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Example research essay topic: The Zen And Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance - 1,761 words

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The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance The book by Pirsig contains a whole mirage of ideas and elaborate theories on life and the world within it. It is a search for truth, and understanding of knowledge at its highest. The narrator and his son are simple marionettes used to string along the underlying themes that Pirsig is trying to get across. Within these marionettes you will find the true meaning of the story depicted through Pirsig's metaphoric use of imagery. In the narrators journey across the country he falsely sets out for a peaceful motorcycle drive with his son and his friends. However, along the path he is faced with brief flashbacks down memory lane.

As Phaedrus he slips in and out of his mind, finds himself no longer on a peaceful path to California, but on a quest into the higher country of the mind to find truth. As Pirsig beings to understand more and more about his buried past, he continues to revive these previous ideas and make them the main focus of his journey. Truth is now what Phaedrus wants to find, along with the complex ideologies of philosophy. Pirsig's former self, Phaedrus, was a teacher of rhetoric and in between detailed description of the present road trip are memories of Phaedrus teaching frustration that begin as fragments in Pirsig's mind. He gets stuck on what constitutes quality and that is the beginning of his desperate study of philosophy. What is most remarkable about the book is the way that it pinpoints the spiritual vacuum in the pursuit of more and shinier personal items.

Unlike many books from this time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance upholds a concept of nobility and worth connected to pursuing material progress in ways that reflect eliminating low quality and replacing it with high quality. Think of this as being like the joy of craftsmanship, compared to the dullness of the assembly line. By setting high standards, expanding those standards, sharing those standards with others, and inspiring people to experience life more fully, we can move forward spiritually as well as intellectually. The motorcycle maintenance details connect these abstractions back to the practical issues of every day, as we roll along across country with the author and his son dealing with the realities of keeping our bike running where the repair and parts options are very limited. Practically the motorcycle and its maintenance are archetypes for technology, and the qualities of these are metaphors for the philosophical virtues. In fact the concept of Quality and the ancient debate between rational and subjective views of the world are truly the subject of the book.

Much of the discourse, plainly, is appropriated from The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which seeks to isolate from among all goods of the world and all enlightenment's some quality, which Pirsig calls Quality, appropriately enough. The genesis of the experiment came from a writing assignment he gave asking students to define quality. The reasoning goes, if you cannot reduce it to other things, it must be its own thing. Quality, then, exists independently of other objects and concepts. Robert Pirsig also flips back and forth between two levels of consciousness.

He opens with a factual, narrated story of his trip through Minnesota. However, he often steps up to a higher philosophical level, a high country of the mind, as he likes to say. At one point he may be talking about chain adjuster links on a motorcycle, and at another he may be writing about the true meaning of a ghost, and how his former personality is a ghost that was not buried well. As the reader proceeds deeper into the book, the philosophical level of the book heightens, moving into discussions of Kant, romanticism and classicism, and finally, at what is truly the climax of the book and the impetus for Pirsig's insanity, an in depth analysis of quality. The careful, gradual escalation into Pirsig's high country makes sure that the reader enjoys a plot line also, making sure that the he or she does not get any altitude sickness from prolonged exposure to metaphysical philosophy, but at the same time, the reader can make a profound philosophical journey out of the book. Pirsig believes that the reconciliation lies in a deeper (pre-classical) understanding of Quality.

Quality is neither objective nor subjective, it is prior to them; it is the primordial ether from which the objective / subjective dualism arises. Phaedrus consults the Tao de Ching of the Taoist way of seeing things that corresponds with quality as the Buddha, scientific reality and the goal of Art. Quality goes beyond objectivity and subjectivity; it creates the subjects and objects of the world and a person who gets this is a person filled with gumption. They do not get trapped in ruts, but are aware of new ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing. To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular and very unimportant.

Phaedrus claim that Quality is the Tao is true. It is hard to find the way to test the truth, since all Phaedrus did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another. He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what the Quality was. Or, more likely, he may not have understood the Tao. I think, furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of what the Tao is. That sounds like an overwhelming rejection of what he thought and said, but it is not.

I believe it is a statement he would have agreed with himself, since any description of Quality is a kind of definition and must therefore fall short of its mark. I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth and thus retard an understanding of Quality. No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been in assimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it is the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad Quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century.

I want to go at these now in as orderly a manner as possible. The first step down from Phaedrus statement that Quality is the Buddha is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are not unified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that quality is the central term of all three, and that this quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three not unified areas have a basis for intro conversion.

The relationship of quality to the area of art has been shown rather exhaustively through a pursuit of Phaedrus understanding of Quality in the Art of rhetoric. Actually, art is high-quality endeavor. In the area of Religion, the rational relationship of quality to the Godhead needs to be more thoroughly established. For the time being one can meditate on the fact that the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical. It is in the area of Science that I want to focus attention in the immediate future, for this is the area that most badly needs the relationship established. The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are value free, that is, quality free, has to work.

It is that value freedom that underlines the death-force effect to which attention was brought early in the Chautauqua. Pirsig's book explores the ways in which eastern philosophies can help western thinkers move toward quality. The book covers a lot of ground, very quickly and is not a philosophical textbook. If a person does not know much about philosophy, this book will not change that fact, but it will make a person to question a lot of the assumptions he or she has made. Pirsig asks us the question whether science and logic can really bring us closer to the Truth. However, we should not forget that quality is indefinable.

It comes before thought, and before actions. Any attempt at describing it is useless, because as soon as a person attempts to categorize it, he or she is only talking about one aspect of it. What Pirsig does in this book, is an attempt to show us ways that we can use quality in our lives. He calls his main character Phaedrus, which comes from Plato's dialogue by the same name. Pirsig states, My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out.

These can be left alone for a while. Theres a place for them but theyve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. Weve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now its just about depleted. Everyones just about out of gumption. And I think its about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource individual worth. (Gurteen) If you feel that the world is becoming more and more empty and hollow, and think that part of your basic humanity has been stolen by alarm clocks, concrete, automobiles, and computers, The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may help you in finding the quality that resides within technology, yet is so often ignored by those who wield technology like a biological weapon.

If you are searching for answers, this book will give you a few more questions, and help you realize that life is about the questions, not the answers! Bibliography: Pirsig, Robert M. The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam, 1981 Course, G. Thomas.

The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as Prophetic Autobiography. Rendezvous, 1977 Gurteen: On Personal Quality by Robert M. Pirsig, web


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