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I had the opportunity to attend the book launch for Wendy Pirsig’s book On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings.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…