Zen and the Art of a Higher Education

 

Within hours of Robert Pirsig’s death at age eighty-eight in April 2017, newspapers and internet outlets began announcing the passing of a philosophical enigma and author of the surprise blockbuster Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974). The obituaries were variations on the same theme: they described how Pirsig was initially blindsided when his book, after having been rejected by 121 publishers, became “one of history’s unlikeliest bestsellers.” Or they noted how the reclusive author reluctantly navigated his fame in the years after its publication. While a handful mentioned “Pirsig pilgrims” who still today retrace the motorcycle tour from Minnesota to San Francisco featured in his novel, most discussed the book’s significance in the past tense. With its “do-it-yourself” mix of motorcycle repair and philosophical inquiry, Pirsig’s book became the bible of the counterculture generation, many of whom were as disenchanted with technological progress as they were with their parents, political leaders, and professors. Pirsig had hoped that his book would also be taken seriously by professional philosophers. But the closest it came to the academy, according to the obituaries, was as a “dog-eared presence in many a college dorm room.”

Beyond agreeing that ZAMM is a relic of the 1970s, the obituary writers struggled to characterize both the genre and the contents of the book that propelled Pirsig into global stardom. At its most basic, it is a first-person narrative of a father who takes a motorcycle trip with his eleven-year-old son and two friends, all the while journeying intellectually and existentially into his past, the philosophical questions that both enliven and torment him, and his fraught relationships with his boy, his friends, and the world. It is a thinly veiled autobiography, for it follows, in novelized form, Pirsig’s own path from intellectual wunderkind to wayward drifter to technical writer to college rhetoric instructor and to doctoral student in philosophy before succumbing to—and nominally recovering from—a debilitating mental illness that landed him in a psychiatric hospital. How does one describe a book that works in different registers (narrative, expository, analytical), speaks in different idioms (mechanical, epistemological, experiential), and addresses such a wide range of themes, from the history of science, Eastern philosophies, and the Montana landscape to camping, valves, and values? The obituaries concurred with the assessment of one reviewer who marveled: “Anything you call it, it’s also something else. They may seem silly, but these problems of nomenclature are symptomatic.” Nevertheless, they all agreed that this inscrutable book—with this most improbable title, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—is utterly, profoundly, sometimes maddeningly sui generis.

Except that it isn’t. While Pirsig’s book is in many respects singular, he drew its title as well as insights on “Oriental philosophy” from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948). Herrigel was a German philosopher who took instruction in kyūdō (“the way of the bow”) in Japan between 1924 and 1929 under Master Awa Kenzō, in order to penetrate what he considered to be the “pure introspective mysticism” of Zen Buddhism. Herrigel’s book recounts his almost six-year-long struggle to experience firsthand the “mystery” of Zen’s “primordial mystic phenomenon.” This required fully submitting to his master, abnegating his “I,” while trying to tap into the mysterious “It” of the “bottomless ground of Being.” (When, in frustration with his bow and himself, Herrigel asked his master what exactly this “It” was, the latter answered, “Once you have understood that, you have no further need of me.”) While the book was enthusiastically received by Western readers when it first appeared in English translation in 1953, Arthur Koestler, for one, was disturbed that it was saturated in “the more ponderous kind of Germanic mysticism,” and manifested an “Eastern guru-father complex” that fetishized authoritarianism. Something was off. Gershom Scholem later confirmed what Koestler’s antitotalitarian nose knew: if Zen in the Art of Archery seemed to reek of a disturbing “Zen-Nazism,” it may very well be because Herrigel spent his “career as a convinced Nazi” and card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party, a fact “carefully hushed up by . . . his admirers.”

Nazism, Mysticism, Zen, Archery, Motorcycles, Guru—this is the sort of word combination you might want to consider deleting from your computer’s search history. Herrigel’s and Pirsig’s books share a portion of a title and an interest in using “Zen” for coming into right relationship with the world. But that’s where the similarities end. While Herrigel’s Zen is mystical, esoteric, and accessible to a chosen few, Pirsig’s is plainspoken, unadorned, practical, and pragmatic.

Differences notwithstanding, the two books helped give birth to a new prolific “Zen-and-the-Art-of” title industry, and with it the convention of yoking “Zen” to an “art” of some task, craft, or field of knowledge. Alan Watts wasn’t wrong when in 1957 he assured his Western readers that Zen “may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.” But even he might have been taken aback to learn that there are now “Zen-and-the-Art-of” guides for everything from knitting, running, dodgeball, changing diapers, diabetes maintenance, medical imaging, and statecraft to screenwriting, healthy eating, successful BBQing, the SAT exam, poker playing, getting rich, and committing murder.

No doubt, many authors simply use the formulation as a marketing hook. (Though few are as honest as Ray Bradbury, who, for his 1990 bestseller, Zen in the Art of Writing, admitted: “I selected the above title, quite obviously for its shock value.”) Nevertheless, many of the works—like Pirsig’s and Herrigel’s before them—draw on “Zen” as an “art” to sharply rebuke received forms of wisdom, institutional learning, and familiar intellectual authorities. Their endorsement of an alternative “way of knowing” might be productive for readers if the authors actually provided some history of Mahayana Buddhism, distinguished Zazen from Zen, or perhaps even explained that while Zen emphasizes open experience, it is indeed an epistemology. Instead, as it crops up in this genre, Zen is typically a thin conceit. It can be many things, but even in all of its myriad interpretations and uses, Zen is not an admonition to, as Bradbury puts it, just “learn from instinct,” and “Don’t Think!” “Beginner’s mind” isn’t an exhortation to be stupid, naïve, or incurious. Rather, it is a powerful way of resetting one’s approach to a knotty intellectual problem or an intractable moral dilemma; but it can also just be a way of finding the wonders and joys of prosaic tasks like housecleaning and dog walking.

While Pirsig’s ZAMM did the most to establish the genre, his book is neither derivative of Herrigel’s mystification and authoritarianism nor befuddled by the slack anti-intellectualism of the knockoffs that followed it. Too many of these books, however, followed Pirsig’s title but not his book’s erudition or earnest intellectual engagement. They used “Zen” only to mock expertise, evade thinking with evidence, or badmouth analytic thought.

Still we might ask of Pirsig’s opus: What’s Zen got to do with it? If we heed Pirsig’s “Author’s Note” on the first page of the book, the answer might be: nothing. “It should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.” Note taken.

But despite this conscientious disclaimer, there is a lot of “Zen” talk in the book. It discusses concerns that should look familiar to any serious Zen practitioner. ZAMM explores the illusion of the self, all the ways in which our egos blinker, trick, and tangle us. It provides a vivid portrayal of impermanence—not only as the father and his companions ride their motorcycles from place to place, but also in his meditations on the “temporal condition” of ideas, beliefs, even scientific truths. The book offers an unmistakable critique of attachment and incessant striving, the kind of impassioned longings that characterized his earlier zeal for “Quality” and landed him in a psychiatric ward. In this regard, at least, the book is a challenge to the elsewhereness of truth:

Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible. . . . To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

Should Pirsig’s ZAMM be read as a primer on Zen? No. But neither should it be dismissed as a period piece of the ’70s counterculture. To do so would be to miss how it subtly works with some of the insights of Zen and Pirsig’s own academic and para-academic experiences as one long comment on higher learning, which is still surprisingly resonant today. Pirsig’s references to the peculiarities, peccadilloes, and power of the university are frequent and unmistakable. ZAMM observes the tensions between radical college professors and conservative state politics, reflects on the euphemism of a “teaching college” (where “you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs”), and worries over a college education that encourages students’ “calculated mimicry.” No doubt there’s a now-clichéd petulance in his characterization of the university as a cool and technocratic “Church of Reason” (in which, at times, he desperately wanted to worship, but which others rebuffed as a “blind . . . sinister, and inhuman” citadel). Yet these are the warnings of a true believer in the mission, if not methods, of the modern academy.

ZAMM may be critical of particular forms of intellectuality, but it is in no way an anti-intellectual screed. Indeed, intellectual engagement happens all over the place—in the sun and in the seminar, alone on dirt roads and together with students in the classroom. Even though this is a travel narrative, most of the novel’s episodes take place in the narrator’s head. There are no crashes, no dramatic tire blowouts, no scenes with the father and son being chased by coyotes from their campgrounds. It’s the narrator working through problems of philosophy, which he learned within and without the university, that drives the narrative. The thinking is the action.

ZAMM is in no way hostile to reason. Pirsig values “the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction.” He explores how discursive thought, though insufficient for understanding the world, should not be silenced or ignored, but observed with curiosity and compassion. He recommends the Zen Buddhist “beginner’s mind” as a powerful way of resetting one’s approach to a complicated task, a painful memory, struggles with a loved one, and thinking itself. But rational inquiry has its role to play, too, though as a complement to—not a replacement of—book learning, scientific experimentation, and immediate experience.

Pirsig long regretted that the book’s role in the life of the university was limited to students’ extracurricular reading while flopped on a beanbag at the end of a long day of classes. Here, Pirsig was only partly right. Though it is rare to find ZAMM on a syllabus for a philosophy course, it has been a persistent presence in the academy as a resource for educators to reflect on the “art” of teaching. For decades now, professors and academic administrators have enlisted ZAMM to consider what it would mean for them to “teach the whole person” and to show students the “gumption traps” that keep them from studying. They have turned to it to ask where “Quality” can be found in the rankings of academic departments and to consider the perils of using grades for motivating students. And they have found it to be a way to demonstrate to scientifically illiterate humanities students the rewards of joining the “two cultures” by showing them that “the Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

Even Pirsig’s use of chautauquas as a means of teaching, whether it be Zen, motorcycles, freshman English, or senior seminars, is worth a third look. I say “third,” and not “second,” because already in the 1970s, Pirsig’s first generation of readers—those of a “counterculture” least likely to find anything in Victorian culture worthy of their appreciation—discovered in ZAMM a reason to reconsider the form. If ever there was a Victorian institution, it was the chautauqua, the traveling lecture circuit designed to—as Pirsig put it—“edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment” to mass audiences (and which William James famously derided as “tame,” “second-rate,” and the “quintessence of every mediocrity”). Surely, James would have agreed with Pirsig that learning should never be reduced to modeling good “table manners,” nor should professors try to “sound like God talking for eternity, [as] that isn’t the way it ever is.” As Pirsig understood it, the true value of the chautauqua, as with any good form of instruction, is that “it’s never been anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever.” Thus, with the use of chautauquas, Pirsig managed a most remarkable feat, one college students would surely appreciate today. Namely, to use education to cultivate what the Victorians called “self-culture”: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself.’”

It may seem odd for the university educated or even university educators to welcome a book that seems to view the academy as enemy territory. But properly understood, and more in keeping with Pirsig’s original intentions, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance shows how the learning in a lecture hall or seminar room should be preparation for a life of learning on the open road. His claim that the “real university is a state of mind” doesn’t mean that there’s no work for bricks-and-mortar higher education to do. Just the opposite: it’s a reminder that awakening the appetite and practicing the skills for lifelong learning are what constitute a university education itself. The Zen and the art in a higher education would train students in these habits of mind and prepare them to take their learning with them, wherever they go, whatever roads they ride.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The God Beat

What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters 

Costica Bradatan and Ed Simon

Editors

Pirsig on Sidis

 Back down in the plains, in a country motel one night with nothing to read, Phædrus had found a small dog-eared Yankee magazine, thumbed through it, and stopped on a brief account by Cathie Slater Spence entitled In Search of the April Fool.

It was about a child prodigy who had possibly the highest intelligence ever observed, and who in his later life went nowhere. Born on April 1, 1898, it said, William James Sidis could speak five languages and read Plato in the original Greek by the age of five. At eight he passed the entrance for Harvard but had to wait three years to be admitted. Even so he became Harvard’s youngest scholar and graduated cum Jaude in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Frequently featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Sidis made the front page of The New York Times nineteen times.

But after graduating from Harvard, the Boy Wonder pursued his own obscure and seemingly meaningless interests. The press that had lionized him turned on him. The most scathing example came in the New Yorker in 1937. Entitled April Fool, the magazine article ridiculed everything from Sidis’s hobbies to his physical characteristics. Sidis sued for libel and invasion of privacy. Though he won a small out-of-court settlement for libel, the invasion of privacy charge was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision. The article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, the court conceded, but Sidis was a public figure and thus could not claim protection from the interest of the press, which continued to hound him until his death in 1944. Obituaries called him a prodigious failure and a burnt-out genius who had never achieved anything of significance despite his talents.

Dan Mahony of Ipswich, Massachusetts, read about Sidis in 1976 and was puzzled. What was he really doing and thinking all that time? Mahony wondered. It’s true he held low-paying jobs, but Einstein came up with the theory of relativity while working in a patent office. I had a feeling Sidis was up to more than most people thought.

Mahony has spent the last ten years looking into Sidis’s work. In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians.

At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on.

When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925!

Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony. For instance, we’ve found just one page of a manuscript called The Peace Paths, and people who knew Sidis have said they saw many more manuscripts. I think Sidis may still have a few surprises in store for us.

Phædrus set down the magazine and felt as though someone had thrown a rock through the motel window. Then he read the article over and over again in a sort of daze, as the impact of what he was reading sank deeper and deeper. That night he could hardly sleep.

It looked as though way back in the thirties Sidis had been on exactly the same thesis about Indians. He was trying to tell people some of the most important things that could be said about their country and they were rewarding him by publicly calling him a fool and failing to publish what he had written. There didn’t even seem to be any way to find out what Sidis had said.

Phædrus tried to contact the Mahony mentioned in the article but couldn’t find him, partly, he supposed, because his effort was only half-hearted. He knew that even if he did get a look at Sidis’s material there wasn’t much he could do about it. The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.

(...)

Phædrus thought about William James Sidis, the prodigy who could read five languages when he was five years old. After discovering what Sidis had said about Indians, Phædrus had read a full biography of him and found that when Sidis was a teenager he announced he would refuse to have anything to do with sex for the rest of his life. It seemed as though in order to sustain a satisfactory intellectual life he felt he had to cut himself off from social and biological domination except where they were absolutely necessary. This vow of ancient priests and ascetics was once considered a high form of morality, but in the Roaring Twenties of the twentieth century a new standard of morals had arrived, and when journalists found out about this vow they ridiculed Sidis mercilessly. That coincided with the beginning of a pattern of seclusion that lasted the rest of his life.

Is it better to have wisdom or is it better to be attractive to the ladies? That was a question debated by Provengal poets way back in the thirteenth century. Sidis opted for wisdom ...

Lila. Inquiry Into Morals

About education or journey into Quality

 Today now I want to take up the first phase of his journey into Quality, the nonmetaphysical phase, and this will be pleasant. It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way. Using his class notes as reference material I want to reconstruct the way in which Quality became a working concept for him in the teaching of rhetoric. His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.      

He'd been innovating extensively. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.    

  One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.   

   When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.  

    He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.    

  It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.    

  She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.     

 He was furious. “You're not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.   

   He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”   

   Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.”  

    Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.   

   He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about “nothing to say.”   

   In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, “Do you have to write about both sides?” Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.   

   As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.  

    That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything…from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.  

    He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, “Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education.”   

   Phćdrus thought about this, and when weeks later a very bright student couldn't think of a subject for a term paper, it was still on his mind, so he gave it to her as a topic. She didn't like the topic at first, but agreed to take it anyway.    

  Within a week she was talking about it to everyone, and within two weeks had worked up a superb paper. The class she delivered it to didn't have the advantage of two weeks to think about the subject, however, and was quite hostile to the whole idea of eliminating grades and degrees. This didn't slow her down at all. Her tone took on an old-time religious fervor. She begged the other students to listen, to understand this was really right. “I'm not saying this for him,” she said and glanced at Phćdrus. “It's for you.”   

   Her pleading tone, her religious fervor, greatly impressed him, along with the fact that her college entrance examinations had placed her in the upper one percent of the class. During the next quarter, when teaching “persuasive writing,” he chose this topic as a “demonstrator,” a piece of persuasive writing he worked up by himself, day by day, in front of and with the help of the class.    

  He used the demonstrator to avoid talking in terms of principles of composition, all of which he had deep doubts about. He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending class time picking nits in completed student work or holding up the completed work of masters for emulation. This time he developed the argument that the whole grading system and degree should be eliminated, and to make it something that truly involved the students in what they were hearing, he withheld all grades during the quarter. (...)

Phćdrus' argument for the abolition of the degree-and- grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, “Of course you can't eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that's what we're here for.”     

 She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.   

   The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal with generalities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, a student completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.    

  Such a student, the demonstrator hypothesized, would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment in.    

  Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he'd completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.    

  In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn't learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.  

    But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody's part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. He wasn't there for a real education in the first place and had no real business there at all. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.    

  The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don't whip me, I won't work.” He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.   

   This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, “the system,” is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, “location” point of view, but it's not the Church attitude.     

 The Church attitude is that civilization, or “the system” or “society” or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.   

   The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he'd abandoned, in what used to be called the “school of hard knocks.” Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that's what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he'd found his level. But don't count on it.   

   In time of six months; five years, perhaps…a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.    

  So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.  

    Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.    

  Such was Phćdrus' demonstrator, his unpopular argument, and he worked on it all quarter long, building it up and modifying it, arguing for it, defending it. All quarter long papers would go back to the students with comments but no grades, although the grades were entered in a book.    

  As I said before, at first almost everyone was sort of nonplussed. The majority probably figured they were stuck with some idealist who thought removal of grades would make them happier and thus work harder, when it was obvious that without grades everyone would just loaf. Many of the students with A records in previous quarters were contemptuous and angry at first, but because of their acquired self-discipline went ahead and did the work anyway. The B students and high-C students missed some of the early assignments or turned in sloppy work. Many of the low-C and D students didn't even show up for class. At this time another teacher asked him what he was going to do about this lack of response.    

  ”Outwait them,” he said. 

     His lack of harshness puzzled the students at first, then made them suspicious. Some began to ask sarcastic questions. These received soft answers and the lectures and speeches proceeded as usual, except with no grades.   

   Then a hoped-for phenomenon began. During the third or fourth week some of the A students began to get nervous and started to turn in superb work and hang around after class with questions that fished for some indication as to how they were doing. The B and high-C students began to notice this and work a little and bring up the quality of their papers to a more usual level. The low C, D and future F's began to show up for class just to see what was going on.      After midquarter an even more hoped-for phenomenon took place. The A-rated students lost their nervousness and became active participants in everything that went on with a friendliness that was uncommon in a grade-getting class. At this point the B and C students were in a panic, and turned in stuff that looked as though they'd spent hours of painstaking work on it. The D's and F's turned in satisfactory assignments.     

 In the final weeks of the quarter, a time when normally everyone knows what his grade will be and just sits back half asleep, Phćdrus was getting a kind of class participation that made other teachers take notice. The B's and C's had joined the A's in friendly free-for-all discussion that made the class seem like a successful party. Only the D's and F's sat frozen in their chairs, in a complete internal panic.   

   The phenomenon of relaxation and friendliness was explained later by a couple of students who told him, “A lot of us got together outside of class to try to figure out how to beat this system. Everyone decided the best way was just to figure you were going to fail and then go ahead and do what you could anyway. Then you start to relax. Otherwise you go out of your mind!”    

  The students added that once you got used to it it wasn't so bad, you were more interested in the subject matter, but repeated that it wasn't easy to get used to.  

    At the end of the quarter the students were asked to write an essay evaluating the system. None of them knew at the time of writing what his or her grade would be. Fifty-four percent opposed it. Thirty-seven percent favored it. Nine percent were neutral.      On the basis of one man, one vote, the system was very unpopular. The majority of students definitely wanted their grades as they went along. But when Phćdrus broke down the returns according to the grades that were in his book and the grades were not out of line with grades predicted by previous classes and entrance evaluations…another story was told. The A students were 2 to 1 in favor of the system. The B and C students were evenly divided. And the D's and F's were unanimously opposed!    

  This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by. (...)

Phćdrus thought withholding grades was good, according to his notes, but he didn't give it scientific value. In a true experiment you keep constant every cause you can think of except one, and then see what the effects are of varying that one cause. In the classroom you can never do this. Student knowledge, student attitude, teacher attitude, all change from all kinds of causes which are uncontrollable and mostly unknowable. Also, the observer in this case is himself one of the causes and can never judge his effects without altering his effects. So he didn't attempt to draw any hard conclusions from all this, he just went ahead and did what he liked.   

   The movement from this to his enquiry into Quality took place because of a sinister aspect of grading that the withholding of grades exposed. Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it's really learning. The questions, What's being taught? What's the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.      What was Phćdrus trying to do, anyway? This question became more and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemed right when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer. 

     But now this made no sense. If they already knew what was good and bad, there was no reason for them to take the course in the first place. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor…to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.  

    For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to do something but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at Phćdrus and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervous breakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn't doing.  

    He couldn't. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?      The next quarter he dropped the whole idea and went back to regular grading, discouraged, confused, feeling he was right but somehow it had come out all wrong. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.   

   He'd heard that Reed College in Oregon withheld grades until graduation, and during the summer vacation he went there but was told the faculty was divided on the value of withholding grades and that no one was tremendously happy about the system. During the rest of the summer his mood became depressed and lazy. He and his wife camped a lot in those mountains. She asked why he was so silent all the time but he couldn't say why. He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry into Values

    Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig's mistake

[We should not confuse religion with education. Building used for religious services should not be sold and transformed into whisky bar.]

 John and Sylvia eat their breakfast hot cakes and drink their coffee, still caught up in the mood of last night, but I'm finding it hard to get food down.   

   Today we should arrive at the school, the place where an enormous coalescence of things occurred, and I'm already feeling tense.   

   I remember reading once about an archeological excavation in the Near East, learning about the archeologist's feelings when he opened the forgotten tombs for the first time in thousands of years. Now I feel like some archeologist myself.    

  The sagebrush down the canyon now toward Livingston is like sagebrush you see all the way from here into Mexico.   

   This morning sunlight is the same as yesterday's except warmer and softer now that we're at a lower altitude again.   

   There is nothing unusual. It's just this archeological feeling that the calmness of the surroundings conceals things. A haunted place.   

   I really don't want to go there. I'd just as soon turn around and go back.  

    Just tension, I guess.      It fits one of the fragments of this memory, in which many mornings the tension was so intense he would throw up everything before he got to his first classroom. He loathed appearing before classrooms of students and talking. It was a complete violation of his whole lone, isolated way of life, and what he experienced was intense stage fright, except that it never showed on him as stage fright, but rather as a terrific intensity about everything he did. Students had told his wife it was just like electricity in the air. The moment he entered the classroom all eyes turned on him and followed him as he walked to the front of the room. All conversation died to a hush and remained at a hush even though it was several minutes, often, before the class started. Throughout the hour the eyes never strayed from him.    

  He became much talked about, a controversial figure. The majority of students avoided his sections like the Black Death. They had heard too many stories.   

   The school was what could euphemistically be called a “teaching college.” At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.    

  Yet despite this he called the school by a name that didn't make much sense, in fact sounded a little ludicrous in view of its actual nature. But the name had great meaning to him, and he stuck to it and he felt, before he left, that he had rammed it into a few minds sufficiently hard to make it stick. He called it a “Church of Reason,” and much of the puzzlement people had about him could have ended if they'd understood what he meant by this.    

  The state of Montana at this time was undergoing an outbreak of ultra-right-wing politics like that which occurred in Dallas, Texas, just prior to President Kennedy's assassination. A nationally known professor from the University of Montana at Missoula was prohibited from speaking on campus on the grounds that it would “stir up trouble.” Professors were told that all public statements must be cleared through the college public-relations office before they could be made.  

    Academic standards were demolished. The legislature had previously prohibited the school from refusing entry to any student over twenty-one whether he had a high-school diploma or not. Now the legislature had passed a law fining the college eight thousand dollars for every student who failed, virtually an order to pass every student.    

  The newly elected governor was trying to fire the college president for both personal and political reasons. The college president was not only a personal enemy, he was a Democrat, and the governor was no ordinary Republican. His campaign manager doubled as state coordinator for the John Birch Society. This was the same governor who supplied the list of fifty subversives we heard about a few days ago.    

  Now, as part of this vendetta, funds to the college were being cut. The college president had passed on an unusually large part of the cut to the English department, of which Phćdrus was a member, and whose members had been quite vocal on issues of academic freedom.    

  Phćdrus had given up, was exchanging letters with the Northwest Regional Accrediting Association to see if they could help prevent these violations of accreditation requirements. In addition to this private correspondence he had publicly called for an investigation of the entire school situation.  

    At this point some students in one of his classes had asked Phćdrus, bitterly, if his efforts to stop accred- itation meant he was trying to prevent them from getting an education.  

    Phćdrus said no.   

   Then one student, apparently a partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation.    

  Phćdrus asked how.    

  The student said they would post police to prevent it.     

 Phćdrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about.   

   That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.    

  It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.  

    Phćdrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phćdrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer “holy ground.” The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.  

    It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?    

  His notes, in response to this question, state the following:  The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.    

  In addition to this state of mind, “reason,” there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.      But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.    

  Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.      They see the second university, but fail to see the first.    

  I remember reading this for the first time and remarking about the analytic craftsmanship displayed. He avoided splitting the University into fields or departments and dealing with the results of that analysis. He also avoided the traditional split into students, faculty and administration.    

  When you split it either of those ways you get a lot of dull stuff that doesn't really tell you much you can't get out of the official school bulletin. But Phćdrus split it between “the church” and “the location,” and once this cleavage is made the same rather dull and imponderable institution seen in the bulletin suddenly is seen with a degree of clarity that wasn't previously available. On the basis of this cleavage he provided explanations for a number of puzzling but normal aspects of University life.     

 After these explanations he returned to the analogy of the religious church. The citizens who build such a church and pay for it probably have in mind that they're doing this for the community. A good sermon can put the parishioners in a right frame of mind for the coming week. Sunday school will help the children grow up right. The minister who delivers the sermon and directs the Sunday school understands these goals and normally goes along with them, but he also knows that his primary goals are not to serve the community. His primary goal is always to serve God. Normally there's no conflict but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister's sermons and threaten reduction of funds. That happens.    

  A true minister, in such situations, must act as though he'd never heard the threats. His primary goal isn't to serve the members of the community, but always God.   

   The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phćdrus said, is always Socrates' old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it's revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that. Normally this goal is in no conflict with the location goal of improving the citizenry, but on occasion some conflict arises, as in the case of Socrates himself. It arises when trustees and legislators who've contributed large amounts of time and money to the location take points of view in opposition to the professors' lectures or public statements. They can then lean on the administration by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don't say what they want to hear. That happens too.   

   True churchmen in such situations must act as though they had never heard these threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community ahead of everything else. Their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth.   

   That was what he meant by the Church of Reason. There was no question but that it was a concept that was deeply felt by him. He was regarded as something of a troublemaker but was never censured for it in any proportion to the amount of trouble he made. What saved him from the wrath of everyone around him was partly an unwillingness to give any support to the enemies of the college, but also partly a begrudging understanding that all of his troublemaking was ultimately motivated by a mandate they were never free from themselves: the mandate to speak the rational truth.    

  The lecture notes explain almost all of why he acted the way he did, but leave one thing unexplained…his fanatic intensity. One can believe in the truth and in the process of reason to discover it and in resistance to state legislatures, but why burn one's self out, day after day, over it?    

  The psychological explanations that have been made to me seem inadequate. Stage fright can't sustain that kind of effort month after month. Neither does another explanation sound right, that he was trying to redeem himself for his earlier failure. There is no evidence anywhere that he ever thought of his expulsion from the university as a failure, just an enigma. The explanation I've come to arises from the discrepancy between his lack of faith in scientific reason in the laboratory and his fanatic faith expressed in the Church of Reason lecture. I was thinking about the discrepancy one day and it suddenly came to me that it wasn't a discrepancy at all. His lack of faith in reason was why he was so fanatically dedicated to it.  

    You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.      The militancy of the Jesuits he somewhat resembled is a case in point. Historically their zeal stems not from the strength of the Catholic Church but from its weakness in the face of the Reformation. It was Phćdrus' lack of faith in reason that made him such a fanatic teacher. That makes more sense. And it makes a lot of sense out of the things that followed.    

  That's probably why he felt such a deep kinship with so many failing students in the back rows of his classrooms. The contemptuous looks on their faces reflected the same feelings he had toward the whole rational, intellectual process. The only difference was that they were contemptuous because they didn't understand it. He was contemptuous because he did. Because they didn't understand it they had no solution but to fail and for the rest of their lives remember the experience with bitterness. He on the other hand felt fanatically obliged to do something about it. That was why his Church of Reason lecture was so carefully prepared. He was telling them you have to have faith in reason because there isn't anything else. But it was a faith he didn't have himself.   

   It must always be remembered that this was the nineteen-fifties, not the nineteen-seventies. There were rumblings from the beatniks and early hippies at this time about “the system” and the square intellectualism that supported it, but hardly anyone guessed how deeply the whole edifice would be brought into doubt. So here was Phćdrus, fanatically defending an institution, the Church of Reason, that no one, no one certainly in Bozeman, Montana, had any cause to doubt. A pre-Reformation Loyola. A militant reassuring everyone the sun would rise tomorrow, when no one was worried. They just wondered about him.   

   But now, with the most tumultuous decade of the century between him and ourselves, a decade in which reason has been assailed and assaulted beyond the wildest beliefs of the fifties, I think that in this Chautauqua based on his discoveries we can understand a little better what he was talking about-a solution for it all-if only that were true-so much of it's lost there's no way of knowing.    

  Maybe that's why I feel like an archeologist. And have such a tension about it. I have only these fragments of memory, and pieces of things people tell me, and I keep wondering as we get closer if some tombs are better left shut.    

  Chris, sitting behind me, suddenly comes to mind, and I wonder how much he knows, how much he remembers.     

 We reach an intersection where the road from the park joins the main east-west highway, stop and turn on to it.    

  From here we go over a low pass and into Bozeman itself. The road goes up now, heading west, and suddenly I'm looking forward to what's ahead.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry into Values

Robert M. Pirsig