Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

What was he running from? He didn’t know then. It seemed like he’d been running all his life.

People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone.

But it’s as foolish to think of a city or a society as created by human bodies as it is to think of human bodies as a creation of the cells, or to think of cells as created by protein and DNA molecules, or to think of DNA as created by carbon and other inorganic atoms.

This city is a higher pattern than either a substance or a biological pattern called man. Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes. Just as a farmer raises cows for the sole purpose of devouring them, this pattern grows living human bodies for the sole purpose of devouring them. That is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.

What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists.

But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth.

That’s the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don’t have the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon you’re back with the cave man. But if you don’t have the freedom to change those patterns you’re blocked from any further growth.

No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority.

This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike?

All this unnecessary ornateness they left behind: that wasn’t just vanity. There was a lot of love in it, too. They gussied this city up so much partly because they loved it. They paid for all these gargoyles and ornamental iron work the way a newly rich father might buy a fancy dress for a daughter he’s proud of.

Dante’s Christian hell is an afterlife of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can’t participate in it. You’re forever a stranger from your own life because there’s something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.

But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way. Phædrus could see how this celebrity could get to be like some sort of narcosis of mirrors where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. The mirrors take over your life and soon you don’t know who you are. Then the culture controls you and when it takes away your mirrors and the public forgets you the withdrawal symptoms start to appear. And there you are, in the Zen hell of celebrity.… Hemingway with the top of his head blown off, and Presley, full of prescription drugs. The endless dreary exploitation of Marilyn Monroe. Or any of dozens of others. It seemed like it was the celebrity, the mirrors of the “gods,” that did

That was the Victorian stance, affecting some romantic notion of social quality without any real intellectual penetration of the meaning of Quality.

In a value metaphysics, on the other hand, society and intellect are patterns of value. They’re real. They’re independent. They’re not properties of “man” any more than cats are the property of cat food or a tree is a property of soil. Biological man does not create his society any more than soil “creates” a tree. The pattern of the tree is dependent upon the minerals in the soil and would die without them, but the tree’s pattern is not created by the soil’s chemical pattern. It is hostile to the soil’s chemical pattern. It “exploits” the soil, “devours” the soil for its own purposes, just as the cat devours the cat food for its own purposes. In this manner biological man is exploited and devoured by social patterns that are essentially hostile to his biological values.

What distinguishes the Victorian culture from the culture of today is that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They called it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was just like their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply made, brittle, cold, and uncomfortable.

Once intellect has been let out of the bottle of social restraint, it is almost impossible to put it back in again. And it is immoral to try. 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.

Cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures.

A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and dies like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals.

Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived. Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. The selection of which inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological patterns of value.

What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century intellectual faith in man’s basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naïve. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction.

What the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that the old Puritan and Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but should not be attacked blindly either. They should be dusted off and re-examined, fairly and impartially, to see what they were trying to accomplish and what they actually did accomplish toward building a stronger society. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.

Literature, musicology, art history and philosophology thrive in academic institutions because they are easy to teach. You just Xerox something some philosopher has said and make the students discuss it, make them memorize it, and then flunk them at the end of the quarter if they forget it. Actual painting, music composition and creative writing are almost impossible to teach and so barely get in the academic door. True philosophy doesn’t get in at all. Philosophologists often have an interest in creating philosophy but, as philosophologists, they subordinate it, much as a literary scholar might subordinate his own interest in creative writing. Unless they are exceptional they don’t consider the creation of philosophy their real line of work.

When an insane person—or a hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture—advances some explanation of the universe that is completely at odds with current scientific reality, we do not have to believe he has jumped off the end of the empirical world. He is just a person who is valuing intellectual patterns that, because they are outside the range of our own culture, we perceive to have very low quality. Some biological or social or Dynamic force has altered his judgment of quality. It has caused him to filter out what we call normal cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his.

Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There’s nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There’s no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn’t an “object” of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself. There is no such thing as a “disease” of patterns of intellect. There’s only heresy. And that’s what insanity really is.

This being so, it follows that the assignment of medical doctors to treat insanity is a misuse of their training. Intellectual heresy is not really their business. Medical doctors are trained to look at things from an inorganic and biological perspective. That’s why so many of their cures are biological: shock, drugs, lobotomies, and physical restraints.

Each culture presumes its beliefs correspond to some sort of external reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can be just about any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to confirm the “truth” are dependent on the culture they live in.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact.

What he thought was, that in addition to the usual solutions to insanity—stay locked up or learn to conform—there was a third one, to reject all movies, private and cultural, and head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all.

If you compare the levels of static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in competition with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but always in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other, depending on evolving circumstances, then you can also see that evolution doesn’t take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too. It’s possible to see Lila as something much greater than a customary sociological or anthropological description would have her be. Lila then becomes a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality. Lila individually, herself, is in an evolutionary battle against the static patterns of her own life.

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There’s no evolution. Those species that don’t suffer don’t survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila. And Lila’s battle is everybody’s battle, you know? Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They’ve taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they’re solving problems for the culture as well.

To put philosophy in the service of any social organization or any dogma is immoral. It’s a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one.

Ideologues usually talk in terms of sweeping generalities and what Phædrus was reading seemed to confirm that James was about as far as you can get from these. In his early years especially, James’s concept of ultimate reality was of things concrete and individual. He didn’t like Hegel or any of the German idealists who dominated philosophy in his youth precisely because they were so general and sweeping in their approach.

James said, “Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.” He said, “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”

In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static biological values such as the biological fear that threatened Jenner’s smallpox experiment; static social values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack. The Metaphysics of Quality says that science’s empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns.

It is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. With equal force it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a baby you will never understand Lila. She’s a culture of one. She’s a religion of one. The main difference is that the Christian, since the time of Constantine, has been supported by huge social patterns of authority. Lila isn’t. Lila’s religion of one doesn’t have a chance.

Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.

Dhyāna was what this boat was all about. It’s what Phædrus had bought it for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or supposed to be. In doing this he didn’t think he was putting this boat to any special purpose. That’s what the purpose of boats like this has always been … and seaside cottages too … and lake cabins … and hiking trails … and golf courses.… It’s the need for dhyāna that is behind all these.

You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep. That is, you master them with such proficiency that they become an unconscious part of your nature. You get so used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. There in the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the Dynamic freedom is found.

Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to “kill” them.

LaVerne had been asking the question within an Aristotelian framework. She wanted to know what genetic, substantive pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking before them could be placed in. But John Wooden Leg never understood the question. That’s what made it so funny. He wasn’t joking when he said, “That’s a good dog.” He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her. The whole idea of a dog as a member of a hierarchical structure of intellectual categories known generically as “objects” was outside his traditional cultural viewpoint. What was significant, Phædrus realized, was that John had distinguished the dog according to its Quality, rather than according to its substance. That indicated he considered Quality more important.

Good as a noun rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn’t a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it.