Rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Part 2, The Ontologization of Value
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1973. The motorcycle ride at the heart of the book took place in 1968. The defining intellectual events in the book, when Pirsig taught rhetoric at Montana State University, took place in 1958-1960.
I don't know how much the fact/value split was on the intellectual radar screen in the late 50s. Of course, the split goes back to the Enlightenment, but its impact upon culture didn't seem to be widely appreciated until the unraveling of the Sixties. The broad, Western cultural consensus, rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, kept the values of Americans mostly homogenous up until the fracturing that occurred during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Consequently, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance captured a moment when people were beginning to notice existential dislocations between human life and technological progress. This fracturing sets the stage of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with Pirsig's reflections upon how his hip and artistic travel companions, John and Sylvia, find themselves romantically alienated from the machine that is making their motorcycle trip possible. John and Sylvia's alienation from technology is taken as an example of a larger cultural diagnosis, how the modern world possesses vast technological capacity but is also existentially lost and adrift. How did this situation come to be? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sets out to answer that question.
Although Pirsig doesn't describe it this way in the book, his answer about our cultural problems basically points the finger at the fact/value split. To the one side is science, rationality, and technology. To the other is value--the true, the beautiful, and the good--what Pirsig calls "Quality." At a critical part of the book, during his years teaching at Montana State, Pirsig chaffs at how Quality/Value has been reduced to the subjective in the modern world. This triggers his mission to prove what I'll call the ontologization of value. This pursuit leads Pirsig into metaphysics, and an eventual mental breakdown. But the mystical insight he reaches, that Value is the Real, is the philosophical accomplishment of the book.
Simply put, Pirsig overcomes the fact/value split by restoring Value to its transcendental status. And more than a transcendental status, an all-encompassing transcendental status.
What might that mean? In the book, Pirsig calls Quality the Dao, Dharma, the Buddha, and the Godhead. I can't recall if he compares Quality to Brahman, but that would also apply. In the Christian imagination, Quality would be the Logos.
This was this bit--the ontologization of value--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I didn't know what to do with when I first read the book. As I recounted in the first post, I was in the grip of science at the time and didn't know what to do with the mystical aspects of the book, or why they were important. But now, as I also recounted, my concerns are more metaphysical, even mystical. Consequently, I better appreciate what Pirsig was trying to do and say. Life after the fact/value split is a disorienting, incoherent mess. And the only way to overcome the split is the ontologization of value. Value exists and we live our lives in relation to that value. This is a critical part of the story I tell in The Shape of Joy.
Of course, I come at this question from a Christian perspective. But I don't think it is too hard to make a connection between the Dao and the Logos. As I wrote about recently, Chinese translations of John 1 translate the Greek word logos as Dao. C.S. Lewis also describes the ontologization of value, in its moral key, as the Dao in The Abolition of Man.
All that to say, having missed the point of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance during graduate school, due to my scientific orientation and wariness about mysticism, I found myself, upon rereading, appreciating the ambition of the book. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, I agree with Pirsig's vision. Value is the Real, and we live our lives in an ongoing mystical relationship with that ontological Reality.
Fascinating. Will you do future posts describing exactly how value is an ontological reality, or how you see that? I intuitively think values are real things, and deeply important, yet when I try to think about where value comes from, or whether a particular set of values is the "right" set, I get into a muddle. One part of that muddle is that sincere human beings differ so emphatically on what values are true. Example: Trump and his most dedicated followers embrace and very different set of values from people deeply committed to liberal or progressive values. Yet both groups see their values as the true ones, and some in each of those groups claim their values agree with and even come from God's values.
Another part of the muddle has to do with how God arrives at values. Does God simply know which values are real, with those values existing outside of God, or does God choose which values are true according to God's essential nature? If the latter, say God decided that murder and causing suffering were good ways of implementing values. Would that make it right for us to murder and torment, or would God simply be wrong? I can't see how to get to the bottom of this one (Plato also thought it was a tough question).
A third part of the muddle is, assuming God apprehends true values (whether God knows them or decides them), why has God not made clear what values are true to all of us? The different faith traditions differ on what the right values are to greater or lesser extents (though they also agree on a lot of them). And within religions, there's similar disagreement. Even within the Bible there is a lack of consistency (hence both Trump supporters and progressives can appeal to the Bible). Why hasn't God given us a clear and consistent message on this? In fact, why is God so silent in general? Some people feel God's presence at least occasionally (I do rarely but every once in a while) while others never do (my sisters, for example, who are open to the idea of God's existence but never feel an inkling of God's presence). That is one of the issues I try to deal with in my forthcoming book which is being published on May 1 (The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of God and Christ).
I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate in the gospel of John. At its climax Jesus declares “I came into the world to testify to the truth,” to which Pilate famously replies, “What is truth.” Truth is a key word in John’s gospel, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It does not mean simply, the opposite of falsehood. It means something like reality. Jesus is reality, the Logos is ultimate reality. This fits beautifully with Pirsig’s quest.