Rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Part 3, Jordan Peterson on Facts and Value

Last post in this series.

While rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I was struck by how much passages of the book reminded me of Jordan Peterson.

(For new readers, I am both appreciative and critical of Jordan Peterson. Any given post I write about Peterson never captures my whole view. This post is in the appreciative category.)

I had recently read Peterson's latest book We Who Wrestle with God, so his ideas were in my head when I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

One of Peterson's big ideas, a repeated refrain, concerns how facts are insufficient to guide human life. In any given moment we face a blizzard of facts. Which ones should we attend to? Which facts have meaning for us? Can a fact even be a fact without that meaning? And so forth. What we need, according to Peterson, are values which help us rank and sort through the facts we encounter. These values, says Peterson, are ranked hierarchically. Some values are more important than others. Continuing, if you keep walking up this hierarchy of value your reach the highest value, the highest good. This is the Logos, the value that governs all other values and determines which facts have value for us in directing our choices and actions.

These ideas are found throughout Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here's a sampling of passages:

"Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value."

"Reason was no longer to be 'value free.' Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality."

Quality (Value) "is the generator of everything we know."

"The facts are there but you don't see them. You're looking right at them, but they don't have enough value...The facts do not exist until value created them. If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts."

Here's an extended passage where Pirsig describes how value rigidity blocks our ability to see facts. This is an example that Peterson has used in his own work:

I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, "Yes, but which facts do you fish for? There's got to be more to it than that."

But the answer is that if you know which facts you're fishing for you're no longer fishing. You've caught them. I'm trying to think of a specific example...

All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey's hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped--by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can't revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. They're coming closer...closer!...now! What general advice--not specific advice--but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this?

Well, I think you might say exactly what I've been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand he's free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is.

A little bit later, Pirsig describes how we avoid value traps like this: "You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts." Living right helps you see the right facts. This is Pirsig's case for virtue ethics and echos Peterson's own interest in "rules for living." We can only come to see the right facts in life if we are "living right," living in accordance to the Dao and the Logos.

Peterson has listed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as among his influences. You can see that influence in the passages above. Specifically, for both Pirsig and Peterson, value comes before facts and helps us select which facts we shall attend to. More so, value creates facts. Value creates our experience of reality. Consequently, in order to live well be must "live right." We must live in accordance to value. For only in living right can we see aright and find the answers to the problems and challenges of life.