Name: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Rating: 3.9 (255 reviews)
Author: Robert Pirsig

What’s in it for me? Balance your classical and romantic mind and achieve harmony in life and work.

What does Zen, a holistic, meditative and spiritual practice, have to do with tinkering with the gears and shafts of a greasy motorcycle? A lot, it turns out, if you’re trying to live a balanced life.

If you are “classically” minded, you tend toward science, approaching problems rationally and working to create order in a chaotic world. If you are more of a “romantic,” you embrace the chaos, understanding the world through emotion and exploring the whole, not the details.

Yet few people can perfectly balance these two mind-sets within themselves; in fact, many of the world’s problems and conflicts stem from exactly this gap between the classical and the romantic modes of thought.
So how do we overcome this gap, and live a balanced and harmonious life? Well, we take a road trip, of course – one that can teach us how to travel that magic middle road.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how exactly philosophy relates to motorcycle maintenance;
why a romantic thinker won’t fix a broken motor himself; and
why quality is the perfect balance of rational and spiritual.

Western thought is split in half, and one half is the rational, unemotional “classical” mode.

The narrator’s journey begins at the start of a motorcycle road trip he’s planned with his son, Chris, and a married couple, John and Sylvia Sutherland.

On a philosophical level, the narrator represents the classical mode of thinking, while the Sutherlands represent the romantic.

Using the metaphor of motorcycle maintenance, the classical mode of thought finds its expression in the rational knowledge and expertise of an engineer or mechanic.

A classical thinker like a mechanic understands all the technical details that make a machine function, how they all fit together and, importantly, how to find what’s wrong and fix it if the machine malfunctions.

When presented with an engine, for example, a classical mind is fascinated by the rich underlying symbols and functions of form that make a machine work – the gears, the belts, the pistons and all the complicated interactions that make a machine what it is.

Looking beyond motorcycle maintenance, other examples of classical thinking include things such as the scientific method, logic and mathematics.

These fields are underpinned by highly systematic, reliable and rational systems. They abide by an established set of rules that have been tested and verified. Each new innovation within a system is built upon pre-existing norms, which are themselves built upon the same standards and rules – thus making the classical mode of thought predictable, straightforward and unemotional.

Ultimately, the classical mode aims to bring control and order to the chaos of the world.

The opposite of a classical mind is the romantic: thought driven by emotional and creative urges.

In contrast to the narrator’s “classical” mind, his road trip partners, John and Sylvia Sutherland, represent the “romantic” mode of thinking.

The Sutherlands refuse to learn how to fix their motorcycle on their own, even though it would be much cheaper to do so – and could make them more self-reliant riders, knowing the basics of how the machine functions.

The dual nature of Phaedrus, a “madness” now cured, haunts the narrator’s classical mind.

During the road trip, the narrator begins to remember and reveal parts of his past identity, which he calls Phaedrus, a “madness” that was cured after undergoing electroshock therapy.

Phaedrus was a philosophy student and English professor who struggled with the tension between the classical and romantic modes of thought.

“Quality” is a theoretical solution to reconcile the divide between the classical and romantic.

While studying philosophy, Phaedrus began to develop his own philosophy, which both caused and would ultimately cure his “madness.”

Phaedrus believed that the dichotomy of classical versus romantic, so central to Western thought, is responsible for the dissatisfaction, confusion and lack of wisdom in modern society.

Living according to the principle of quality is not an easy task; both grief and happiness are the result.

Although the philosophy of quality is intended to reconcile the classical and the romantic modes of thought, this was unquestionably a struggle for the narrator.

Despite Phaedrus’s criticisms of rationality, set definitions and blind fanaticism, he nonetheless employs all these elements in his criticisms of himself.

Key ideas in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance