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. The sleeping Lila he had just met tonight. But the waking Lila, who never sleeps, had been watching him and he had been watching her for a long time.

After a while Capella left for the bar. Phædrus was alone with her, facing up to a kind of emptiness. Something needed to be said but he didn’t know what to say. He could see it was beginning to bother her too. He wasn’t her “type,” she was beginning to see that, but the ale was helping. It obliterated the differences. Enough ale and everything got reduced to pure biology, where it belonged.

“There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re ‘objective’ you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.

There’s so much I can’t say. But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know little and say a lot.… Don’t you agree?”

The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that “hallucinatory” experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term, “hallucinogen,” is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a “heathen” religion and Islam as “barbaric,” it begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a “de-hallucinogen,” since it’s their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.

It ran deeper than sentimentality. Sentimentality is a narrowing of experience to the emotionally familiar. But this was something new opening up.

I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over in that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them I lived happily.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian.

The whole field seemed like a highway filled with angry drivers cursing each other and telling each other they didn’t know how to drive when the real trouble was the highway itself. The highway had been laid down as the scientific objective study of man in a manner that paralleled the physical sciences. The trouble was that man isn’t suited to this kind of scientific objective study. Objects of scientific study are supposed to hold still. They’re supposed to follow the laws of cause and effect in such a way that a given cause will always have a given effect, over and over again. Man doesn’t do this. Not even savages. The result has been theoretical chaos.

“Values provide the only basis for fully intelligible comprehension of culture because the actual organization of all cultures is primarily in terms of their values. This becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to present the picture of a culture without reference to its values. The account becomes a meaningless assemblage of items having relationship to one another only through coexistence in locality and moment—an assemblage that might as profitably be arranged alphabetically as in any other order; a mere laundry list.”

Values were believed to be eternal because they were God-given, or divinely inspired or at least discovered by that soul part of man which partakes somewhat of divinity, as his body and other bodies and tangibles of the world do not.

Mores, determinants, norms … these were the jargon terms of sociology into which they converted things they wanted to attack. That’s how you know when you’re within a walled city, Phædrus thought. The jargon. They’ve cut themselves off from the rest of the world and are speaking a jargon only they can really understand.

The term mystic is sometimes confused with “occult” or “supernatural” and with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. 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.

Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, “Ahh, do it anyway. It’s interesting.” This was the intellectual part that didn’t like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn’t anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.

Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. 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. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.

The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own.

Rigel vigorously soaped the warm wash cloth and applied it to his face. He thought the Great Author’s respectful readers should have seen him last night dancing with Lila. They probably wouldn’t have minded though. Among his respectful readers drunkenness and whoring were probably considered some form of “Quality.”

“Please will you, in future days, consider the possibility that the ‘Great Source of All Things,’ that speaks only to you and not to me, is, like so many of your ideas, just a figment of your own fertile imagination, a figment that allows you to justify any act of your own immorality as somehow God-given. I consider that undefined ‘Quality’ to be a very dangerous commodity. It’s the stuff fools and fanatics are made of.”

As Einstein said, common sense—non-weirdness—is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation.

But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist, Then one doesn’t seek the absolute “Truth.” One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along.

Zoologists, to cover up their problem, had to invent a patch. They created a new order, monotremata, that includes the platypus, the spiny anteater, and that’s it. This is like a nation consisting of two people.

There are always some pieces like platypi that don’t fit and we can either ignore these pieces or we can give them silly explanations or we can take the whole puzzle apart and try other ways of assembling it that will include more of them.

Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time. Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

If science is a study of substances and their relationships, then the field of cultural anthropology is a scientific absurdity. In terms of substance there is no such thing as a culture. It has no mass, no energy. No scientific laboratory instrument has ever been devised that can distinguish a culture from a non-culture. But if science is a study of stable patterns of value, then cultural anthropology becomes a supremely scientific field. A culture can be defined as a network of social patterns of value.

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon.

Although in many primitive cultures there is a recognized division of function between priests and shamans, in the more highly developed cultures in which cults have become strongly organized churches, the priesthood fights an unrelenting war against shamans.… Priests work in a rigorously structured hierarchy fixed in a firm set of traditions. Their power comes from and is vested in the organization itself. They constitute a religious bureaucracy. Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control; hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders.

Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuñi. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself—any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.

“There’s always something happening,” he said. “When you say ‘nothing is happening’ you’re just saying nothing is happening that fits your cliché of what something is.”

If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reason atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules’ freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever.

Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.

Now when we come to the chemistry professor, and see him studying his empirically gathered data, trying to figure out what it means, this person makes more sense. He’s not just some impartial visitor from outer space looking in on all this with no purpose other than to observe. Neither is he some static, molecular, objective, biological machine, doing all this for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. We see that he’s conducting his experiments for exactly the same purpose as the subatomic forces had when they first began to create him billions of years ago. He’s looking for information that will expand the static patterns of evolution itself and give both greater versatility and greater stability against hostile static forces of nature. He may have personal motives such as “pure fun,” that is, the Dynamic Quality of his work. But when he applies for funds he will normally and properly tie his request to some branch of humanity’s overall evolutionary purpose.

Phædrus had once called metaphysics “the high country of the mind”—an analogy to the “high country” of mountain climbing. It takes a lot of effort to get there and more effort when you arrive, but unless you can make the journey you are confined to one valley of thought all your life.

Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of the computer’s electronics. You can’t do it. You can see how the circuits make the novel possible, but they do not provide a plot for the novel. The novel is its own set of patterns. Similarly the biological patterns of life and the molecular patterns of organic chemistry have a “machine language” interface called DNA but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms possess or guide life. A primary occupation of every level of evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution. But as the higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on purposes of its own.

What, after all, is the likelihood that an atom possesses within its own structure enough information to build the city of New York? Biological and social and intellectual patterns are not the possession of substance. The laws that create and destroy these patterns are not the laws of electrons and protons and other elementary particles. The forces that create and destroy these patterns are the forces of value.

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns.

There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, “We are suspended in language.” Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they’ve done so because it’s “better” and that this definition of “betterness”—this beginning response to Dynamic Quality—is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based.

A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.

The strongest moral argument against capital punishment is that it weakens a society’s Dynamic capability—its capability for change and evolution. It’s not the “nice” guys who bring about real social change. “Nice” guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the “bad” guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.

First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life—conventional morals—proscriptions against drugs, murder, adultery, theft and the like. Third, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the intellectual order over the social order—democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Finally there’s a fourth Dynamic morality which isn’t a code. He supposed you could call it a “code of Art” or something like that, but art is usually thought of as such a frill that that title undercuts its importance. The morality of the brujo in Zuñi—that was Dynamic morality.

A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That’s what you are. That’s the best definition of you that’s ever been invented.

He turned and put the tip of his forefinger against the wrist. The scars were there, all right, but they were smooth. It must have been long ago. It could have been a car accident or some other trauma, of course, but something told him it wasn’t. It seemed like more evidence of some past internal war with the thing that had brought her here tonight—some enormous battle between the intelligence of her mind and the intelligence of her cells. If that’s what it was, the cells had won. Probably they had bled enough to throw off infection, then swelled to slow down the bleeding, clotted, and then slowly, with the special intelligence of their own that had nothing to do with Lila’s mind, they remembered how they had been before she had cut them apart and they carefully joined themselves back together again. They had a mind and will of their own. The mental Lila had tried to die but the cellular Lila had wanted to live.

These cellular patterns have been lovers for millions of years and they aren’t about to be put off by these recent little intellectual patterns that know almost nothing about what is going on. The cells want immortality. They know their days are numbered. That is why they make such a commotion.

The ebb-tide feeling. At ebb tide this cellular sexual activity is all so intellectually vulgar and shunnable, but when the flood tide returns the vulgarity magically turns into a high-quality attraction and there’s a deflection of mind by something that isn’t mind at all and there’s some feeling of awe in this. The mind sitting detached, aloof and discerning is suddenly rudely shoved aside by this other intelligence which is stronger than its own. Then strange things happen that the mind sees as vulgar and shunnable when the tides are out again.

These poor stupid bodies that “We” has invaded, he thought. Every once in a while, like tonight and last night, they overthrow the program and go about their ways leaving “We” mystified about how all this could have happened. That’s what happened just now.

These cells make sweat and snot and phlegm. They belch and bleed and fuck and fart and piss and shit and vomit and squeeze out more bodies just like themselves all covered with blood and placental slime that grow and squeeze out more bodies, on and on. “We,” the software reality, find these hardware facts so distressing that it covers them with euphemisms and clothes and toilets and medical secrecy. But what “We” is covering up is pure quality for the cells. The cells have gotten to their advanced state of evolution through all this fucking and farting and pissing and shitting. That’s quality! Particularly the sexual functions. From the cells’ point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all.

“Sad Sack.” That was the term she used. It had no intellectual meaning, but it had plenty of meaning nevertheless. It meant that in the eyes of this biological judge all his intelligence was some kind of deformity. She rejected it. It wasn’t what she wanted. Just as the patterns of intelligence have a sense of disgust about the body functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila’s patterns of biology have a disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don’t like it. It turns them off.

Although the feminists and the male Provençal poets would appear to be condemning the opposite sex, they are, in fact, both actually condemning the same thing: not men, not women, but static biological antagonism to social and intellectual Quality.

Saying what this city is like is like saying what Europe is like. It depends on what neighborhood you’re in, what time of day, how depressed you are.