Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
hn-books.com
hn-books.com
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.
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"...
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.
He wrote a book called The Anti-Christian. What else can you say?
He wanted his critiques to hit hard; he wanted to be subversive. My reading, at least, is that he wanted to teach people to be critical of highly-regarded cultural norms and morals and his writings are essentially case-studies in exactly that.
He even said a few good things about Christ but anything positive was along the lines that the Christians got him wrong.
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.
Besides that, the man just isn't given enough credit these days.
If you think Nietzsche is anti-Jewish, you're not understanding him.
He thought of the Jews as having a different position to his but also admired them far more than Christians.
He was also a hater of antisemites.
He despised anti-semitism as well as the formative groups that led to national socialism.
To focus on one example he made like that is very bad form.
His commentary on the brutality of societies relatively to how secure they feel was particularly brilliant. Applicable today especially when you contrast European democratic socialism and their criminal justice systems versus the US and other parts of the world.
And yet all you can extract out of his writing is that you believe he was some kind of provocateur?
This makes me genuinely sad. I'd expect a deeper and more thorough reading of my favorite author and philosopher out of HN.
I hope you'll review Genealogy or consider reading Beyond Good & Evil.
Secondly, I didn't say that it was "all [I] can extract out of his writing," either.
Perhaps "my impression was..." would "sound" preliminary. This doesn't.
The accusations of anti-semitism against Nietzsche are rampant and my attempts to play whack-a-mole with them really have nothing to do with your inability to couch your statements.
If you don't want that kind of response in future, clarify yourself. I have enough work to do that I shouldn't have to keep adding a N.B. to half-baked readings of core western philosophy.
I found ZAMM irritatingly condescending.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.
-- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html
1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".
Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.
EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people".
And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance.
EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.
1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization.
Like Jonas Salk and polio.
Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist.
In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds.
Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.
You're still just coming up with synonyms for "got them to do what I want."
I'll thought experiment you back. If 1984 were largely ignored, would you still think it worth reading? You claim that this book influenced the behavior of a world ripe for totalitarian domination. That's a big claim in and of itself, but let's let it stand for the sake of the point I really want to make.
Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect on a bunch of people you don't respect (you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"). Even you are treating it basically as a remedial text for political idiots. You don't even mention anything you got out of reading 1984.
So, if it weren't effective at convincing people you don't respect of your viewpoint, would you care at all? Would this book be worth reading if you were the only person ever to read it?
That last is my measure of quality, and 1984 falls short - sure, it's an important cultural phenomenon, but I could have reaped the benefits of the cultural phenomenon without ever reading the book.
people you don't respect -- you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease" -- remedial text for political idiots
I respect (former) East Germans. I don't think they're idiots or have weak minds, or need remedial texts or any kind of higher education or higher intelligence. I don't think they're any different from West Germans. Same with North Koreans and South Koreans. There's no such thing as a mind which is naturally insusceptible to bad ideology. We all need inoculation.
Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect
Yes. Orwell fought with a gun in Spain as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. He was fighting with a pen when he wrote 1984. He was more successful with the pen.
would you still think it worth reading?
Dunno. I never claimed it worth reading. But it's short, to the point, and concisely illustrates some important ideas. It might be worth reading just to add "memory hole" to your vocabulary. On other hand maybe Milan Kundera is a more entertaining choice. I love this Kundera quote: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Whether any given book is worth reading seems very personal to me. I don't have much of an opinion about it. I, personally, didn't love the book. But I did love the movie.
Consider 1984 as being targeted at those who would otherwise be influenced by equally-simplistic totalitarian ideologies, and who might otherwise be led to collaborate with the equivalent the Stasi in the belief that they were doing good.
There was - and is - an unfortunately large population of such people, and I can't find much fault in Orwell's intention to shrink its ranks.
Vonnegut lets us in on the insane parts of his mind. He tells interesting stories and frames them in a way that I, personally, never would. Even if I had some of his crazy ideas, I wouldn't think about them at all like he does. I've never seen another author break down the fourth wall the way Vonnegut did; after reading a few of his books, I felt like I understood a lot about the way he thought. (Another author who did this was Douglas Adams, whose output was markedly less than Vonnegut's, and Adams wasn't quite as "out there" as Vonnegut.)
In other words, I've never really heard of reading Twain and Vonnegut for their ideas or philosophies. While I would argue that their beliefs were rather anomalous for their times, I wouldn't consider their philosophies to be the main virtues of their writings.
I didn't get that same sense from Pirsig, but while the ideas he presented were interesting, I didn't feel I was getting a novel perspective on them.
But ZAMM and Atlas Shrugged certainly felt to me a bit dishonest in that these works are primarily delivery devices for the authors' philosophical ideas. Other authors inject philosophy and ethics into their "straight" fiction, such as the philosophical rant-free work of Tolkien (LOTR = a treatise against fascism) and Stephen King (The Stand = a treatise against organized religion), but their philosophies never smack you in the face. [edit: grammar]
I suspect that what goes wrong is not writing a philosophical treatise in the form of fiction - what goes wrong is that the One True Philosophy is treated as a Mary Sue within the context of the fiction.
This book put philosophy at the right place in my life - or me in the right place to understand philosophy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_referenc...
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.
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.
I tried Lila once in college and found it muddled and self-congratulatory, and gave up on it after just a few chapters.
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.
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?
I guess its a lot about timing, had i read it at any other point in my life, i might have not liked it.
...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!