Development
The Metaphysics of Quality originated with Pirsig's college studies as a biochemistry student at the University of Minnesota. He describes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that as he studied, he found the number of rational hypotheses for any given phenomenon appeared to be unlimited. It seemed to him this would seriously undermine the validity of the scientific method. His studies began to suffer as he pondered the question and eventually he was expelled from the university.
After spending some time in Korea as a soldier, Pirsig realized that Oriental philosophy was a better place to search for ultimate answers. On his return home from Korea, Pirsig read F. S. C. Northrop's book The Meeting of East and West which related Western culture to the culture of East Asia in a systematic way. In 1950, Pirsig continued his philosophical studies at Banaras Hindu University, where he came across the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi -- in his words, "Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are (Subjective), and everything you think you perceive (Objective), are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is to become enlightened." The nature of mystical experience plays an underlying role throughout his work.
In the late 1950s, Pirsig taught Rhetoric at Montana State University and, with the encouragement of an older colleague, decided to explore what exactly was meant by the term Quality. He assigned his students the task of defining the word. This, coupled with a Native American Church peyote ceremony he attended with an anthropologist friend, James Verne Dusenberry, led Pirsig into what he called "a mushroom cloud of thought." Pirsig began developing his ideas about Quality in his first book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and expanded and codified his ideas into the MOQ in Lila.
Read more about this topic: Pirsig's Metaphysics Of Quality
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)