Finally we are done; The Effect of the Unanswerable

Mankind, especially the brightest, is perpetually searching for answers. One thrives under the idea that one is superior because of man’s capacity to create and discover. However, as the sum of mankind’s search for truth is taken into account, each truth learned and all progress made in the name of knowledge seems to only bring about the conclusion that some things are just out of man’s reach. In other words, the more one knows, the more one realizes one doesn’t know, and the more on realizes one can never know.

This is a terrifying conclusion to come to, one that often only plagues that most intelligent.  Amongst the most intelligent would be Phaedrus, later found to be the narrator of the novel, and the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whose life this autobiographical novel is based on.

Robert Pirsig at the age of nine was recorded to have an IQ of 170, just as the Phaedrus did in the novel, and as such skipped several grades and graduated high school at the age of 15 (Adams). However his intelligence seemed to plague him at times. While studying biochemistry he became distracted by the limitations in science, which lead to failing classes and ultimate expulsion from the University of Minnesota. He then joined the army and went to Korea for the war. It was there that he found an interest in Buddhism. After the war, Pirsig returned to education, gaining a degree in Eastern Philosophy and also studying eastern culture and journalism. He later became a teacher of creative writing. However he was still not at peace. His intelligence and search for meaning, a search for quality, left him to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, which he was treated for with electroconvulsive therapy, a therapy that is expressed as the turning point in his life in the novel (Adams).

The therapy changed him; it left him as a different person, somehow separated from who he was in the past. In the novel he expresses his life before the therapy as a sort of previous life and his life after as an attempt to come to terms with it and reconnect with his son. It was in this time period of his life that he wrote the novel that he became so well known for (Adams). It is evident by the similarities between Pirsig and Phaedrus that this novel was an attempt to come to terms with his treatment and all that had occurred. He makes it clear from the novel that it was his intelligence that caused the majority of his problems. Pirsig’s intelligence forced him to consider questions that could not be answered. His intelligence also made him terribly frustrated and unnerved by not being able to answer these questions. There were questions that he could not answer and the novel is the story of his coming to terms with that fact.

Pirsig spends much of the novel discussing specific concepts that had plagued him. The story itself, the actual plot is simply a canvas for the ideas Pirsig hopes to express. Within these concepts there are two categories, idea’s that look for answers, and ones that admit that there are no answers to be found. The ideas that look for answers are expressed earlier in the novel and seem to never really be resolved, while those that explain an inability to find answers are explained fully.

            The concept or question that was essentially the reason for the narrator’s journey was that of Quality. The narrator expressed a desire to achieve quality, to find it, however how could he find it when he did not even know how to define it? Quality, the narrator decides, can be found somewhere between the realms of classic and romantic thought.  Classic thought is the viewing of the world “as an underling form of itself”(Pirsig, pg.73). It views the individual parts that make the whole in a logical fashion focused solely on the science. This Classical thought can later be divided into both subjective and objective categories. Romantic thought, on the other hand, is the viewing of the world “in terms of immediate appearances”(Pirsig, pg. 73). It looks at the whole rather then parts in a way that is meant to see past the surface in an artistic fashion. The narrator argues that to find quality, one must blend the two completely different forms of thinking and acquire that which appeals to both, a task seemingly too large for him to manage. He expresses Phaedrus’s search for quality as unproductive. He could not find it because “for him Quality is better seen up at the timberline than … obscured by Smokey windows and oceans of worlds.”(Pirsig, 392) He could not escape the “Smokey windows and oceans” because that is state of the world, no matter how far he drove on his motorcycle.

     The narrator expresses another idea, one focused on distributing true education, The Church of Reason. This concept came to Phaedrus, the narrator, and Pirsig’s former self, in his years as a professor. It came from a time of governmental upset, in which his school was about to loose accreditation. Phaedrus’ students did not understand that the school is still a school without accreditation; it still has its courses, its professors, and the books. The true university would not leave the school just because they had lost their accreditation because the spirit of learning, of gaining knowledge would stay. The Church of Reason, “the real university is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.”(Pg. 150)

        Though many concepts were answers to questions the narrator had, there were many he could not answer. The reason he could not answer these questions was because flaws in the scientific method, more specifically the formulating of a hypothesis. Phaedrus, in his years as a science student, became disturbed by science’s inability to find answers. He found that every time he created a hypothesis the answer to his hypothesis would be hidden within another one, and another one, until all he had were questions with no definite answers. This forming of questions leading to more questions lead him to a higher level of thinking, however at a price. This higher level of thought was one not many dared to obtain because there were only questions, and no answers. In fact, at this level of thought, there was no hope to find the answers. This leads the narrator to a questioning of the concept of truth (Pirsig, 61).

The inability to find answers is painful to everyone, especially when they are of higher intelligence. Phaedrus leaves with a question, “if he doesn't get the answer he just drives and drives until he gets one and that leads to another question and he drives and drives for the answer to that one essentially pursuing questions never seeing, never understanding that the questions will never end. Something is missing.” When one finds themselves lost in a sea of questions, all they can hope for is a tether of certainty to prevent them from floating away into oblivion. It is that tether, that certain truth that Phaedrus, and in actuality everyone, is looking for.

         Phaedrus could not find this tether, and it caused him to go insane. Through the narrator’s eyes the reader learns that Phaedrus’s search leads him to loose his job. The novel then reveals that the narrator and Phaedrus are one in the same, the two separated by electro-shock therapy, like the one Pirsig underwent, that was brought on by the mental breakdown of Phaedrus. His search for questions literally drove him to insanity. And when his necessary treatment was completed, he lost himself. He became a different person, confused and desperate to find some healthy connection, some link, between his new self, the narrator, and his former self, Phaedrus, without once again pushing himself to madness.

       Chris, the narrator’s son, is also affected by the questions around him. It is revealed early in the novel that Chris, like his father, is an incredibly curious individual. Chris asks his father many questions including a question of his belief in ghosts. The narrator’s answer is unsurprisingly terribly complex and confusing for Chris to understand, and he becomes extremely frustrated because “he really does want to know things.” (Pirsig, 39) Throughout the novel the narrator expresses Chris’s poor behavior and quick temper. These qualities seem to come from Chris’s overbearing curiosity and inability to know everything, after all he is his father’s son, in fact the novel briefly alludes to a possible psychological issue in the boy, much like that of his father.

        Even John and Silvia seem to be plagued by unanswerable questions. For them these questions come in the form of technology. However, instead of pushing and frustrating themselves with the questions they avoid them at all costs. John, and Silvia as represented by him, displays his avoidance of technology in his refusal to learn how to repair his own motorcycle (Pirsig, 59). In their journey in the mountains, John and Silvia are attempting to escape technology, which seems to be an overbearing question to them. However the great irony of their situation is that in the attempt to escape technology, they travel on a motorcycle, a piece of technology itself, making the questions that plague them inescapable. That is why John becomes so frustrated when the narrator tries to teach him to fix his motorcycle, because unlike the narrator, who obsesses over his questions, John simply wants to avoid them (Pirsig, 58).

          Phaedrus’ issues with the unknown are also issues the narrator of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky must deal with. The entire work is placed under the idea that “to be too conscious is an illness” (Dostoyevsky, 3). The narrator expressed how “the more conscious (he) was … the more deeply (he) sank into (his) mire, and the more ready (he) was to sink into it altogether.”(Dostoyevsky, 4) In other words, when one is too conscious he can no longer be “a man of action” because his mind gets in the way of action, distracted by all that he is conscious of, much like the Phaedrus’ intelligence got in the way of his teaching.  (Dostoyevsky, 4)

Dostoyevsky wrote the book in a time period where there was much confusion. The reveal of evolutionary theory brought to question hundreds of years of beliefs. The narrator expresses how the inaccuracy of the church meant that nothing could be believed, which lead to an unease in his mind. Essentially, nothing can ever be truly known. The narrator enjoyed his toothache because it was something tangible. Pain can be used as the tether of truth, to hold one’s mind away from all that is obscure. The narrator also expressed a hatred of mankind, and himself for being a part of the human race. His hatred came from mankind’s inherent naivety. Humans are simply incapable of understanding all that there is and the frustration that that brought the narrator drove him to hatred.

When the conclusion that nothing can be truly known is combined with the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, the reason behind the turmoil that comes with the inability to know becomes clear. In a famous experiment a later noble prize winning Physicists, Erwin Schrödinger explained a paradox with a theoretical experiment. If a cat were placed in a box with poison, a radioactive isotope and a hammer then the state of the cat, whether it were alive or dead, would rely on the release of the poison. The radioactive isotope would decay, and then cause the hammer to break the vial and release the poison, however there was no way to determine when the isotope decayed. Therefore until the box was opened one would not know whether the cat was alive or dead. Schrödinger explained that this lack of knowledge meant that until the box opened the cat is both “living and dead … in equal parts” (Kramer).

If the lack of knowledge leads to a duality in existence, and if mankind does not truly know anything, than at any given time, one is both everything and nothing at all. It is an idea that can cause one to spend hours running in circles in their own mind, and it those circles that cause the characters in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so much suffering.