I have had the pleasure and benefit of corresponding with Robert Pirsig in recent months, and as a result have been able to make and publish a significant update to my Robert Pirsig Biographical Timeline.
See my Pirsig Project Pages for the significance of Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974) and “Lila, an Inquiry into Morals” (1991), to my knowledge modelling objectives.
“The relevance to our present day situation seems to me to be impossible to exaggerate” said Dr James Willis. I say Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” may not be an entirely original treatment of the epistemological continuum nor may it actually qualify as a “metaphysics”. However, the frustration of the Catch-22 of objective fundamentalism, which I’ve dubbed “the rational trap”, has probably never been better illuminated than the story of Pirsig’s own life. There, but for the grace of quality, go we all – to the lunatic asylum.
Far from fading with the passing of 60 years since Pirsig’s experiences began, we find the problem was not only ever thus, but that the recent combination of “scientific” management with ubiquitous information and communication technologies, simply throws the urgent need for alternative thinking into ever starker relief.