Abstract
With the passing of Robert M. Pirsig, I felt that it was an appropriate time to write a tribute to his work and the influence it has had on my own theorising in regard to autistic ways of being. This reflection utilises the concept of an ‘aut-ethnography’ to examine passages that I had highlighted word by word when I first read Pirsig’s book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These fragments contain links to a number of theoretical ‘lines of flight’ within my own work and that of others, from his concepts of dynamic ‘quality’ to his discussion on the tension between scientific method and lived experience.
Keywords:
Introduction
Luckily, one might say, I grew up in a family that loved books. Although I was of the persuasion of reading the Atlas, or Observer books, there was one book on my mother’s shelf that stood out above all the others with a strange and enticing title. That book was the best-selling philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig Citation1974). It was not until I was a young adult that I actually read it, yet it was to have an impact upon me that perhaps few other books have, and so this article is a tribute to that influence.
When I first opened Zen and read the introductory phrase I was intrigued by the riddle of what it meant and what would lay ahead for me in reading it:
What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? (Pirsig Citation1974, 9)
Aut-ethnography
Unlike auto-ethnography which often seeks to construct a coherent narrative of self over time, to me an aut-ethnography (at least my experience/version) is a fragmented one, where snippets of information are formed into ‘rhizomatic’ patterns of shifting meanings. This article seeks to simply reflect on the passages I underlined some 25 years previously in my reading of Pirsig’s first book (Pirsig Citation1974). I wanted to trace the passages I had originally highlighted and decipher patterns in the fragments that resonated with my work since that time.
Ghost in the machine
As a child I had experienced significant psychological trauma following a road-traffic accident and resultant symptoms that one might consider today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Having had some negative experiences with psychiatrists, I tended to avoid them. For a number of reasons I had also withdrawn from university. For years I had felt a ‘presence’ in my life that I found difficult to explain. Was it a ‘displaced super-ego’? Was it just a symbolic manifestation of hidden influences upon my being as it was then, and is now? I called this alter-ego ‘the conductor’ and wrote poems about my relationship with this figure. It was quite a revelation to find interesting parallels with these experiences in Pirsig’s work and the use of his Phaedrus, along with his accounts of trauma at the hands of psychiatric professionals. Making such a connection made me feel less isolated, less alone.
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to make their place among the living. (Pirsig Citation1974, 43)
He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments, and political organisations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his earlier failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary of institutional truths for the remainder of his time. (Pirsig Citation1974, 124)
The scientific method and lived experience
What you’ve got here, really is two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here. (Pirsig Citation1974, 63; original emphasis)
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. (Pirsig Citation1974, 86)
From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. (Pirsig Citation1974, 85)
Monotropism, dispositional diversity and the double empathy problem
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking, from a completely different dimension. (Pirsig Citation1974, 62; original emphasis)
Quality and flow
But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality, but when you try and say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. (Pirsig Citation1974, 187; original emphasis)
In previous work (McDonnell and Milton Citation2014) I have argued that the repetitive behaviours often referred to in relation to autistic people could be interpreted as ‘flow’-like states, where someone is fully immersed in the ‘dynamic quality’ of an activity. Flow in this sense can be linked to the notion of ‘gumption’ (or interest). Interestingly, however, CitationPirsig relates notions of ‘quality’ and absorption in an activity with ‘care’:
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on with other things. (Pirsig Citation1974, 36)
When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to ‘care’ about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. (Pirsig Citation1974, 300)
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. (Pirsig Citation1974, 136)
Final remarks
In just two philosophical novels, Pirsig offers a myriad of insights that this article has merely scratched the surface of, and so I would encourage readers to dust down those old copies and read them anew.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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