Written by Robert Pirsig.
I read this a month or two ago - one of the best books I've read. As someone rather obsessed with rationality I found it thoroughly thought provoking - a better understanding of that which is pre-rational, driving. Is that a contradictory concept?
Throughout the book Pirsig intertwines a description of a motorbike trip with a philosophy. It may well be flawed, others may well have come up with similar / more advanced ideas much earlier, (Heidegger is mentioned) but I found brilliantly accessible. If any here have read it and have thoughts on it I'd love to hear them, as well as suggestions for further reading in this vein. I'll quote some parts of a larger summary, found at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~consigny/pirsig.html
The full book can be read at http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/index.html
Albeit a simplification of "rationality," maintaining a motorcycle, Pirsig shows, involves a wide variety of cognitive activities. One must be able to discover and formulate possible reasons for malfunctions, conceptualize the parts and their role in the system, and remember the stages of disassembly and reassembly. One must attend to detail, speculate wisely, and make sound judgments. But these cognitive activities can only be carried out, Pirsig insists, if we have the proper emotional attitude, the "attitude of caring." If we do not care about what we are doing, we will fail to be attentive to our task, unable to become engaged in it. Caring, he states, is "a feeling of identification with what one's doing" (Pirsig 290). A passionate caring is central to understanding and maintaining a motorcycle, because 'cycle maintenance occurs within an emotional context. The emotions are our ways of being attuned to the world and our tasks, the states in which inquiry and judgment occur. "The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness," he asserts, "are part of nature's order too. The central part" (Pirsig 287).
Our cognition, then, is grounded in and logically dependent on our emotional states. In Richard M. Weaver's terms, "sentiment is anterior to reason. We do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest . . . the fact of paramount importance about anyone is his attitude toward the world" (Weaver 19). Pirsig here also follows Heidegger, for whom "The possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach. far short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to [emotional] moods" (Heidegger 173). Further, though we may transform one emotional state or mood into another, we can never totally escape our emotions into a neutral "objectivity." In Heidegger's phrase, "when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter mood. We are never free of moods" (Heidegger 175).[3] Our understanding ceases, then, not when we lack technical data, but when, through impatience, boredom, or anxiety, we lose our enthusiasm or gumption, and no longer care about what we are doing. Enthusiasm, notes Pirsig, derives from the Greek enthousiasmos, "which means literally 'filled with theos, or God, or Quality'" (296). Enthusiasm, or gumption, allows us to become engaged in the world through our tasks, and thereby to better understand the world.
The specific terms Pirsig focuses on are those of "subjectivity" and "objectivity." Our culturally ingrained commonplace is that subjects are contrary to objects; that as feeling beings we are necessarily separated from the world of objective things; that, in Lawrence Rosenfield's phrase, "external and internal reality" are distinct" (Rosenfield 69). Our feelings are seen as private and inward, ultimately incommunicable, and effectively distortions of objective perception. This separation lies at the basis of the dualism of our "two cultures," and of our "dissociation of sensibility." All feeling is taken as irrelevant to understanding the world, and only technological, analytic reason is applicable to controlling the environment. Hence reason is narrowed to logical consistency, and technology, the product of that reason, is depleted of all human values. Technological ugliness is thus not the source of personal fragmentation and alienation; it is correlative with it.
The similarities and contrasts between Pirsig's project and those of Booth, Perelman and others would demand lengthier examination than I can provide here. But Pirsig's argument, and his place in the rhetorical tradition, may be located directly by elaborating his dispute with Plato. As Crusius notes, "while Booth and others like him trace our problems to Cartesian logic, Pirsig digs deeper and wider, going back to the sophists and to Plato, and to the subject-object split profoundly embedded in the Western mind" Crusius 170). For having discovered that "analytical, dialectical" reason is inadequate, Pirsig finds that his primary opponent is Socrates. As Richard M. Weaver demonstrates, Socrates was the first major opponent of rhetoric, offering dialectic or abstract reasoning about propositions as "sufficient for all the needs of man" (Weaver 62). Just as Nietzsche earlier found that it was Socrates, "the great exemplar" of theoretical man, the "mystagogue of science, who killed Greek tragedy, Pirsig now finds with Weaver that it was Socrates who undermined the earlier rhetorical emphasis on Quality (Nietzsche 92-93).
I read this a month or two ago - one of the best books I've read. As someone rather obsessed with rationality I found it thoroughly thought provoking - a better understanding of that which is pre-rational, driving. Is that a contradictory concept?
Throughout the book Pirsig intertwines a description of a motorbike trip with a philosophy. It may well be flawed, others may well have come up with similar / more advanced ideas much earlier, (Heidegger is mentioned) but I found brilliantly accessible. If any here have read it and have thoughts on it I'd love to hear them, as well as suggestions for further reading in this vein. I'll quote some parts of a larger summary, found at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~consigny/pirsig.html
The full book can be read at http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/index.html
Albeit a simplification of "rationality," maintaining a motorcycle, Pirsig shows, involves a wide variety of cognitive activities. One must be able to discover and formulate possible reasons for malfunctions, conceptualize the parts and their role in the system, and remember the stages of disassembly and reassembly. One must attend to detail, speculate wisely, and make sound judgments. But these cognitive activities can only be carried out, Pirsig insists, if we have the proper emotional attitude, the "attitude of caring." If we do not care about what we are doing, we will fail to be attentive to our task, unable to become engaged in it. Caring, he states, is "a feeling of identification with what one's doing" (Pirsig 290). A passionate caring is central to understanding and maintaining a motorcycle, because 'cycle maintenance occurs within an emotional context. The emotions are our ways of being attuned to the world and our tasks, the states in which inquiry and judgment occur. "The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness," he asserts, "are part of nature's order too. The central part" (Pirsig 287).
Our cognition, then, is grounded in and logically dependent on our emotional states. In Richard M. Weaver's terms, "sentiment is anterior to reason. We do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest . . . the fact of paramount importance about anyone is his attitude toward the world" (Weaver 19). Pirsig here also follows Heidegger, for whom "The possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach. far short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to [emotional] moods" (Heidegger 173). Further, though we may transform one emotional state or mood into another, we can never totally escape our emotions into a neutral "objectivity." In Heidegger's phrase, "when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter mood. We are never free of moods" (Heidegger 175).[3] Our understanding ceases, then, not when we lack technical data, but when, through impatience, boredom, or anxiety, we lose our enthusiasm or gumption, and no longer care about what we are doing. Enthusiasm, notes Pirsig, derives from the Greek enthousiasmos, "which means literally 'filled with theos, or God, or Quality'" (296). Enthusiasm, or gumption, allows us to become engaged in the world through our tasks, and thereby to better understand the world.
The specific terms Pirsig focuses on are those of "subjectivity" and "objectivity." Our culturally ingrained commonplace is that subjects are contrary to objects; that as feeling beings we are necessarily separated from the world of objective things; that, in Lawrence Rosenfield's phrase, "external and internal reality" are distinct" (Rosenfield 69). Our feelings are seen as private and inward, ultimately incommunicable, and effectively distortions of objective perception. This separation lies at the basis of the dualism of our "two cultures," and of our "dissociation of sensibility." All feeling is taken as irrelevant to understanding the world, and only technological, analytic reason is applicable to controlling the environment. Hence reason is narrowed to logical consistency, and technology, the product of that reason, is depleted of all human values. Technological ugliness is thus not the source of personal fragmentation and alienation; it is correlative with it.
The similarities and contrasts between Pirsig's project and those of Booth, Perelman and others would demand lengthier examination than I can provide here. But Pirsig's argument, and his place in the rhetorical tradition, may be located directly by elaborating his dispute with Plato. As Crusius notes, "while Booth and others like him trace our problems to Cartesian logic, Pirsig digs deeper and wider, going back to the sophists and to Plato, and to the subject-object split profoundly embedded in the Western mind" Crusius 170). For having discovered that "analytical, dialectical" reason is inadequate, Pirsig finds that his primary opponent is Socrates. As Richard M. Weaver demonstrates, Socrates was the first major opponent of rhetoric, offering dialectic or abstract reasoning about propositions as "sufficient for all the needs of man" (Weaver 62). Just as Nietzsche earlier found that it was Socrates, "the great exemplar" of theoretical man, the "mystagogue of science, who killed Greek tragedy, Pirsig now finds with Weaver that it was Socrates who undermined the earlier rhetorical emphasis on Quality (Nietzsche 92-93).
