Zen and the Art of Despair
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In Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Phaedrus personifies Anti-Climacian despair to its fullest extent. His consciousness of this despair climaxes in a total mental breakdown, of which his defiance to the very simplicities of human decency becomes his reality. Phaedrus has become a totality: a totality of defiance. By exploring how Phaedrus despairs in defiance of the solution that has been present all along, one can understand how his eventual faith in Tao saves him from his previous defiance of Tao.
First of all, one must understand Anti-Climacian despair before one can see how it relates to Phaedrus.
In despair the self wants to enjoy the total satisfaction of making itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself; it wants to have the honor of this poetic, masterly construction, the way it has understood itself. And yet, in the final analysis, what it understands by itself is a riddle; in the very moment when it seems that the self is closest to having the building completed, it can arbitrarily dissolve the whole thing into nothing. (Hong 69-70)
Anti-Climacus separates despair into three levels, with the latter two being the most intense: unconscious despair, conscious despair in willing to not be oneself, and conscious despair in willing to be oneself (13). Phaedrus is plagued by the most intense form: conscious despair in willing to be oneself, or in other words, defiance.
Phaedrus becomes aware of the answer to his problem halfway through the novel, yet in his despairing defiance he refuses to acknowledge it...