Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

published	December 1st 1992 by Bantam
binding	Mass Market Paperback
isbn	0553299611 (isbn13: 9780553299618)
pages	480
date added	01-07-07 edit book

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Mason rated it:

05/02/08

Read in April, 2008

Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this book has a lot of deep philosophical discussion interlaced with stories of a journey of some sort that Phaedrus (the author in his earlier life) is on. In this one, Pirsig is on a trip to sail down the Hudson River into the Atlantic and then down to Florida. The story begins just outside of Manhattan where he encounters a mysterious woman named Lila who spends a few days on his boat with him. She is somewhat of an unsavory character, and lat...more Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this book has a lot of deep philosophical discussion interlaced with stories of a journey of some sort that Phaedrus (the author in his earlier life) is on. In this one, Pirsig is on a trip to sail down the Hudson River into the Atlantic and then down to Florida. The story begins just outside of Manhattan where he encounters a mysterious woman named Lila who spends a few days on his boat with him. She is somewhat of an unsavory character, and later goes completely crazy. Throughout the 2 or 3 days that pass in his story on the boat with her, Pirsig gets in to all sorts of discussion.
He begins by looking at the study of Anthropology and proceeds to discount it completely because of the objective-subjective struggle. Science can only be objective, which he says anthropology tries to do, but anthropology will only work if it is subjective. He tells the story of a former colleague who did many studies on Indians (Native Americans) but had no credit with anthropologists because he got in with the culture and really became a part of it. According to Pirsig’s view of anthropology, this doesn’t work, but is really how anthropology should be. He also dives into Native American culture and explains that it is more a part of current American culture than we think. He draws parallels to old westerns in which the traits that the cowboys we so adore showed all came from the Native Americans. He then talks a lot about metaphysics and how in his first book he only started the examination of Quality. In the time between the two books he tried to define the Metaphysics of Quality and essentially broke down Quality into 4 different realms which sometimes complement each other, but more often cause struggles, or misplaced values. Different cultures and times in our history have put different levels of importance on different realms of Quality and he wants to look at where the emphasis should be. That’s as far as I’ll go into that, but I’ll say that he also has a lot of interesting things to say about Manhattan, celebrities, American culture, Victorianism, Insanity (he spent time in an insane asylum and has a very unique perspective on it, saying that it is all cultural and societal. For example, if there is only one person living alone in this world, could they possibly be insane? By what measure?) and Science/Evolution/Intellectualism. He is obviously a very smart person who spends almost all of his time thinking and very little of his time interacting with others. He admits that he hates small talk and generally struggles to carry on a conversation with people.
Although this book, like his other one, has many long, deep, slow sections that you may choose to re-read because you find that you have no idea what he is talking about, I recommend it. I think he has a lot of good things to say and he is very thought-provoking. I did prefer his first book, but I definitely liked this one too. One thing I like is that he openly talks about his first book in this one and also about becoming famous (kinda) and meeting Robert Redford (to sell the movie rights to his other book) and answering fan mail and so on. If you liked his other book, or if you are a fan of philosophical books, give this a shot.
Quotes to follow:
“…it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than to know little and say a lot”

“But Phaedrus never learned to make small-talk like that and as soon as he got into it his mind always drifted off into his own private world of abstractions and the conversation died.”

“Science superseded old religious forms, not because what is says is more true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more Dynamic.”

“A society that tries to restrain the truth for its own purposes is a lower form of evolution than a truth that restrains society for its own purposes.”

“It is better for an idea to destroy a society than it is for a society to destroy an idea.”

“The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral. There aren’t any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your imagination.
From the perspective of subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals, just functions.”

“There is no scientific evidence that little children are born into sin, they said. The whole idea of sin has no objective reality. Sin is simply a violation of a set of arbitrary social rules which little children can hardly be expected to be aware of, let alone obey. A far more objective explanation of “sin” is that a collection of social patterns, grown old and corrupt and decadent, tries to justify its own existence by proclaiming that all who fail to conform to it are evil rather than admit any evil of its own.
There are two ways to get rid of this “sin,” said the intellectuals. One is to force all children to conform to the ancient rules without ever questioning whether these rules are right or wrong. The other is to study the social patterns that have led to this condemnation and see how they can be altered to allow the natural inclinations of an innocent child to fulfill his needs without this charge of sinfulness arising. If the child is behaving naturally, then it is the society that calls him sinful that needs correction. If children are shown kindness and affection and given freedom to think and explore for themselves, children can arrive rationally at what is best for themselves and for the world. Why should they want to go in any other direction?”

“The intellect’s purpose has never been to discover the ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. Its historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies. It can do this well or poorly, depending on the concepts it invents for this purpose.”
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