Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Part I
6
The analytic method one can rationally analyze an object by breaking it down into its components. one can also break it down by function of its components
classic vs romantic
the knife that is used to dissect the object of analysis
7
Phaedrus' knife
romantic seeing the sand as is analytic sorting the sand "... it is necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all"
What I take this to mean is that when you are trying to understand something, romantics would look at the items as is in its beauty, analytics would try to dissect it to understand its component. While Phaedrus is recommending a way that unites these two approaches in one, he is also saying that we must also consider the entity doing the understanding... to fully understand the thing.
the analytic thought
the buddha exists within the analytic thought.
Phaedrus was pursuing the ghost of rationality.
Part II
8
motorcycle maintenancee being alert and looking for things if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.
peopl who havee never worked with steel associatee it with shapes - pipes, rods, girders etc. a person who does machining or foundry work sees steel as having no shape at all. Steel can by any shape if you are skilled enough.
tying a philosophical idea to a tangible object like motorcycle for explanation
9
logic induction : reasoning from particular experiences to general truths. deductive : start from general observations and predict a specific obseervation
11
lateral drift. exploring sideways
13
robert pirsig is impressed with how Phaedrus cleaves the College. He could have chosen students, professors, administrators as components of a college but instead he cleaves it into the church and the location. this is whats being refered to in Heading 7 above as Phaedrus' knife. being able to look at something and break it into constituents and which constituents you choose to select can be illuminating.
19
: 26 : Gumption traps
ego anxiety boredom boredom can be a sign of deeper issuee and yyou might need to turn towards them before fixing your motorcycle
The best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when you're in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
What does this mean? What it means is that you won't be able to avoid the gumption traps mentioned in this book when you are fixing your bike, if you live with those gumption traps in your life. If you approach your life with ego or anxiety, you aren't going to be able to just put them aside on the weekend when you are fixing the bike. When you are anxious while debugging a problem at work, I know that its usually because there is a deadline and a client is going to want to see this work when i don't have it ready. Did this anxiety arouse just now when you encountered this bug or was it festering for the last month when you didn't assign it enough time or work on it with great care.
IV
27 : the nightmare about confronting Phaedrus
28 :
Quality in my work
[[Quality]]
If euclidean geometry describes reality, what does non-euclidean geometry describe Jun 27 2021
Why do I like this book
Merger of creative and rational
the metaphor of motorcycle maintenance aligns with debugging. the chapter on gumptions trap might as well have been about debugging software bugs.
The treatise on Quality I am not sure I understand the entire thing about quality mentioned in the book and that might be the reason I re-read parts of it. But anyone who think of themselves as being engaged in a creative endeavour, has had to grapple with the question of Quality (or Goodness, as its nearest colloquial equivalent). I have wondered about what good work is and how one does it. If I were to trust my personal experience, I know that a lot of my creative ideas have not come from a rational process. I've experienced waking up from a state of semi sleep to jot down an idea. I've sometimes thought of something that's impressed myself. If the idea arose from within me, this surprise seems unintuitive, how can one surprise oneself. Some explanations that I have found of this experience lean towards the mystical side. While appealing, its always been at odds with my world view.
Braindump
how does one teach anything without getting too analytical? Phaedrus is upset that aristotle's method of teaching rhetoric involves listing down components and the relationship between them. How would one do it? Whats a method of teaching a new thing that exhibits Quality?
Pirsig read F. S. C. Northrop's book The Meeting of East and West which related Western culture to the culture of East Asia in a systematic way.
Picked up from https://www.solidangl.es/post/varieties-the-spice-of-life When doing mathematics "rigorously," we develop things in a very meticulous way. We state our axioms, define our terms carefully, prove our theorems logically, prove more theorems on top of those, and so on. You're not allowed to use something unless you've proven it, lest the foundation of your arguments be put at risk. This is the norm for writing mathematical papers, as it should be, since that level of rigor is crucial for advancing the field.
But that's not how we actually do mathematics.
We tinker with examples, notice interesting relationships, and fiddle around until things become clear. Only then do we decide on the best order to elegantly define our terms and prove our results.
So why is it that in textbooks and in the classroom, we start with the cleaned-up end result, rather than letting students partake in the journey that gets us there?
analytic method is looking at something from a distance classic method takes you within the item and makes you the source