Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

The narrator begins to elaborate on Phaedrus’s quest for the “ghost of rationality.” He reproduces a quote from Albert Einstein that details the different factors that motivate people to pursue science: ambition, commitment to the utilitarian good, and, most profound of all, the pure desire to escape into the eternal, rational world. Phaedrus is a member of the latter group.

By age 15, Phaedrus had already completed a year of university biochemistry. He becomes fascinated by the formation of hypotheses—potential explanations for a phenomenon—because they appear to be supplied neither by nature nor by the mind of the scientist alone. He concludes that any phenomenon can be explained by infinite possible hypotheses. This conclusion discredits the scientific method as a route to decisive truth; moreover, as more scientific thought is conducted, more hypotheses arise, and established scientific truths are refuted and revised at a faster pace. Thus, sustained application of the scientific method actually makes stable truth harder to attain.

Phaedrus reasons that this use of the scientific method showcases a harmful deficiency in the state of reason—one that causes many social problems. He becomes disenchanted with his academic pursuits, and fails out of the university at age 17. From there, he begins to drift “laterally” in search of truth, no longer searching for truth directly before him.