The Motorcycle as a System
Item
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Title
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The Motorcycle as a System
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Description
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I was talking about these concepts yesterday when I said that a motorcycle can be divided according to its components and according to its functions. When I said that suddenly I created a set of boxes … And when I said the components may be subdivided into a power assembly and a running assembly, suddenly appear some more little boxes.
And you see that every time I made a further division, up came more boxes based on these divisions until I had a huge pyramid of boxes. Finally you see that while I was splitting the cycle up into finer and finer pieces, I was also building a structure.
This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge. …
The box “motorcycle” contains the boxes “components” and “functions.” The box “components” contains the boxes “power assembly” and “running assembly,” and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as “causes” which produce long chain structures of the form, “A causes B which causes C which causes D,” and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operator’s “exists,” “equals,” and “implies” produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these inter-related structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.
That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.
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Designer
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Pirsig, Robert M.
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Date
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1974
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Source
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Bibliographic Citation
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Pirsig, Robert M. 2005. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace. William Morrow. Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition. Pages 96-98.
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