I was surprised to discover that Edward Dyason and Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974, had something in common. Dyason in his early sixties and Pirsig, in his early twenties, were concerned with the problem posed by the rise of science in the West as the principal means of understanding the world, that is how to align scientific knowledge with the equally significant values or aesthetic elements that inform human social life in its various forms.

In coming to grips with this problem, each found inspiration in the work of F.S.C. Northrop, Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale University and a prominent ‘public philosopher’ in mid-twentieth century America. Particularly influential for both men were The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding, published in 1946, and its companion text, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, published in 1947. 

Prisig enrolled in a Yale philosophy degree to get the benefit of Northrop’s teaching. The outcome of this encounter was the engrossing and widely popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974.

Around 1947, Dyason decided to settle in London where he happened to meet the son of an American he was acquainted with in the Institute of Pacific Relations. Dyason discovered that the young man and his friends knew of Northrop and some were planning to study with him. Their talk encouraged him to write to Northrop and after an exchange of letters, Northrop invited Dyason to join his seminar at Yale in the coming Spring. Dyason spent a month there in 1949, attending Northrop’s seminar, talking to him and other scholars, and reading in the library.

At the same time, Dyason was ruminating over an idea of funding a series of visiting lecturers in Australia, under the auspices of the Australian Institute of International Relations. His intention was to address Australia’s isolation from the current of ideas running in Europe and America around the construction of an international post-war order.

Observing Northrop’s personality and manner of conducting his lectures and seminars, Dyason decided that he had the qualities to be the inaugural lecturer, to give both public lectures and to preside over smaller and more intimate gatherings of professionals in government and the universities. 

Some of his Australian-based associates in this venture questioned Northrop’s suitability, prejudiced perhaps because he was not English. They came around to support the project after Dyason distributed copies of The Meeting of East and West and details of Northrop’s standing in America which Dyason compared to that of Arnold Toynbee in England. Northrop generated so much interest in Melbourne that a larger accommodation had to be found after his first public lecture.

Note regarding the photo of Dyason

From University of Melbourne Archives, Edward Dyason collection

Note regarding the photo of Pirsig

Image copied from Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/what-reading-robert-pirsig-taught-me-about-writing-and-life/ June 5, 2017.