The Book that Changed Me

Robert Pirsig as Prophet of the Metacrisis

“Whatever situation you are in, you should find yourself there immediately.”

- Robert Pirsig.

Saturday night was a memorable night. I left a joyous engagement party of an old friend at 10.30 pm in a suitably bubbled state. It was one of those parties with regular refills and passing trays of tasty starters that charm you into accepting that the main meal is your responsibility. My wife Siva and I emerged outside happy but hungry, and we got a bit lost until we noticed we were close to one of our favourite restaurants, Dishoom, and we were delighted to get a table just before the kitchen closed.

Dishoom has quality, as Robert Pirsig might put it, and it is one of the few places where I am tempted to break several of their rules.

The Rules at Dishoom on High Street Kensington.

No sleeping with the python. The food, especially their signature black dahl, is usually so good that subversive temptations quickly pass, but the playful spirit stays with you.

We arrived home at midnight and checked the kids were ok, Siva crashed out, and I remembered that a few hours earlier the BBC had aired an extended Radio Documentary about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which was published 50 years ago this year.

I was interviewed for the programme, so I made the deliberate mistake of starting to listen just for a few minutes before bed, and an hour later I found myself in my living room, alone, wide awake at 1 am, moved and very much at home in the world.

Earlier at the party I had met someone called Babethe (a French rendition of Elizabeth that is normally spelt Babette) and was reminded of Cynthia Bourgeault’s writings on the spiritual significance of the film Babette’s Feast, in chapter four of The Eye of the Heart (another book that changed me. Bourgeault renders the film into ‘chiastic’ time which roughly means that certain moments are like the centre of concentric circles of meaning, and they can contain and reflect a whole life. That’s another post, but I share the idea here partly because I have come to realise how deeply Pirsig informs the ideas I work with, and the confluence of merriment, time with several old friends, quality time with Siva, and then especially that time alone hearing my own thoughts on my favourite book on national radio was chiastic because I felt at the centre of things and I could trace the other circles.

I was invited to speak about Pirsig partly because I know Chris Harding, the presenter, from back in the day when he was part of our inquiry at the RSA spirituality project, though we have barely spoken since then. Chris had come upon some of my reflections on Pirsig below. He deftly created the show, with carefully selected archive footage, other interviews, a clear focus with probing questions on the idea of quality, but enough atmospheric detail to enchant the listener and leave a beautiful legacy to Pirsig’s work.

I appear around 24 minutes in, and then every few minutes after that, and I confess to feeling touched to have played a significant part in the documentary, celebrating the work of one of my intellectual heroes. I imagined saying to my younger callow self who encountered the book as a undergraduate. Read carefully, Jonathan, because years from now you will be asked to make sense of this book for others.

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In 2017, just after Robert Pirsig died, I began a reflective post as follows:

Yesterday I received a text from my wife Siva just after leaving my office: “Apparently Pirsig died today.”

I stopped in my tracks and noticed that the space created by sadness was filling up with joy. There was solidarity with the man himself, knowing his struggles with grief and mental afflictions. There was gratitude for the many hours of reflective inspiration, intellectual companionship and panoramic insight he offered. But above all I felt touched that Siva knew I would want to know.

We have known each other for almost twenty years now. In the very early stages she came to visit me in Edinburgh, on a train from Oxford. I saw her alighting with Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in her hand. She saw that I saw, with an expression of gentle exasperation that that I have never forgotten. The book is brilliant and singular, but it is not easy.

During COVID, I chose ‘ZMM’ as it is sometimes known as “The Book that Changed Me” for Rebel Wisdom’s book club. I do a lot of such online talking head interviews, of varying quality, but I showed up that day.

My love for the book grew as I investigated it more closely, including listening to old interviews with Pirsig, which gave me a sense of the creative struggle involved in creating the narrative (very early rising) and the publishing struggle (it was rejected 121 times) and the editing struggle (4 years of letters, lots of rewriting) and then the publicity struggle (Pirsig is generally shy). Book-writing is glamorised, but it is often a real grind, especially the first time.

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This is my 1989 edition of his first book which was published in 1974, three years before I was born. I first tried to read it while I was an undergraduate at Oxford, but despite studying Philosophy and doing well in exams I didn’t even understand what it was trying to do. Later when I was travelling as a professional chess player I read it again and the confluence of lived experience, intellectual analysis and what he beautifully calls ‘lateral drift’ began to cohere. I ‘got it’.

While preparing for the Rebel Wisdom event in 2021 (above) I couldn’t find this copy (mercifully I have since) so I bought the more recent edition that included Pirsig’s foreword and afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition, as well as his letter exchange with his editor James Landis (who speaks affectionately in the BBC documentary about the time Pirsig first saw him and instinctively hugged him). This additional material is all excellent.

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Those who haven’t read the book will want to know what it’s about. The problem is that about questions rarely lead to edifying answers. For any complex phenomenon, especially in marital arguments, it’s never about what it’s about. The plot of Zen is ostensibly a there-and-back-again American road trip taken by a father and his son on their motorcycle, joined by a couple who are friends. And it’s also a philosophical inquiry into what matters and how we might know what matters, particularly in the context of social and technological change the sixties counter-culture. And then again it’s also about a tender but tense relationship between a father and his son, which is informed by the main narrator describing his former self who apparently went mad, haunts the book, and yet also feels like the true author.

Pirsig appeals to people who sense that the underlying problems of society are ultimately spiritual in nature, but who don’t feel that this should mean surrendering their intellect. Pirsig’s insistence on acquiring and practising the craft, tenacity and vigilant attention required to fix his own means of transportation is indicative of behaviour that is not at all about spiritual bypassing. Pirsig is keen to get into the right relationship with reality, which is a spiritual task, but he’s also a man of thought and action.

Only today I realised what the book is really about for me - a metacrisis prophecy. In fact, it might be the first book about the metacrisis we are currently living (there have been others). After several close readings and considering commentary, I now see Pirsig as a metacrisis prophet, well ahead of his time.

For those unfamiliar with the term, I write about it in all its glory here, and more recently in terms of its terminology here, and Perspectiva’s ten premises give it some definition here, I talk about living in the metacrisis in a short documentary here, and here’s my most recent definition:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.

Pirsig says nothing about the metacrisis directly, and nor does he examine some of its main features. There is no mention of ecological crisis in the book, nor failures of governance, nor the internet or smartphone or the impact of artificial intelligence, and I don’t think capitalism is mentioned by name. There is no talk of superorganisms or Moloch and even in the context of the cold war, no mention of existential risk. Pirsig’s modality of inquiry is too intimate to dwell on such things and his arena is culture in general and intellectual culture in particular.

However, while some theorists today juxtapose polycrisis (many interlocking crises in which the whole is much worse than the sum of its parts) with metacrisis (multifaceted delusion caused by the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity) Pirsig goes straight to the metacrisis, or at least a proto-metacrisis. He sees delusion under it all, as I do, and I now think I probably do because of his influence.

One line from page 104 stands out, and I still quote this sometimes when speaking about Perspectiva’s relationship to systems and the trite language of systems change.

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

That point really matters! It’s a subtle claim, but it highlights why so much talk about systems change is bogus. Until you can see that systems have emotions and epistemologies, there is little hope of really changing them. That’s partly why our organisation Perspectiva refers to ‘systems, souls and society’ as a more inclusive premise.

Detailing the ways in which ‘systematic patterns of thought’ as Pirsig calls it are off is another essay, but I am drafting something related about the ‘mental-rational’ structure of consciousness that defines and permeates modernity that I will share on Perspectiva’s Substack before long. For Pirsig the problem was ‘subject-object metaphysics’, but this can also be characterised as problems of intellectual biases (analytical, epistemological, exterior, and present).

There is too much to say here for now, but Paul Marshall sums it up in an elegant way:

The ‘pattern of thought’ we have been encultured to value entails a standing back and looking at the world, which is about the subject (interior) viewing the world (exterior) and is the basis for much that we consider good about science and objectivity today. However, that mode of perception is only one part of the mental mode, and when it becomes the exclusive mode it is deficient because we have the problems of the four biases. When the mental mode is in its efficient mode however, the standing back is combined with a looking within (to subjectivity and individuality) and beyond (to being itself and monotheism) which were spiritual breakthroughs of the axial age that remained in Ancient Greece when the mental mode was relatively efficient. When standing back is combined with looking within and beyond, the problems of the subject/object split are mitigated and this mode of consciousness is perhaps in some sense ‘closer’ to ‘Quality’ as Pirsig puts it, and they start to move us beyond what Jean Gebser would call perspectival conscsiousness, with the world still viewed through a mental frame of reference, rather than a form of aperspectival (free from a single perspective) or diaphanous awareness, or ‘seeing through the world’ which he believes is the quintessence of the integral mode, or what it might feel like to be in tune with the Tao (see below).

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I read Pirsig’s second book, Lila, and also enjoyed it. I remember he presented a version of the great chain of being, and ended with a beautiful summary of what his ‘metaphysics of quality’ was about. For Pirsig, ‘quality’ is the fundamental feature of the world, and something beyond the subject/object distinction we tend to build our ideas of reality around. The following extract from right at the end of Pirsig’s second book captures the main idea: goodness, quality or value is something we can intuit directly when we unlearn our cultural conditioning:

…They were all walking down the road … when one of those raggedy nondescript dogs that call Indian reservations home came onto the road and walked pleasantly in front of them … [the woman] asked John ‘What kind of dog is that?’. John thought about it and said, ‘That’s a good dog.’… The woman …wanted to know what genetic, substantive pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking before them could be placed in. But John Wooden Leg never understood the question. He wasn’t joking when he said ‘That’s a good dog’. He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her … John had distinguished the dog according to it’s Quality, rather than according to its substance. That indicated he considered Quality more important…

Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn’t a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it.

“That’s a good dog”. Whenever I see a dog, I think of the depth of that line.

Lila, however, didn’t have quite the same narrative charm as the first book. I think that’s because it was intellectually rather than existentially driven. It was ideas with a narrative tacked on rather than Pirsig working through ideas to make sense of the experiences he felt he needed to share with the reader. It was as if he had to write the first book, but merely chose to write the second. Or as he puts it in the lecture shared at the end, the gap between himself and the activity, between the doer and the done, was much less in the first book.

There is too much to say, but his distinction between classical and romantic understanding — broadly how things work and how things feel— feels particularly pertinent because it speaks to the pervasiveness of technology that we don’t understand. There are connections to Matthew Crawford’s work on our need for an ‘attentional commons’ and some fertile overlaps with Iain McGilchrist’s emphasis on our two main forms of perception — discriminating focus and broader contextual awareness (which are similar, but not identical to Pirsig’s classical and romantic understanding).

I reflect further on that connection with Iain’s work in Values are what Command our Allegiance. Recent work contending that Value may be an ontological primary alongside space, time, causation, consciousness and motion is the fleshing out of Pirsig’s fundamental insight. Indeed, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an ‘inquiry into values’ but more precisely, it is an inquiry into what Max Scheler calls ‘valueception’. This idea is developed by Iain McGilchrist in chapter 26 of The Matter with Things, and Zak Stein and Marc Gafni speak of the need to open the eye of value (Zak discusses this in a recent interview with Nate Hagens as being a critical education imperative, especially in the context of AI; and the conversation between Iain and Zak on Valueception is here).

Max Scheler’s work predates Pirsig, and it was no doubt informed by others including classical philosophers, but he didn’t write about a motorcycle trip with his son! I am not saying ‘valueception’ is Pirsig’s idea alone, but I do think it’s his main philosophical legacy, and it’s a big idea that shifts our entire perception of reality. When Chris Harding asked me on the programme what Pirsig means by ‘Quality’ I could have said “to define it is to misunderstand it” but instead I went for what I feel to be as close as language can get us: “Quality is the direct perception of Value”.

The multifaceted delusion at the heart of the metacrisis includes the risk that we are entering a technologically mediated world where we will no longer be able to directly perceive value i.e. we could literally lose contact with the source of the meaning of life. One way to think of the idea is that just as a neurodivergent person may struggle to perceive the social field, technologically meditated culture may shift our aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities to such an extent that we cease to perceive the field of value.

A curious twist is that this stranging of the world is often framed as a technological overreach problem in which the solution is to reclaim our humanity from the machine. Iain McGilchrist can sometimes sound like he’s saying that, namely that the spread of technology is co-extensive with (and to an extent caused by) left-hemisphere overreach. It’s hard to know what Pirsig would make of that, but I think he might be inclined to share Physicist Phil Goyal’s view that while the left and right hemisphere offer distinctive and valuable guides to reality, he is not sure that the right hemisphere is meaningfully superior. This is not a minor point, becuase that is a central plank of Iain’s argument (See here from 1:05:20 - it gets quite intense!).

I am inclined to think Pirsig would want to say ‘engage with technology’ and he would not want us to be alientated from the world around us. However, fixing a motorcycle is a far cry from navigating social media or what Shoshanna Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, or generative AI, or virtual reality, or deep fakes. The world has changed a lot in the last fifty years, and by no means all for the better. I wonder how Pirsig would make sense of all that, and whether his ideas are rich and strong enough to apply even in today’s context.

Unlike in the late sixties/early seventies I don’t think he would be able to make sense of the technology/society interface today without contending more deeply with the systems and structure of power on our psyches and lived environments. Even so, I am sure he would find some underlying spiritual angle to help us navigate it, as he did in his own time. This is why I think of him as a prophet of the metacrisis. He sensed something coming but like most prophets he couldn’t see all of it, or the extent of what he was intuiting. He could just sense the underlying pattern was off, and he offered insight that was hard-earned and beautifully shared.

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One final thing to share is my love of the climax of the first book. You really need the intellectual and emotional build-up to feel the full effect of it, but in chapter 20 there is a compellingly ambiguous description of an experience that sounds both like liberation and enlightenment but also a complete existential and emotional collapse:

What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything. Then his mind’s eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and…I don’t know what really happened…but the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into in avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand. No more anything. It all gave way from under him.

“It all gave way from under him”. I’ll never forget the exhilaration of reading that passage over and over — that darkly fascinating sense of a mind capable of writing about watching itself implode. In the BBC programme I am asked about whether it meant breakdown or breakthrough, and I tried to account for the way in which it might be both. I read it aloud below for fun:

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And again finally, a newly surfaced video of the man himself from half a century ago! In the first few minutes Pirsig quotes a Zen master sharing the line I opened the piece with.

“Whatever situation you are in, you should find yourself there immediately.”

I love that line!