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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- andrewce 16y agoThe schism between classicism and romanticism, as presented in "Zen", changed the way I view the world. I've been slowly teaching myself to see both, and to switch between those views at will, though it's occasionally unsettling to do so.
- prospero 16y agoOut of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.
- chanakya 16y agoI had read some philosophy before reading ZAMM, but it didn't seem connected to my everyday life. It seemed to be about abstruse, academic arguments that had been going on for centuries about things which really didn't seem very important to my life. This book put philosophy at the right place in my life - or me in the right place to understand philosophy.
- andrewce 16y agoHad I not been a writing teacher when I read this book, I would not have appreciated it as much as I did. In particular, the "Itty-bitty rules for itty-bitty people" line (while he is at the U of Chicago) resonated with me. You're right in that not much was particularly revelatory, as all of the discussed elements are discussed in multiple other places, often with greater depth. But it's rare to see it all come together in a way that is almost immediately pragmatic and sensible.
- alexophile 16y agoIf you come from a solid grounding in (specifically Greek) philosophy, the concepts and questions Pirsig raises are familiar, but for me the way he addressed them seemed much less self-indulgent. Greek philosophers were public intellectuals and, for me at least, reading their texts was somewhat off-putting because of the level of... grandstanding for lack of a better word. ZAMM seems so much more honest. It's framed as a man attempting to pass on actionable wisdom to his son that will make him a better person. The questions are the same questions people have been asking for thousands of years: what is good? (and derivitives thereof) but Pirsig frames his answers with a very appealing humility. Having lived off of my writing for a spell, I struggled deeply with the problem of metaphysical quality and no amount of classical philosophy ever brought me the admittedly limited clarity I felt like a got out of ZAMM. YMMV, though.
- neutronicus 16y agoMMV, indeed. I found ZAMM irritatingly condescending.
- steveklabnik 16y ago> grandstanding for lack of a better word. This is really interesting to me. I've recently started reading more political philosophy, and a few weeks ago, dug into "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit (the one about hawks and lambs), all I could think was "this sounds like /b/" or "I bet he was just trolling for pageviews, given that he's writing this in 1887 Germany"...
- alexophile 16y agoI like that comparison, he is kind of the troll of philosophical history. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, though (esepecially in Geneaology) is that he takes on so many different voices to address different existing philosophies such that you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-semitic (In fact, IIRC he seemed to dig the old testament Jews' style) or anti-christianity. The difference between his adolescent jabs at Christianity, Judaism, the English, etc. and an ironic motivational poster is that he had a sort of overarching point to make. Among other things, he wanted to demonstrate that existing philosophy was essentially a really deep catalog of the personal biases of a bunch of well-spoken white dudes.
- alnayyir 16y ago>adolescent Pointing out the hypocrisy and self-consuming nature of the greater moral system underlying western religion is scarcely adolescent and even in his day that took a good deal of courage to speak out like that. He was provocative, but not for its own sake.
- cema 16y agoAdolescents are often courageous, but also sophomoric. I think the latter is what the poster referred to.
- tibbon 16y agoThere have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too. I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful. Oddly, I like philosophy and I ride motorcycles too. My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.
- neutronicus 16y ago> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel. Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games. I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category. An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.
- davidmathers 16y agoOrwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter. Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellectuals, to everyone. In the most clear, straightforward and plain way possible so that the greatest number of people could read and understand what you wrote. Now try to imagine a book better at that than Animal Farm.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoI think the more common reaction is the other way around. The book was revelatory when I read it (as a young teen), but when I returned to it years later, after studying philosophy, I was surprised by how shallow it really was. I think that books like this are life-changing if and only if they connect with you at the right time. Put another way, the number of life-changing books one reads tapers off quite quickly after, say, 30.
- wiredfool 16y agoI think that this book, like Atlas Shrugged, is one of those that can lead to a mental confirmation that what a teenager thinks is the whole truth and everyone else who doesn't understand is just plain wrong. Doesn't happen with every reader, but a higher than normal proportion read it and then turn into single topic lecturers for a while. Hopefully they grow out of it. (I hope I did).
- barce 16y agoThere's a difference between a work being a result of philosophical genius and a work producing in the reader a philosophical experience. As someone who studied philosophy, I felt that his proof for the existence of quality lacking. He appealed to a small sample, his class, in order to ground the existence of quality which is simply a hasty generalization. However, I did feel something of a philosophical experience when he raised the issue of classic vs. romantic. He took pains to give examples and I feel that we all have to figure out this problem.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoYes. It should be said that this is not a philosophical book. It is a book about a man struggling with his sanity and parenthood and he does that in terms of his philosophy. Because of this struggle, and because of the personal and warm way he does it, this book has a philosophical impact: it makes you think about philosophy and understand how philosophy affects people. But it's not a philosophical text by any means.
- snissn 16y agoVery wordy review of a very good book. My favorite take-aways from the book are that 'Good is a noun' and the concept that not all questions may actually be formed properly and thus may not deserve an answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Cultural_references http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Cultural_referenc...
- john2x 16y agoI failed at my first attempt to read this. I'll have to try again someday.
- juiceandjuice 16y agoI'm about halfway through, and it's taken 5 months to get there. Although I got through the first section in a week or so.
- klbarry 16y agoThis book did not appear to have value for me when I attempted to read it.
- neutronicus 16y agoI completely agree - I put it down in irritation after ~100 pages.
- kalak451 16y agoI had to read this as part of my Rhetoric class my freshman year of college. I hated just about every minute of it, very hard to absorb, more than a big long winded in places. It also didn't help that my TA for the class was convinced that the book was written about him (not really, but every other class was a discussion about how what was happening in the book was related to his life.) However, attempting to deal with, understand, classify, define "quality" is one of the few explicit activities I did for a college class that I spend any time reflecting on today.
- Gilpo 16y agoThe cornerstone of originality within this book is how Pirsig introduces his philosophy of Quality. Yet, if you read ZAMM carefully, he never defines this term. Overall, a frustrating and thought-provoking read.
- wiredfool 16y agoWell, that's sort of the point. psedo-qq/ Quality is that which is good, but if you try to put your finger on it, it sort of squishes out and you end up with empty platitudes and tautologies. / (my apologies, it's been 10 years since I've read it, and my copy isn't here) He goes into it in the class, teaching it but refusing to define it, and one level higher, does it with the book.
- praptak 16y agoThis is similar to the "quality without a name" as described by Christopher Alexander. Btw, his seminal book on patterns is totally worth reading - the GoF patterns seem bland and uninteresting in comparison.
- jvagner 16y agoi read this entire book outloud to my girlfriend in college. we loved it.
- pirsig_fan 16y agoIt never ceases to amaze me how often technical people in general and computer programmers in particular read this book and can't see the point, which is that your values can't be deduced by logic.
- unoti 16y agoHere are some thought provoking ideas for computer hackers that he discusses at some length: * Is it a good idea or bad idea to listen to music while working? Why? * Do machines have souls, and can they? * Why do machines frustrate me so much? What happens when I get frustrated? What role does frame-of-mind play in productivity, and how do you control it? A lot of the negative comments I see here are perhaps expecting too much from the book. It's not like God wrote it and provided all the answers to life. (And even if that did happen, probably a lot of people would hate it.) It's just a very interesting and thought provoking book. And with regard to the comparisons to Ayn Rand, it's nowhere near that level. The book is very short compared to what Ayn Rand writes. It's not preachy at all like her stuff. It's also far more practical. Ayn Rand writes about how civilization as a whole should live. This book is far more personal and contemplative, and not preachy at all. Ayn Rand might talk for 45 pages about how socialized medicine is a parasite on the productive people. Persig might talk for 3 pages about how if you keep working on the machine when you feel frustrated, you're just building your frustration into the machine and making it part of it. Totally different in scale and practicality.
- mista_x 16y agoHow about a computer hacker break into Cuban internet users with the news with what happened in Egypt.
- wisty 16y agoI saw the point was something like this: you can deduce all of some values by logic, and you can some of all vaules by logic, but you can't deduce all of all values by logic. It also had a nice, short, well written take on a lot of philosophy by a fairly smart guy who geeks tend to identify with.
- briandoll 16y agoLila: An Inquiry into Morals is Pirsig's second book which is described as the defining work of the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ). I loved ZAMM, but Lila is a much better book and even more though-provoking. I've read it 4 times through, and I still don't think I could write a complete review of it. So if you liked ZAMM, definitely pick up Lila.
- JoelMcCracken 16y agoInteresting, because I really did like ZAMM, but I've never heard of Lila. I'll check it out.
- wildster 16y agoI agree, I think I read Lila first then went back to ZAMM and was not that impressed by it. I then went and read Lila another 3 three times.
- tjic 16y agoI loved ZAMM, and have read it a few times (in college at age 20, then a decade later at age 30, and then once more in my mid-30s). I tried Lila once in college and found it muddled and self-congratulatory, and gave up on it after just a few chapters.
- davidmathers 16y agoThere's a great portrait of hacker vs non-hacker mentalities which I think is on pages 15 and 16. I just went to Google Books to see if I could pull a quote from it but those 2 pages are missing.
- tjic 16y agoAgreed; that's a choice bit. It was the first time I realized how sad and constrained the world-views of non-hacker types were. ...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!
- davidmathers 16y agoThat's it. The bit about the shim is what I was specifically thinking of.
- pavelludiq 16y agoI loved this book when i read it. I liked it mostly because it was able to explain to me what i already "knew" but couldn't explain. I now had the vocabulary and a road map to figure myself out. Its not so much that the ideas in the book were life changing, they were interesting to think about, but what i got out of it is that the book sparked a process in my mind to turn myself from a depressed cynical high-schooler, into a pragmatic adult, who enjoys his work, his studies, and his art, yet is not blinded by idealism or plagued by cynicism. I guess its a lot about timing, had i read it at any other point in my life, i might have not liked it.
- crcarlson 16y agoI recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality. When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice to get out of slumps: usually) actively recharge with rest/sleep, when under the gun) coffee.
- chwahoo 16y agoZAMM and the follow-on Lila are both worthwhile reads. However, I was uncomfortable with Persig's (pervasive) discussion of insanity. He defines insanity as, roughly, holding beliefs that differ widely from those held by an overwhelming majority of society. There seems to be an explicit avoidance of physical causes for mental illness to the point of rejecting the idea that mental illness is an "illness" to be treated. His "insanity" is a natural result of pursuing complex paths of thought to their logical end (beyond where most people take them). Can anyone shed light about the current (medical) take on mental illness and whether it jives with what Persig has to say?
- TWAndrews 16y agoI don't think his account ever claimed to be a factual, science-based analysis of mental illness, but rather a subjective account from someone who is/was mentally ill.
- chwahoo 16y agoI'm not sure what you mean by that. A major theme in the books is reconciling science with subjective experience, but he doesn't advocate doing so by ignoring factual things. I would have a hard time believing that he intentionally treated mental illness that way.
- slvrspoon 16y ago1.5 cents: - fine book placing some of the key ideas of greek philosophy in a context where they could resonate with baby boomers / others (now hackers). "first contact" with such ideas by most thoughtful people is exciting, hence a lot of the feedback. - those well read in philosophy tend to find it problematic, thin, etc. they also tend to dislike the practical application of the ideas suggested by RP. - lastly, Pirsig certainly did not break any new ground in philosophy but comparisons to the crazed rambling of Ayn Rand are unfair.
- mitko 16y agoI've read the book twice once at age of 17-ish and once at 22. I got very different things from it each time. I don't think that I learned some specific knowledge or skill from the book. Rather it provoked me to look differently on many things that surround me. What I found works best for me is to read few pages, select the most important thesis he is making (because he states a lot of things all over) and to write a short essay on the topic. However, at some point I got lazier, and the book became more narrative, so I switched to reading the book.
- bdigital 16y agoI believe douglass adams once referenced this as "zen and the art of going to the lavatory"
- antihero 16y agoWell I've ordered it.
- Herald_MJ 16y agoI like the big "works best on kindle" advert on the right, despite the fact that ZAMM isn't available in Kindle (or any ebook) format.