Rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Part 1, My Journey Back to Value

I read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in graduate school, and like millions before me was fascinated by the blend of memoir, travel narrative, cultural commentary, and philosophy, both Eastern and Western. The book is hard to classify, and it can be enjoyed in many different ways.

When I read the book in graduate school I was just discovering my love for psychological research. I was writing my Masters thesis at the time and was finding that project engrossing. I was also taking counseling classes and seeing clients in my practicum settings. So mental illness was also on my mind. If you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you can see how my interests at that time in both the scientific method and mental illness would have drawn me to the book. I also had a longstanding interest in philosophy, and almost pursued a PhD in philosophy, so that was a draw as well.

But what I didn't really appreciate at the time was Pirsig's "metaphysics of Quality." I don't really think I understood it, and it sounded a little woo-woo. My thinking then, as I said, was pretty rationalistic and scientific. I was deep into my research. So the Zen stuff didn't really connect with me. I was, though, interested in Pirsig's reflections about how scientific insights, guided by Quality, mysteriously bubble up into consciousness. I was experiencing my own discoveries at that time, minor though they were, and had felt the euphoria of theoretical insight and empirical confirmation known by all scientists. It was a thrilling time.

Still, it was strange to feel a bit alienated from the central focus of the book, the metaphysics of Quality.

Many years have past since graduate school. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a book I once liked but had not thought much about since. But over time my interests have evolved. In the early part of my career, psychological research is what I did and I published journal articles. You can browse some of them here in my Google Scholar profile. In the early 2000s, my research turned toward the psychology of religion, research that culminated in my first two books, Unclean and The Authenticity of Faith. From there, starting with Reviving Old Scratch, I began to write theologically focused books for a general and popular audience. To the point that a lot of people think and call me a theologian when I'm really an experimental psychologist. I teach statistics and research for a living.

Due to the theological turn in my thinking and writing, almost all of it shared and recounted here in this online space, over the last decade I've been thinking a lot, like many theologians, about the fact/value split and its effect upon us. Simply stated, the fact/value split describes the dislocation between science and values. When it comes to factual claims science is the tool we use to describe the world, a tool that can bring about unanimity of opinion. Facts are public and empirically available. Values, by contrast, are personal, private, and subjective. Given this, there is no way to bring about a consensus when it comes to morality or the common good. Our values are personal and relative. Which is an intolerable situation. The modern world is characterized by scientific and technological power on the one hand with moral incompetence and spiritual confusion on the other. The story of how this all came about is told in books like Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

My interest in the fact/value split comes into view with my latest book The Shape of Joy. Readers of the book will have observed how I connect our mental health crisis to our loss of value--our disconnection from the true, the beautiful, and the good. A clear example of this that I describe in the book concerns the psychological construct known as mattering, also called cosmic or existential significance. Brené Brown describes mattering as the spiritual conviction that you are worthy of love and belonging. Let's underline that word "worthy." Our worth is existential and cosmic in nature, an issue of metaphysical value.

Given how much I was thinking about mental health and the metaphysics of value in writing The Shape of Joy, my mind started to drift back to that book I read in graduate school. The subtitle of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is, after all, "An Inquiry into Values." Specifically, the metaphysics of value. My interests had dramatically changed since I had first read the book in graduate school. In graduate school I was a scientist. Today, I'm more a theologian and metaphysician. I wondered if in rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I would be better able to appreciate the central thesis of the book concerning the metaphysics of Quality.

So, I reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In the next post I’ll share what I found.