Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

“Quality,” they called it. European quality. Full of status and protocol.

Victorian men with beards. Victorian women with long involuted dresses. He could see them walking among the trees. Stiff, somber. It was all a pose.

They approved whatever was socially fashionable and suppressed or ignored anything that was not. The period ended when, after having defined for all time what “Truth” and “Virtue” and “Quality” are, the Victorians and their Edwardian successors sent an entire generation of children into the trenches of World War I on behalf of these ideals. And murdered them. For nothing.

That war was the natural consequence of Victorian moral egotism. When it was over the children who survived never got tired of laughing at Charlie Chaplin comedies of those elderly people with the silk hats and too many clothes and noses up in the air.

Young people of the twenties read Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, drank bootleg gin, danced tangos into the night, drove fast roadsters, made illicit love, called themselves a “lost generation,” and never wa...

Instead of improving the world forever with their high-flown moral codes they did just the opposite: left the world a moral vacuum we’re still living in.

He’s just trying to imitate a Victorian because he thinks it sounds good.

in this culture there aren’t any fundamental meanings of morality. There are only old traditional social and religious meanings and these don’t have any real intellectual base. They’re just traditions.

We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there.

The same is true of subjects and objects. The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy. But he isn’t.

The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation.

The Metaphysics of Quality provides a better set of coordinates with which to interpret the world than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive.

This is the real reason values have been avoided by empiricists in the past, not because values aren’t experienced, but because when you try to fit them into this absurd brain location you get a sinking feeling that tells you that somewhere back down the line you have gone way off the track and you just want to drop the whole subject and think about something else that has more of a future to it.

The real mystery, the real enigma, is how mature, objective, trained scientific observers can blame their own goof on a poor innocent platypus.

The problems of free will versus determinism, of the relation of mind to matter, of the discontinuity of matter at the subatomic level, of the apparent purposelessness of the universe and the life within it are all monster platypi created by the subject-object metaphysics.

When one takes the whole ill-shaped, misfitting structure of a subject-object explained universe apart and puts it back together in a value-centered metaphysics, all kinds of orphaned puzzle pieces fit beautifully that never fit before.

this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for “failing to understand reality”? By this criterion shouldn’t all but a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy here and who is sane?

The term “cause” can be struck out completely from a scientific description of the universe without any loss of accuracy or completeness.

Strike out the word “substance” wherever it appears and substitute the expression “stable inorganic pattern of value.” Again the difference is linguistic. It doesn’t make a whit of difference in the laboratory which term is used. No dials change their readings.

Once a thief is caught a whole string of crimes is often solved.

In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything beneath it.

When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world’s classic intellectual form. It is something else.

Patterns of Culture

without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.

Benedict wrote: “Most ethnologists have had … experiences in recognizing that persons who are put outside the pale of society with contempt are not those who would be placed there by another culture.…

“The dilemma of such an individual is often most successfully solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and accepting the role the culture honours.

He was taken before the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual procedure in a charge of witchcraft.

The unhappiness that was inseparable from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of Zuñi would have had no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses.

There is not a person alive who is not in some way or other in the kind of situation this “witch” was in.

brujo is not a semi-mythical, semi-comic figure that rides a broomstick but a real person who claims religious powers; who acts outside of and sometimes against the local church authorities.

Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communed directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.

The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out any time it wanted to. It wasn’t just a sweet singing voice

There has to be another source of good and evil outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal change.

Probably the war priests thought he was some kind of egotist trying to build his own image by tearing down tribal authority. But he showed later on that he really wasn’t. If he’d been such an egotist he wouldn’t have stayed with the tribe and helped keep it together.

tribe can change its values only person by person and someone has to be first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with everybody else.

After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality.

Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new.

Good is conformity to an established pattern of fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical.

A “dim perception of he knows not what” gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation.

The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one’s self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past.

What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms.

Static quality is what you normally expect.

Why is it that if such a man suffers a heart attack and, taken off the train at New Rochelle, regains consciousness and finds himself in a strange place, he then comes to himself for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, and begins to gaze at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight?

The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.

When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the previous examples.

That is why we think of subjects and objects as primary. We can’t remember that period of our lives when they were anything else.

This first division of the Metaphysics of Quality now covered the spectrum of experience from primitive mysticism to quantum mechanics. What remained for Phædrus to do next was fill in the gaps as carefully and methodically as he could.

Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

“Why would anyone want to write about this? Nothing is happening.” “There’s always something happening,” he said.

The picture looked so real you wanted to stick your finger in it and feel how warm the water was.