Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values
Author: Robert M. Pirsig
List Price: $26.00
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ISBN: 0688002307
Publisher: William Morrow (01 May, 1974)
Sales Rank: 3,747
Average Customer Rating: 4.02 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
Maybe, Maybe Not
This is the kind of book that a person who is intelligent but uneducated in philosophy would pick up, read, and be excited and terribly enlightened by. This apparently was the state of many of the "hippies" who read this book when it came out. But for someone who has read Aristotle and Plato and the myriad of others, especially the Greeks, this book can seem almost ridiculously off-center in its generalizations. Whether it is or not, that is for the reader to decide, I suppose.The narrator is at first likeable, but as the book moves on and his madness becomes evident, you see his character become despicable, self-absorbed, mean, closed-minded, and, well, a hypocrite in a number of ways. This change may be a large part of the appeal of this book as a sort of psychological novel, though I am still not sure whether that is what Pirsig intended it to be.
Despite the disgust and boredom I sometimes felt while reading, the book has a lot of good things to say about living and the self. Most importantly, if you pay enough attention it will definitely get you thinking. Overall, a controversial book, but worth reading if only for the thought and controversy it will provoke within your own mind.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Buried treasure
Read this book. Talk about it. Share it with your friends. This book is more important than one thinks at first glance. I have read it 5 times over the past 25 years, first as a teenager thinking it was about motorcycles, next as a Philosophy major at Harvard, and each time I have gotten something new out of it. It is more than a travel adventure. It is more than a father/son reconciliation story. It is more than an autobiographical odyssey of psychological redemption. It is even more than an "inquiry into values." This book reveals the greatest crime perpetrated against intellectual history. While Pirsig is concerned with a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, he points us to the violence done by Plato in his attack on the Sophists. Until Plato, Philosophy was a part of the common life. Sophists wandered the Greek world offering instruction (for pay) in rhetoric and Philosophy, and this was deemed the normal course of life. Even Plato's revered Socrates conducted his discourses in the marketplace, the agora. The aristocratic and elitist Plato's crime (in my view) was to whisk philosophical discussion away from the agora and put it in the acadamy, where it has remained gathering dust for 25 centuries. His Theory of Forms tells us that few, if any other than himself, can see things as they "really are." The Republic tells us that only the philosopher-king (Plato himself being the leading candidate) is fit to rule. If all of Philosophy is a "response to Plato" as A.N. Whitehead put it, then we are debating with a traitor to humanity. Nothing is more relevant than a synthesis of the Philosophical and the Practical ways of being, as well as Eastern and Western ways of thinking. I have devoted my life to dragging the philosophical debate back from the academy into the agora where it belongs and where it can be of the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Reading and sharing this book with friends is a wonderful way to begin that pilgrimage yourself. I just wish someone would make a film of it. Can't you just see William Hurt in the lead?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Let Go. Please !!!
This is an account of one man's slow and painful descent into madness. The descent is caused by compulsive thinking, with an obsessive need to find "The Answer" and to take on the established order. The object of the obsession is hardly relevant. The greatest value of this book is as a cautionary tale against over-thinking.The word "Zen" does not belong in the title of this book. Zen is something to be practiced and lived, and there isn't the slightest hint that Pirsig is in tune with this concept.
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