Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert Pirsig
“I want to talk about
another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways,
for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and
call it the high country of the mind.
“If all of human knowledge,
everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure,
then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this
structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.
“Few people travel here.
There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high
country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that
to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.
“In the high country of the
mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the
enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these
questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the
mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them
and never finding one's way out.
“What is the truth and how
do you know it when you have it? -- How do we really know anything? Is there an
``I,'' a ``soul,'' which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating
senses? -- Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? -- When
it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?
“Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context. Even within a single civilization old trails are constantly closed and new ones opened up.
“It's sometimes argued that
there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass
warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of
debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced
mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting
and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this
argument, though romantically appealing, doesn't hold up. The primitive tribes
permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars
were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology
that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without
ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some
of the detractions of his primitive life...the pain, the disease, famine, the
hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to
modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole
agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.
“One can see how both the
informal and formal processes of hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, century
after century, repeated with new material, have built up the hierarchies of
thought which have eliminated most of the enemies of primitive man. To some
extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very
effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. It's
such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it's all but shut out everything
else and now dominates man himself. That's the source of the complaint.”