Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Morrow, 1974. Toronto: Bantam, 1975.

Eventually a best-selling — and for a while highly influential—attempt to show how a world split into "hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic" can be reunited through a proper apprecition of "Quality," a "real understanding" of which "captures the System, tames it, and puts it to work for one's own personal use . . ." (Bantam edn., 200). Since "the System" is mostly technology and the intellectual approach to the world underlying technology (14-15), the analysis offered by ZAMM is quite useful for an introd. to the philosophical oppositions RMP has indentified—even if Quality, thus far, has failed to synthesize the oppositions and contradictions of Western culture. (See under this Category, the entries for T. Roszak.)