Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher, best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The book tells of a motorcycle journey across the American West with his son, interwoven with reflections on technology, rationality and value, and on his earlier self, Phaedrus, whose search for meaning ended in breakdown. It was rejected by over a hundred publishers before becoming a bestseller. Pirsig developed his Metaphysics of Quality further in Lila (1991), arguing that value is the basic reality from which subjects and objects emerge.

Key ideas

• Quality is not a property of objects or a feeling in subjects but comes before both and gives rise to them.
• Classical understanding sees the world as underlying form, romantic understanding as immediate appearance; both are needed.
• Caring about the work in hand, as in maintaining a motorcycle, is a way of meeting Quality in everyday life.
• In Lila, reality is divided into static patterns of quality and the dynamic quality that changes them.

Major works

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
• Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991)

In the Book corner

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 1974 · Intermediate
  A novel-like blend of autobiography and philosophy, subtitled An Inquiry into Values. The narrator rides a motorcycle from Minnesota towards California with…

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