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Gumption and Areté
20 Sep 2016This post is part 3/3 in a series about Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of motorcycle Maintenance. See also part 1 and part 2.
This post will talk about two notions that Pirsig puts forward: gumption and areté. Gumption is originally a Scottish term, meaning "common sense, shrewdness", but also "drive, initiative".
A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes.
Gumption-filling occurs when one is quiet long enough to see, hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it.
It's common in people returning from long fishing trips. They seemingly have put a lot of time for nothing, but in reality they come back with an abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things they were sick to death of a few weeks before. It's not wasted time.
"Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going." It is necessary to all psychic tasks of interest. If you don't have it, you might as well not start. Similarly, its level must be monitored at all times.
When gumption loss occur: take a long break, don't rush in to make up for lost gumption.
One of the gumption traps is ego:
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
(Thanks to my friend Stanislav for bringing this quote to my attention.)
Areté is a greek notion that refers to excellence, acquired not as a duty to others but to oneself.
Areté implies excelling in many domains in life, a respect for the wholeness of one's life. It implies contempt for efficiency, or rather a higher idea for efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
