Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Study Guide

Themes

The Necessity of Reconciling the Classic/Romantic Split:

This theme is reinforced at frequent intervals throughout the book in various direct and indirect ways. The Narrator directly deals with it often in his Chautauquas. It was the basis for the ghost of rationality that so plagued Phaedrus. The Narrator asserted that unless the split was healed, civilization was bound to continue in a downward spiral into more technological ugliness and increasingly brutal warfare. Objectivity gone wild, especially as represented by value-free scientific perspectives, would continue to move the world to ugliness and discord. Naive rejections of technology would not be viable, either. Blind action and reaction resultant from a lack of receptivity to the guiding urgings of Quality need to be replaced by right living cultivated through caring attentiveness.

The Importance of Spiritualizing Everyday Life:

The Narrator.....

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