Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanace

Imagine traveling state to state on a motorcycle, the wind rushing through your hair and the vibrating of the engine massaging your body. Imagine traveling cross-country on a Honda motorcycle on a seventeen-day journey. Robert Pirsig and his son Christopher experienced exactly this. Pirsig saw this journey as a way to rediscover himself after a mental breakdown, to ponder the basic aspects of philosophy, and to decipher the way people think. His son was just along for the ride. And from this adventure, the basis of Pirsig’s first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was created.

Robert Pirsig was born on September 6, 1928, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Education played a very important role in Pirsig’s upbringing. After he finished his four years in high school, he enrolled in the University of Minnesota. Unfortunately, he dropped out after only two years, and he joined the U.S. army shortly there after. After completing his term in the service, Pirsig returned to the University of Minnesota, and received his B.A. in 1950.

Later in his life Pirsig traveled to India to study philosophy at the Benars Hindu University. In 1954, Pirsig returned to the Midwest and married his first wife, Nancy James. Pirsig li

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

Since the world doesn’t function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it's defined or not (Pirsig 195): He says, “You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and tap, and the whole world splits right in two, hip and square, classic and romantic, technical and humanistic, and the split is clean. Pirsig, his twelve-year-old son Chris, and their friends John and Sylvia are traveling to Montana. On their trips they prefer the back roads over the straight super-highways. He begins with inductive reasoning:

“Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. (Pirsig 99)

With such passages, Pirsig shows how his own mind works and how he arrives at understanding. (Pirsig 92)

Pirsig uses inductive reasoning to give the reader just alittle taste of how his mind works and how he thinks. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly-flash! -He understands something he didn't understand before. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps.

Pirsig enrolled himself in a doctoral program at the university of Chicago in 1961. A in journalism at the University of Minnesota. In both cases he uses the motorcycle as a point of comparison and clarification.

Approximate Word count = 1359
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.