Thursday 15 August 2019
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I’m happy to have read it again. I’m surprised at how well it read a second time.
One thing that surprised me was how much I remembered. Not just the core ideas, or the revelation about who Phaedrus was, or the interplay between Chris and his father, but quite a few of the scenes. The descriptions of coming over a rise, and the landscape opening up.
I liked the interplay between the descriptions traveling through the landscape, and the conceptual work — the Chataqua — that was being done. It was not too tight, not lockstep, but every now and then there were correspondences that resonated. The transition from the midwest, where the landscape was ordered out of value, to the west, where the untidyness of the land reflected its loss of value. The high country with its clarity and deliniation, with the abstraction of ideas about quality. The parallel for riding upwards through the valley and coming to the source of the river, and the upward path to the root of the ideas.
I was struck, as well, by how much more sophisticated a view I take of the philosophical content. I am now more confident in rejecting certain points. And I am struck by the absence of large swaths of thought that are now central to my view of the world. One swath is the social constructionist view, in which cultural norms generated through an interplay of material culture, ideology, and personal experience are central. In retrospect, it is amazing at how little from psychology and social thought makes its way into his thinking.
Another perspective that I lacked, at the time of reading, is a skepticism about the ability of language-based reasoning to get at the truth. Now I believe that language is untrustworthy: language gives us Zeno’s paradox, whereas Newton’s Calculus removes it. That is not to say that Math is the road to truth, but rather that different representational systems can solve different problems (as well as creating their own muddles).
I was also struck by his (too) simple notion of scientific truth, though that certainly echoes the positivist cant of the times. SSST certainly provides a different view of both science and scientists…
There a number of experiences in the book — both reminiscences and first-hand experience — that I recognize as mania and other forms of delusional thinking. When I first read this, I had no direct experience with people so afflicted. Now I recognize it.
I also remember, strongly, the description of the structure and function of motorcyles — their ontologies — and the pleasure in seeing it laid out as a thing of beauty. Today I would look at this more in terms of systems and feedback and resonance that the function/structure approach. And I would think more about chaotic effects, and the way in which the seemingly identical parts of a motorcycle become individual over time. …I wondered a bit if he would get into this when he recognized that by listening to the sound of his motorcycle — the audible synthesis of the intermeshing of parts — could tell him when things were wrong. This would seem to suggest limitations to his systematic approach.