Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The chapter opens with a flashback of Chris at six years old. He and Phaedrus are driving through a ruined city and neither seem to know where they are. Chris mentions that they are looking for the “bunk-bedders,” and the pair drive around for hours in their search. The narrator has lost grip on reality for the most part, it seems, and Chris is aware of this. The narrator asks him where they live, and Chris has to ask for directions to their house from strangers. At home, Phaedrus’s wife is angry. Chris defends his father, and yet he has a look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. This was the moment for Chris, when he realized his father was different, and would perhaps never be the same. The flashback helps the narrator with his resolve. He plans to put Chris on a bus back home when they reach San Francisco, sell the motorcycle, and check into a hospital.

The narrator then decides to recount the conclusion of Phaedrus’ story while he still has time left. When Phaedrus asked his colleague Sarah where he learn about Quality as a subject in English, he had no clue, citing that her field was Ancient Greek, and that the entire field was about Quality. From this insight, Phaedrus begins looking for a college to obtain his PhD, and finds one at the University of Chicago where the board consists of unique academics whose fields seem to work well with Phaedrus’s Quality.

Chris begins asking the narrator what their purpose in traveling is. The narrator wants to tell him it is an exercise in Quality, but knows this will not satisfy Chris. He realizes the animosity he feels from Chris is because Chris knows he is hiding something, and that he will have to tell Chris the truth and explain his past to him eventually. A pivotal point comes later in the chapter when the two visit Crater Lake. The place is touristy and Chris again questions their purpose for visiting the lake, this time in front of others. As they prepare to leave, the narrator sees that Chris is crying.

Phaedrus applies to the program in Chicago and is admitted by the interim acting Chairman based on his resume. When the program’s Chairman returns, Phaedrus interviews with the scholar for a scholarship, but is caught up on one question from the Chairman as he was before dropping out of college earlier in his life. The Chairman remarks to his field of English composition, distinguishing it as a methodological field. In essence, he separates substance and methodology in a way that contradicts Phaedrus’s principles on Quality. Phaedrus returns to the mountains in Montana, annoyed and disappointed that the committee’s dualistic approach might undermine his entire thesis without even giving him a chance to explain matters. Phaedrus then researches the committee’s principles to see what he can find and comes across the writings of its Chairman. To his surprise, they seem to be a different picture than the impressive Chairman with whom he had the short interview. The writings were all obscure, painfully so. Phaedrus realizes, however, that the obscurity might actually be deliberate.

As it turns out, the program was at the center of a major controversy surrounding Aristotle and how his thoughts should or should not play a pivotal role in higher education. Phaedrus learned that the Chairman is the last remnant of a group of detractors who discounted empirical scientific education and placed Aristotle’s thoughts, and the substance/method dichotomy above all else. He also learned that the Chairman demanded his pupils subscribe to his Aristotelian theories. Realizing that he probably would not be accepted by the Chairman based on Quality’s conflicting stance with Aristotelian thinking, Phaedrus writes the Chairman and strongly worded letter explaining matters. He explains his theses on Quality and how it refutes a dualistic division between substance and methodology, and as such, comes to an anti-Aristotelian conclusion. This spirit of competition, however, should be welcomed at the University of Chicago, to contribute to the overall discourse in Aristotle.

The letter written to the Chairman is ego-driven and delusional, showing how far Phaedrus has gone. Given the facts, the committee actually suggests the Phaedrus study with the Philosophy department instead, but as Phaedrus has already been admitted to the interdisciplinary department and wants to continue with it out of a sense of competition.

Phaedrus’ family relocates to Chicago, and as he has no scholarship from the committee to study at the program, he has to support himself by teaching rhetoric full-time at the University of Illinois’s Navy Pier campus. During this time, Phaedrus studied the Ancient Greeks obsessively and became even more convinced that due to the unconscious internalization of their thoughts, Western society has been badly damaged. Phaedrus also realizes that in order to reject the subject-object division at the heart of Greek though, he will actually have to reject the Greek notion of “mythos,” which is “one’s cultural surroundings,” in favor again of a pre-mythos Quality. This stance in relation to such a cornerstone belief of western thought will make him seem like a madman.

The narrator and Chris finally reach a town called Grant’s Pass, where they check in to a local motel.

The narrator and Chris take care of errands while in town, and while Chris is washing the clothes, the narrator goes off in search of a chain guard for the motorcycle. Finding none, he instead finds a welder who, though having a bad attitude, is a very skilled craftsman. The narrator complements the man, but does not receive a response. In fact, the narrator notes that people on the East and West coasts in general carry a feeling of loneliness, and are much more isolated than those in the Midwest, for instance. This way of thinking is again a result of technology, of mass media and a desire to search but not knowing what to look for. Quality, in fact, is what is needed.

The classroom environment as the University of Chicago was taxing, and Phaedrus read Aristotle frantically, albeit with the wrong end in mind, to ensure his professor could not catch him in a trap during class. The professor takes his anger out on another student, and by doing so, Phaedrus saw how to best combat the professor. This in turn frightens the professor, however, and during subsequent classes he was always on his guard and afraid of Phaedrus attacking him during class. The more Phaedrus studied Aristotle, the more enrages he became in response to Aristotle having such a negative view of rhetoric. Phaedrus also heavily took issue with the concept of “dialectic” in Aristotle’s writing. There seemed to be something about the word that even frightened the Professor of Philosophy, and Phaedrus realized that he could find answers by investigating the concept of dialectic itself.

The class then moved on to Plato, which was a relief to Phaedrus. However, Phaedrus took issue with Plato’s equation of rhetoric with “the Bad.” During this time, Phaedrus became obsessed with his idea of Quality and proving its place in the world. He read to prove theories wrong, not so much as to gain insight. When asked one class period to answer a question, Phaedrus agonized over the question that he could not answer. He sat in silence, going over all of the possible outcomes in his mind. The fact angered him, and the professor of philosophy became increasingly alarmed, so much so that he dismissed class early.

Attempting to find context for Plato’s rejection of rhetoric and, more importantly, Sophists, Phaedrus research into pre-Socratic Greece and even older modes of thought. He found that the entire reason for Plato and Aristotle’s stance against the Sophists was that they posed an immense threat to Plato’s idea of Truth. Once again, dualistic thinking shaped the world as we know it, truth as relative or absolute, the “horse” or “horseness” debate of Plato’s. Phaedrus also found that the Sophists were teachers of virtue, and so had to establish what was meant by virtue. When researching Greek heroes, and citing the Iliad, Phaedrus realized that what motivated Hector of Troy was “arête,” or excellence, and more to the point, an excellence for oneself as opposed to for others. This excellence aligned for Phaedrus with Quality. Seeing excellence in this light, it was clear to Phaedrus that Quality had been there all along.

Returning to Plato, Phaedrus realized that Plato had not destroyed “arête,” but had turned it into his concept of “the Good,” and made it a fixed concept. This is how Aristotle was able to later change the idea by placing it in a subservient role. As Western society is based on this train of thought, it is also the reason that Western society is so devoid of Quality.