Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 2 Summary
Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Part 2, Affiliate 8 | Summary
Summary
In this chapter, the narrator leads readers through a "mindful" motorcycle repair because the art of motorbike maintenance is "actually a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." The narrator explains that rational understanding of a motorcycle requires agreement of what'south inside the engine. The possessor must interpret the symptoms before they tin set them. For this, precision measuring instruments are essential: "The enormous forces of heat and explosive pressure level inside this engine can only be controlled through the kind of precision these instruments requite." It's impossible for a motorcycle to work perfectly, but using and respecting precision instruments takes the rider as close as possible to perfection and to a functioning that "would exist called magic if it were non so completely rational in every style."
The narrator explains that the motorcycle is a "prepare of concepts worked out in steel," a set of interrelated structures operation every bit a unit. Motorcycle owners need to understand that their machines are not complicated, disruptive contraptions filled with mysterious steel gadgets and parts. Rather, they represent human ideas and creative labor.
The grouping is in a happy mood as they get together for a restaurant lunch. John mentions that the governor of Montana was once said to accept a list of l dangerously radical college professors. The narrator answers that if the list is that long, it must comprise his own name.
Every bit the group leaves the eatery and heads for home, they laissez passer a urban center park—and the narrator is suddenly visited by a retention. Phaedrus once slept on that bench on his way to the higher in Bozeman.
Analysis
The narrator's exposition of a "completely rational process"—motorcycle maintenance—is given more than space than his more dramatic memory of Phaedrus sleeping on a park bench. In this department, the clan between motorcycle maintenance and rationality is highlighted. It is not, of course, the just philosophical clan between the two, but it is a betoken of significant note: "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a report of the fine art of motorbike maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." This is at present Part 2 of the text, and as the reader enters Part 2, the focus begins to shift from occasional allusions to philosophical ideas to a more overt focus on them.
The reader may find it helpful to consider that the initial department of the book has functioned to establish that the narrator is not "insane"; therefore, his philosophical ideas are not without merit. The structure of the book is such that the reader has at present had ample time to form a connexion to the narrator, to see him as true, insightful, and experienced. These traits allow for the deeper, more intensive inquiries that are about to boss the text in the chapters to follow.
Here, for example, Pirsig utilizes a visual chart to demonstrate his point that he is "working on concepts." The inclusion of a visual chart is a departure from the writing manner in prior chapters. Moreover, afterward he has branched into this approach, he points to a further alignment of his book-length use of the motorcycle and its associated aspects (maintenance, parts, and relationship to landscape and rider) with philosophical inquiry. The narrator notes that the very stuff of the machine—steel—has no shape. "Steel has no more than shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine hither. These shapes are all out of someone's mind." Much like concepts, the stuff that makes up the machine has no form until it is given class, meaning, and shape by man.
The connectedness betwixt Phaedrus'southward insanity and philosophy is addressed in brief equally part of this discussion. The narrator states, "That's what Phaedrus was talking about when he said it'south all in the mind." The reader is invited to question the idea that Phaedrus was insane. Pirsig has just demonstrated to the reader that these are sound ideas: concepts have been subdivided into hierarchies, and the similarity betwixt man giving raw steel shape and man giving concepts shape has been outlined conspicuously. Apparently, these are the things Phaedrus was maxim when he was alleged insane.
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