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Conference opening statement
by Robert Pirsig
It has been nearly half a century since the
ideas in the Metaphysics of Quality first appeared to me in
Bozeman, Montana. That is a very long time. Yet this is the
first academic conference on the subject I have ever attended,
and for all I know, the first one ever held. This long delay
in academic interest has a number of reasons that are worth
thinking about.
The first reason, I think, is the title of the book, “Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which seems almost
calculated to invite academic disrespect. One hundred and
twenty one publishers turned it down, setting a Guinness World
Record for editorial rejection. The paperback publishers themselves
classified it as “New Age,” which translates as beads and
incense and drugs and free love and the sort of low-class
uninformed speculation called “pop philosophy.” It is to the
credit of just one famous literary critic, the Cambridge professor,
George Steiner, that my first book got off the ground at all.
The second reason for the delay in academic recognition
has been myself. For many years now I have avoided publicity
of any kind after discovering that this publicity seemed to
be going away from what I was writing about. Though what I
was writing about was camouflaged as the biography of a madman,
underneath that camouflage was a serious attempt to describe
a newer and better way of looking philosophically at the world.
Some saw what I was saying, some did not. I have always been
grateful for those who have seen it and especially those who
are here today. What has been most dismaying in the past was
the discovery that among those who did not see it were the
very people who should have been first to take an interest,
that is, philosophic scholars whose duty is not just to preserve
past views of the world but to carefully examine new ones.
Over the years my response to this neglect has been the
same as the response that carried me through the mental hospital,
a kind of Socratic internal voice that kept saying, “Don’t
worry. Stay calm. Time is on your side.” Time has indeed been
on the side of the Metaphysics of Quality since it was first
set down and the best evidence of that is that here we are
today in Liverpool.
I would like to say a word about England. As many of you
know, this is the country where I learned to read and write
and acquire a love of language that has shaped my life. In
addition to the English word “quality” which I think most
would agree I have really run into the ground, there is another
word, a uniquely English word, that I have not talked about
at all, That is the word “fair.” I’ve read that there are
at least 16 different meanings of the word, fair, but that
the word itself has never been successfully translated into
a foreign language. Yet it is a word that runs through the
deepest roots of the English culture, and is the reason, I
think, for why we are here today. England has certainly seen
enough evil and unfairness in its long history, but from my
outsider’s perspective it has seemed to me
that in the end, when all accounts are settled, it is this
sense of fairness that has been the prime mover of the evolution
of England, and which governs the attitudes of English people
today to an extent they may not see as easily as outsiders
do. One of the early things I noticed about Anthony McWatt’s
writing is that he cannot condemn anything without stopping
and making sure that he is being fair. At times I have wanted
to say to him,
“Why don’t you stop watering down your criticisms with all
this fairness and just damn the opposition all to hell as
they so properly deserve?” But he never does, and I think
this trait will serve him well over the years to come.
In addition to Anthony McWatt’s fairness, there is the fairness
of a person we all know as “Horse,” without whose website
on the “Metaphysics of Quality”, this meeting could never
have taken place. There is the fairness of this philosophy
department at the University of Liverpool which is the first
in the world to admit a Ph.D. thesis on the Metaphysics of
Quality. There is the fairness of those members of the faculty
who, though they have shown no agreement with the MOQ, have
helped it through. In particular, I would like to thank Professor
Stephen Clark, who has come through to me as a philosopher
whose fairness has done more than that of any other single
person to guide Anthony’s thesis through to its successful
conclusion.
The Metaphysics of Quality has a long way to go toward complete
academic and social acceptance, and, at 76, I’m a little sad
that I won’t be able to see all the progress in the years
ahead. But I’m confident now that the ideas are in good hands
and I can relax a little and calm down and feel that my efforts
of a lifetime will make a positive difference for this world.
MOQ Conference
Thursday July 7th 2005
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