'Metaphysics of Quality' taken seriously?
March 6, 2010 5:42 PM   Subscribe

How is 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' received among professional philosophers?

I'm simply wondering if the actual world of philosophy cares about this book and the 'metaphysics of quality'. Has it had any real effect on the academic world? Are dissertations written about it? I don't want to give my own opinions about his ideas so as not to color the responses.

A similar but different question was asked here, and it seems as though the consensus in that thread is "no effect, not taken seriously," but I wanted to target this question more specifically.

Thanks
posted by aesacus to Religion & Philosophy (22 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Came across this.
posted by quodlibet at 5:45 PM on March 6, 2010


My undergraduate education was (generally) in philosophy. I also pursued a graduate education for the purpose of studying ancient and medieval political philosophy. Most professional philosophy students I know don't think much of it. This is only my experience. My own personal reflection on it is that it's probably the worst reading of Plato and Aristotle I've ever come across. Again, just a personal perception, so take from that what you will.
posted by koeselitz at 6:14 PM on March 6, 2010 [3 favorites]


I studied philosophy some and never heard anyone talk about it. But realize that many philosophers don't even take other academic philosophers seriously. My friend who studied and taught logic, for instance, feels contempt for philosophers working in aesthetics or existentialism — they're not as pure as logic, you see. I seriously doubt any of them care about Robert Pirsig enough to not care about him.
posted by argybarg at 6:23 PM on March 6, 2010


I teach college philosophy part-time; I found Zen/Motorcycle extraordinarily silly and self-indulgent and generally full of very boring special snowflakey-ness.

My background is in theology, and I teach because I like to teach, not because I have a burning urge to publish or anything else, so I don't generally feel in competition with other philosophers (as some of my colleagues do). I actually read the book during a plane trip just because I'd heard a lot about it over the years from regular people and was curious about it, not because I was looking for a philosophical read.

Now, if it were just a memoir, I'd still think it was rather silly and the author not so much self-aware as self-fascinated, but it wouldn't really bother me. Claims that it's "philosophy" kind-of bother me because it's just so RIDICULOUS. The story of him having a nervous breakdown was passably interesting (although a little alarming that he kept teaching for so long while obviously out of touch with reality), but the idea that it had anything to do with philosophy (let alone the monumentally arrogant idea that he was the first to marry Eastern and Western philosophy!) was appalling.

The one part I really did enjoy was where he stops giving his students grades and describes their reactions. That cracks me up every time.

Just a quick reaction; if you wanted a real analysis of why it's so silly, I'd probably have to re-read it, and since it was so painfully dull and narcissistic the first time, I'm not sure I could manage it again!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:51 PM on March 6, 2010 [7 favorites]


I have an undergrad philosophy degree, and on top of that I've read a lot of philosophy books for fun. I've never seen Pirsig or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or the phrase "metaphysics of quality" referred to in any kind of conventional or academic philosophical context.

One test would be if any significant encyclopedia/dictionary of philosophy has an entry for Pirsig. Searching the Cambridge Dictionary turns up nothing. No entry in Simon Blackburn's Dictionary. No references in either of the two most prominent online philosophy encyclopedias.

Anytime I've heard anyone refer to Pirsig or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the context was an unabashedly personal "This book is amazing and it had such a big effect on me." (I haven't read it, so I have no opinion of this sentiment.)

Maybe there are some philosophy courses somewhere in the world that assign this book, per the first comment. And you've seen from the previous AskMe that people can say whatever they want about how "it is [or isn't] legitimate philosophy." But in the sense that you're asking about, I've seen no sign that it is taken seriously as philosophy, as opposed to just being a philosophically themed book that's profoundly affected a lot of people.

Since it's hard to prove a global empirical negative, I'm not going to outright say it has had no impact of the sort you're asking about. But that's my strong hunch.
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:51 PM on March 6, 2010


With derision.
posted by Nelson at 6:55 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]


I wanted to add a small note and say I don't think I'm really offended by the book, although I've met professional students of philosophy who were. I've known philosophy professors who dismissed it outright and tossed it in the same bin as they did Ayn Rand. (Of course, I hear rumors now about Rand being taught in philosophy courses, and I hear the same thing about Pirsig.)

I think what bothered me about it was that it was so dismissive of philosophy as a whole. I guess that's what philosophers since Nietzsche are supposed to do – be dismissive of anyone and everyone else – but that book, being a popular book as it is, makes this process all too easy; it's just so simple for a popular text to simply turn away from philosophy, since the popular mind has little invested in philosophy and would rather not worry about it anyway. And (if I may be allowed to be dismissive a little myself) this isn't to say that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't a bit better than a lot of philosophy being written and published today.

Zen just tends to make snap judgments about particular very insightful writers who certainly deserve a lot more thoughtfulness and confrontation than they're afforded there. Descartes, Kant, Plato, Aristotle – all of these are just bylines in the plot, some afforded little more than a paragraph or two before the youthful protagonist figures them out and moves on. Life just isn't that simple.

All this is just to say, I guess, that in my mind it's not that Zen doesn't fail to meet some grand standard of philosophy books. I don't think it's incredibly thoughtful, but that's really neither here nor there, and lack of thoughtfulness is common enough that it's not that notable. What's notably different about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is that it paints the whole of philosophy in such dismissively, derisively, or simplistically broad brushes that it ends up tossing out a whole lot more than it should.

Also, as a last note, it's good to remember that pretty much anybody who tries to talk about "the West" and "the East" is simplifying things immensely.
posted by koeselitz at 7:08 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]


In general, I've found it's quite unusual to come across a writer of popular works who is appreciated all that much by actual practitioners in his or her field. I can think of a few exceptions - I know a lot of astrophysicists who really, really adore Carl Sagan, for example - but in general the analogies that people employ to make highly technical topics accessible to laymen dilute or skew the subject matter to the point of rendering it either facile or just nonsensical.

And then you find yourself at a party and someone will say, "Oh, you study philosophy? I'm into philosophy too, I just loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," as if the experience of reading it was anything like the 8 years you spent getting your PhD in philosophy.

So I would say Pirsig's impact (or lack thereof) is the rule rather than the exception. I don't know squat about philosophy, but in general if it's a book that kids pick up to read in high school I find I can pretty safely assume it is not taken seriously by any academic audience. Certainly I go back and read popular math or computer science books I read as a kid and find myself cracking up at some of the forced, goofy tactics these writers employ to explain concepts that really require way more theoretical grounding than anyone picking up a popular text would probably want to master. (The obvious exception being Godel, Escher, Bach...and I know people with degrees in math who couldn't get through it.)
posted by little light-giver at 7:10 PM on March 6, 2010


I was a philosophy major in college, and in two years of serious class work I never heard Pirsig mentioned once.

I started reading Zen once for fun but stopped halfway through because Pirsig seemed to me like a fairly muddy thinker. For better or for worse, philosophers care about how well an argument is constructed as much as they care about the substance of that argument. I think people like Pirsig who are considered "popular philosophers" often don't make the cut in academic circles because their logic isn't tight enough.
posted by colfax at 7:21 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]


it's a philosophy book for people who don't read philosophy.
posted by rhizome at 7:33 PM on March 6, 2010 [4 favorites]


Are dissertations written about it?

I'm not a philosopher, but I am a librarian with access to Dissertations and Theses Full Text. I did a cursory search for anything with "Pirsig" in the citation or abstract, and found 16 that seem to actually be about the book, as opposed to false hits on author names, etc.

Here's an author/year/title/degree/institution list. I can get abstracts to you via memail if you're really interested; it's a bit much to reproduce here. I will say that at a glance, very few of the works seem like they could have been for straight-up philosophy degrees.

Sorry about the all-caps, that's how older data looks in the database.

Bastien, Stephane (1999). Qualite, valeur et experience. M.A. dissertation, University of Ottawa

Blais, Donald Marcel (1990). Constructivism applied to algebra: Transforming novices into experts. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri

CULLIS, TARA ELIZABETH (1983). LITERATURE OF RUPTURE: SCIENCE AND LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison

DEL COL, JEFFREY ANTHONY (1978). EARLY CLUES FOR THE NEW DIRECTION? THE TECHNOCRATIC MYTH IN PYNCHON AND PIRSIG. Educat.D. dissertation, WestVirginia University

FREEMAN, BLONDELL JONES (1987). WRITING ANXIETY: INTERPERSONAL VIEWS OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS. A.D. dissertation, University of Michigan

GEORGE, ROGER ALLEN (1986). THE TRANSCENDENTAL TRAVELER (THOREAU, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington,

Granger, David A. (1998). Learning to care for experience: John Dewey and Robert Pirsig on recovering the aesthetic in the everyday. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago

HALEY, CHARLES WILLIAM (1983). DREAM FORMS. (ORIGINAL COMPOSITION). D.M.A. dissertation, University of Missouri - Kansas City

Laird, Ross A. (2000). The echo of leaves: A meditation on the spirit of craft. Ph.D. dissertation, The Union Institute

PERRY, JOAN ELLEN (1976). VISIONS OF REALITY: VALUES AND PERSPECTIVES IN THE PROSE OF CARLOS CASTANEDA, ROBERT M. PIRSIG, URSULA K. LE GUIN, JAMES PURDY, CYRUS COLTER AND SYLVIA PLATH. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Wisconsin

Sharke, Paul F. (1998). Samuel Florman and a literature of technology. M.S. dissertation, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Shin, Doo-ho (1993). The aesthetics of indeterminacy: A meeting ground between Eastern mysticism and postmodernism and selected novels by Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, and Robert Pirsig. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Sneddon, Andrew George (1995). A process analysis of quality: A. N. Whitehead and R. Pirsig on existence and value. M.A. dissertation, The University of New Brunswick

Storseth, Terri Lee (1997). On the road with monkey: The transmission of Zen Buddhism in two contemporary American novels. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington

TIECHERT, MARILYN CHANDLER (1984). A HEALING ART: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE POETICS OF CRISIS. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University

TOTTEN, LEON E., III (1984). RETHINKING EVALUATION OF TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION. Educat.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
posted by donnagirl at 7:59 PM on March 6, 2010 [9 favorites]


I asked a philosopher friend about it once. Her response? "It's just a novel, isn't it?"
posted by piedmont at 12:44 AM on March 7, 2010


I found Zen/Motorcycle extraordinarily silly and self-indulgent and generally full of very boring special snowflakey-ness.

Seconding Eyebrows McGee. I found it breathless, redundant and, all in all, an embarrassing case of much ado about nothing. I have the impression that Pirsig misunderstands the workings of academic philosophy in much the same way Ayn Rand did with her strange "Objectivism" (although the content of their theories is, of course, completely different). For me, it's just a novel...

[I have graduate training in philosophy, mainly analytic philosophy, but I'd say I'm usually quite open to "outsiders" and non-standard approaches to philosophical questions.]
posted by The Toad at 4:43 AM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


In addition to my previous comment, I'd say that part of the problem is the "It's just a novel" reaction. But this struck me as wrong at first, because one of the philosophy courses I took had us read novels along with standard philosophy, and there didn't seem to be any bias against philosophy in novel form. But the novels were by Camus and Sartre, who are also philosophers, not just novelists. If a real philosopher (someone who has written serious philosophy just as philosophy, with no narrative frame at all) has also written novels, the novels will be respected. Pirsig, as far as I know, is famous for exactly one thing: that novel. If he's such a good philosopher, why didn't he write any philosophy ( =/= novel with philosophical content)? This raises a red flag in the academic world. Or, rather than even raise a red flag, perhaps a better way to put it is he doesn't rise to the level of being noticed as even a potentially interesting thinker.
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:24 AM on March 7, 2010


Studied philosophy for three years. Never heard it mentioned or referred to once.
posted by MuffinMan at 8:08 AM on March 7, 2010


I did undergrad and grad work in philosophy and am now a professor. What I would say is that it certainly doesn't come up as a serious text to be studied, discussed and written about. I wasn't under the impression that the author intended that much in any case, but I've never read it. I think the notes of derision coming up here are as much a function of a subset of the people who have read the book and become convinced of their own expertise. Much like Ayn Rand's work (though nowhere near as perniciously), some people read it and feel they're already working at the same level as people who devote their lives to it and have extensive knowledge. Some further subset of those people (again, fewer and less perniciously than the objectivists) even see themselves as leaping ahead of academics because they're more "open" and less "elitist" about their studies. Why thinking you know it all after reading one book or no books at all doesn't make you more elitist and condescending than someone who has done lots of study about something, I will never really understand. Intellectual homeopathy.

This is by no means to say that liking ZATAOMM makes you an idiot, but there is a certain subset of the idiots that LOOOOOOOOVE the book in a particular way.
posted by el_lupino at 10:38 AM on March 7, 2010 [3 favorites]


I'd maybe shelve it somewhere inbetween the "The Celestine Prophecy", and "The Alchemist". I enjoyed reading it, but I don't want it mixed in with my Nietzsche and Sartre.
posted by robotot at 2:01 PM on March 7, 2010


I teach philosophy; as other have said here, the book has made no impact on academic philosophy, and it is not taken seriously as a scholarly work of philosophy. I think of it in the same category as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the Little Prince, or that sort of book - which people find thought-provoking and enjoyable and personally meaningful, but which are not really systematic or careful.

Note that most of the dissertations listed above seem to have been written for PhDs in other departments (like English or education), not philosophy departments.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:19 AM on March 8, 2010


I am not a fan of Pirsig or his work but he has received some slight academic attention. Anthony McWatt was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from Liverpool University for a dissertation on the Metaphysics of Quality. He runs the website robertpirsig.org which sells copies of his dissertation and a Metaphysics of Quality textbook also written by McWatt. Some additional papers are also hosted. In this interview, Pirsig says that McWatt faced "a huge amount of academic hostility". I'm not surprised. See this very readable interview with Julian Baggini for some insight why.

I don't think that the comments "He wrote a novel." have much to do with why his contributions have been ignored. Plato's Dialogues are fiction, perhaps "historical fiction", but self conscious literary creations. Same with Kierkegaard. A number of philosophers have written poetry or pointed to philosophical issues embedded in poetry. Others have claimed that he is dismissed because he doesn't concern himself with the Western tradition. Wittgenstein also gave it scant attention, but he's read very carefully and will likely continue to be. Pirsig has been ignored for the same reason Ayn Rand has been, they don't merit the attention. People have been writing philosophy for a couple of thousand years now, the competition for a place in the first rank is stiff.
posted by BigSky at 11:32 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks a lot for all your answers. Definitely confirmed my hunch.

While I do think Pirsig's 'metaphysics of quality' and ideas about the objective and subjective are all complete nonsense, and all his trumping up of his own ideas throughout the book very narcissistic, there are some valuable personal lessons to be found in the book. Perhaps it has no worth as any kind of philosophical treatise, but there are some good practical lessons about craftsmanship and education mixed in there.
posted by aesacus at 8:38 PM on March 8, 2010


Others have claimed that he is dismissed because he doesn't concern himself with the Western tradition.

I'd just like to second BigSky that it is not plausible that this is why Pirsig has been ignored. It's a commonplace to point out that Descartes and Hume (who are arguably two of the three greatest philosophers of the last 1,000 years) are deeply rooted in Eastern thought. It's not considered at all scandalous or taboo to point this out in academic philosophy (not to say that it's given as much attention as it should).
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:20 AM on March 9, 2010


ZATAOMM is muddled, but Lila (the sequel) is a much more solid work as far as constructing a coherent philosophical framework goes. For whatever reasons, it hasn't got as much traction.
posted by Sebmojo at 10:56 PM on May 7, 2010


« Older Using Excel Formulas to Rank Ordered Lists   |   We call it Master and servant, let's play Master... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.