Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Farewell to Robert Pirsig

I see that Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, passed away yesterday. I ran across this book at a friend's house where I was staying way back in the 70s. I like to read in bed before I go to sleep and I picked this up off the shelf because of the unusual title. But I ended up reading the entire book instead of sleeping! Years later I read it again a couple of times. I was just thinking a couple of weeks ago that I was due to read it again. This is a profoundly unusual book. The idea of the title has been copied many times, but the idea of the book has not. It is as much about Plato as it is about Zen. And it is as much about life and psychology as it is about philosophy. I recommend it highly.


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4 comments:

  1. Will WilkinMay 3, 2017 at 5:11 PM

    Funny, that was the most famous of the Zen books and one of the few I never read....

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  2. Bryan TownsendMay 4, 2017 at 12:03 AM

    I just finished it the other day and I have been musing whether it really stands up after all these years. In some ways it does. It is really one of the most interesting novels I think I have ever read. It reminds me of the book on the California installation artist Robert Irwin, who seems to have gone through a similar kind of Odyssey. There are some strange journeys only available to a rare sort of person. But I am wondering, after this latest reading, if the intellectual journey in the book is of much real substance or not. I should look up some reviews of it by professional philosophers and see what they say. Is Pirsig just a hack philosopher or does he have a real point here? I honestly can't decide.

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  3. Will WilkinMay 4, 2017 at 3:10 PM

    The zen approach would be to avoid all philosophy.

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  4. Bryan TownsendMay 5, 2017 at 2:01 AM

    That is well-discussed in the book.

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