Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

There is Lila, this single private person who slept beside him now, who was born and now lived and tossed in her dreams and will soon enough die and then there is someone else—call her lila—who is immortal, who inhabits Lila for a while and then moves on.

I thought about this for a few days and tried explaining it to people. Not an easy point to show someone who has a series of defense mechanisms for things like this.

When the last gate opened up from the last lock they looked on a dark oily river. The river flowed by a huge construction of girders toward a loom of light in the distance.

think what we’re buying with these boats is space, nothingness, emptiness … huge sweeps of open water … and sweeps of time with nothing to do.… That’s worth a lot of money.

They all moved together in a way that indicated they knew each other very well but did not know this place at all.

she could feel it and she began to quiet down from her anger and he began to quiet down from his awkwardness. Do a little dance

It felt good not to be related to this harbor in any way. He didn’t know what was above the banks of the river or behind the harbor buildings or where the roads led to or who the houses belonged to or what people would appear here today or what people they would meet.

That sounded contradictory but the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the past four years on that pilot berth where he didn’t have to think of them. That was what he wanted.

When information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form.

But he felt sure that sooner or later some sort of a format would have to emerge and it would be a better one for his having waited.

slips split with a line to indicate both emotive and rational aspects of their subject; but all of these had increased rather than decreased confusion and he’d found it clearer to include their information elsewhere.

He knew from experience that if he threw stuff away on these days he would regret it later, so instead he satisfied his anger by just describing all the stuff he wanted to destroy and the reasons for destroying it.

It seems unnecessary at the time you are writing it but later when interruptions have interrupted interruptions which have interrupted interruptions you’re glad you did it.

He didn’t think objectivity had any place in the proper conduct of anthropological study.

He could see that some of the anthropologists were struggling to get outside that wall, but within the wall there were no intellectual tools that would let them out.

It was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself.

Boas seemed to think that someday such a theory would emerge out of the facts but it’s been nearly a century since Boas had those expectations and it hasn’t emerged yet. Phædrus was convinced it never would.

What is an attitude in terms of the laws of molecular interaction? What is a cultural value? How are you going to show scientifically that a certain culture has certain values? You can’t. Science has no values.

No values, huh? No Quality? This was the point of focus where he could begin an attack.

The solution to the anthropological blockage was not to try to construct some new anthropological theoretic structure but to first find some solid ground upon which such a structure can be constructed.

Metaphysics is what Aristotle called the First Philosophy. It’s a collection of the most general statements of a hierarchical structure of thought.

logical positivists, who say that only the natural sciences can legitimately investigate the nature of reality, and that metaphysics is simply a collection of unprovable assertions that are unnecessary to the scientific observation of reality.

They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided.

both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located.

Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

“Metaphysics of Quality” is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.

If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.

he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times.

Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity. But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort.

The only person who doesn’t pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn’t yet been born—and to whose birth no thought has been given.

Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.

Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of scientific language.

It was cold out, but not as cold as before. A mild breeze rippled the water toward the stern of the boat, and he felt it on his face.

What was really angering was that he hadn’t even granted the author permission to raft.

These thoughts are impossible to defend in earnest. They would never survive. The quality is too low. Only in observation can they be written.

He seemed so naïve most of the time and yet there was something … clever about him that infuriated. He shouldn’t let him make him so angry like this. He didn’t really matter that much.… If he wasn’t careful he was going to cut himself with this razor.

here was a man who was passing himself off as an expert on “Quality,” with a capital “Q.” And he got away with it! It was like watching some ambulance chaser sway a jury. Once he got them emotionally on his side there wasn’t much you could do about it.

There were old rotting timbers and hulks that had to be crossed by a series of precarious gangplanks to get to dry land.

“Well, we’ve been talking in a rather general way so far, now let me ask a rather specific question: Did the universal source of things,

Ok i get it. Aristotle is rigel

“Now you may argue, and many do, that the values of the community and the laws they produce are all wrong. That’s permissible. The law of the land guarantees you the right to hold that opinion. And moreover, the laws provide you with political and judicial recourses by which to change the ‘bad’ laws of the community.

“You talked for chapter after chapter about how to preserve the underlying form of a motorcycle, but you didn’t say a single word about how to preserve the underlying form of society.

Now he’d brood for days and go over everything that was said and recycle every word over and over again and think of perfect answers that he should have said at the time.

If you didn’t go for Lila you’re some kind of prissy old prude. If you did go for her you were some kind of dirty old man. No matter what you did you were guilty and should be ashamed of yourself. That trap’s been around since the Garden of Eden, at least.

Cool connection to the bible but where is the prude shaming voice in either story?

For a while he had wondered why his boat always seemed to stop in the oldest part of each city it came to, and then he realized that small boats stopping right there is what got the city started in the first place.

It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.

It’s a peculiarly American phenomenon, to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them.

socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian

So what you get is this tension, this business executives’ tension, where you’re the most relaxed, smiling, easy-going guy in the world—who is also absolutely killing himself to beat the competition and get ahead.

They love you for being what they want to be but they hate you for being what they’re not.

They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.

It was the first time he had ever seen her smile.

He kept looking back again at the mansion rising back of the trees, as the boat moved away from it.