Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a narration of the motorcycle ride from Minnesota to southern California that Pirsig took with his young son Chris. The book details the events, and most of Pirsig’s/Phaedrus’s thoughts that happened during that trip. It is a book about Quality, the results of scientific thinking, and insanity (his own). Zen is a look at how ancient Greek philosophy (through the thoughts/thought process of Phaedrus) has affected the current state of Western civilization and our future path, particularly in how it has affected our own culture. It also describes Pirsig's search, his insanity, and the culmination of his search afterwards.
The distinction in logic/understanding is a clean break between the Classical and the Romantic. Classical understanding is of underlying form while Romantic understanding is imaginative, creative, intuitive, and inspirational. The dichotomy of Classical and Romantic understanding is displayed by the differences between Pirsig’s fellow riders, John and Sylvia, and himself. John and Sylvia are artists, seeing the world through their Romantic lens, ignoring technology and finding its advances dangerous to their very survival. This is contrasted with Pirsig’s experience as a technical writer, understanding and being comfortable with technology, viewing the world (by default) through his Classical lens (though he analyzes the lenses themselves later, he is default Classical).
The dichotomy between Classical and Romantic is continued through Pirsig and the couple’s different views/actions regarding motorcycle maintenance. John and Sylvia see their motorcycle from an emotional standpoint, seeing surface beauty of the paint or shape of the casing without understanding the te...
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...standards. Remembering the pieces of Phaedrus’s logic and piecing them all together finally, Pirsig agrees with Phaedrus and leaves the mythos of Western culture, going insane as he (Phaedrus) did before.
Rejecting his mythos is the cause of Phaedrus’s insanity. For no man can merely reject the mythos which guides his life, the definition of such a person is, as Phaedrus found out, “insane.” Pirsig went insane after rediscovering all the pieces of Phaedrus’s logic. Pirsig planned to sell his motorcycle when he reached California, bus Chris back home, and check into a mental hospital. Chris’s distress prevents him from following through with this plan. Pirsig’s discovery of Chris’s internal torment allows Pirsig to suppress Phaedrus and deny him, for his son. While the story has a happy ending, Phaedrus’s Truth is never revealed which is a bit of a loss for him.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Understanding the differences between Socrates and Perpetua rests in two major elements. The first one is the role of religion and
Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel describes the ritualistic arts of discipline and focus that the Zen religion focuses around. In this book, Herrigel describes many aspects of how archery is, in fact, not a sport, but an art form, and is very spiritual to those in the east. The process he describes shows how he overcame his initial inhibitions and began to look toward new ways of seeing and understanding. In the beginning of the book Herrigel tells us that he is writing about a ritual and religious practice, “whose aim consists in hitting a spiritual goal, so that fundamentally the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself.” (Herrigel p. 4) Through his studies, the author discovers that within the Zen ritual actions, archery in this case, there lies a deeper meaning. Herrigel explains throughout this book that it is not through the actual physical aspect of shooting arrows at targets that archery is Zen, but through the art and spirituality through which it is performed. It is not merely shooting an arrow to hit a target, but becoming the target yourself and then, in turn, hitting yourself spiritually. By meeting this spiritual goal, you will then meet the physical goal. The struggle then is, therefore not with the arrow or the target but within oneself.
Furthermore, resonation can be found in Preziosi exploration of the establishment of female identification through aesthetics. Within Preziosi chapter on aesthetics he addresses main issues including “Kant’s Critique of Judgment, judgment about beauty, and perception of perfection.” Aesthetics was addressed in the perception of how the female body is formed and encased while a male looks at the female body. In this case the male would be Degas gazing at his ballerina while either sketching his model or doing a sculpture of the ballerina. Preziosi states that “there should be two kinds of theory or sciences of knowledge corresponding to each logic and aesthetics.” This concept of two kinds of theory made more apparent as every sculptor Degas made is presented as a different theory, yet the two theories are different, Degas’s artwork deals with both logic and aesthetics. Logic can be applied to Degas’s____, works of art. Where as aesthetics deals with____. Later on in Preziosi chapter on aesthetics, he brings up the issue of “the idea that sensory knowledge could have its own perfection-and, further, that an aesthetic judgment about beauty or beautiful objects.” When viewing Degas’s sculptor the
We must not isolate ourselves from what we think we know, but instead allow ourselves to comprehend. Bibliography:.. PERRINE'S STORY AND STRUCTUE 9TH ED. ARE, THOMAS R. 1998, HARCOURT-BRACE COLLEGE PUBLISHERS. FORT WORTH, TX -.
Fiero, Gloria K. “Greece: Humanism and the Spculative Leap” The Humanistic Tradition: The First Civilizations and the Classical Legacy. McGraw Hill. 6th ed. New York: New York, 2011. 76-134. Print.
The Ancient Greeks for many years in history have been critically acclaimed as a culture that emphasizes significantly on executing and maintaining perfection within its society. It is a culture popularly known for its significant advancements in areas such as; art, architecture, math, and philosophy. This constant need to improve seemed to be a trait that heavily lied within the Ancient Greeks and this is shown through their embodiment of perfectionism. All throughout history, the Greeks have been praised and looked upon greatly due to their significant lifestyle and historical achievement. Through extensive research of the Greeks, including the analyzation of their art, architecture, math and philosophy, I will be able to depict the true
Whether it is a book, piece of art or even something that we eat, most of the things that we see and perceive in our lives are generally distinguished by their form and content. Form and content have always been a discussion topic among great philosophers (such as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), lovers of art and intellectuals. These two categories, seemingly different from one another, when fully elaborated, are actually interrelated ide...
As the owner of a vintage 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle, I have always been curious about the bond of nostalgia that is common amongst Volkswagen owners, prior owners and admirers. This infectious enthusiasm for the Volkswagen between owners combined with a general interest in the themes of how icons are born and the perceived societal status bestowed upon their owners have prompted me to write this article.
Throughout the early years in many East Asian countries, there were many people who were looking for answers to this world’s, and otherworldly, questions. When Gotama became enlightened, and began preaching the practices of Buddhism, it came at such a time when the Han dynasty was collapsing, citizens were tired of Confucianism and looking for a new ideology that they could put there hearts and souls into. Over the years, Buddhism proved to be much more than just a religion; it became a way of life. But over time, the powerful orthodoxy transformed, and many different Buddhist sects emerged. One of the more popular sects, Ch’an, or Zen, Buddhism, has become one of the most influential religions in China and Japan, and is still flourishing today.
In his highly influential Introduction to Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture (1933), Werner Jaeger discusses the ideals of Greek paideia in terms of their seminal influence on European culture, a culture which he forebodingly describes in the early thirties as "tired of civilization." Jaeger employs the term "hellenocentric" to describe the essential nature of the Greek influence on the development of modern European culture; his method of interpreting Greek culture rests on an attempt both to reanimate the waning classicism of nineteenth century philhellenism and to challenge the widespread, Nietzschean-inspired "war against the excessive rationalization of modern life," a war that also leads, claims Jaeger, to a carte blanche historiographical dismissal of Greek paideia as excessively rationalistic. In his attempt to reanimate and challenge nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figurings of Greek paideia, Jaeger argues that the "intellectual and spiritual nature" of Greek intellectual life cannot be understood, as he felt it had been understood, "in vacuo, cut off from the society which produced it and to which it was addressed." In his Introduction to Paideia, Jaeger reconstructs the dynamic interplay in Greek paideia between the polis and the individual, between social responsibility and individual freedom, --in short, between the zw'/on politikon and the gnw'qi seautovn-- in the hope of restoring to European culture a greater appreciation of its hellenocentric origins.
For Dewey, the fundamental error characteristic of both Greek and Modern thinking is the artificial bifurcation of our thoughts, feelings and actions from the natural world. As I see it, the heart of this metaphysical mistake is captured by the key distinctions he draws between the "instrumental" and "consummatory", and between the "precarious" and "stable". I will therefore cover the history of philosophy with blanket criticisms of the blanket categories of "classical" or Greek thought (from Plato who, according to Dewey, set the tone of
Schiappa begins his study by acknowledging his debt to George Grote and Eric Havelock. Schiappa concurs with Grote's assessment of the Sophists as "a positive force" in the fifth-century Greek enlightenment (12); and he accepts Havelock's notion that the transition from orality to literacy in Greek society led to a progression "from a mythic-poetic to a more literate, humanistic-rationalistic culture" (21). Drawing on these two scholars, Schiappa depicts Protagoras as a pivotal figure of the fifth century enlightenment helping to transform Greece from an irrational, mythical and theocentric culture into a rational and humanistic culture. Schiappa then proceeds to examine Protagoras' contribution to this intellectual progress, namely his advocacy and analysis of logos, or "rationality" as the proper means of inquiry. In a detailed analysis of Protagoras' five extant fragments, Schiappa argues that Protagoras provides the groundwork for the subsequent development of rational inquiry by delineating the assumptions or principles, the proper procedure or method, and the kind of results or explanations that may be attained through rational inquiry.
The gestural and heavy working of the paint and the contrasting colors make the painting appear active yet are arduous to follow. The defining element of Woman and Bicycle is the presence of the black lines that do most of the work in terms of identifying the figure. Through the wild nature of the brushwork, color, and composition of the painting, it can be implied that the artist is making an implication towards the wild nature of even the most proper of women.
Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism is a work which begins like a work of poetry, and deals with the celebration with the technology, the future, and the machine, while rejecting the natural world and the past. Marinetti despises the sounds created by canals “muttering feeble prayers”, and “the creaking bones of sickly palaces,” while he embraces the “famished roar of automobiles” (Apollonio 19-20). He orders us to “shake the gates of life”, and instead, “test the bolts and hinges” (Apollonio 20). To Marinetti, technology and the machine, such as the automobiles, are to be embraced and celebrated for its speed and beauty. No longer is a natural landscape beautiful, rather “the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot” is seen as more beautiful than any romantic painting (Apollonio 21).