Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full-Throttle Aristotle (Popular Culture and Philosophy Book 18)

I was an undergraduate philosophy major with all of the earnestness and seriousness that implies. Years later, after getting my MBA, starting and running a successful business, and buying a Harley to ride, I came on this book. It reminded me of all of those seminal college conversations late into the night with girls I was trying to score with and to impress.(Usually the girls were not impressed!)This book is fun because it does not take itself too seriously and is written by philosophers-riders who can relate the topic of philosophy to a motorcycle, especially a Harley. The book is funny, irreverent, and a little Monty Python-like. It helped me to remember all of those philosophical issues I had thought I'd forgotten over the years -- e.g., what is the best way to live one's life? -- and it started me thinking about philosophy while riding my Harley.

Written by a bunch of philosophers that own Harley's, I appreciate their try at trying to explain what owning and riding a Harley is all about, but for a couple of the chapters, they mostly failed. Too much emphasis on historical philosophers and how their philosophies relate to modern day riders. NOT!!! Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, just way too convoluted in trying to get to their messages. I found it frustrating, waiting for something to 'pop' with their thoughts, but for the most part, it just didn't happen. Disappointing.

The book is really not a bike book, just uses bikes as a take off point to discuss philosopy. One or two chapters related to bikers but most are generalizations. I will say I read the whole book in a couple of sittings as it was an interesting comment on society at large.

in 70's lingo: "heavy, man"....

I bought the book based on the title and the hope it would be what I was looking for. I was sorely disappointed. They missed the mark by a mile. Not one of these essays reflect the true meaning or spirituality that is riding a motorcycle.

I saw about a dozen of these remaindered in the philosophy section of a used book store, so I picked one up for examination.Did you know that there are only two motorcycles? Harley-Davidson's and Honda's. (A friend of mine was a member of The Wrecking Crew, racing for Harley-Davidson in the twenties, he said the factory always insisted that they say Harley-Davidson, not just Harley.) All other manufacturers don't really count because after all Suzuki and Yamaha actually just make Honda's and Triumph, Norton and BMW actually just make Harley-Davidson's. I kid you not, that is what it says in this book.I thought about this profound idea for a moment in time and then I set the book down and left.I own eight bikes, my brother has two and his boys have one each. We vacation on motorcycles. I had just been to Vintage Days at Mid-Ohio for three days.I could go on but hey, if Paul Senior says it is a good book then it must be a good book, right? His thoughtfulness and vocabulary indicate that he is well read, right?

This is volume 18 in a series called Popular Culture and Philosophy. I've seen titles from this series in bookstores and never looked beyond the cover, thinking them likely shallow, muddle-headed, oh-so-hip, and probably written by the kind of authors who like to use words like 'valorize', 'privilege' (as a verb, along with its adjectival form: 'privileged'), 'deconstruct', 'hegemony', and 'aporia'. (Almost none of those words appear in this volume, so I was at least partly wrong.) I bought it because I got it for two bucks, and I read it because I was already reading Daniel Wolf's  The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers , and I thought it'd be an interesting accompaniment. Wolf's book, incidentally, isn't mentioned in this one.The book has fourteen essays and there isn't space to discuss them in detail. The authors are: Graham Priest, Randall Auxier, Jonathan Goldstein, Bernard Rollin, Alan Pratt, Fred Feldman, Craig Bourne, Graham Harman, Steven Alford, Suzanne Ferriss, Gary Kieffner, and David Jones.It starts out with Graham Priest (who rides a Harley - he says he 'drives' it) trying to hook into Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; I suppose because that's the one famous book about motorcycles that uses them as a hook into an area of philosophy. Pirsig is concerned with the notion of Quality, if I remember right, and Priest, in his eight page essay never mentions that. Instead, he goes on in a simple way about "ultimate reality and the conceptual grid" (reality has no structure or difference, structure and difference being an imposition of mind, itself of reality) and how that relates to riding a motorcycle, specifically a Harley; remarks (dubious, I think) which he could have made without mentioning Pirsig.Randall Auxier (who rides Hondas) wants to talk about Heidegger and Husserl (he merely name drops, then drops them altogether), and whether Bruce Springsteen would ride a Honda. He means the iconic Springsteen and the iconic Honda. He has some good lines: "[A] Harley is not first and foremost a bike or even a machine. A Harley is a decision about life and what makes it valuable, and how it needs to be lived. When that decision comes to be embodied and epitomized in a machine, we call it a Harley." (20) In other words, as he reminds us: "It's not just a bike, it's a choice."Auxier follows his first essay with another where he gives a typology, based on schools of ancient philosophy, of bikers in the biker bar. He has more good lines in this essay: "Does anyone want to die on a Honda? The Honda conserves itself, and those who ride them do not give themselves to the world in a reckless quest to love life and be loved in the midst of it. Hondas bespeak good sense, but Harleys are for people who can understand that he who would save his life must be willing to lose it." (45)Jonathan Goldstein (who owns a 1958 Harley FLH, a 1973 Norton, and a 1986 BMW) invokes Hegel and Marx and the dialectic process in a discussion of tensions within the disparate motorcyclist community: "the commodification of the motorcycle leads to major divisions among bikers." (55)Bernard Rollin (who rides a 1986 FXRS) writes the fifth essay and the tenth. The fifth uses the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 exhibition (a misprint subtracts ten years) on "The Art of the Motorcycle" as an impetus to discussing theories of art and why a motorcycle might be art; and the tenth is on helmet laws and personal freedom. Rollin mentions, among others, Heidegger, John Dewey, Giles Deleuze, Plato, Karl Popper, and Robert Wolff. "Excessive emphasis on safety, health, and "welfare" as dictated by "experts" is turning American society from a society of reckless adventurers, risk-takers, ocean and continent crossers, and zealous protectors of individual choice to a nation of helmet wearers." (142) He could just as well have said "a nation of cowards".Alan Pratt (who rides with eighteen-inch ape hangers - so let's hope it's a Harley) writes on "motorcycling, nihilism, and the price of cool". He mentions Freud, Nietzsche, Camus, biker movies, and prepackaged FTW outlaw biker fashion. He doesn't mention, but should have, the now fully appropriated by conventional culture and thus now vacuous symbol of outlaw rebellion: the tattoo.Fred Feldman (who rides "a nearly stock 1986 FXRT") ponders the association of Harleys with freedom. He summarizes notions of freedom in order to understand what the freedom associated with Harleys might be. He finds the association mistaken. I'll give him a hint: the horse.Craig Bourne (who rides a Ducati) discusses "the aesthetics of motorcycles", having a preference for Italian bikes, but singling out the Harley V-Rod as "a stunning looking machine." His essay could have followed Rollin's on the same topic. They both mention the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 exhibition and both are concerned with how a motorcycle can be categorized as a work of art. Neither essay is satisfactory, but Bourne's is closer to the topic. He lands on a self-serving Bauhaus aesthetic. Already inclined to the design of the Ducati, he rationalizes his taste by declaring that the Ducati 916 and the Harley V-Rod both "express their own construction". In the Ducati more than in the V-Rod, "the styling and the functionality go hand in hand, satisfying the Bauhaus requirements well." (116) Mentioned in the essay are Hume, Kant, Richard Wollheim, Gregory Currie, Herbert Gans, and Arthur Danto.Graham Harman (he doesn't say if he rides or has ridden a motorcycle), who gets a raspberry for being the first writer in the book to use 'privileged' (he says it twice), looks at "Easy Rider and the Life of Harleys". He mentions Richard Dawkins, Mary Shelley, Nietzsche, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Whitehead, and Bruno Latour. "In Easy Rider, we encounter a world of infantile or senile humans who are both cared for and ultimately euthanized by machines, which are the true actors in the film. Easy Rider marks the triumph of the power and rigor of Harleys and other inanimate objects over the libertine transgressions of 1960s dropouts, and in this way marks the collapse of all dominance of the transcending human subject in the manner of philosophers René Descartes and Immanuel Kant." (126) Ya think? Here's another: "Objects may sometimes be wiser than humans, because they are more attuned to the deeper realities of the world." (132)Steven Alford (who rides a Honda and a Triumph, "but not at the same time") contrasts Hobbes and Rousseau in a discussion of the primitive and the biker as a modern embodiment of it. "This primitive man, simultaneously a threat to society and its salvation, offers a useful conceptual framework for envisioning the motorcyclist, since contrasting our civilized values and behaviors with those of the primitive is a fundamentally ambiguous act." (152)Suzanne Ferriss (who rides a Yamaha FZ1) gets a raspberry for using 'privilege' as a verb. Her essay, envisioned through Freud and Marx, is on biker fashion and the sexual allure of leather. "The black leather jacket has become a fetish object." (160) She means by a fetish "an object that we make and endow with magical properties. The magical properties of the fetish protect us against our fears. There are two forms of fetishism: psychosexual and commodity fetishism. The biker's leathers are caught up in both definitions." (160)Gary Kieffner (who rides a 1992 Harley XL and a Volkswagon Trike he built) intones Foucault throughout his essay and writes about "how the world of motorcycling has become sexually charged largely because of how larger societal explanations, studies, and descriptions of biker sexuality have exerted their influence." (167) Relying on Foucault's ideas of discourse, sexuality, power and social control, Kieffner is concerned with the various social power structures that seek to control the motorcycle rider's cultural image. He speaks of 'objectification' but surprisingly avoided 'valorize' and 'hegemony'. This is the essay most like what I expected the entire book to be like.David Jones (who rides a Harley Sportster) writes "A Dao of Riding". It is formed around a solitary, pensive ride in Hawaii. "[T]he accomplished rider is like the shengren, the Daoist sagely ruler, who is the rhythmic expression of the pulsing dao, the way, that ebbs and tides as it gives expression to the yin and yang of the natural world." (188) I suppose this essay is intended to complement the first essay and its zenish oneness of all in the Harley riding experience.Overall, the topics of the essays are interesting, but the ways they are discussed are not.

Pourquoi pas ? Même si la démarche rappelle celle, possiblement initiée, par Jostein Garner, dans son remarquable ouvrage de vulgarisation de la philosophie, "Le monde de Sophie", au milieu des années 90. Mais pour les amoureux de Harley, cela reste toujours un plaisir.

All is OK.

Harley, or no Harley - or, as the case of my friend, no bike at all... this book still hits the spot in terms of combining both formal and more 'popular' philosophy into a manageable read.

Should have known when the word philosophy was in the title. Possibly a good book if I had the patience to read philosophy. Maybe will read it one day.