Robert Pirsigs Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Essay

Robert Pirsigs Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry into determine Confronting crises of technological annihilation and personal madness, Robert Pirsig finds each to be a manifestation of a deeper crisis of Reason. In response) he suggests an alternative to our current paradigm of rationality, the art of ride maintenance. By showing that our infrastanding and performance derive from our emotional and evaluative commitments, he challenges the cultural commonplace which construes subjective states as distortions of objective reality. In so doing, he asserts that wholeness or sanity may be achieved only through passionate caring, and an aw beness and acceptance of how our emotions and values shape our experiences. Further, he shows that technology, a manifestation of our values, may be controlled only through emotional and moral commitment. A restorative rhetoric, on Pirsigs analysis is, then, one in which the passions and values are recognized as the very ground of b eing in and interpreting the world. The crisis of reason As he begins his Chautauqua, Robert Pirsig finds himself in a twofold crisis. He characterizes the commonplace dimension of the crisis as arising in large part from the technological fragmentation of nature and man. Having transformed nature from a field of daffodils into a field for its throw potential appropriation, technology, as Marshall McLuhan has noted, now also shapes and controls the scale of human association and action (McLuhan 8). Seemingly indifferent to human values and developing under its own logic, technology increasingly isolates us from our natural environment, from one another, and even from ourselves. For though we may be in touch with Belgrade or Toky... ...ight give, the sophist being a hunter of young men of rank and distinction who works not by violence, but by persuasion. (The Middle Speech of Platos Phaedrus, ledger of the History of Philosophy, 9 1971, 421). Pirsig admits that his defense of th e Sophists against Plato is not original indeed such a defense dates to the nineteenth century. Everett Lee Hunt elaborates this point in his On the Sophists, in The Province of Rhetoric, ed. Joseph Schwartz and seat A. Rycenga (New York Ronald Press, 1965) and in Plato and Aristotle on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians (Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians, ed., Raymond F. Nowes Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell Univ. Press, 1961, p. 20), he writes It is to Hegel that the Sophists owe their rehabilitation in modern times. Hunt also shows that Lewes, Grote, Sidgwick and John Stuart Mill all joined in the defense.