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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Monday 14th April 2008 00:30 in Human Relations

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceI read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was about 20 years old, very reflective and introspective, and familiarising myself with philosophical texts. I thought it rather meandering and weird, and very much born of its era (and I still do). It is not rigorous philosophy and is written somewhat in the style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I adopted this abstruce style myself at that time as I wrote thousands of words of reflections. I even used the name Phædrus, from the novel, as a pseudonym for a while on chat clients (we called them “talkers”) back in 1994. At that point there was no MSN and no Internet Explorer, just NSCA Mosaic and Lynx, a text-based browser - and the talkers consisted of just a command line.

Whatever the book’s shortcomings, though, it certainly contains a number of insightful remarks, and here are some of them:

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.”

“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 solutions all are simple… after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.”

Robert M. Pirsig





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