Saturday, December 17, 2005
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It's a strange book. I had tried reading it a couple of times in the past, but had never made much headway with it. This time I got an audiobook version, and managed to complete it. The narrator was very good, and it was probably an abridged version that he was narrating. I confess I didn't get a whole lot out of this book. The author focuses on the concept of 'quality' - how quality separate the objective assessment of objects from a subjective assessment. That much I understood. There were sections on Aristotle vs Plato and rhetoric vs dialectic that completely went over my head.
I've been reading up on the Internet today, and it seems like this was an autobiographical book. I had no idea!
Was this book written to counter the anti-materialism of the '60s? It seems like an attempt at bringing a synthesis of materialism and anti-materialism through 'quality'. Is that the idea?
