Plato and Aristotle in Robert Pirsigs Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Essay Example

World Literature 10 December Plato and Aristotle in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Rhetoric is the cornerstone of literature. Robert Pirsig, an American writer, knew this when he built the main intrigue of his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance upon the differences in Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of rhetoric and poetry. The book has at least two plots: one consisting of events and another telling about the journey of thought. On the latter, the main character called ‘Phaedrus’ (a significant name from one of Plato’s dialogues) meets Plato and Aristotle to get fascinated with the former, attack the latter, and than come to the deeper, non-evaluative understanding of both. At the same time, the novel itself is a work of literature, that is, a special type of discourse about which the two philosophers debated so actively. Rhetorical strategies are not only theoretical background of the philosophical discussion but also the praxis of the author. This paper focuses on the theoretical understanding of rhetoric in Pirsig’s novel as well as the practical aspects of his writing. It may seem that Phaedrus is the author’s literary double: they share many unique experiences, such as teaching, being in army, teaching creative writing, being in hospital with a personality disorder, and parenthood (Pirsig). Phaedrus is on his material road as a motorcyclist and a spiritual one as a former philosopher. However, some of the details suggest that this character is fictional. The name is significant: Phaedrus meant wolf to the ancient Greeks, and, like many other young friends of Socrates, he has the character related to his name: aggressive, reticent, and ready to attack (Pirsig ch. 29). It is significant that he leads Socrates to the wild it outskirts, and it appears that Phaedrus knows the places surrounding his polis much better than Socrates does: Phaedr. What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates: when you are in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger who is led about by a guide. Do you ever cross the border? I rather think that you never venture even outside the gates. Soc. Very true, my good friend; and I hope that you will excuse me when you hear the reason, which is, that I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country (Plato). Pirsig actively uses this country-city contrast in constructing his character’s identity. In a sense, Pirsig is a pastoral writer, both innovative, producing non-sentimental pastoral scenes (Marx 5), and conservative, seeing in pastoral and wilderness the symbols of his country. He changes the hierarchy of mountains for the sea depth. His connection with wilderness shapes his anti-system and at the same time distinctly American behavior: For him Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf (Pirsig ch. 30) It’s the primary America we’re in (Pirsig ch. 29). The “primary America” is a technological country that comforts an individual instead of challenging common beliefs. As an alternative to the simple pastoral retreat, Phaedrus wants people to re-invent their technology. He speaks of technology in a broader sense than just the motorcycle and the instructions for several appliances the protagonist is dealing with: to Pirsig and his character, technology in the purest sense is the way of life connected with the idea of ‘Quality’. Thus, Phaedrus is constantly interested in rationality that is connected with this concept as well as technological development. His hunt for the “ghost of rationality” leads him to Plato and Arisotle, the primary sources. Phaedrus’s first reaction to Aristotle’s writings is irony and hostility: That just left Phaedrus aghast. Stopped. He’d been prepared to decode messages of great subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to understand the deeper inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an asshole statement like that! It really shook him (Pirsig ch. 29). An admirer of rhetoric, Phaedrus dislikes Aristotle’s tone – a ‘square’ tone, which had not been associated with anti-system movements of 1960s. Pirsig distinguishes between the ‘romantic’ (superficial but global) and ‘classic’ (functional but deprived of any higher sense) perceptions: A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form (Pirsig ch. 6) Aristotle is a distinctly ‘classic’ thinker that fails to recognize the overall picture and merely goes into the categories of the world, this way imposing his order upon the things around. The controversy between Phaedrus and Aristotle becomes a real life controversy between him and his professor. Phaedrus figures out that the professor represents the ‘dialectic’ side of the debate, prescribing what ideas are ‘appropriate’ and what are not (Pirsig ch. 29). Phaedrus himself takes up the rhetoric side: to him, rhetoric is not a simple play with words but rather the technology of expression of quality. Thus, he is appalled by the fact that rhetoric is not as important as dialectic for Aristotle. Plato, however, does not give him the answer, either. The difference between Plato and Aristotle regarding their treatment of poetry and rhetoric art is so well known that it has acquired a special name – ‘the Acient “Quarrell”’ (Tanner 59). Plato seems to distrust rhetoric and poetry on the ground that it is a manipulative technique that does not teach values; his cautious attitude is visible in such writings as Ion, Republic, Gorgias, and Phaedrus (Griswold). However, this does not mean that Plato dismisses the poetic art altogether: according to Tanner, the poetic imagination as divinely inspired (enthusiasis) is not dangerous to Plato; he is afraid that the mimetic poetry can take people from the critical values of life by exercising mimesis of inappropriate things (45-47). Actually, philosophy has come from poetry, and the controversy between them comes partly from this relation, which is conveyed by the Greek word ‘diaphora’ (Tanner 59-60). To Pirsig’s Phaedrus, Plato and his Socrates represented the school of thought that concentrated on values but would never let them to be expressed dynamically, with all the changes the notion of truth undergoes. From this perspective, Aristotle’s writing is merely an attempt of corrective, non-hierarchic interpretation of things: Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists… because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth (Pirsig ch. 29). The pre-Socratic school of thought, according to Pirsig, searched for eternal entities that rule the process of human inquiry and the world itself. The sophists, specifically, were a group concerned with good pedagogy, not the truth which is unstable. Socrates was carrying out the war against sophists, though he himself was also believed to be a sophist (Tanner 8; 43). Pisig says that this was not even war but a struggle for the fixation of dynamic life principles, the one in which dialectic has left rhetoric behind in the history of mankind. To Phaedrus’s ill consciousness, the city looks like a consequence of dialectic’s dominance: superficial functional forms, but without any deep search for meaning (Pirsig ch. 31). To him, Socrates was too good a rhetorician: his dialogues did not invite his friends to share thoughts but rather were traps for the beliefs Socrates wanted to eliminate. The novel itself is not in the form of dialogues. It is an extended monologue, confessionary yet sometimes didactic (the tradition of chautauqua teaching). It is not, though, perfectly didactic, the fact that makes this writing a literary work, not just a book of popular philosophy. The main character is complex: he had undergone insanity in the past, which throws a shadow on all of his philosophical revelations. He travels with his son, but ignores the emotional needs of the latter until the child tries to draw attention by the attempt of suicide (Pirsig ch. 32). It is very ironic that Phaedrus, a dialogue about love, turns out to be the polemic about truths and metaphors for the protagonist. The end of the book is marked with the narrator’s shocking realization of the fact that he has almost lost the quality of life behind the thoughts about Quality; the science of life finally becomes praxis to him. To sum up, both Plato and Aristotle in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are blamed and praised for one of the most important features of contemporary Western civilization, the analytical thinking. Plato is associated with the generalizing, ‘romantic’ trend and search for truth, while Aristotle is a defender of non-hierarchical, purely rational and categorical philosophy. The main character of the novel learns to avoid sticking to both of these worldviews through a deliberate philosophical dialogue with them; he exchanges the pure thinking for mere praxis of real life. The literary representation of this process through the lenses of different genres, from a diary to a technical instruction, is itself an example of imaginative literary rhetoric. Works Cited Griswold, Charles L. "Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Web . Marx L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford University Press, 2000 (1964). Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. 1984.Web. http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive, 2012. Web. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html Tanner, Sonja. In Praise of Plato’s Poetic Imagination. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010. Print. Read More