One Thought

I’ve been making my way through Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book’s good. I love its mix between philosophical discussions and narrative, and it’s very well written.

Pirsig himself is an interesting guy. He was a precocious child with a high IQ score (170) at age 9. He started college as a biochemistry student at age 15, but he dropped out three years later. He was losing faith in science as a means to ultimate truth. After a brief stint in the army, he turned to philosophy, which he studied as an undergraduate and graduate student. He then traveled to India to learn about Eastern philosophy at a Hindu university there.

At 33, Pirsig suffered a nervous breakdown. He spent time in mental hospitals for a few years, eventually getting diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. While hospitalized, doctors subjected him to electroshock treatments, which he says left him a completely different person.

All this happened before Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book chronicles a cross-country motorcycle trip he took with his 11-year-old his son, Chris. It took four years to write and was apparently rejected 121 times by publishers before going on to sell more than 5 million copies.

Classical and Romantic Perspectives

One bit of ZatAoMM that has really struck me so far is Pirsig’s distinction between two modes of thought: “classical” and “romantic.” These modes are more than just ways of thinking. They’re approaches to life — even approaches to truth. 

The classical view sees the world primarily in abstractions, explanations, and underlying forms. It proceeds by reason and by laws. It loves to dissect things (and ideas) into their component parts, to explain, and to classify. The fields of science, law, and medicine (for instance) fall into its realm.

The romantic view sees the world primarily in terms of its immediate appearance. It sees the whole rather than the parts, the thing itself rather than abstract categories or classifications. It is, in Pirsig’s words, “primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive.” To a romantic, feelings take precedence over facts. Art is usually a romantic pursuit.

Although no one sees the world purely from a classical or romantic viewpoint, most fall clearly on one side or the other. People tend to cluster with those on the same side and clash with those on the opposite side. (Side note: if you’re familiar with Myers-Briggs types, I think the most-classical people are probably NT’s (iNtuitive Thinkers) and the most-romantic people are probably SF’s (Sensing Feelers). Classifying people into personality types is a very classical thing to do, so you know what side I’m on!)

Disagreements between classics and romantics can be intense. Pirsig says that both sides misunderstand and underestimate what the other side is about. Neither wants to give up its idea of truth. He writes:

To a romantic, this classic mode often appears dull, awkward, and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through a computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endless grey. The death force.

Conversely, to classics, romantics are:

Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society.

Pirsig’s distinction is highly applicable to my own life. I’ve spent large swaths of my life immersed in the classical side of things. You have to when you’re a computer programmer, and I spent a good 17 years as one. Besides the fact that I tend to focus monomaniacally when I’m interested in something, computer programming is mentally demanding. It’s not something you can start or stop on a whim. It takes all your concentration and tends to occupy your thoughts even when you aren’t doing it.

Computer programming–as with, say, biochemistry or motorcycle repair–is all about abstractions, components, and laws. You don’t succeed as a programmer by relying on your gut, your feelings, or your intuition (though those do come in handy). Instead, you need to adopt an objective, highly rational, logical perspective. As a programmer, biochemist, or motorcycle repairman, you form and test hypotheses. You surrender your feelings to the laws of nature or the machine: the program works or it doesn’t, the motorcycle runs or it doesn’t, the hypothesis is true or false.

When you spend much of your time working in the classical mindset, it tends to filter into other areas of your life. You don’t just stop being a classic at the end of the workday. You usually live your entire life on one side or the other.

I found myself moving further to the classical side as I got older. I think this was mostly due to specialization. As we get older, we tend to spend more and more of our time doing one thing — specialization is the way most people make a living, after all. For me, that one thing was programming.

I also spent five years in college, and colleges tend to emphasize the classical mindset, even in humanities departments. Academic research is all about analysis: dissection, classification, categorization, and deduction. It’s likely that the longer you stay in academia, the more classical you become. You have to if you want to succeed there.

I think I became frustrated at my job (at Google, as a programmer) in large part because I was becoming increasingly imbalanced. The romantic side of me was being suppressed; I craved an outlet but simply wasn’t getting it at my job. It also was hard to do anything significant or focused outside of work — as I said, programming can be very demanding.

In the past year, I’ve regained the balance that I think I lost when I started college. Writing essays (like this one) exercises the classical part of my mind, while writing music exercises the romantic part. I feel whole in a way that I didn’t a year ago.

So I’ve achieved a balance – but does it make sense, in general, to try to balance the classical and romantic modes?

On the surface, it seems the answer is yes — balance is good, right? But there is a danger: In trying to balance between extremes, it’s possible just to become boring. Sometimes it’s better to go with natural inclinations than to fight them. Balance can be bland, boring, and fake; everyone doesn’t need to be the same, anyway.

In the case of classical and romantic viewpoints, though, I do think it’s worth seeking some sort of balance. You’re missing out on an entire realm of experience if you don’t. Both modes are valid (and even true) in their own way. They both contribute to human experience and achievement. If you fall too far into one camp or the other, you’re only seeing half of the picture. You’re only engaging half of humanity.

One major goal of Pirsig’s book is to establish a common ground between the two modes. I think he’s on the right track.