On Robert Pirsig
“Pirsig’s work consists most notably of two novels. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, develops around Pirsig’s exploration into the nature of “Quality”. Ostensibly a first person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is a deep exploration of the underlying metaphysics of western culture. He also gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Socrates as part of an ongoing dispute between “cosmologists” admitting the existence of a Universal Truth and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig finds in “Quality” a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views. Pirsig’s publisher’s recommendation to his board ended, “This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I’ll wager, attain classic stature.”[8] Pirsig noted in an early interview that Zen was rejected 121 times before being accepted by William Morrow Publishers. In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig’s writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that “the assertion itself is valid… the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent”.[9] The Times Literary Supplement called it “profoundly important, disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights, a wonderful book”. In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he developed a value-based metaphysics, called Metaphysics of Quality, that challenges our subject-object view of reality. The second book follows on from where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left off.” – Robert M. Pirsig – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://goo.gl/NKI4h
