I don't know how much the fact/value split was on the intellectual radar screen in the late 50s. Of course, the split goes back to the Enlightenment, but its impact upon culture didn't seem to be widely appreciated until the unraveling of the Sixties. The broad, Western cultural consensus, rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, kept the values of Americans mostly homogenous up until the fracturing that occurred during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Consequently, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance captured a moment when people were beginning to notice existential dislocations between human life and technological progress. This fracturing sets the stage of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with Pirsig's reflections upon how his hip and artistic travel companions, John and Sylvia, find themselves romantically alienated from the machine that is making their motorcycle trip possible. John and Sylvia's alienation from technology is taken as an example of a larger cultural diagnosis, how the modern world possesses vast technological capacity but is also existentially lost and adrift. How did this situation come to be? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sets out to answer that question.
Although Pirsig doesn't describe it this way in the book, his answer about our cultural problems basically points the finger at the fact/value split. To the one side is science, rationality, and technology. To the other is value--the true, the beautiful, and the good--what Pirsig calls "Quality." At a critical part of the book, during his years teaching at Montana State, Pirsig chaffs at how Quality/Value has been reduced to the subjective in the modern world. This triggers his mission to prove what I'll call the ontologization of value. This pursuit leads Pirsig into metaphysics, and an eventual mental breakdown. But the mystical insight he reaches, that Value is the Real, is the philosophical accomplishment of the book.
Simply put, Pirsig overcomes the fact/value split by restoring Value to its transcendental status. And more than a transcendental status, an all-encompassing transcendental status.
What might that mean? In the book, Pirsig calls Quality the Dao, Dharma, the Buddha, and the Godhead. I can't recall if he compares Quality to Brahman, but that would also apply. In the Christian imagination, Quality would be the Logos.
This was this bit--the ontologization of value--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I didn't know what to do with when I first read the book. As I recounted in the first post, I was in the grip of science at the time and didn't know what to do with the mystical aspects of the book, or why they were important. But now, as I also recounted, my concerns are more metaphysical, even mystical. Consequently, I better appreciate what Pirsig was trying to do and say. Life after the fact/value split is a disorienting, incoherent mess. And the only way to overcome the split is the ontologization of value. Value exists and we live our lives in relation to that value. This is a critical part of the story I tell in The Shape of Joy.
Of course, I come at this question from a Christian perspective. But I don't think it is too hard to make a connection between the Dao and the Logos. As I wrote about recently, Chinese translations of John 1 translate the Greek word logos as Dao. C.S. Lewis also describes the ontologization of value, in its moral key, as the Dao in The Abolition of Man.
All that to say, having missed the point of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance during graduate school, due to my scientific orientation and wariness about mysticism, I found myself, upon rereading, appreciating the ambition of the book. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, I agree with Pirsig's vision. Value is the Real, and we live our lives in an ongoing mystical relationship with that ontological Reality.
