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Not even sure if this is the right section to post this, but I fear some may have missed this, and it's a wonderful read. Regardless of whether you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or not. Because if you haven't, you might be persuaded to do so by the end. Wonderful, Eugene.
WHAT ROBERT PIRSIG TAUGHT ME ABOUT DESIGN
Apr 25, 2017|Eugene Rabkin
Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” passed away yesterday at his home in Maine. The below reflections are in lieu of an obituary.
One day in my early twenties I stood in the Zen Buddhist book section of a Barnes & Noble in Union Square, holding a book with a peculiar and intriguing title, “Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. It seemed at once esoteric but also of this world. As many people of my age I was searching for answers as to why the world I lived in felt so alienating. And, like many others, I was reading books on Buddhist philosophy in the hope of finding some insight. This one seemed different. “You should get that one,” a chubby girl standing next to me said. I looked at her and the conviction in her eyes pushed me over the edge. In my mind from time to time I still thank her, because ZAMM became my guiding light in terms of my worldview, which also includes my appreciation of design. When people ask where the principles that underpin my opinions come from, I point them to Pirsig.
I became engrossed in the book from its opening passages, and I gobbled it up, though it was a dense read. The arc of Pirsig’s thoughts was not for the faint of brain – not having his IQ of 170, mine had to work at full capacity. But the rewards of my newfound understanding were immense.
In short, Pirsig proposed that alienation we feel is because what he called our classic understanding of the world – everything that has to do with reason, which includes science and technology, and its underlying principle of function – and our romantic understanding of the world – everything that has to do with intuition, such as art and other cultural disciplines, and its underlying principle of form – have been artificially put at odds with each other by the fundamental teachings of Western civilization. Pirsig puts the blame on Plato and Aristotle, though I would not go so far back in history. I think the separation of form and function occurred after the Renaissance and at the dawn of industrial revolution (Martin Luther is also to blame, but that’s another story).
To put it crudely, Pirsig maintains that before the split there was no distinction in the West between art and craft. There was no such thing as fine art, nor was art considered useless. Those decorated Greek urns we now look at behind glass in museums had a function. “Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant ‘art.’ The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them,” he wrote.
According to Pirsig, as Europe’s population grew, we had good reasons to decouple form from function in order to let scientific revolution reign, which in turn eventually clothed, fed, and raised the quality of life for most people in the West. In the process everything that has to do with the classic understanding came to be viewed as serious and useful, and everything that has to do with the romantic understanding came to be viewed as frivolous and useless. And because we removed all romantic thinking from scientific revolution, we have built a world full of technological ugliness that is evident in everything from bad architecture to a sea of horrible mass market stuff we now drown in, alienated from what once was familiar.
Now that we have been sated with stuff and that for many of us in the West the quality of life is unprecedentedly high, at least in historical terms, what Pirsig foresaw is the flight to quality we are witnessing now. This is why we are fascinated with design more than ever before. And for Pirsig the only way to quality was through uniting the classic and the romantic understanding of the world. And that’s when the light bulb went on for me – there is nothing in this world that combines form and function, intuition and pragmatism, aesthetics and technology, the way design does. All around me I was witnessing the rise of interest in design on society’s part, and now I knew why. It made total sense.
Continued on sz-mag
WHAT ROBERT PIRSIG TAUGHT ME ABOUT DESIGN
Apr 25, 2017|Eugene Rabkin
Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” passed away yesterday at his home in Maine. The below reflections are in lieu of an obituary.
One day in my early twenties I stood in the Zen Buddhist book section of a Barnes & Noble in Union Square, holding a book with a peculiar and intriguing title, “Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. It seemed at once esoteric but also of this world. As many people of my age I was searching for answers as to why the world I lived in felt so alienating. And, like many others, I was reading books on Buddhist philosophy in the hope of finding some insight. This one seemed different. “You should get that one,” a chubby girl standing next to me said. I looked at her and the conviction in her eyes pushed me over the edge. In my mind from time to time I still thank her, because ZAMM became my guiding light in terms of my worldview, which also includes my appreciation of design. When people ask where the principles that underpin my opinions come from, I point them to Pirsig.
I became engrossed in the book from its opening passages, and I gobbled it up, though it was a dense read. The arc of Pirsig’s thoughts was not for the faint of brain – not having his IQ of 170, mine had to work at full capacity. But the rewards of my newfound understanding were immense.
In short, Pirsig proposed that alienation we feel is because what he called our classic understanding of the world – everything that has to do with reason, which includes science and technology, and its underlying principle of function – and our romantic understanding of the world – everything that has to do with intuition, such as art and other cultural disciplines, and its underlying principle of form – have been artificially put at odds with each other by the fundamental teachings of Western civilization. Pirsig puts the blame on Plato and Aristotle, though I would not go so far back in history. I think the separation of form and function occurred after the Renaissance and at the dawn of industrial revolution (Martin Luther is also to blame, but that’s another story).
To put it crudely, Pirsig maintains that before the split there was no distinction in the West between art and craft. There was no such thing as fine art, nor was art considered useless. Those decorated Greek urns we now look at behind glass in museums had a function. “Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant ‘art.’ The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them,” he wrote.
According to Pirsig, as Europe’s population grew, we had good reasons to decouple form from function in order to let scientific revolution reign, which in turn eventually clothed, fed, and raised the quality of life for most people in the West. In the process everything that has to do with the classic understanding came to be viewed as serious and useful, and everything that has to do with the romantic understanding came to be viewed as frivolous and useless. And because we removed all romantic thinking from scientific revolution, we have built a world full of technological ugliness that is evident in everything from bad architecture to a sea of horrible mass market stuff we now drown in, alienated from what once was familiar.
Now that we have been sated with stuff and that for many of us in the West the quality of life is unprecedentedly high, at least in historical terms, what Pirsig foresaw is the flight to quality we are witnessing now. This is why we are fascinated with design more than ever before. And for Pirsig the only way to quality was through uniting the classic and the romantic understanding of the world. And that’s when the light bulb went on for me – there is nothing in this world that combines form and function, intuition and pragmatism, aesthetics and technology, the way design does. All around me I was witnessing the rise of interest in design on society’s part, and now I knew why. It made total sense.
Continued on sz-mag
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