Word: pirsig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PIRSIG IS unabashed and maybe naive in his echoes and borrowings. He mines ideas, allusions, archetypes and symbols not only from Zen, but from Greek, German and Christian mythology, from films and novels of the American Road and from the scores of scientists and philosophers who populate his "talks." After setting Aristotle in a historical context he inserts him into American experience by likening the philosopher to a "third-rate technical instructor, naming everything, showing the relationships among the things named, cleverly inventing an occasional new relationship... and then waiting for the bell so he can get on to repeat...
...blatantness of Pirsig's borrowings, his Americanizing of Aristotle and the Zen archer will appear vulgar to some readers. To me the borrowings are signs of a vital writer, maybe a myth-maker. The "good mechanic" resonates in my own experience; he brings to mind a good friend, a mechanic and scientist...
Like the Chautauqua and Lyceum orators, Pirsig is an inveterate moralist. In common with Emerson and the other nineteenth century American Romantics he bemoans the predicament of manufactured man and extolls "self-reliance" and "gumption" and the kind of knowledge that is not to be found in books but only at the cutting edge of experience. But Pirsig also recognizes that "self-reliance" has become the philosophy of American greed and reaction and that the familiar Romantic exhortations about experience and immediacy do not penetrate very far into technology nor into its scientific underpinning. For him the problem is that...
BENEATH HIS POMPOSITY and seeming scorn Sir Charles was in earnest. And he probably did search hard for a writer probing the same problems that engaged him. I wonder if he would have embraced Robert Pirsig delivering his own "talks" from the seat of an old high-miler. I do not know enough about science or philosophy to assess Pirsig's originality from that perspective, but he did not write the book to be weighed in as a philosopher. The autobiographical threads that connect his chautauquas possess the urgency of self-revelation. An attempt to exorcize and thrash the "ghost...
...good thing about a Chautauqua is that you can understand it as well as your neighbor and share it with him; that is Pirsig achievement. In the only decent sense of the word, he has class...