• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

June 2013 - Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Thank you Meadow for clarifing things at the half-way point. To be honest, it kind of muddles and to me, I caught his drift, not his full point. Just a technicality, but I really dislike the term "quality." Not sure what I would replace it with, but just a minor thing that I'm hung up on at the moment.

I believe it is chapter 18 or 19 where he goes into duality quite a bit. I was very surprised to see that he introduces a monism of sorts in regards to his theory. It reminds me a lot of Wilber's four quadrants that attempts to show how everything is connected. Interesting to note that he connected them, the line that shows how they are connected is rather murky.
 
yeah I suppose that I don't particularly like it either but is there a better term? It is the best all inclusive term for what he is talking about that I can think of.
 
As I said earlier rereading ZAMM this time around I was much more struck with the autobiographical aspects of it than I was the first times I read it. I'm not convinced that his intelligence is a contributing factor to his mental illness, although it may have made the manifestation of it worse. If he even had a real mental illness despite being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but because of when he was diagnosed I do have my doubts. In those days they were not exactly known for their compassionate and understanding attitude towards people who had problems fitting in. The use of ECT for depression and schizophrenia was widespread in the 1950's and 1960's despite emerging anti-psychotic medications. Psychiatry does not have a very good history I'm afraid. ECT along with prefrontal lobotomies a lot of people had irreparable harm done to them just because they were different and not necessarily mentally ill.
 
Chapters 29 and 30 were rather fascinating. I had a sense of being a spectator as Phaedrus parries the Professor and Chairman then as witness to his breakdown, while in the present his son wonders if the man he remembered to be his father will ever return.


What I got mostly from this book was Pirsig’s need or means to find a way towards reconciliation -- classic-romantic, valley-mountain, empiricist-a priori, city-country, and so forth, as a bridge for starting the reconciliation of Phaedrus and the narrator.
 
Occlith said:
Chapters 29 and 30 were rather fascinating. I had a sense of being a spectator as Phaedrus parries the Professor and Chairman then as witness to his breakdown, while in the present his son wonders if the man he remembered to be his father will ever return.


What I got mostly from this book was Pirsig’s need or means to find a way towards reconciliation -- classic-romantic, valley-mountain, empiricist-a priori, city-country, and so forth, as a bridge for starting the reconciliation of Phaedrus and the narrator.
Click to expand...

Yes although it is clear that the reconciliation can only ever be incomplete, which was overwhelmingly sad to me.
 
Occlith said:
I didn't get that impression. It's an unknown by the end of the book.
Click to expand...

How can it ever be anything but incomplete? Huge chunks of his memory, of who he was, are gone forever. He can never regain them. Not only that but he has these other chunks of retained memory that are floating loose with no connectedness to anything. If triggered he just remembers them but can't place them in the context of the time line of his life. He might come to some kind of resigned terms with what happened and the effect of it, but how can he ever reconcile what was, what has been lost, what he still has, with who he is now in any kind of complete sense?
 
At the start of the journey he is becomes aware of Phaedrus and remembers more as he travels. By the end he has remembered his breakdown and the source of his disturbing nightmare. It's quite possible that he regains all his memories.

Phaedrus has never truly gone away, the narrator just more fully integrates him into a mentally healthy aspect.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top