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Robert Maynard Pirsig war ein US-amerikanischer Autor. Sein erstes Werk Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten wurde zum internationalen Bestseller. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. September 1928 – 24. April 2017   •   Andere Namen رابرت پیرسیق
Robert M. Pirsig Foto
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Robert M. Pirsig Zitate und Sprüche

„Berge sollte man mit möglichst wenig Anstrengung und ohne Ehrgeiz ersteigen. Unsere eigene Natur sollte das Tempo bestimmen. Wenn man unruhig wird, geht man schneller. Wenn man zu keuchen anfängt, geht man langsamer. Man steigt auf den Berg in einem Zustand, in dem sich Rastlosigkeit und Erschöpfung die Waage halten. Dann, wenn man nicht mehr in Gedanken vorauseilt, ist jeder Schritt nicht mehr bloß ein Mittel zum Zweck, sondern ein einmaliges Ereignis. Dieses Blatt ist gezähnt. Dieser Felsen scheint locker. Von dieser Stelle aus ist der Schnee nicht mehr so gut zu sehen, obwohl man ihm schon näher ist. Das sind Dinge, die man ohnehin wahrnehmen sollte. Nur auf irgendein zukünftiges Ziel hin zu leben ist seicht. Die Flanken des Berges sind es, auf denen Leben gedeiht, nicht der Gipfel. Hier wächst etwas.“

Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Über Leben , Berg , Über natur , Anstrengung

Robert M. Pirsig: Zitate auf Englisch

“The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing—using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 9; in Ch. 22 (see below) Pirsig recounts finding that Henri Poincaré had made a similar statement decades earlier.

“It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7

“What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Kontext: The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

“What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.
Then his mind's eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and…I don't know what really happened…but the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything.
It all gave way from under him.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20

“All this is just an analogy.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30

“Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book like this.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 13

“Poincaré wrote, "If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment." This was the statement made by Phædrus in the laboratory; it raised the question that failed him out of school.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 22; the quote is from Poincaré's The Foundations of Science, ch. 12, "Optics and Electricity".

“Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 1

“Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things—it fits.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides' disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things."”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece.
Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately—and this is an important way of seeing it—and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form—and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example—this wrench—has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8

“Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle's patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn't afford much satisfaction.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping aretês place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20

“Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the "one." Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the "many."”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30

“Plato often names Socrates' foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for "colt." Phædrus' personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means "wolf."”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates' discourse on love and is tamed.
Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30

“The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 24

“Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991)

“You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don't go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28

“Dialectic generally means "of the nature of the dialogue," which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

“There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane."”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

To go outside the mythos is to become insane.
Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28

“I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 31

“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.”

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Robert M. Pirsig

NPR Interview http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612364 with Pirsig (1974)

“The Quality, the aretê he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.”

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Robert M. Pirsig buch Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten

Quelle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30

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