Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Lila is Zen’s sequel.* In Zen, a heavy philosophical work, Pirsig was frustrated with a Western philosophical paradigm that didn’t match up with the way that Pirsig saw reality. In Lila, Pirsig relays that his time in a mental institution was due to his struggle to see the world in his particular way. His insanity was philosophical deviance, not social. He, Phaedrus, was the sophist trying to see reality straight up, within a Western perspective that either engaged in mystery (Plato) or emphasized facts and de-emphasized value (Western science). Both perspectives deny the world of material value � who we are at our core and what gives us meaning.**

The scaffolding for Zen was Pirsig’s motorcycle trip across the country with his son. In Lila, it is Pirsig’s (as Phaedrus) boat trip from upstate New York to New York City, on his way to Florida. Along the way, Phaedrus picks up a stray character, Lila, who had had a hard life and, as Phaedrus came to realize, suffered from mental illness. Phaedrus describes his thoughts on insanity as a culturally-defined condition (he does not mention any organic basis for insanity). Basically, it is being an outlier from accepted social and moral paradigms and morals. While Phaedrus’s insanity was philosophical at its core, Lila’s was everything but intellectual. She is a visceral being who has been constrained by culture when she needed to be free. For Lila, as for Phaedrus himself, a vacation represents, literally, a vacating. It’s an emptying out of oneself which must be done before a recovery is possible.***

Lila’s life, and mental breakdown, illustrates what Phaedrus refers to throughout the book as the “Metaphysics of Quality.� Phaedrus sees a dialectical relationship between the static and conservative (culture) and the dynamic (freedom from culture). In his view, both work together to create a new, healthy self. Lila’s problem is that in embracing freedom she let go of a culture that would anchor her. She was all about freedom but with this came the obvious chaos in her life. For Phaedrus, Lila’s dilemma reflects a larger social-construction-of-reality problem: whereas in the East, freedom is integrated with ritual, in the West, we “spasm� between (too much) ritual and (too much) freedom.

The reintegration of the static and the dynamic is the Metaphysics of Quality (“metaphysics� references a philosophical worldview). It’s about values, meaning, purpose and mental health. This stands in contrast to an other-worldly Platonic metaphysics as well as to the unstated underlying Western science that ostracizes and exorcises value in favor of facts and dispassionate observation.

Phaedrus notes that biology and evolution is all about teleological purpose. It is to live but this dynamic, alone, is a problem as it tears apart social ties. It destroys the static social prong of the dialectic. The Metaphysics of Quality requires a transcendence from this animalistic egoism so that we can tether ourselves to social order. Both the individual and social prongs are necessary. Both work together as value-based good.****

Pirsig, as Phaedrus, characterizes his “Metaphysics of Quality� as a new intellectual paradigm that dialectically combines the organic and the cultural domains. He separates metaphysics into four levels (inorganic, organic, cultural, intellectual), each of which are autonomous, but he goes too far in separating mind from the body. In a dialectic system, the new has its origins in the old. It is the same in what Pirsig puts forward. His intellectual perspective rests on and expresses its biological foundation. As life, we are defenders of our integrity. We are conservative and static that way, and change is only welcomed when it serves our needs. But we also need to be free to seek, to obtain what we need to live, and to live well, and to be individually who we need to be. We are like cells this way, and we have followed this pattern in our individual as well as our evolutionary development. We are born with a dynamic individual nature that protects what it is, yet is open to what it needs to be.

Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality is not divorced from our biology but is it its embodiment. Both our need to be free (Dynamic Quality) and our tribal nature (“culture�) serve our needs for survival and well-being. The intellectual domain (Pirsig’s synthesis stage, though he does not use these dialectical terms), builds upon both (we are need-based beings, needing to be free, individually, and needing to be a member of a “culture�), yet extends them significantly through our capacity for abstract thought. And this intellectual capacity does what it is supposed to do. It regulates our relationship with the environment to protect and promote our interests and who we are. It sorts out the past; it sorts through the possible futures. It combines what we need to do with who we need to be.

This book is as engaging and compelling as Zen. Perhaps more so. At times the dialogue in both books even takes off in a voice like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Lila’s (the book) distinctive virtue is that it re-introduces the psychology of value to Western philosophy and science (and negatively critiques what he calls Pirsig’s Western metaphysics).

*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

**Phaedrus is a character in Plato’s dialogue of that name who, in his debate with Socrates, articulates a this-worldly viewpoint (the dialogue itself deals with metaphysics, madness, the irrational, and divine inspiration). As with Zen, Lila is a hard-to-decipher book. Pirsig is far-ranging in what he puts forward. There are pockets of thought scattered throughout, but all connect to one main theme � the overriding, value-laden importance Quality. As he comments in Lila, Pirsig declined to define Quality in Zen. “What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself had insisted in his book [Zen] 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.�

***For Phaedrus, the sailboat in open water represents the freedom that he needed. Pirsig writes that what Lila needed was “a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She’s clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move forward.�

****Pirsig ends the book with this: “Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. 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.�