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.
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.
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"...
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.
He wrote criticisms of just about every major western belief system - if you take into account his larger body of work, saying he was anti-this or anti-that just seems disingenuous. Much of what he wrote was criticism for its own sake because that's what leads to progress.
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.
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.
I wasn't trying to reduce his criticisms to adolescent jabs - I have great respect for his analysis. But he occasionally gets a little carried away and takes an unnecessary pot shot. They're symptomatic of his sort of unique brand of narcissism and, were he any less of an intellectual force, probably would have been edited out of the final versions.
I don't think you're reading the book very well, to be honest. I'm a bit of a Nietzsche fan and I think you'll find that he praises the Jews in various parts of the book.
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.
People tend to extract and reference what stuck with them most about a particular work unless they're a scholar in the material.
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 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.
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.
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.
1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history.
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 manipulated a lot of [gullible] people"
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.
"1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization."
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.
No no no no. It didn't occur to me that my words might be interpreted this way:
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.
I think there's quite a distinction to be made between the people who did their best to survive under the East German system and the people who actively participated in establishing and maintaining that system.
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.
You could summarize that whole discussion with one word warning. 1984 is a warning as to what can happen. And a succesful one, as a lot of people are afraid of the extreme dystopia it shows. The analogies tot diseases and vaccination are interesting, but appear to just confuse people.
I'm curious why you chose to put Twain and Vonnegut in there. My take on their writings is that they were amazing storytellers. Twain used simple language and local color to produce wonderful imagery with an expertise that few achieved before him. He whisks us away and drops us into a place in history that we otherwise never could have experienced.
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 think Ayn Rand is writing to an audience who already fundamentally agrees with her ideas. A lot of her writing strikes me as clarification of her philosophy, rather than a justification of it.
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.
Pirsig and Rand both embed their philosophy within fiction, thus leaving you befuddled and oddly unsatisfied: "Did I just read a philosophical treatise or fiction?"
Does it matter? Isn't the point to read these ideas and to as with all good ideas they get told in many forms. As with art movements, perspective shifts and whole genres of the arts move in unison, from performing arts to fine art. Unless as is the case with some ideas, the medium is the message, then the format used, be it a nice comfortable paperback or a think hardcover text is of no importance.
Does it matter? Hmm. That's a good point -- it may not.
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 think it's okay to smack the reader in the face with all sorts of knowledge provided you're sufficiently up-front about it, make sure there's more to the book than that, and give the other side a fair voice. (MoR!Dumbledore, MoR!Quirrell, the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu from Three Worlds Collide...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
It 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.
Here 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Lila: 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.
I 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.
The 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.
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.
This 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.
ZAMM 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?
I 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.
I'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.
I 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.
I'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.
There'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.
