Polytropy

After sitting behind his father on a motorcycle for a day, and riding through a thunderstorm, Chris Pirsig wants to tell and hear ghost stories. He asks whether his father believes in ghosts.

The father does not believe in ghosts. Having no mass or energy, they are unscientific. However, the same is true of scientific laws themselves.

The narrator tells that story of himself and his son in chapter 3 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). By chapter 7, we are hearing about

a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

Live, though you will fail. This is what you must do, and you may not question it. The imperative seems never to have struck me so much before as it does now, though I have been reading Robert Pirsig’s novel since high school. The impression of the passage above must always have been covered over by later ones.

What indeed are we living for? We may fail to ask, because we are too busy engaged in living, or in making a living. In a novel that I have been reading since college, one character was not too busy. The scene here is the stoop of a house, sixty miles from Chicago, in the fall of 1919:

“Let’s be sensible. A man must work, Larry. It’s a matter of self-respect. This is a young country and it’s a man’s duty to take part in its activities. Henry Maturin was saying only the other day that we were beginning an era that would make the achievements of the past look like two bits. He said he could see no limit to our progress and he’s convinced that by 1930 we shall be the richest and greatest country in the world. Don’t you think that’s terribly exciting?”

“Terribly.”

“There’s never been such a chance for a young man. I should have thought you’d be proud to take part in the work that lies before us. It’s such a wonderful adventure.”

He laughed lightly.

“I daresay you’re right. The Armours and the Swifts will pack more and better meat, the McCormicks will make more and better harvesters, and Henry Ford will turn out more and better cars. And everyone’ll get richer and richer.”

“And why not?”

“As you say, and why not? Money just doesn’t happen to interest me.”

Isabel giggled.

“Darling, don’t talk like a fool. One can’t live without money.”

“I have a little. That’s what gives me the chance to do what I want.”

“Loaf?”

“Yes,” he answered, smiling.

That is from The Razor’s Edge (1944), a late novel of Somerset Maugham.

Maugham had created a rough draft for Larry in “The Fall of Edward Barnard,” included in The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921). The title character has been in Tahiti, but now his friend has travelled from Chicago to fetch him. Here they are, talking:

“Come with me to-morrow, Edward. It was a mistake that you ever came to this place. This is no life for you.”

“You talk of this sort of life and that. How do you think a man gets the best out of life?”

“Why, I should have thought there could be no two answers to that. By doing his duty, by hard work, by meeting all the obligations of his state and station.”

“And what is his reward?”

“His reward is the consciousness of having achieved what he set out to do.”

“It all sounds a little portentous to me,” said Edward, and in the lightness of the night Bateman could see that he was smiling. “I’m afraid you’ll think I’ve degenerated sadly. There are several things I think now which I daresay would have seemed outrageous to me three years ago.”

Edward and Bateman were of the Lost Generation; however, Maugham himself came earlier – he had been born in 1874.

Pirsig came later. Like my parents, he was of the the Silent Generation. I don’t know what this explains. After serving in the Korean War like my father, but also doing a lot of other things, Pirsig earned a journalism degree. Then he found himself teaching in Montana, which

was undergoing an outbreak of ultra-right-wing politics like that which occurred in Dallas, Texas, just prior to President Kennedy’s assassination …

• Professors were told that all public statements must be cleared through the college public-relations office before they could be made.
• … the legislature had passed a law fining the college eight thousand dollars for every student who failed …
• The newly elected governor was trying to fire the college president for both personal and political reasons …
• funds to the college were being cut …

It must always be remembered that this was the nineteen-fifties, not the nineteen-seventies. There were rumblings from the beatniks and early hippies at this time about “the system” and the square intellectualism that supported it, but hardly anyone guessed how deeply the whole edifice would be brought into doubt.

That is from chapter 13 of ZAMM. The square, on the one hand, and the beat or hip, on the other: they correspond respectively to what Pirsig calls classic and romantic modes of understanding. I don’t know whether he takes those terms specifically from musical history.

I have learned that the Norman Mailer anthology Advertisements for Myself (1959) includes an essay called “The Hip and the Square.” This begins with “The List,” and Pirsig’s terms feature near the top:

Hip	Square
wild	practical
romantic	classic
instinct	logic
Negro	white
inductive	programmatic
the relation	the name
spontaneous	orderly
perverse	pious
midnight	noon
nihilistic	authoritarian
associative	sequential
a question	an answer
obeying the form of the curve	living in the cell of the square
self	society
crooks	cops
free will	determinism
Catholic	Protestant
saint	clergyman
…	…

All told, there are more than sixty pairs on the list. Making all of those distinctions: is it a hip or a square thing to do? Mailer does offer a disclaimer:

Reading the list, many were likely to feel that just so soon as some kind of internal order came to present itself for a few of the items, the mind would stumble over a new pair of opposites whose connotations to the reader were the opposite of what he had thought Hip or Square could be. There are of course places where the list is doomed to be private, especially since large words are set in new bearings without qualification at all: I put the Catholic with Hip, the Protestant with Square, yet just a line or two earlier, ‘free will’ has been dealt to Hip, ‘determinism’ to Square, and after all it is Protestantism which gave freedom of conscience, and so by implication, free will, to the emotional history of the West …

If one wants to read Pirsig as a product of his time, one might read Mailer on that time. I have not done this, except a little bit, mostly indirectly, as in Geoff Shullenberger, “Mailer and the monoculture,” Washington Examiner, January 6, 2022:

The hipster’s embrace of black diction, music, and style, for Mailer, was incidental: the more essential development was his pursuit of a new “existentialist” consciousness that, he claimed, had also emerged first among black people. In the postwar era, he asserts, the “psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb” forced people to recognize that a civilization ostensibly on an inexorable path toward technological abundance was in fact under constant threat of cataclysmic self-destruction. The standard response, according to Mailer, was the fear-driven conformism of the Eisenhower era.

The hipster offered a radical alternative … Mailer’s hipster takes after his black compatriots. It took the faraway events of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nazi camps to instill in a handful of white people a sensibility black people had developed closer to home. He writes: “It is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro, for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” This is how Mailer glosses his controversial title: The hipster, he says, “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”

The “controversial title” that Shullenberger refers to is indeed “The White Negro.”

Perhaps “the hipster” and “black people” are understood as male. However, American housewives of the 1950s had questions about life. So I read in a used book that I picked up, not long after college, from a cart in the lobby of a public library in Alexandria, Virginia. Though I was Gen X, I knew somebody who had Baby Boom children, and she confirmed the account of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963):

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”

All that Pirsig has to say about women in ZAMM is this, in chapter 6:

The classic mode, by contrast [to the romantic mode], proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.

“Women never go near it” – and neither did Pirsig’s male friend John Sutherland, riding on the other motorcycle, his wife Sylvia behind him, on the trip from Minnesota to Montana that Pirsig reports on.

Without the Sutherlands, Pirsig père and fils continued on to California. This was in 1968, when Iron Butterfly put out In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. According to “the first person in the world to receive a PhD on Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality,”

Pirsig did have a lot of sympathy for what the hippies and young people were trying to do, but he saw that for their progressive ideals to become established they needed to ground their ideas in practical changes. Free love, hedonism, and psychedelics won’t change this world for the better by themselves. This is one of the primary reasons Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was written.

Thus Anthony McWatt, “Robert Pirsig & His Metaphysics of Quality,” Philosophy Now 122, 2017.

Did Pirsig really state the whole problem in chapter 7, that society gives us a goal, to live, when we are inevitably going to fail? Pirsig elaborates in chapter 10:

Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is – emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty.

I might suggest now that climate change is liable to “overwhelm everything else.” Climate change is wrought precisely by “our current modes of rationality,” exhibited by Pirsig himself in chapter 25:

We stop at an abandoned school yard and under a huge cottonwood tree I change the oil in the cycle. Chris is irritable and wonders why we stop for so long, not knowing perhaps that it’s just the time of day that makes him irritable; but I give him the map to study while I change the oil, and when the oil is changed we look at the map together and decide to have supper at the next good restaurant we find and camp at the first good camping place. That cheers him up.

“The oil is changed” – that is, Pirsig has dumped the old oil over the roots of the “huge cottonwood tree.” We can infer this from his more explicit account in chapter 28:

At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I’m done the new oil on the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water. Ahhhhh!

Pirsig’s satisfaction at an oil change is like that of defecation. Feces can be made harmless, but are not always so; at least, I wondered whether untreated sewage in the Sea of Marmara was the reason why I got an ear infection during a stay on Marmara Island in July, 2012. (I recalled the trip in “Surgery & Recovery,” June 13, 2016.) As for used oil, there are probably less bad things to do with it than dump it on the ground.

I suppose Pirsig still believes in something that Wendell Berry calls a superstition. This is in “Conservation is Good Work,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993; reprinted in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019):

The global economy (like the national economy before it) operates on the superstition that the deficiencies or needs or wishes of one place may safely be met by the ruination of another place. To build houses here, we clear-cut the forests there. To have air-conditioning here, we strip-mine the mountains there. To drive our cars here, we sink our oil wells there

– and we dump our dirty oil on the ground. Pirsig admits to the superstition in chapter 19 of ZAMM (the brackets are his):

Kids are told, “Don’t spend your whole allowance for bubble gum [immediate emotional impulse] because you’re going to want to spend it for something else later [big picture].” Adults are told, “This paper mill may smell awful even with the best controls [immediate emotions], but without it the economy of the whole town will collapse [big picture].” In terms of our old dichotomy, what’s being said is, “Don’t base your decisions on romantic surface appeal without considering classical underlying form.” This was something he kind of agreed with.

When I learned to drive, and I started changing the oil in my mother’s car, I followed her brother’s advice of putting the old oil in an empty milk carton, in order to throw it out with household trash – which would all be dumped on the ground in a designated “landfill.” Apparently Alexandria now burns its trash; I don’t know if this is better. (The Wikipedia article “Waste-to-energy” currently reads like industry propaganda, but “Incineration” includes arguments both for and against.)

Other ways of life are possible. The following is not about cars, but I wanted to pass it along. In “Conserving Forest Communities” (Another Turn of the Crank, 1995), Wendell Berry reports on “the tribal forest of the Menominee Indians in northern Wisconsin”:

In 1854, when logging was begun, the forest contained an estimated billion and a half board feet of standing timber. No records exist for the first thirteen years, but from 1865 to 1988 the forest yielded two billion board feet. And today, after 140 years of continuous logging, the forest still is believed to contain a billion and a half board feet of standing timber. Over those 140 years, the average diameter of the trees has been reduced by only one half of one inch – and that by design, for the foresters want fewer large hemlocks.

That would seem to be sustainability. (I have reverted some minor childish vandalism on the Wikipedia article just linked to.)

In Zen and the Art …, Robert Pirsig has a name for his former self, who was teaching in Montana. The name is Phaedrus, because of a confusion that no fact-checker cleared up. The name should have been Lysias (Λυσίας), this being the person in Plato’s Phaedrus whose name suggests “wolf” (λύκος) in Greek. The suggestion is all the stronger if the name is misspelled “Lycias” – as it is in Pirsig’s Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of his novel.

When I think about what message Pirsig has in the novel, I may focus on chapter 29:

Phaedrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that – a new spiritual rationality – in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be “value free.” Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.

I don’t know where Pirsig gets his generalization about “the ancient Greeks.” They could attract both the square and the hip – at least, I read something like that once, in an essay that may have predated the terminology and was in any case referring to British classicists; it was in a book belonging to a friend of mine in college.

As I tried to say in “Anthropology of Mathematics,” it is unfortunate that Pirsig did not read Collingwood’s

• Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), on the overlap of classes;
• Essay on Metaphysics (1940), on how metaphysics is the historical science of absolute presuppositions.

Phaedrus was engaging in precisely that science when he started “to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself.” Pirsig reports this in chapter 10 of ZAMM. Experiments seemed only to multiply hypotheses; however,

No one that Phaedrus talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so baffled him. They seemed to say, “We know scientific method is valid, so why ask about it?”

For ordinary scientists, the validity of their method is an absolute presupposition – or perhaps an hypothesis, in the sense of the third part of the Divided Line that Socrates lays out in the latter part of Book VI of the Republic.

It would have been good too for Pirsig to read Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis (1924), which is based on the observation in the Preface:

We find people practising art, religion, science, and so forth, seldom quite happy in the life they have chosen, but generally anxious to persuade others to follow their example: Why are they doing it, and what do they get for their pains? The question seems, to me, crucial for the whole of modern life …

The triple of art, religion, and science becomes a theme of Pirsig, who says in chapter 21 of ZAMM,

The first step down from Phaedrus’ statement that “Quality is the Buddha” is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.

I happen to have seen the triple in Andrew Doyle, “What ‘fascism’ really means” (September 13, 2025):

According to Mussolini, fascism demands that the citizen develops his mind and body for the betterment of the nation, that he prioritises education and intellectual pursuits – the artistic, the religious and the scientific – as much as his physical prowess.

Doyle seems to be alluding to the following from “The Doctrine of Fascism,” by Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile – I use the version posted by the World Future Fund:

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for mankind. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the outstanding importance of education.

Doyle also brings up the Orwell essay that I did in two recent posts, “Prairie Life” (September 3, 2025) and “Artificial Language” (September 6, 2025).

Art, religion, and science may seem to sum up what we do with our minds. For Hegel, apparently, the triple was art, religion, and philosophy. In Speculum Mentis, Collingwood actually took up the quintuple of art, religion, science, history, and philosophy. He has a disclaimer:

Any clever fool can make a symmetrical philosophy, and it takes nothing more than ingenuity to find quincunxes in the heavens above and in the earth beneath …

The reader need not be alarmed. We are not looking for quincunxes, and we have no intention of holding his nose to any dialectical grindstone.

I am not sure what Collingwood is alluding to, although I have found David Clayton, “The Quincunx – a Geometric Form of Christ in Majesty” (March 11, 2021):

Around the central image of the enthroned Christ we see four figures representing the four evangelists carrying the Word to the four corners of the world. I have read (St Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, writing in the 2nd century) that one of the reasons that the Church settled on four gospels was to emphasis this symbolism. The quincunx also symbolizes Creation, as the number four represents the cosmos. The symbolism is of, again the four corners of the world …

Meanwhile, since fascism has come up, let me note two relevant posts, which I happen to have edited last month:

• “Attribution of Fascism” (December 11, 2016),
• “Fascism As Abetted by Realism” (October 10, 2017).

The former mentions Collingwood’s relation with Gentile; the latter features mainly Collingwood’s analysis of fascism as class war waged on behalf of the capitalists. More simply, fascism is war; for, here again are Mussolini and Gentile:

Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it …

The population policy of the regime is the consequence of these premises. The Fascist loves his neighbor, but the word neighbor does not stand for some vague and unseizable conception. Love of one’s neighbor does not exclude necessary educational severity; still less does it exclude differentiation and rank. Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces …

Compare with Carl Schmitt, whose

arguments in favor of temporary dictatorship so impressed Nazi officials that after they came to power a few months later, they invited him to become one of the regime’s legal counselors. Schmitt accepted, and within months newspapers were calling him the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.

Thus Mark Lilla in “The Enemy of Liberalism” (New York Review of Books, May 15, 1997). He says also,

the best introduction to Schmitt’s thought remains his The Concept of the Political, a short essay … Schmitt takes the question with which all political theory must begin – What is politics? – and reformulates it as: What is “the political” (das Politische)? By “the political” he does not mean a way of life or a set of institutions, he means a criterion for making a certain kind of decision.

• Morality finds such a criterion in the distinction between good and bad,
• aesthetics finds it in the distinction between beauty and ugliness.
• What is the criterion appropriate to politics? Schmitt answers in his characteristically oracular style: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

Schmitt seems to have tried to create what Collingwood called “a symmetrical philosophy.” Was it effectively making a list like Mailer’s?

Whoever touts friend and enemy as a fundamental distinction ought to confront arguments such as the one Socrates has with Polemarchus in Book I of the Republic. It may not be clear who our real friends are, so why take chances, attacking the wrong target? In any case, justice does not allow us to harm anybody. Of course there can be a snide response, like that of Thrasymachus.

Carl Schmitt was described in the New York Times (July 13, 2024) as “The Nazi Jurist Who Haunts Our Broken Politics.” Under that title, Jennifer Szalai writes:

Where Schmitt may actually be useful is as a guide to the implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States. In a blistering post, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued that the majority’s reasoning “leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship.” Schmitt, she said, “offers some insight into the court majority’s mind-set” by showing how Schmittian assumptions about politics as a zero-sum struggle between friends and enemies can lead to a refusal to accept the other side as legitimate and, ultimately, to a Schmittian expansion of executive power.

Szalai seems to be referring to “Supreme Court Rules Hitler Immune from Prosecution for Burning Down Reichstag, Seizing Absolute Power” (July 2, 2024), credited to Liz Anderson, apparently the Elizabeth Anderson who was a source for my post “Feminist Epistemology” (January 29, 2021).

After suggesting the possibility of “introconversion” of religion, art, and science, Pirsig says on his next page,

the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical.

So God is understood as the English word for Buddha. In the previous chapter, Phaedrus is said to have concluded, not that Quality is the Buddha, but that Quality is the Tao. Such looseness seems characteristic. On the front endpaper of my copy of the 1999 edition of ZAMM, I have kept a list of what turn out to be couple dozen terms that Pirsig uses for Quality.

I am not going to go into all of that now. I want only to look at Phaedrus’s analysis of the people who would give us

Ancient Sparta … Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell.

They were the same people who wanted him to quit smoking. They were square. What characterized them

was intellectual primarily, but it wasn’t just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws – reason – and that man’s improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires.

I might have thought that satisfaction of one’s own desires was the goal of being hip. On the other hand, for some people, the goal of being square or hip is conformity. The desires of squareness include buying the products of capitalism; but then, capitalism will sell to the hipsters as well.

In any case, the analysis of our soul into reason and desire alone is impoverished. Desire can be

• a vague sense that something is missing, or
• a precise sense of what that thing is.

The former becomes the latter by passion, at least by Collingwood’s account in yet another book, The New Leviathan (1942). I shall not try to say much more here than I have already done in the posts just linked to. Collingwood identifies passion with the third part of the soul, in addition to mind and appetite, that Socrates distinguishes.

I have worked through the Republic more recently than The New Leviathan. Perhaps the memory of the latter primed me to notice in the former that appetite had no power to satisfy itself. Satisfaction required that third part of the soul: passion or θυμός. The Greek word is translated also as “spirit” – not meaning ghost, but as in “team spirit.” If a square wants to discover the “laws of reason” and apply them “toward satisfaction of his own desires,” then squareness would seem to involve subjecting passion, as well as reason, to the appetites – and not individual appetites, but those of the “team” or society, since the “laws of reason,” being laws, are somehow general or universal.

According to Pirsig in chapter 25 of ZAMM,

It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.

It seems to me Socrates was all about “reassimilating those passions,” albeit to let them serve reason. Pirsig goes on, in chapter 26, to talk about how to maintain gumption. I brought this up in “Prairie Life,” and I could have linked then to “One & Many” (June 20, 2016), to which I had added a note on Salman Rushdie’s discussion – quoted in “Solipsism” (May 1, 2024) – of Pirsig’s discussion of gumption. I would understand this now as θυμός, though for Pirsig the Greek word is ἐνθουσιασμός – enthusiasm.