Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry Into Values

by Robert M. Pirsig

mass market paperback, 540 pages

English language

Published April 25, 2006 by HarperTorch.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-058946-2

(188 reviews)

"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself.'"One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live and a meditation on how to live better. The narrative of a father on a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest with his young son, it becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions. A true modern classic, it remains at once touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.

53 editions

David Colborne reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

The world's first LessWrong poast

3 stars

If you're thinking of reading this book for its philosophical insights, I recommend playing "Disco Elysium" and then reading David Chapman's Meaningness.com. Both hit the same beats with better precision and entertainment value.

As a cultural slice of life, it has considerably more value. The book captures the spirit of the early '70s — an era in which top-down systemic thinking had passed its zenith, yet the childish nihilism of the hippies offered no useful alternatives. The author, a former technical writer, tries his best to synthesize the zeitgeist, blending half-remembered pieces of Buddhism, bits of misremembered Greek philosophy (Lycus, not Phaedras, is named after the wolf), and a rebellion against academia into the world's first LessWrong post.

It would be the longest until HPMOR was authored decades later.

Given everything I said above, it may seem odd to give it three stars instead of two or only one. As …

It would be the longest until HPMOR was authored decades later.

Given everything I said above, it may seem odd to give it three stars instead of two or only one. As I said earlier, however, it accurately captures the spirit of the '70s. It was popular — incredibly so. The bits of philosophy, musings on mental health, and surprisingly sparse instructions on how to maintain a motorcycle (they don't build them like they used to and thank goodness for that) are a snapshot of an age that still echoes into the present day.

Mormegil reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Hubris

2 stars

Content warning Includes a quote from the book.

Robert Prisig sets out to expand and fuse the limits of western and eastern philosophy with his "Quality" (which as far as I can tell is just an innacurate translation of Dao), but all he proves is how truly seductive the strawman argument can be to a big fish in a small pond. Is reading this "chautauqua" better than rotting your brain with the television he maligns? Maybe, but not by much, and it truly depends on what you're watching. At the very least, this book got me to give up on pop philosophy and just try to struggle with the originals (Plato, Aristotle, Kant etc.) because all I ever get out of this kind of stuff is a few interesting concepts buried under a mountain of frustration.

Here's a quote filled with the false dichotomies and strawmen that Prisig uses to constantly paint himself as able to pass judgement on all of art, history, philosophy, and motorcycles I guess:

"At present we're snowed under with an irrational loth expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts because there's very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific Knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the results is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long over-due."

He is also mean to his son.

Geoff reviewed Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

This book started slow and frustrating but redeemed itself by the end. I’m not a philosophy expert by any stretch of the imagination but I found Part 3 engaging and thought provoking.

Part 1 felt, to me, marred by a sort of narcissism that was grating. Both the narrator and the author felt a bit like a “well actually” reply guy except instead of one exhausting tweet, he wrote a whole book.

At one point the narrator describes a time when he felt seen and accepted as his true self, and it was when he stood at the head of a classroom and everyone hung on his every word. This is revealing.

But like I said, although this narcissism never went away, and the narrator remains, to me, deeply unlikable, the philosophy of the later parts drowns it out and it becomes worth reading.

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (3rd re-read)

4 stars

This is the third time I've re-read this book, and I liked it the least this time. This book has a few important points, some of which I haven't found other books that talk about — in particular, the ideas about the tautological nature of "rationality" and "science" are important and unique, and the ideas about the nuances of what about the relationship of people to technology causes unhappiness and strife is well-considered. Unfortunately, much of the book is discussion of the novel philosophical concept that the author calls "Quality", a concept which I think is ill-considered and ill-argued. Frustrating, since the disagreements the author assumes a reader might have with his arguments are not the ones that I have.

I still do love this book, and I certainly would still recommend it in many circumstances, but I was sad to return to it and find it not quite as …

I still do love this book, and I certainly would still recommend it in many circumstances, but I was sad to return to it and find it not quite as lovely as I'd remembered. Then again, this book has somewhat of a reputation as being a book that's attractive to younger people, so perhaps that's natural.

tanquist reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

An engaging motorcycle journey and guide to understanding life

5 stars

On my third reading of my paperback copy, it began to fall apart. The book got lighter as I progressed because I recycled the pages I had finished. I identified with the author's emotional struggles and admired his dedication as a father and motorcycle mechanic. The author draws parallels between different aspects of the machine and how we can better understand our lives and surroundings.

horiaconstantin reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

not a good bedtime read

3 stars

This is the second time that I stop reading this book. I really enjoyed the journaling of the motorcycle trip, but that's only half of the story. After a day at work, sitting in bed, trying to wind down, the whole discussion about classicism vs romanticism and rational analysis, etc is just too dry and tiring to follow.

zayn reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Listened to the full BBC 4 Radio Full Cast Dramatisation.

Makes me want to get a MotorBike and Travel across the plains of the USA

Deuce reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

While I liked a smaller part of it, the rest of hardly bearable. Pretentious statements, useless philosophy lessons and a very lousy storyline you will get some 10% of time spent on. The rest was pretentious af and boring. And I had a philosophy course, I was trying to get it. But it is all the mastery to bring ideas into the world and he clearly hadn't one. The motorcycle maintenance? Well, you will get some of it spread across his whole story in accidental cuts and carved book pages. I have some mixed feelings about this one. I like it but it made me struggle a lot.
Way too much watery goo one might assume to be philosophy but it ain't.
Consume with caution

Dragna reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I wanted to love this book, and I did for major portions of it. Like Phaedrus, though, I struggled with the classic side of things, and when Pirsig ventured into the intricacies of motorcycle repair he lost my attention. Finally finished it though, felt like a beast I had to slay. The last night I was reading it my wife was like, "Just finish the last 50 pages, that book has tortured you long enough."

jon_bon reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

Fy. Fan. Så tråkig. Och huvudpersonen (författaren själv) en extremt självupptagen, pretentiös karaktär som presenterar "djupsinnigheter" mellan själsdödande passager om hur han åker motorcykel, stannar, äter, sover, ser träd m.m. Läs inte!

magije reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Everybody should read this book.

Matthew Royal reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Very little fresh philosophical content; mostly name dropping. There is some small value in introducing some basic philosophical ideas, but there's quite a lot of garbage here to stumble over along the way. This book provides an insufferable meditation on how brilliant Pirsig considers himself:
- teaching Rhetoric by first convincing students of their need for it,
- driving himself mad by getting hung up on an apparent logical contradiction, rather than stepping back and reexamining his assumptions,
- redefining the word "Quality" to mean a 3rd category, separate but equal to "mind" and "matter,"
- inventing a useless, near-religious belief rather than investigating the real meaning and underlying mechanisms of quality.

Rather than switching tracks when he came to the end of the line in his "quality" investigations, Pirsig bashes his head into the buffer stop, and desires his readers to admire his maverick, intellectually honest attitude.

Systems engineering possesses most of the tools for what he was looking -- balancing the interaction of the objective and subjective to arrive at what Quality means for any given thing. The field has existed since the 1940s at Bell Telephone Laboratories and most recent triumphs to Pirsig's time were the Apollo missions. Pirsig should have realized that quality was more of a question of "how" rather than "why" -- "why" leading to the synonymous question of "What is good?" -- "how" leading him to a field of thinkers perhaps disjoint with the group of academic philosphers.

He may admire the rowdy kids in the back of the class, but it's because he, like they, is guilty of not doing his homework.

Nathan Friedly reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

This was a sad story of a man who was searching for God, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge Him, and ultimately going crazy in the process.

There were a lot of interesting ideas, but he just took them way to far.

I know some folks got a lot out of this book, and I'm sure I got a little, but on the whole, it just left me feeling sad and depressed.

Kattas reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Dense and philosophical, but it is thought provoking and an intriguing set of nested and interwoven narratives.

outofrange reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

An excellent meditation. As a technologist, seeing how well the motorcycle metaphor holds up to current technologies is something I take notice of. Other topics I have less background in seem relevant too, impressive.