Why does /lit/ hate this book?
Because Eastern mysticism is gay, and it was only the boomers who thought it was clever to idolize whatever was exotic and foreign to them while simultaneously shitting all over their own culture. I liked the bit early on where he describes passing by a pond or marsh, and feeling the dampness of the air, and the smell of wet earth.
>>23812853Some days ago i started a thread over this and had to reply to all my posts myself. So be it.This is a 'second grade' book.It's written for delusional pretentious people by delusional pretentios people. /lit/ should like it though bc the trope of this book is 'im better than you in every way and fuck you by the way'.The idea of this book however was the opposite of picrel. That be 'no new age zen BS will save your soul and you're ethernally doomed'.P.s. the author does a pretty good job on shitting on the beatniks and kerouack, but the book ends with hoplesness similar that of 'on the road', ironically.
>>23812853Pirsig loved the smell of his own farts. >And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.
>>23813171i admit the levels of self-faggotry were skyrocketing high.The book is originally about STEMcel getting involved with "le philosophy" that gets him, 'the phaedrus' done. This is why other stemfags keep on loving this book. They are just too busy to pull their head out of their ass once in a while to look around.Combine this with self-righteousness of a Stoner and bob is your uncle. My background is physics and i can assure stemfags often self delet after getting involved with Kant.
>>23812921I remember reading the intro as a kid thinking " oh the writer must be really clever , wow, literally the most intelligent person IRL". Reading the book as an adult the cope detectors went through the roof. The guy was ready for anything just to make himself look justified. Kinda like self unfulfilled Ted Kaczinsky.
>>23812853This is on my backlog. I didn’t know it was not well liked here. That’s not going to convince me not to read it, although it’s no where near the top of my list. If pretentiousness is the main critique, then I’ll still give it a go. I can take on a certain level of self stomach-stew sniffing
The man is a moron. Pirsig is one of those STEM IQ autists that thinks because he got a big number on an aptitude test that makes him right about everything. Reading this book (which I had to do in high school) made me understand Foucault and the necessity of postmodernism because the alternative is to have to listen to billions of these assholes going around talking about "inherent quality" based on nothing more than their own subjective cultural values that they don't even realize exist as biases shaping their thoughts.
>>23814621>made me understand Foucault and the necessity of postmodernism because the alternative is to have to listen to billions of these assholes going aroundVery based take.
>>23813233A lot of autist STEMcels are extremely fucking stupid people. They aren't smart.>>23814621I notice a lot of nerds and geeks can't read books beyond ones that are the equivalent of Star Wars or Starship Troopers (the movie). Starship Troopers, the book would bore them. They only care about power armor and spaceships when the book isn't about any of that. They're the type of people who would want the worldbuilding of Animal Farm and read a book where the animals from Animal Farm go on adventures. There is nothing wrong with books like that, but I don't understand how people can't see the difference between those kinds of books and ones that are about ideas rather than a story about space bugs attacking Earth and they have to fight them. I would hate reading fiction if books like Animal Farm didn't exist and we were only left with fiction divorced from the human condition. I know it sounds pretentious, but some books seem to have a lot more impact than others.
>>23812853For the longest time I thought this book was a meme people pretended to like. I didn't realize people were actually serious until I upset someone who was praising it.
>>23812853>my son is hecking le mentally illerino>and bikes are.... le coolSuch a masterpiece
>>23812853>OHHH NOOOO!!!!!>OUR GENERATION DESTROYED THE EARTH AND PUT THE MOST CARTOONISHLY EVIL PEOPLE IN POWER FOR NEARLY A CENTURY WITH NO COMPLAINTS WHATSOEVER AND NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF LEAVING OUR CHILDREN IN A WORLD RUN BY LITERAL PEDOPHILE VAMPIRES THAT WOULD GO TO NUCLEAR WAR WITH EACH OTHER OVER $50,000!!!!!!!!!!!>oh wait>everything is like le fluid and non dualistic bro. I didn’t even vote those pedophile vampires into office because the universe like willed it or something bro>dude this Alan Watts guy ROCKS!
>>23814621pomo thinking is just true, whether it sucks or not
>>23816465ironically clinging to dharma like this is a type of sin in buddhism
>I like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but I have to reject it overall. The reason is that the author, Robert Pirsig, went completely mad and was psychiatrically committed. This is all related in the book, aside from the philosophical speculation it also contains.>You shouldn’t listen to people who have been psychiatrically committed. It’s why you shouldn’t listen to Nietzsche, either—he didn’t have syphilis, as his smearers say, but his father died young from a brain condition so he obviously had some congenital brain defect. Nietzsche’s constant talk about “strength” and “vitality” reflected his own permanently weakened state—he was an ill man, and his works try to “talk himself well”.>Not to listen to people like Nietzsche is common sense, really—but we live in a society where common sense is rare. In fact, at least since the Romantics and the French Revolution, we’ve had the idea that we should listen to lunatics, the deformed, whores, children, drug addicts, racial outsiders, homosexuals, women, and sexual perverts.>These people have special wisdom to impart to us—the idea must go back to Christianity (“the last shall be first”) and perhaps even further back than that, but it took off again around the time of the French Revolution and has only gathered force since then. It’s connected to sentimentalism combined with a prurient taste for the unusual (i.e. feminisation).>Figures like William S. Burroughs are symptomatic in this regard: when he shot his wife to death in a game of William Tell he was on heroin—he said he was possessed by “the ugly spirit”, felt it descend on him just before he shot her (same deal with Burroughs’s fellow writer, the chronic depressive and heroin addict David Foster Wallace—who eventually hanged himself).>Personally, to judge by the heroin addicts I’ve seen, I think they’re possessed by demons in the literal sense, with the drug being akin to ayahuasca or some sacred ichor that lets the demons in.
>>23816556>But hang on, didn’t you say some time back that you had a psychotic episode? Not quite—that was what other people said and thought (for insincere reasons). In fact, from my view, I was just very very angry—and I was completely aware of consensus reality at the time, even though I was very angry. I certainly do some odd and sometimes outrageous things, but I’ve never been in a state where I didn’t understand what consensus reality is (even if I don’t agree with it).>Similarly, in the previous article I spoke about “poetic madness”—but I meant that in the colloquial sense that to the normal person the poet seems “away with the fairies” (i.e. very eccentric and impractical). I don’t actually think any of the really great poets have been psychiatrically committed—though they might have had agonies of passion. >Pirsig, by contrast, was actually psychiatrically committed and for a period didn’t know who he was—he relates how he “woke up” in the hospital, with only fragments of who he “was” around him (so leading him to discourse throughout the book with the ghost “Phaedrus”, who is the remnants of his old self in dialogue with his new self). >You shouldn’t listen to these people—Nietzsche, Burroughs, Pirsig. You shouldn’t listen to people who actually go mad or are actually possessed by literal entities they describe as “the ugly spirit” or “the anti-Christ”. For sure, you can take the odd insight here and there, nobody is wrong all the time—even people who are mad or generally evil.>However, what you shouldn’t do is buy “the whole package”—and it’s typical that in our age these people, particularly people like Burroughs, who isn’t an entertaining writer, are pushed forward. Because the world is in chronic inversion and so you are encouraged to follow these people—basically by demonic forces.
>>23816560>It’s a point Guénon makes—you shouldn’t listen to spiritual advice from people who have been psychiatrically committed; and, secondly, people who tangle with the esoteric often go mad (at least for temporary periods). I think that was a sensible and common-sense observation.>It’s like The Exorcist; in that film, the priestly authorities resort to anything but exorcism and use conventional psychiatry right up to the last minute before they admit it’s a possession. The reality is that real spiritual positions are not about “powers” or “phenomena”, which are almost illusions that fool people who don’t know what they deal with—the full union being characterised by peacefulness, not disturbance.>It’s worth noting that Pirsig was also a leftist. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance features complaints about the college he teaches at in a very conservative state like Idaho or Montana—he complains it’s too conservative, and that the college consensus thinks that Eleanor Roosevelt, who has been invited to speak there, is a communist. Pirsig thinks this is foolish and contemptible—but Eleanor Roosevelt was really far to the left, further than her husband. So Prisig was…>Ultimately, you have to be suspicious as regards anything that has mass success—especially post-1945 (and, if you ask me, post-1500 BC). If it has mass success, it has been pushed—and if the masses like it then you have to be suspicious (because the masses don’t have great taste—and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had mass success).>As noted, I don’t mean to be obtuse—as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa pointed out, something can be mostly wrong but still contain a singular truth; it would be fanaticism and bigotry just to throw something away and say “worthless”—however, what you shouldn’t do is swallow any of these things whole (for example, swallow Nietzsche whole); because, taken as a whole, they’re almost certainly bad.
>>23816562>It’s called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but there isn’t really much Zen in it—and perhaps that’s the problem. Pirsig stays at the scientific level. He admits in the book that he prefers technology, he prefers science—he has no time for his fellow motorcycle riders, a drummer and his girlfriend, who both hate technology. Pirsig has contempt for them—perhaps because they have what he needs (rhythm). >The whole book is him engaged in resistance to the rhythm—he wants to find an intellectual way to get at “quality”, to reconcile it with “the machine” (but there just isn’t a way). It’s significant that he worked writing technical copy and advertising copy—it explains why his prose was so clear, and why he sold so well. But perhaps it explains his dilemma: he didn’t have much of a soul—he was scientific and commercial.>Pirsig’s son, whom he rides his motorcycle with in the book, was murdered by a black man outside a San Francisco Zen centre. The last letter he sent to Pirsig, days before his murder, said, “I never thought I would ever live to see my 23rd birthday.” He was murdered two weeks before he turned 23. >To me, the conclusion is obvious—a premonition. But Pirsig fights shy of that—later, he does say that he thinks a girl child he decided not to abort represents his son’s rhythm returned, but it’s still kept in material terms. He never accepts *.>I suppose, for me, I began to divorce myself from that view when I started to think about coincidences as “synchronicity”—the more I saw things as synchronicity, the more I moved, without realising it, to the view that the world isn’t to be understood as being about cause-and-effect relations, but rather the true origin of everything that happens is in another realm.>There’s a term to dismiss synchronicity as a logical fallacy—“the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon”—developed by a researcher who had synchronicity around the Baader-Meinhof faktion terror group in the 1970s. He saw the group’s name everywhere—and his mind had to squash that as being “a statistical anomaly”.>However, if you persist in seeing things as meaningful coincidences you will eventually break with cause-and-effect thought—and see that it all comes from another realm; it’s all wyrd—it’s all about your destiny.
Man, "spiritual" types are all fucking insane. What a bunch of total nonsense. Muh synchronicity my rhythm.. shut the fuck up, retard, that's all babble.
>>23816565where are these pastas coming from?it reads as if it was a diary of Julius Evola ngl.Meanwhile, there's another person coming up, when i was reading it. C.Wright Mills. I guess he had nothing to do with Pirsig, besides living the dream instead of larp.
>>23816565>you shouldn’t swallow these things whole>swallows psychiatry whole, the shrink is his ultimate arbiter to reality
>>23812853Made it about a quarter of the way through the book before I gave up. Was hoping his son would beat the author to death with a wrench. Terrible book.
>>23812853Because despite /lit/ pretending to care about the pre-socratics, /lit/ is mainly composed of Platonists who get worked up by Pirsig's warmed-over defense of sophistry. The thinly-veiled portrayal of Richard McKeon is funny to anyone who reads him, but /lit/ doesn't so they miss the reference entirely.Also /lit/ has a hard time recognizing the rest of the book that is really just comfy road trip story where an autistic dad bonds with his autistic son; probably hits too close to home for most of the posters here desu senpai.
>>23818310The truth is many ways we live in a platonistic society. If you want to do pre-platonic apologetics you better be a figure on the intellectual level of a Nietzsche or a Heidegger or people will instinctually call you a pseud. It’s Plato’s world, we’re just living in it.
>>23812853It starts off well but becomes a real fucking slog once they get to the town where he taught university about 1/3 of the way through the book.
>>23818400>The truth is many ways we live in a platonistic society.
>>23818310Hello Prisig
>>23816556lol ur a christcuckur just as mentalgo back to fellating a rabbi
>>23818494
i was assigned that for a class, bought it, then dropped the class, still have it, didn't read lol
>>23812853Why do you assume /lit/ hates the book? The proper polite question to ask is, "What does /lit/think of this book?" Stop using angling questions, it's annoying and lame.
>>23818400>we live in a>society
>>23812853>Stuff being cool transcends the subject/object distinction
>>23818944at least put some effort in losergive him aristotle's head or something and make it say we live in a plato society idk
>>23818955>implying it doesn'tcrazy that we just accepted as a society that love isn't realcould it have something to do with the death of religion?
>>23818963>we live in a>society Lol, I can't believe you fucking wrote that while calling some other guy a pseud. Get some self-awareness, autist.
>>23812853I like the concept of quality over quantity in it. So not everyone here hates it. Stop using angling questions on 4chan. 4chan is based on Japanese culture, not angling question culture.
>>23818981I don't get it, do we not?
>>23819071Newfag.
>>23819100Been here a decade mr. redditor. We live in a society still isn't funny
>>23819103>mr. redditorNewfag.
>>23819113
>>23819116>>23819103>Been here a decade
>>23814769You'd be shocked at how few people in high level stem care about sci fi and star wars.
>>23812853I was already familiar with most of the concepts he explained wrong (all of them) and am horrified and embarrassed that a generation of know-nothing dipshits told me a grotesque pseud narcissist making a shit ontology where "what me and black guys like is the arche of all things" and thinks he's a genius for not defining quality (obviously, because the instant you try to, anyone could trivially prove it's a nonsense standard) it changed their life. Meaning that they're so fucking gullible and lacking in curiousity that they never even bothered to look further into the concepts they found SO fascinating when a gay retard incorrectly summarized them. It's true garbage.
>>23819544Not an argument.
