Robert Pirsig, through his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, provided a philosophy of life to the lost cultural minions of 1970s. This pseudo-autobiography offers individuals a moral anchor in the early post-modern cultural void. Pirsig describes how a mindful connection to the events of our life can provide us with a source of meaning to life.

Pirsig advances his philosophical questioning of established anthropological wisdom in his 1992 book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Lila is not academically rigorous—actually questioning the academic foundations of anthropology, metaphysics, and moral theory.

Much like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Lila is a pseudo-autobiographical presentation of Pirsig’s metaphysics masquerading as a novel. In Zen, Pirsig explores what he called the metaphysics of quality. This evolves into a more complex construction in Lila. There Pirsig focuses on value-events as experience. Value-events lie between subject and object, comprising what Pirsig considers the only real experience. His assertion is that reality arises outside of a subject and object distinction. In this way, Pirsig challenges the notion of objective truth. For Pirsig, objective truth, even when grounded in empiricism, is actually one of many possible value-decisions. In effect, value-events are supraordinate to causation, replacing the materialist definition of causation.

In the radical materialism and deconstruction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Pirsig counters with value as the foundation of what is real. We may not agree or even fully grasp his philosophy, but for the individuals unfulfilled by radical materialism, Lila and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offer a vision of self-created meaning through valuing.