm than good. He’ll have to hear about Phædrus, although there’s much he can never know. Particularly the end.

Phædrus arrived at the University of Chicago already in a world of thought so different from the one you or I understand, it would be difficult to relate, even if I fully remembered everything. I know that the acting chairman admitted him during the Chairman’s absence on the basis of his teaching experience and apparent ability to converse intelligently. What he actually said is lost. Afterward he waited for a number of weeks for the Chairman to return in hopes of obtaining a scholarship, but when the Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of one question and no answer.

The Chairman said, “What is your substantive field?”

Phædrus said, “English composition.”

The Chairman bellowed, “That is a methodological field!” And for all practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some inconsequential conversation Phædrus stumbled, hesitated and excused himself, then went back to the mountains. This was the characteristic of his that had failed him out of the University before. He had gotten stuck on a question and hadn’t been able to think about anything else, while the classes moved on without him. This time, however, he had all summer to think about why his field should be substantive or methodological, and all that summer that is what he did.

In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about Quality and substantive and methodological fields.

Substance doesn’t change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader.

But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them. Quality isn’t a substance. Neither is it a method. It’s outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.

“Substance” and “substantive” really corresponded to “object” and “objectivity”, which he’d rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and method, just as when everything’s divided up into subject and object, there’s really no room for Quality at all. His thesis not be a part of a substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all. But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered.

He decided to examine more closely the background of the committee and did some library digging for this purpose. He felt this committee was off into some entirely alien pattern of thought. He didn’t see where this pattern and the large pattern of his own thought joined together.

He was especially disturbed by the quality of the explanations of the committee’s purpose. They seemed extremely confusing. The entire description of the committee’s work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained. This wasn’t the bells ringing he’d heard before.

He studied everything he could find that the Chairman had written and here again was found the strange pattern of language seen in the confusing description of the committee. It was a puzzling style because it was completely different from what he’d seen of the Chairman himself. The Chairman, in a brief interview, had impressed him with great quickness of mind, and an equally swift temper. And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phædrus had ever read. Here were encyclopedic sentences that left subject and predicate completely out of shouting distance. Parenthetic elements were unexplainably inserted inside other parenthetic elements, equally unexplainably inserted into sentences whose relevance to the preceding sentences in the reader’s mind was dead and buried and decayed long before the arrival of the period.

But most remarkable of all were the wondrous and unexplained proliferations of abstract categories that seemed freighted with special meanings that never got stated and whose content could only be guessed at; these piled one after another so fast and so close that Phædrus knew he had no possible way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.

At first Phædrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this was over his head. The articles assumed a certain basic learning which he didn’t have. Then, however, he noticed that some of the articles were written for audiences that couldn’t possibly have this background, and this hypothesis was weakened.

His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a “technician”, a phrase he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he’d lost the ability to communicate with people outside. But if this were so, why was the committee given such a general, nontechnical title as “Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods”? And the Chairman didn’t have the personality of a technician. So that hypothesis was weak too.

In time, Phædrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the Chairman’s rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about. This, it turned out, was the correct approach. He began to see what his trouble was.

The Chairman’s statements were guarded… guarded by enormous, labyrinthine fortifications that went on and on with such complexity and massiveness it was almost impossible to discover what in the world it was inside them he was guarding. The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just ended. Everyone is quiet. No one is talking.