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Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928) is an American philosopher and author, famous for his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974). The book outlined Pirsig's interpretation and definition of Quality and the Good. Written in the form of a mostly-autobiographical tale of a man's motorcycle trip across North America with some friends and his son, the book remains a best seller to this day. In 1974 Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write its follow-up, (1991), in which he elaborates and focuses a value-based metaphysics to replace the subject-object view of reality. This he terms a Metaphysics of Quality. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pirsig was a precocious child, with an IQ of 170 at age 9. He was promoted several grades, which, along with a stammer, made for a difficult childhood school experience. Pirsig began his education by studying biochemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1943. According to the narrative given in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he was far from a typical student. He was an idealist of a sort, interested in science as a goal in itself, rather than as a way to establish a career. To explain his attitude he quotes: And so Pirsig tells us that as a young man he regarded the scientific quest as a noble and high thing. As such a person he took quite seriously everything that he did in his university studies. While doing biochemistry lab work, he was greatly bothered by the seemingly undeniable notion that there was never just one workable hypothesis for a given phenemenon, but many, and that the number seemed almost unlimited. He was gratified later in life to find the scientist Henri PoincarĂ© seeming to concur as he stated: Pirsig could not think of any way around this, and to him it seemed that the whole scientific programme had been brought to a halt, in some sense. The distraction this question posed served to draw his attention away from his actual schoolwork, and he wound up flunking out of university. Eventually, he would go on to develop a new metaphysical system featuring a mystical sounding term, Quality, which he insisted remain undefined. His narrative in the book links this metaphysics back to the Poincare "infinite hypothesis" problem which had stopped him in the laboratory, and failed him out of school early in his career. Unfortunately, his study, Quality, became so intense that he wound up giving everything to it and, as his book relates, he had a mental breakdown while studying at University of Chicago. After serving with the US military in Korea, he returned to receive his B.A. in 1950. He then attended Banaras Hindu University in India to further explore Eastern philosophy. In 1954 he married Nancy Ann James and the couple had a son, Chris, in 1956, and a second son, Theodore (Ted), in 1958. Supporting himself by taking freelance jobs and teaching freshman English, Pirsig spent 1960–1963 in and out of mental institutions following an emotional and mental breakdown; he was treated with shock therapy. Pirsig divorced Nancy in 1978, going on to marry Wendy Kimball later in the year. The couple had a daughter, Nell, in 1981. Pirsig has published little other than his two major works and avoids the public eye, frequently traveling around the Atlantic by boat, and has lived in various places around the United States as well as Sweden, Belgium, and England. In 1979, Pirsig's first son Chris - who had played an important role in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - was stabbed to death during a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen Center.
Recognition Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended by commenting, "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." Later, George Steiner, the reviewer, compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid... the analogies with Moby Dick are patent". The Times Literary Supplement called it "Profoundly important, Disturbing, Deeply moving, Full of insights, A wonderful book". In 2005, the first ever conference on Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality was organized by Dr Anthony McWatt at Liverpool University, England. This was at the same time as he was awarded the first ever academic PhD specifically concerned with the subject. Papers presented at the conference. NBA coach Phil Jackson cites Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as one of the major guiding forces in his life. As a result, Jackson has acquired the nickname "The Zen Master". In an afterword to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence, Pirsig talked about Chris's death. He said that he and his second wife had conceived a child and were seriously considering aborting it. But he saw that this unborn child was a continuation of the life pattern that Chris had occupied, and on that basis, they decided not to abort it. Notes | ||||||||
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