Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I have one tiny fragment of Phædrus standing in the stone corridor of a building, evidently within the University of Chicago, addressing the assistant chairman of the committee, like a detective at the end of a movie, saying: “In your description of the committee, you have omitted one important name.”

“Yes?” says the assistant chairman.

“Yes”, says Phædrus omnisciently, “ — Aristotle — ”

The assistant chairman is shocked for a moment, then, almost like a culprit who has been discovered but feels no guilt, laughs loud and long.

“Oh, I see”, he says. “You didn’t know — anything about. — ” Then he thinks better of what he is going to say and decides not to say anything more.

We arrive at the turnoff to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the National Park… clean, tidy and preserved. It really shouldn’t be any other way, but this doesn’t win any prizes for Quality either. It turns it into a museum. This is how it was before the white man came… beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere… but now that the white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.

At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, “Don’t go too close!” and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of “Well, there it is”, just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

“Why did we come here?” Chris says.

“To see the lake.”

He doesn’t like this. He senses falseness and frowns deep, trying to find the right question to expose it. “I just hate this”, he says.

A tourist lady looks at him with surprise, then resentment.

“Well, what can we do, Chris?” I ask. “We just have to keep going until we find out what’s wrong or find out why we don’t know what’s wrong. Do you see that?”

He doesn’t answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he’s crying a little and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.

We wind down out of the park to the south.

I said the assistant chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was shocked. What he was so shocked about was that Phædrus didn’t know he was at the locus of what is probably the most famous academic controversy of the century, what a California university president described as the last attempt in history to change the course of an entire university.

Phædrus’ reading turned up a brief history of that famous revolt against empirical education that had taken place in the early thirties. The Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was a vestige of that attempt. The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phædrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist and medievalist.

Adler’s study of evidence, cross-fertilized by a reading of classics of the Western world, resulted in a conviction that human wisdom had advanced relatively little in recent times. He consistently harked back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who had taken Plato and Aristotle and made them part of his medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. The work of Aquinas and of the Greeks, as interpreted by Aquinas, was to Adler the capstone of the Western intellectual heritage. Therefore they provided a measuring rod for anyone seeking the good books.

In the Aristotelian tradition as interpreted by the medieval scholastics, man is counted a rational animal, capable of seeking and defining the good life and achieving it. When this “first principle” about the nature of man was accepted by the president of the University of Chicago, it was inevitable that it would have educational repercussions. The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the “College”, in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.

Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a “good” education. Science is “value free.” The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values.

Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the “oughts” of life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same direction as Phædrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped there.

There was a clash.

Even those who were willing to admit Hutchins’ preoccupation with Quality were unwilling to grant the final authority to the Aristotelian tradition to define values. They insisted that no values can be fixed, and that a valid modern philosophy need not reckon with ideas as they are expressed in the books of ancient and medieval times. The whole business seemed to many of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.

Phædrus didn’t know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn’t feel this tradition should be left unreckoned with. The answer to all this was somehow deeply enmeshed in it and he wanted to know more.

Of the four who had created such a furor, the present chairman of the committee was the only one now left. Perhaps because of this reduction in rank, perhaps for other reasons, his reputation among persons Phædrus talked to wasn’t one of geniality. His geniality was confirmed by none and sharply refuted by two, one the head of a major University department who described him as a “holy terror” and another who held a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago who said the chairman was well known for graduating only carbon copies of himself. Neither of these advisers was by nature vindictive and Phædrus felt what they said was true. This was further confirmed by a discovery made at the department office. He wanted to talk to two graduates of the committee to find out more of what it was about, and had been told that the committee had granted only two Ph.D.’s in its history. Apparently to find room in the sun for a reality of Quality he would have to fight and overcome the head of his own committee, whose Aristotelian outlook made it impossible even to get started and whose temperament appeared to be extremely intolerant of opposing ideas. It all added up to a very gloomy picture.

He then sat down and penned, to the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago, a letter which can only be described as a provocation to dismissal, in which the writer refuses to skulk quietly out the back door but instead creates a scene of such proportions the opposition is forced to throw him out the front door, thus giving weight to the provocation it didn’t formerly have. Afterward he picks himself up out of the street and, after making sure the door is completely closed, shakes his fist at it, dusts himself off and says, “Oh well, I tried”, and in this way absolves his conscience.