Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 1
    
    20/2/09
    
    Absolute goodness, rhetoric and rationality: a discussion of Robert Pirsig's novel Zen and the art of
    
    motorcycle maintenance and Plato's Phaedrus.
    Catherine Osborne, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom. Abstract: The paper examines the explicit and implicit connections between Robert Pirsig's popular philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the dialogue of Plato from which Pirsig borrowed the name for his novel's hero. Pirsig was attempting to challenge the dominant approach in Western Philosophy by appeal to an alternative outlook in which absolute goodness (or 'quality') is left undefined but is granted its proper place, the supreme place, in the
    
    metaphysics of the world and in the values of the philosopher. Pirsig associated this outlook with Plato's opponents, the sophists and rhetoricians of ancient Greece. I argue that Plato's Socrates, and not his opponents, speaks out for the very same values that Pirsig wished to defend; and that he does so particularly clearly in the dialogue named after Phaedrus. Hence Pirsig was misguided in his attack on Plato, though the moral that he wished to illustrate is a worthy one that has found other, more famous, champions.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 2
    
    20/2/09
    
    Absolute goodness, rhetoric and rationality: a discussion of Robert Pirsig's novel Zen and the art of
    
    motorcycle maintenance and Plato's Phaedrus.
    Catherine Osborne, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom.
    
    Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values.1 This book which came out to much acclaim in 1974 and reached a kind of cult status is now more than 25 years old, and still in print. In 1999 it came out in a new 25th anniversary edition with a new introduction and a reader's guide. Twenty five years of surviving in print makes it begin to look like a classic. But there are those who have never read it, and some who clearly don't much want to read it. There are two possible reasons why one might be
    
    frightened of reading the novel. One is the temptation to judge a book by its title. Since, in this case, the book is neither about Zen Buddhism nor about motorcycle maintenance dismissing it on the grounds that one is not interested in either topic is not well-advised.2 A better reason for suspicion is the reputation that it has for unsettling the predominant values with which we normally live comfortably. This aspect is hinted at, but rather understated, in the book's subtitle 'an inquiry into values'. It seems clear that the author deliberately
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 3
    
    20/2/09
    
    intends to unsettle his readers, particularly his philosophical readers, and hence knowing what sort of thing is inside the book might still make someone hesitate, if they are reluctant to have their values questioned, just as much as not knowing what is inside it. Provoking the reader to rethink his or her preconceptions about values, and about the role of philosophy in establishing those values, is a task that Pirsig's novel shares with most of Plato's dialogues. In this paper, I shall be exploring the connections between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and one in particular of Plato's dialogues, namely the Phaedrus. Of course, one very general connection is that Zen, like Plato's Phaedrus, challenges us to think again. But it would be premature to stop there, and in any case I hope to show that the situation is much more complicated: for the novel actually fails to do what it sets out to do, because the author (or the main character in Zen) misrepresents the structure of Platonic ethical thinking, and indeed
    
    misunderstands the relation between reason and the search for truth in Platonic thought. In the novel Pirsig invents a character called Phaedrus whose enthusiasm for rhetoric, as an alternative to the dry rationality that is privileged in the Western philosophical tradition, is the main theme of the story. Pirsig (or rather the novel's hero, Phaedrus) traces Western Philosophy's
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 4
    
    20/2/09
    
    depressing emphasis on rationality to the malign influence of Plato—Plato who attacks the Sophists, and all the other representatives of the rival tradition which would have favoured something more impressionistic and visionary.
    
    Among these enlightened but suppressed victims of Plato's hostility, Pirsig places the character called Phaedrus in the dialogue of that name. In all this, however, Pirsig has got the story exactly the wrong way round, as I shall go on to show. In fact it is Plato, and Plato's Socrates, who is the enthusiast for madness, for love, for the attraction of absolute goodness as an object of desire. In the Phaedrus in particular it is Socrates, not Phaedrus, who speaks on behalf of love as the motivation that leads us to goodness, beauty and truth, and who delivers a powerful description of the effect that the vision of beauty can have on the philosophical lover. By contrast it is the pedantic rationalist Phaedrus who offers a model of philosophy done without passion and without love, pursued by cold, calculated, reasoning that does not discern the beauty of goodness but only the force of argument. Phaedrus's value system, as represented by Plato, leaves one with the shivers. It is cunningly captured in the disturbing image of a pederast seducing a boy for sex without love, by convincing him that it is better to make rational
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 5
    
    20/2/09
    
    choices, rather than to be driven by emotion. But, thank God, that is not Plato's verdict. But let us return to our initial question: besides its general attempt to reflect on values and on the implicit logocentrism of western philosophy, what other ties does Pirsig's novel have to Plato's Phaedrus? Let us investigate a range of more detailed and explicit connections between them.
    
    The name of the character.
    The first point is obvious, in that the name of the hero of Pirsig's novel is, as we have already observed, 'Phaedrus'. The choice of name indicates an explicit and deliberate connection with the Platonic dialogue. But to say the 'hero' of the novel here means something slightly strange, because this hero is not the main character. 'Phaedrus' is the name that the main character gives to his former self, the self whom he is seeking to rediscover throughout the book. That former self, whom he calls 'Phaedrus', has been suppressed beneath a façade of conformity with the expectations of society. This lost self finally emerges in the very last pages of the book and speaks in his own right, but for most of the book he is, as it were, behind a glass screen, struggling to get out but suppressed all the time by the value judgements of the main character, who has beaten him into submission over many years. Thus most of the book presents the ambivalent relation that the main character, who is also the narrator, has towards this former
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 6
    
    20/2/09
    
    self. Indeed we, the reader, learn to feel warm towards the character Phaedrus and to despise the narrator, despite seeing everything through the eyes of the narrator. Phaedrus, the lost self, had been an obsessive enthusiast for philosophy, so obsessive that he had become (or been declared) insane. The present character of the narrator is, by contrast, the face of sane and reasonable North American values, rationality as we know it now. After a spell in a mental hospital, this rational self has managed to suppress the inner enthusiast; yet he lives in fear of the inner enthusiast breaking out and sending him mad again, and also in thrall to the fascination of trying to rediscover what it felt like to be that person, moved by whatever it was that had once moved him—his former self— so profoundly and with such vital force. Pirsig has thus set up the two identities of his main character to parallel Plato the philosopher and his fictional character Phaedrus. Plato, on this model, comes out as the arch rationalist, trying to suppress the passionate and obsessive enthusiast Phaedrus. According to this story, Plato's dialogue was written as a representation of the virtues of rationality triumphing over the excesses of sophistic rhetoric. Plato's lasting success—so the story goes—in
    
    suppressing the attractions of the rhetorical values was such that it set in train the whole depressing history of Western
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 7
    
    20/2/09
    
    philosophy thereafter. And philosophy has never succeeded in escaping from the tyranny of this sanitized 'rationality'.
    
    The journey motif
    Besides the name of the character, we can see a clear thematic connection between the setting of the Phaedrus and the setting of Pirsig's novel. Both include a journey. Of course, in one sense they are a million miles apart. In the novel the narrator and his teenage son Chris travel across America from East coast to West coast on a motorcycle, stopping at various familiar or unfamiliar places on the way. In Plato's dialogue Socrates and his friend Phaedrus walk a little way outside the walls of Athens and then sit down under a tree to talk. Still we might imagine that the journey motif is significant. There is a tradition, which Pirsig clearly took for granted, that used to assume that Phaedrus in the dialogue is pictured as a young man,3 and Socrates as rather more mature. The novel reflects that assumption in setting the scene as a journey in which the more mature father and the young boy travel together.4 For part of the journey they are accompanied by another couple, man and wife, who find no counterpart in Plato's dialogue, but this need not lead us to deny that the construction of the novel is reminiscent of Plato's structure.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 8
    
    20/2/09
    
    The journey motif is a backdrop in the novel which comes into the foreground intermittently, while the main story line is contained in long passages of monologue. These monologues represent the narrator thinking through his past and
    
    attempting to reconstruct his former preoccupations, in a journey of self-discovery. As in the Phaedrus, monologue fills the gaps between occasional passages that return to the dramatic setting. Furthermore it seems that there are two simultaneous journeys going on in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: the physical journey from one side of the continent to the other coincides with the mental journey of rediscovery of the self. We might compare this with the two journeys in the Phaedrus, one the physical journey as Socrates and Phaedrus walk down the Ilissus valley, and the other the vividly portrayed struggle of the fallen soul to regain the place from which it originated and to see once again the form of beauty that it once saw— a journey that is described within the speech spoken by Socrates in the dialogue. In both cases, we find the rediscovery of the former self, and the reawakening of its enthusiasm for goodness and beauty, pictured as a kind of journey, and a journey to something that is alarming as well as fascinating. In both cases that journey is recounted within the monologue speeches in the dialogue. But note that the speeches in which it happens in Plato's dialogue are the speeches of Socrates—Socrates rediscovering the visionary capacities of his former self—not Phaedrus who
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 9
    
    20/2/09
    
    shows no sign of having much capacity for this kind of enthusiasm.
    
    Madness
    A third obvious thematic connection between the novel and the dialogue is the focus on madness. Yet the attitude to madness is ambivalent in Plato's dialogue, and it is not clear that Pirsig has done justice to that fact. Firstly, in the Phaedrus, madness initially enters the picture under the guise of an affliction characteristic of those who are in love. In the first of the speeches on the subject, the speech that Phaedrus has brought with him from Lysias's house, the young boy is advised to avoid the attentions of a lover, because of the lover's crazed obsession. So, we are persuaded, for reasons of self-interest a boy should avoid the company of someone who is besotted and associate instead with someone who is coolly detached. The rational choice is to associate with someone who neither cares for you nor feels any strong affection. This first speech is a joke, and yet the Phaedrus of the dialogue is impressed. The sentiments appeal to his
    
    admiration for abstract reasoning that makes no appeal to any values other than those of rationality. Phaedrus thus
    
    associates himself with detached reason, against obsession and emotion.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 10
    
    20/2/09
    
    Secondly, Socrates, responding to the challenge to compete on the same terms, temporarily adopts the same attitude, according to which madness and obsession are classified as detrimental afflictions and count against the lover's claim to be a good influence on others. That is the motif of Socrates's first speech which presents the same theme. But that persona is only temporary. Socrates immediately recants, and offers in its place, as a corrective, a visionary speech in favour of the virtues of madness and of the benefits of love. Here, by contrast, the obsession of the lover turns out to be the source of his attention to things of beauty and his appreciation of all that is fine and lovely. In fact, according to Socrates's revised speech, it seems that to be a true philosopher one must fall in love, and unless one has a hearty obsession with the Eternal Forms one can never actually get the knack of doing dialectic at all. Given the expressions of dismay and repentance uttered by Socrates over the offensiveness of his first speech,5 it seems clear that the second speech is the one that he is supposed to stand by, and hence that he genuinely endorses its positive assessment of the value of love and of madness in the form of an obsessive passion for beauty and truth. Yet this second speech is a whole-hearted rejection of the value system endorsed by Phaedrus, who, far from defending non-rational attachment to particulars or to other worldly forms, stood for cool rationality and calculation of worldly utility. If Western
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 11
    
    20/2/09
    
    philosophy has a rational utilitarian streak to it, and a fear of obsession with goodness, it is following the lead of Phaedrus, not the Plato who gives to Socrates such a compelling speech on behalf of the madness of the philosophic-lover. Like the Phaedrus, Pirsig's novel is also exploring this contrast between rationality and madness. The narrator, with his tedious interest in classification, seems to represent sanity as it is conceived by society, while the mysterious figure of mad Phaedrus, his former and now suppressed self, represents a kind of obsessive determination to question society's values. That was what had once made him a threat to everyone including himself. It was for that reason that he had been classified as insane and restored to "sense" by some unspecified kind of treatment in the psychiatric hospital. But as the novel proceeds we are brought to side more and more with the boy Chris, who searches for the father he used to know. In the process we come to realise that the supposed madness was actually a kind of vision, which the tedious narrator has been suppressing by forcing it into conformity with the false values of society. So here too, as in the Phaedrus, we find a shift from condemnation to affirmation of a kind of philosophical insanity. The shift in evaluation is the same as that effected in the Phaedrus. Yet it is not clear that the author has seen it as the same, for he appears to associate Plato with the suppression
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 12
    
    20/2/09
    
    of philosophic madness, with the logocentric outlook and with the narrator's values of sanity as social conformity.
    
    Rhetoric
    The speeches in the Phaedrus (particularly the first two) are uncharacteristic for Plato, being designed as rhetorical
    
    exercises on a set theme. The conversation gets going because Plato's character Phaedrus is keen on the work of Lysias the orator, and has been memorising a speech written by Lysias on the subject of whether a boy should agree to have sex with a disinterested male suitor. Rhetorical composition and set pieces start the dialogue off, and the subject of rhetoric returns to the fore in the last part of the dialogue. By contrast with other Platonic dialogues, this one seems unusually positive towards rhetoric as an art or a possible art, even though the example of the genre provided in Lysias' own speech is treated to some destructive criticism for faults of style. At any rate Socrates is, unusually for him, portrayed as entering into the spirit of rhetorical display and showing flair at the traditional task of arguing on both sides of a debating topic. To this extent the dialogue does indeed allow rhetoric a bit more credibility than it receives elsewhere. 6 Rhetoric also figures in Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because the mysterious figure called Phaedrus had been engaged in the task of teaching rhetoric in the English department at minor university institutions, both
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 13
    
    20/2/09
    
    before he signed up for graduate school and later while he was trying to fund himself for his PhD studies at Chicago. It was in connection with the task of teaching students to see the difference between good and less good written work that he had acquired his obsession with trying to discover and define what 'quality' was. This was what had started to tip him over into insanity, as the topic developed philosophical
    
    ramifications about the nature of value and whether it was objective or definable, ramifications that led him into deeper and deeper puzzles about the nature of objective reality and metaphysics. Questions about rhetoric thus lead him into questions of metaphysics and a search for the foundations of value. Nevertheless there is a running thread which recurs periodically throughout the novel, whereby Phaedrus and his commitment to rhetoric and the search for value is set up in opposition to the whole edifice of philosophy as established by Aristotle and continued in the Western tradition. The latter tradition is described as 'dialectic', Plato's term for analytic philosophy. Thus in his dispute with the professors at Chicago, the score is kept in the form "rhetoric 2, dialectic 0" where Phaedrus is the player for rhetoric and the philosophy professor is the player for dialectic.7 Pirsig thus sets up a contrast between rhetoric and dialectic, and in this respect the novel's questions, even if not
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 14
    
    20/2/09
    
    its answers, are closely linked to those explored in the Phaedrus. Pirsig's Phaedrus, like the Phaedrus of the
    
    Phaedrus, had been an enthusiast for rhetoric, and he conceives of rhetoric as the unfairly suppressed vision of true 'quality'. That vision, he finds, has been stamped out by the Western philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle onwards, in just the same way as the poor mad Phaedrus had been suppressed by the rational and dominating self that is the narrator. Thus the novel seems to contrast rhetoric and dialectic. It identifies rhetoric with vision, and dialectic with control, domination, and reason. Yet if we compare this with the positions advocated in the first three speeches in the Phaedrus, we shall find a mismatch. For rhetoric is the suppressor of vision and engagement in the Phaedrus, while madness is the prerequisite for philosophy. The pitch seems to be differently configured, and the players play to different strengths.
    
    Explicit references to the Phaedrus
    There are two passages where Plato's Phaedrus is cited and discussed in the novel. The first is slightly less than half way through. The narrator meets some of his former colleagues from the college in Montana where he first taught rhetoric. He tries to piece together some fragments of memory of his time
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 15
    
    20/2/09
    
    there, in his former identity as the person he calls 'Phaedrus'. He asks a former acquaintance called Robert De Weese: "Did I ever talk about an individual named Phaedrus?" "No" "Who was he?" Gennie asks. "He was an ancient Greek…a rhetorician…a 'composition major' of his time. He was one of those present when reason was being invented." "You never talked about that, I don't think." "That must have come later. The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they're unique in that they've stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told." page 172 As he observes, the occasion was actually later in his past life, after the period in Montana. Towards the end of the book the occasion to which he refers is reconstructed in fuller detail: In the Professor of Philosophy's absence, another Platonic dialogue had been assigned. Its title was Phaedrus… The Greek Phaedrus is not a Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue, which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic rhetoric.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 16
    
    20/2/09
    
    Phaedrus doesn't appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is merely a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato. p. 383 This relatively positive account of the content of the dialogue is, however, undercut by the character Phaedrus' further reactions to the dialogue after the first reading. The narrator continues thus: Our Phaedrus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the magnificent poetic imagery. But he's not tamed by it because he also smells in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterised as the destroyer of understanding, and Phaedrus wonders whether this is where the condemnation of the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably not… 383-4 We are left with the impression that the Phaedrus figures as the prime example of a phenomenon that is supposed to be universal among the Greek philosophers, namely the attempt to suppress the direct intuitive and emotive responses and to
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 17
    
    20/2/09
    
    place supreme value on what the book has identified as 'reason' or 'classic rationality' or logic. The hero of the book identifies a conflict between the urge to classify and
    
    rationalise, which he attributes to the Aristotelian tradition, and on the other side, rhetoric which he attributes to the sophists. And while the classic urge to rationalise and classify is, indeed, distinctly Aristotelian, the Phaedrus of Pirsig's book finds the origin of this attitude in Plato's dialogues, in Plato's hostility to rhetoric and to the Sophists. Everything goes wrong from there, he thinks, and a whole alternative way of looking at reality has been suppressed by western thought ever since. Plato, then, is the real culprit and the Phaedrus a prime example of Plato's unfair rejection of a whole outlook that he found incompatible with logic.
    
    Quality
    I shall be coming back to this antagonism towards the Phaedrus shortly, but first we need a brief diversion by way of the notion of 'quality'. This word, when used as a term of evaluation, comes with rather unfortunate overtones to those of us struggling beneath the oppression of methods of 'quality assurance' that seem designed to sacrifice good teaching in favour of vacuous documentation. Quality is not to us any longer synonymous with genuine excellence; but in the 1970s, in the USA, evidently, 'quality' was a word that had a meaning, and in Pirsig's novel it stands for the quality in virtue of which
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 18
    
    20/2/09
    
    something is good. Writing that has quality is writing that is good, and art that has quality is art that is good. In the novel, the character called Phaedrus gets a fixation with this notion of quality and it is to pursue an enquiry into 'quality', a term which he has decided he not only cannot but must not define, that he moves his family to Chicago so that he can embark on a PhD. Of course, quality is here serving simply as an abstract noun meaning 'goodness', and many other philosophers have sought to clarify the meaning of the term 'good' or indeed to deny that it can be defined. Pirsig partially acknowledges this fact by placing his character's investigations in relation to other converging trends in the whole history of philosophy, both Western and, to some extent, Eastern. But there is one relationship that is obscured by the choice of the bland term 'quality' for Phaedrus' obsession, and that is the relation with Plato, because if there is one person who put an indefinable abstract notion of 'goodness' as his first and supreme explanatory principle, that philosopher was Plato. Pirsig goes halfway there, in acknowledging at one point, that the Greek notion of arete has got something to do with the quality, and on one occasion he suggests that Plato's notion of the good is an attempt to fix and formalise the goodness encapsulated in the notion of arete.8 But instead of concluding that Plato's
    
    philosophy correctly places goodness as its starting point, he makes three devastating complaints.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 19
    
    20/2/09
    
    First he complains that the notion of goodness was stolen by Plato from the Sophists.9 Second, he complains that by making it a Form Plato makes it merely a form of reality and not reality itself, so that it loses thereby the fundamental role in reality that it should have.10 And thirdly he complains that Plato subordinates goodness to truth, and truth is here caricatured as the urge to systematise according to the logical structures typical of Western rationality.11 Plato, then, is
    
    identified as the villain who distorts the goodness seen by the sophists and twists it into conformity with structures that have prevented us from regaining it ever since.
    
    Conclusion
    I hope it is apparent by now that there's a very curious relationship between the novel we have been considering and Plato's dialogue named Phaedrus. Pirsig's character Phaedrus stands, in the novel, for a passionate devotion to goodness as the foundation and substance of reality, and a belief in the possibility of perceiving goodness by a kind of intuitive vision, rather than reducing it to rational definitions and
    
    classifications. He stands out against the Socrates of Plato's Phaedrus, who is taken to be the champion of cool rational destruction of any such passions. Yet if we look at the dialogue that Plato wrote, Phaedrus does not stand for the passionate intuitive grasp of absolute goodness: Socrates does. On the contrary, what Phaedrus
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 20
    
    20/2/09
    
    liked was the speech by Lysias which argued on grounds of pure expediency and rationality that, madness and passion being rather dangerous, one should avoid anyone who is in love or involved in passion at all. Here, from the school of
    
    rhetoric, was the argument that one should lay aside enthusiasm and pursue benefits by calculation, not by appreciation of beauty or goodness. By contrast it was Socrates who produced the third speech, the recantation, that shows instead that love is a fine kind of madness, and also that a vision of something (ie a Form) that is intuitively perceived, not defined, is the foundation and prerequisite without which rational philosophy can never get going. It was Socrates who described, in the richest poetic terms, the way in which the soul is passionately moved by this experience and by the recovery of such a vision. Thus in the dialogue that Plato wrote the roles are the exact reverse of those envisaged by the character Phaedrus in Pirsig's novel. Somehow the novel manages to argue for the very vision that Plato presented, while at the same time attacking Plato for destroying that vision and replacing it with arid reason. So what has Pirsig's novel got to do with Plato's Phaedrus? Apparently a very great deal if we observe that its ethical vision, its metaphysics and its metaphilosophy seem to be identical with those defended by Plato in the Phaedrus.12 But
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 21
    
    20/2/09
    
    at the same time, in developing that vision, it attributes to the author of the Phaedrus the negation of that vision. Still, we should perhaps beware of saying that Pirsig has just got Plato exactly wrong. For in neither work do we hear the voice of the author. In Pirsig's novel and in Plato's dialogue, both alike, the reader is faced with the ironic blank look of a fictional character. Plato never tells us what we ought to believe or which parts of his work are fiction. We are left to work it out for ourselves—which is, after all, the only way to do philosophy.13
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 22
    
    20/2/09
    
    Bibliography
    
    Camacho, Luis. "'Tendencias Actuales En Filosofia De La Tecnologia'." Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica (1990): 21-5. Griswold, Charles. Self Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Hackforth, R. Plato's Phaedrus Translated with an Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Nehamas, Alexander, and Paul Woodruff. "Introduction." In Plato Phaedrus. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Osborne, Catherine. ""No" Means "Yes": The Seduction of the Word in Plato's Phaedrus." Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 15 (1999): 263-81. Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values: The Bodley Head, 1974. Reprint, London, Vintage Books 1999. Ramirez, Edgar Roy. "'Tecnologia Y Calidad Segun Robert M. Pirsig'." Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica (1994): 51-9. Rowe, Christopher J. "'Introduction'." In Plato Phaedrus. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986.
    
    1
    
    Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
    
    An Inquiry into Values (The Bodley Head, 1974; reprint, London, Vintage Books 1999) References below are to the pagination of the 1999 edition (London, Vintage 1999).
    2
    
    It has been pointed out to me that the book is, in fact,
    
    about both, so this claim is overstated. It is true that
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 23
    
    20/2/09
    
    incidentally the book includes a certain amount of reflection on modern society's relation to machines, and that the recurrent and evocative motif of mending the motorcycle does satisfy the description 'motorcycle maintenance'. And it is true that of the three articles and one review on Pirsig's works that are listed in the Philosophers' Index, two are articles that discuss Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a contribution to the philosophy of technology (Luis Camacho, "'Tendencias Actuales En Filosofia De La Tecnologia'," Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica (1990); Edgar Roy Ramirez, "'Tecnologia Y Calidad Segun Robert M. Pirsig'," Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica (1994)). But still, to my mind, it is not 'a book about motorcycle maintenance', for all that (though my researches also suggest that male readers see the motorcycle, and the associated reflections on alienation from technology, as more prominent in the story and in the moral message than women readers do).
    3
    
    Cf. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An
    
    Inquiry into Values, 383, where Phaedrus is said to be a young man. Pirsig was writing in the seventies, but it appears that his view of Plato and of the Phaedrus in particular, was formed at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Cf. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values chapter
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 24
    
    20/2/09
    
    30 and the author's introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition (Vintage 1999) p. xi. The error about Phaedrus's age is encouraged by the play-acting in the dialogue (Phaedrus is often misread as volunteering to act the role of the boy for Socrates's speech at 243e) and by Diogenes Laertius 3.29 (who however is talking about Plato, not Socrates, having a boyfriend called Phaedrus). R Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus Translated with an Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge
    
    University Press, 1952), 13 note 3, had already observed that Phaedrus must have been twenty years older than Socrates, but the error persists (see for instance Charles Griswold, Self Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 31; Martha C Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 200. For accurate reflection on the relative ages and erotic relations of the characters see Christopher J. Rowe, "'Introduction'," in Plato Phaedrus (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986), 11; Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, "Introduction," in Plato Phaedrus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), xiv note 9; Catherine Osborne, ""No" Means "Yes": The Seduction of the Word in Plato's Phaedrus," Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 15 (1999): 265-6 and 81n.42.
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 25
    
    20/2/09
    
    4
    
    Pirsig pictures the mature father in a role analogous to
    
    the oppressive Plato (or Plato's Socrates in the Phaedrus) and the young Chris as more in tune with the iconoclastic philosophical reflections of his own youth as 'Phaedrus'. Ironically the motif fits quite well with the observation that actually the real Phaedrus was an older man, and also a man much more like Pirsig's narrator than like his 'Phaedrus'.
    5
    
    Plato Phaedrus 242d-243e. Contrast, for instance, the discussion with Gorgias in the
    
    6
    
    first part of Plato's Gorgias. This difference is partially acknowledged by Pirsig when he allows his Phaedrus to be temporarily impressed by the Phaedrus (383-4; 386) after a previous encounter with the Gorgias. But the next section of the novel is muddled: it is unclear whether Phaedrus thinks that Plato himself constructed his dialogue so as to 'condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to' (384) —ie Plato uses rhetoric to
    
    undermine rhetoric— or whether the Philosophy Professor misreads the dialogue when he identifies the dark horse with passion and the good horse with reason and thereby reduces Plato's message to the Aristotelian world view (388).
    7
    
    e.g. p.390
    
    8378
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 26
    
    20/2/09
    
    9
    
    379 379 379-80 This is perhaps slightly over-generous. The metaphysics
    
    10
    
    11
    
    12
    
    and metaphilosophy of Pirsig's novel are rather unclear, and often muddled, and the later novel Lila, which has generated a popular following for a peculiar theory called the 'Metaphysics of Quality', appears to be even more confused. But it remains true that, for all his faults, Pirsig is aligning himself with a perfectly respectable outlook that can be paralleled not only in Plato but in certain themes common to Wittgenstein, Levinas, Derrida and much recent continental philosophy. Charitably interpreted, this text joins its voice to a familiar outcry against the implicit value system that underpins much of the Western philosophical tradition.
    13
    
    Earlier versions of this paper were read to audiences at a
    
    colloquium at Warwick University and at UEA Philosophical Society. I am grateful to both audiences for insightful comments, based on impressive recall of youthful readings of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, often memories of twenty five years' standing. The final version of the paper was prepared during a period of leave funded jointly by the
    
    Pirsig and Plato
    
    Page 27
    
    20/2/09
    
    University of East Anglia and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Add Comment

To add a comment, you need to login or signup (you can signup without leaving this page)