Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition), with a new introduction by the author (New York: William Morrow, 1974, 1999) ("Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts." Id. at 310. "The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. [W]hen a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen . . . would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. . . . What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer 'holy ground.' The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestations." Id. at 149. "The real University . . . has no specific location, it owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself." Id. at 150. "[Robert Maynard] Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a 'good' education. Science is 'value free.' The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values." Id. at 342-343. Note: Pirsig is not a fan of Hutchins & Adler's project, The Great Books of the Western World, or at least not Aristotle, as a good source for "Quality," or values. I am, however.).
Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York: Bantam Press, 1991).
