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Maartje Peters
Professor Johnston
English 1B
September 23 2013
Gravity is a ghost
In chapter 3 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig claims
that the “law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost!” (42).
According to him, the law of gravity has no more claim to reality than the idea of ghosts. In
order to understand how he came to this conclusion, his preliminary thoughts prove
insightful. He argues that man’s intellect has not significantly changed across the ages and,
therefore, “the context in which [is] thought” becomes a defining factor in what is
considered “real” or not (40). Because he effectively argues against the evolution of man’s
intellect, something else must then explain why “truths” change over time and why such
“truths” are not necessarily universally true. Pirsig offers culture, or what he refers to as
“context,” as an explanation for this observation. The law of gravity is, furthermore, an
abstract idea, which means it has no physical counterpart. Gravity is currently an
unquestioned belief that explains what we perceive with our senses and serves as a major
“building block” in how we construct—imagine—the world. At the root of this apparent
contradiction of “science as belief” lies the mind with its capacity to imagine independent
existence outside of itself.
Ideas that the world is flat and witches are real were once considered
incontrovertibly true, yet are now outdated. This should help clarify how a seemingly rock
solid truth like a “law of nature” is bound to cultural context and hereby loses its absolute
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value. The problem with these examples, however, is that they are easily and, given our
culture, instinctively countered with the idea that we now know better because we have
evolved. Our culture, the context in which we think, “dictates” that there is an objective
reality out there, which we are discovering more of as our human intellect evolves. Pirsig
denies this. He opines that “IQ’s aren’t that much different” between modern and medieval
humans or among different races (40). Rather, he seems to suggest, our explanations for
phenomena have changed over time and differ among cultures. The law of gravity, then,
becomes a relative truth—relative to culture, that is. Pirsig provides additional proof for
this assertion by showing that the concept of gravity did not always exist, since its
beginning can be traced to the brain of Isaac Newton. The phenomena that triggered the
idea of “the law of gravity” in his brain, furthermore, did not exist “before the beginning of
the earth … before the primal generation of anything” (41). Like ghosts, then, gravity is an
idea, a belief, which we all assume to be true in the context we are bound to be thinking in
due to “mass-hypnosis” (42).
In western culture, ghosts are considered a fabrication of the mind and cannot be
proven to exist according to the laws of science because they have no matter or energy of
their own. Similarly, argues Pirsig, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no
energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s mind” (39). They are abstract
ideas because they have no physical attributes. In observing our direct surroundings, it
becomes more obvious that gravity is an idea we use to explain what we perceive with our
senses and, more importantly perhaps, to imagine the world, the universe, and our place in
it—where we are, in other words. Both ghosts and gravity are beliefs in the human mind
only, but part of the “gravity package” is the belief that gravity exists independent of mind
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and is therefore real, whereas it is believed ghosts do not exist outside of mind and are
therefore ultimately unreal. After close examination this does not hold up and Pirsig
alludes to this when he says, “the whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the
idea that it isn’t a human invention” (43).
Confusion arises in our science-based culture when ghosts and gravity are seen as
beliefs and the distinction between “real” and “unreal” gets erased in this way. “The
contradiction the scientists are stuck with is that of mind,” Pirsig explains, because “mind
has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do”
(43). It is the paradox of the mind, which lies at the root of this confusion, then. The human
mind is capable of imagining an independent reality outside of itself, such as gravity.
However, the “scientific proof” of gravity must necessarily happen within the mind, hereby
losing the exact criteria that would have given it “real” existence, i.e. mass and energy. It
lays bare the arbitrary nature of reality: a conventional belief is sufficient to separate a
ghost from gravity. One is believed to be a belief and the other is believed to be real, yet
both consist solely of belief, which is without substance by nature. This again underscores
the pivotal role cultural context plays in lending legitimacy to Pirsig’s argument that gravity
is a ghost. Culture drives reality rather than “objective” science.
In time, the law of gravity has changed from a concept in mind to an unquestioned
and permanent truth: a fact with seemingly independent existence. A “law of nature” like
gravity is never disputed. We are culturally programmed, by way of “mass-hypnosis”
asserts Pirsig, to belief that gravity lives outside of the mind (42). All we need to do, after
all, is look around and we are assured of gravity’s existence. The law of gravity, however,
fails the “scientific” test of existence much like ghosts do, as it is without mass or energy.
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Rather, it is an abstract idea that helps describe the appearance of our world. Before Isaac
Newton conceived the idea, it did not exist in anybody’s mind and prior to the existence of
mass and energy the phenomena that gravity explains were absent. The fact that the law of
gravity is considered real beyond any doubt is based on flawed logic because the very thing
reality depends on to be real is missing, since all of gravity, including “proof,” exists in the
human mind only. Whether our concept of gravity—a belief—denies this is beside the point
since it cannot give gravity substance. Science cannot solve this problem because any
solution has to take place within the human mind, which then runs into the same logical
troubles as the law of gravity.
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Works Cited
Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 1974. New York:
HarperCollins,
2006. Print.