A study of Professionalism through Readings on Excellence / Quality / Virtue1

Based on excerpts from:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Robert M. Pirsig

The motorcycle is a physical system but also a creation of the mind…
Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it’s some kind of a"knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, andmost of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. Amotorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really aminiature study of the art of rationality itself…
The motorcycle is a system…a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’smind.I’ve noticed that people who have never workedwith steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with givenshapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who doesmachining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you areskilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not...Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel.
…The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate. It’s almost impossible to state them precisely; they must be felt rather than formulated.

Individual Assignment 1:

  1. Read the excerpts above, and highlight one or more areas that catch your attention, or things you agree or disagree strongly with.
  2. Re-read the final paragraph of excerpt 2 (in bold) and indicate whether you agree or disagree.
  3. If you agree, what are some of the ‘rules’ or ‘feelings’ that you believe guide the inventor’s creativity?
  4. If you disagree, how would you describe the ‘essential work of the inventor?’

Group Assignment 1:

  1. Each group member should share their response to item 1 from the Individual Assignment, and explain what caught their attention and why.
  2. Discuss each member’s response to item 2 from the Individual Assignment, and create a group statement about creativity and invention that everyone in the group can agree with. One group member should write out the group statement on the group sheet.

Peace of Mind

The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible.The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technologyis ... not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. Whenthis transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of publicrecognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on apersonal basis, in one’s own life, in a less dramatic way.

Such personal transcendence of conflicts with technology doesn’t have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a level as simpleas sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems are the same. In each case there’sa beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability tosee what "looks good" and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that "good" are needed. Both classic andromantic understandings of Quality must be combined.

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would alwaysgive only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use asewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" wouldnaturally follow. The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored.

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneerof "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not justdepressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology:stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. …Quality isn’tsomething you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects andobjects, the cone from which the tree must start.To arrive at this Quality requires a somewhat different procedure from the "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3" instructions that accompanydualistic technology, and that’s what I’ll now try to go into.

Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that whichdestroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward theend of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothingelse. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good andunderstand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, apeace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier inheavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces acomplete identification with one’s circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietnessquite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there arelevels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in whichone has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wanderingdesires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

I’ve sometimes thought this inner peace of mind, this quietness is similar to if not identical with the sort of calm you sometimes getwhen going fishing, which accounts for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the line in the water, not moving, not reallythinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that haveprevented you from solving problems you couldn’t solve before and introduced ugliness and clumsiness into your actions andthoughts.

You don’t have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle. A cup of coffee, a walk around the block, sometimes just putting offthe job for five minutes of silence is enough. When you do you can almost feel yourself grow toward that inner peace of mind thatreveals it all. That which turns its back on this inner calm and the Quality it reveals is bad maintenance. That which turns toward it isgood. The forms of turning away and toward are infinite but the goal is always the same...there’s a kind of inner peace ofmind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The materialand the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant thematerial is right.

When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one canbe said to "care" about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. When one hasthis feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself. So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’sself from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces rightvalues, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be amaterial reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

Individual Assignment 4:

0. Read the entire selection above, and think about what the author says about peace of mind.

  1. Give examples from your experience of people or situations where ‘peace of mind’ was evident.
  2. Give examples from your experience of people or situations where ‘peace of mind’ was lacking.
  3. Thinking back on the examples you gave for the items above, can you identify any factors that help to cultivate this peace of mind that connects you to your work? Also, describe what you remember about the difference in the outcomes or the success of situations where peace of mind was present and where it was lacking.

Group Assignment 4:

1. & 2.Discuss each member’s responses to items 1 and 2 from Individual Assignment 4, and pick the best example for each situation to record as the examples from the group. One group member should write out the group examples and explanations.

  1. Discuss each member’s response to item 3from Individual Assignment 4, and compile or summarize the group discussion of factors help to cultivate peace of mind. Also, compile or summarize common differences in outcomes or success rate between situations where the person has peace of mind and where the person does not have peace of mind.

What would college look like without grades (What is our motivation for Education?)

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real teaching couldbegin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as aresult of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate whatthe teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacherin such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it onyour own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautionedagainst it. He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right.Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you’ll get real education." …One student laid it wide open when shesaid with complete candor, "Of course you can’t eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for."

She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree andgrades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and themechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal withgeneralities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, astudent completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.Such a student, the demonstrator hypothesized, would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. Hemight go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life wasnot his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get anassignment in.

Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he’d completedthe assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a pointwhere the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.

In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to payattention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn’t learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he wouldstop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.

But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is whatshould have happened. He wasn’t there for a real education in the first place and had no real business there at all. A large amount ofmoney and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had beenburned.

The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mulementality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, whichhe supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

…The movement from this to his enquiry into Quality took place because of a sinister aspect of grading that the withholding of gradesexposed. Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothingmemorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned andsome have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’sbeing taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of gradesexposes a huge and frightening vacuum.

What was he trying to do, anyway? This question became more and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemedright when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves whatwas good writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look withinthemselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer.

But now this made no sense. If they already knew what was good and bad, there was no reason for them to take the course in the firstplace. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...totell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposedto the whole idea of the University.

For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to dosomething but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at him and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervousbreakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to worktoward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn’t doing.He couldn’t. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap ofauthoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?