7 ms·

Out 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 ma

Out 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 ago
I 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 ago
Had 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 ago
If 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 ago
  MMV, 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 ago
    I 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 ago
        Adolescents are often courageous, but also sophomoric. I think the latter is what the poster referred to.
tibbon 16y ago
There 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 ago
    Orwell 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
There'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 ago
  Yes. 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.

Out 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 ago

I 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 ago

Had 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 ago

If 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 ago
MMV, 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      Adolescents are often courageous, but also sophomoric. I think the latter is what the poster referred to.

tibbon 16y ago

There 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 ago
  Orwell 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago

There'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 ago
Yes. 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.