Robert Pirsig and the Ancient Greeks Who Also Knew Aristotle Was Messing With Our Minds

I had the opportunity to attend the book launch for Wendy Pirsig’s book On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings. My book, Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism, devotes a chapter to parallels between part of Robert Pirsig’s thought and ancient Greek Pyrrhonist philosophy.

I asked Wendy if Bob knew anything about Pyrrhonism. She said as far as she knew, he was completely unaware of it. This is a great pity, as the ancient Pyrrhonists pointed out some of the same faults in Aristotelian thinking that Pirsig critiqued in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These mistakes that Aristotle made are the ones Pirsig pointed to as the source of today’s problems in the Western worldview and why our lives are not as good as they should be — the crux of his book.

I reprint here an adaptation of a section from the chapter from Pyrrho’s Way titled, “Pyrrhonism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” describing one of the parallels between Pyrrhonism and Pirsig’s philosophy. This one is about a major idea from Aristotle both Pirsig and Pyrrho targeted as erroneous.

If you’ve not read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s an absolute must. It’s one of the most important books of the second half of the 20th century. It’s also a captivating read. Pirsig is the master of putting complex philosophical ideas into the form of a novel. The ideas in it are just as relevant now as when the book was written. As it says on the back cover, the book is indeed “a penetrating examination of how we live and how to live better.”

Although Pierre Hadot’s book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, is often cited as the key catalyst for today’s popular revival of interest in the ancient Greek philosophies of life, I think credit should rightly go to Pirsig’s book. It not only predates Hadot’s, but Pirsig has had at least ten thousand readers for every one that has touched Hadot’s work. Pirsig has, more than any other writer, reached more people alive today with the message that philosophy is important to our lives and crucial to the question of how to live better.

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Robert M. Pirsig begins his famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with the following statement:

And what is good, Phaedrus,

And what is not good…

Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Deep in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig attempts to answer that question, starting with a discussion of arete. Arete is usually translated into English as “virtue” and occasionally as “excellence.” These terms fail to reflect the full meaning of this term, which was central to the ancient Greek ethos. Homer describes arete in both the Greek and Trojan heroes and in female figures. In the Homeric poems, arete is frequently associated with bravery, but it more often is associated with effectiveness. The man or woman of arete is a person of the highest effectiveness. They use all their faculties — strength, bravery, and wit — to achieve results. Arete involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans.

Pirsig describes how Plato demoted arete from its position of highest honor in Greek thinking to being in second place, after Truth, which Plato combined with the Good. That which is true is good; that which is good is true. Subordinating arete to the True and the Good set the stage for other philosophers to come up with arguments that arete should be demoted further within a “true” order of things. That’s what Aristotle did. As Pirsig put it:

Aristotle felt that the mortal horse of Appearance which ate grass and took people places and gave birth to little horses deserved far more attention than Plato was giving it. He said that the horse is not mere Appearance. The Appearances cling to something which is independent of them and which, like Ideas, is unchanging. The “something” that Appearances cling to he named “substance.” And at that moment, and not until that moment, our modern scientific understanding of reality was born.

Pirsig capitalizes “Appearance” here as it is a crucial, technical term used in ancient Greek philosophy. It doesn’t quite map to the English word. Except for the Epicureans, the ancient Greek philosophies sharply divided the concept of what we experience (the “appearances,” or, as the term is often translated in Stoic texts, the “impressions”) from what is reality.

It is this part of Aristotle’s philosophy that Pyrrho seems to have been reacting to in developing his own philosophy. Aristotle subordinated the appearances to a non-evident idea he named “substance” which was independent of the appearances. It is this “substance” that Pyrrho was likely most keen to point out was adiaphora, astathmeta, and anepikrita in order to return the appearances to their rightful status.

· Adiaphora (Not differentiable by logical differentia, i.e., diaphora. In other words, the use of logical categories for classifying the “substances” doesn’t work. There are no clear ways of consistently classifying the elements of the “substances.” Hence, things are undefinable, unclassifiable, uncategorizable, non-different, without distinguishing characteristics)

· Astathmeta (Unstable, unbalanced, unmeasurable)

· Anepikrita (Undecidable, unfixed, unjudged)

In other words, Aristotle said that behind the appearances there was some stable, unchanging, definable essence, which he called “substance.” It is these substances that allow for things to be differentiated from each other. Pyrrho said Aristotle was wrong. Things cannot be differentiated on the basis of these “substances” because nothing has an essence. Nothing is stable. We cannot accurately make the kinds of judgments that Aristotle claims we can make.

You may be familiar with these ideas from Buddhism. The Buddhist terms for the nothing-has-essence argument are sunyata and anatta. Things are empty and without self. The term for the nothing-is-stable argument is anicca. Things are impermanent.

As one ancient Pyrrhonist said, “No form, no words, no object of taste, or smell, or touch, no other object of perception has any distinctive character.”¹ And as the Mahā Prajñāpāramitā Heart Sutra says, “Therefore in emptiness there is no form; no sensation, perception, mental reaction, consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of thought; no seeing and so on to no thinking….”

The Buddhists and the Pyrrhonists are talking about the same thing. They agree with each other — and with Pirsig. Aristotle was wrong. Aristotle’s “substances” are not real — “real” being in the sense that they are part of nature, part of reality. They are useful — indeed, without them we couldn’t make much sense of things — but the truth is they are not part of reality.

It was likely this idea of “substance” that the Pyrrhonist philosopher, Timon, was reacting to in saying, “appearance is strong in every way, everywhere.” Aristotle would have you believe the opposite, that it was the “substances” that were strong, in every way, everywhere, and that the appearances were just flimsy things that clung to the “substances.”

Aristotle rearranged the hierarchy of philosophy to put “substances” into second place, after the True. Reason, logic, and knowledge became the primary concerns. He demoted the Good to a minor branch of knowledge called “ethics.” This became the new Western worldview, and it survives to this day. Arete wasn’t exactly “killed” as Pirsig claimed, but it was conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s thinking and appears only as a minor topic in ethics. Replacing arete was a new goal: to create an endless proliferation of information about the “substances” and to call this “knowledge.”

Pirsig, a former professor of rhetoric, particularly lamented the status of rhetoric in Aristotle’s new hierarchy. Rhetoric, which was once the very essence of learning, was reduced by Aristotle to the teaching of mannerisms and forms. What Pirsig saw as the result was that the front-row students who were good at mimicking got their Aristotelian A’s, whereas the students with real arete wondered what was wrong with themselves because they found that they could not like this so-called “rhetoric.”

Pirsig noted that:

…those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: “What is the Good?” And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren’t objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha.

“Change your mind.” You may have heard that before. It has become a Buddhist slogan one can find on t-shirts and bumper stickers. Laughter aside, we seem to have two things we can change. One is our circumstances; the other is our minds. Both have limitations. Most people’s knowledge and skill about changing their circumstances seems to be greater than their knowledge and skill about changing their minds, but our potential ability to change our minds greatly exceeds our potential ability to change our circumstances.

Not only does Buddhism aim to change minds, so too do the Hellenistic philosophies of life. Perhaps that’s why, starting about a generation after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a popular revival of the Hellenistic philosophies would arise — outside the universities, which in the twentieth century somehow mostly lost their ability to teach classical ethics, into which the Hellenistic philosophies had been subsumed.

It seems no surprise that among the various Hellenistic philosophies that are being revived, it is the highly virtue-centric Stoicism that has by far achieved the greatest interest — almost entirely outside of universities. Pirsig’s work received a similar reception: massive public interest and little effect on what went on in universities.

The Pyrrhonist philosopher, Sextus Empiricus said that the practice of Pyrrhonism makes it “…possible to seem to live rightly (‘rightly’ being taken, not as referring only to arete, but in a more ordinary sense)….” Pyrrhonism puts arete back into its original place, no longer subordinate to that unsupportable Aristotelian idea of Truth. It uses rhetoric — the art of argument — as its principal tool for achieving this end. It does so without falling into the relativism of the Sophists (or the Postmodernists) or the rash conceit of the dogmatists. (Dogma is a technical term in Pyrrhonism. Its meaning is related to but different from the English term, “dogma,” which is a firm belief unsupported by reason. Dogma in Pyrrhonism is a firm belief in something non-empirical. Such a belief may be supported by reason.)

As no criterion of truth can be demonstrated, there’s no firm ground for truth to stand on. Truth with a capital T is disempowered of its ability to subordinate anything. Pyrrhonism allows us to pursue arete and eudaimonia, free from the tyranny of the hobgoblins of dogma.

Pirsig, Pyrrho, and the Buddha all invite you to repair the damage Aristotle has done to your mind.

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For more, see Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism. You can read the introduction to the book here.

Footnotes:

1. Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, p 419