Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

  Mahony has spent the last ten years looking into Sidis’s work. In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians.

  At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on.

  When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925!

  Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony. For instance, we’ve found just one page of a manuscript called The Peace Paths, and people who knew Sidis have said they saw many more manuscripts. I think Sidis may still have a few surprises in store for us.

  Phædrus set down the magazine and felt as though someone had thrown a rock through the motel window. Then he read the article over and over again in a sort of daze, as the impact of what he was reading sank deeper and deeper. That night he could hardly sleep.

  It looked as though way back in the thirties Sidis had been on exactly the same thesis about Indians. He was trying to tell people some of the most important things that could be said about their country and they were rewarding him by publicly calling him a fool and failing to publish what he had written. There didn’t even seem to be any way to find out what Sidis had said.

  Phædrus tried to contact the Mahony mentioned in the article but couldn’t find him, partly, he supposed, because his effort was only half-hearted. He knew that even if he did get a look at Sidis’s material there wasn’t much he could do about it. The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.

  5

  It felt cold again and Phædrus got up and reloaded the coal stove with more charcoal briquets.

  After that depressing experience in the mountains he had wanted to give the whole thing up and move on to something more profitable, but as it turned out, the depression he was feeling was just a temporary setback. It was a prelude to a much larger and more important explanation of the Indians. This time it would not be just Indians versus whites, treated within a white anthropological format. It would be whites and white anthropology versus Indians and Indian anthropology treated within a format no one had ever heard of yet. He would get out of the impasse by expanding the format.

  The key was values, he thought. That was the weakest spot in the whole wall of cultural immunity to new ideas the anthropologists had built around themselves. Value was a term they had to use, but under Boas' science value does not really exist.

  And Phædrus knew something about values. Before he had gone up into the mountains he had written a whole book on values. Quality. Quality was value. They were the same thing. Not only were values the weakest spot in that wall, he might just be the strongest person to attack that spot.

  He found surprising support for this attack from one of Boas' students, Alfred Kroeber, who with Harvard anthropology professor, Clyde Kluckhohn, had led a drive for the reinsertion of values into anthropology. Elsewhere Kluckhohn had said, 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.

  Kluckhohn conceded that, The degree to which even lip-service to values has been avoided until recently, especially by anthropologists, is striking. The hesitation of anthropologists can perhaps be laid to the natural history tradition which persists in our science for better or worse. But in Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions they said that, culture must include the explicit and systematic study of values and value-systems viewed as observable, describable, and comparable phenomena of nature.

  They explained that negativism toward the use of values resulted from attitudes of objectivity. It was the same objectivity, Phædrus noted, that Dusenberry had so much trouble with. It is this subjective side of values that led to their being long tabooed as improper for consideration by natural science, Kroeber and Kluckhohn said. Instead [values] were relegated to a special set of intellectual activities called "the humanities" included in the "spiritual science" of the Germans. 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. A new and struggling science, as little advanced beyond physics, astronomy, anatomy and the rudiments of physiology as Western science was only two centuries ago, might cheerfully concede this reservation of the remote and unexpected territory of values to the philosophers and theologians and limit itself to what it could treat mechanistically.

  Kluckhohn conceded that values are ill-defined and subject to a multiplicity of competing definitions, but asserted that verbal definitions of values are not necessary to field work. He said that whether they were well-defined or not everyone agreed with what they were in actual practice. He tried to solve the problem by allowing everyone in his Values Project to define values any way they wanted to, but in formal social science that’s unacceptable.

  In his Values Project Kluckhohn described five neighboring Southwest American cultures in terms of their evaluations of their neighbors, and provided a good description of these cultures by this method. But as Phædrus continued reading elsewhere, he discovered that values, like every other general term in anthropology, were subject to the usual bilious attack. Sociologists Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis had the following to say about values:

  As long as the cultural configurations, basic value attitudes, prevailing mores or whatnot are taken as the starting point and principal determinant, they have the status of unanalyzed assumptions. The very questions that would enable us to understand the norms tend not to be asked, and certain facts about society become difficult if not impossible to comprehend.

  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.

  Worse yet, they went on, the deceptive ease of explanation in terms of norms or value attitudes encourages an inattentiveness to methodological problems. By virtue of their subjective emotion and ethical character, norms and especially values are among the world’s most difficult objects to identify with certainty. They are bones of contention and matters of disagreement… an investigator… tends to be explaining the known by the unknown, the specific by the unspecific. His identification of the normative principles may be so vague as to be universally useful, i.e. anything and everything becomes explicable. Thus, if Americans spend a great deal of money on alcoholic beverages, theater and movie tickets, tobacco, cosmetics and jewelry, the explanation is simple: they have a good-time ideology. If, on the other hand, there is a lack of social intimacy between Negro and white, it is because of a racism value. The cynical critic might advise that, for convenience in causal interpretation, the values of a culture should always be described in pairs of opposites.

  Explicit definitions, when given, demonstrate the nebulous character of "value", Blake and Davis said. Here, for example, is the definition of "value-orientation" in a 437-page book on value orientations:

  Value orientations are complex but definitely pat
terned (rank-ordered) principles resulting from the transactional interplay of three analytically distinguishable elements of the evaluative process — the cognitive, the affective, and the directive elements — which give order and direction to the ever-flowing stream of human acts and thoughts as these relate to the solution of common human problems.

  Poor Kluckhohn, Phædrus thought. That was his definition. With that lead balloon for a vehicle there was no way he could succeed.

  The attack made Phædrus want to get in there and start arguing. The statement that values are vague and therefore shouldn’t be used for primary classification is not true. There’s nothing vague about a value judgment. When a voter goes to the polling booth he’s making a value judgment. What’s so vague about that? Isn’t an election a cultural activity? What’s so vague about the New York stock exchanges? Aren’t values what they’re dealing in? How about the US Treasury? Who in this world is more specific than the Internal Revenue Service? As Kluckhohn kept saying, values are not the least vague when you’re dealing with them in terms of actual experience. It’s only when you bring back statements about them and try to integrate them into the overall jargon of anthropology that they become vague.

  This attack on Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s values was a good example of what had stopped Phædrus' own entry into the field. You can’t get anywhere because you are forced to resolve arguments every step of the way about the basic terms you are using. It’s hard enough to talk about Indians alone without having to resolve a metaphysical dispute at the end of each sentence. This should have been done before anthropology was set up, not afterward.

  That was the problem. The whole field of cultural anthropology is a house built on intellectual quicksand. As soon as you try to build the data into anything of theoretical weight it sinks and collapses. The field that one might have expected to be one of the most useful and productive of the sciences had gone under, not because the people in it were no good, or the subject was unimportant, but because the structure of scientific principles that it tries to rest on is inadequate to support it.

  What was clear was that if he was going to do anything with anthropology the place to do it was not in anthropology itself but in the general body of assumptions upon which it rests. 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. It was this conclusion that placed him right in the middle of the field of philosophy known as metaphysics. Metaphysics would be the expanded format in which whites and white anthropology could be contrasted to Indians and Indian anthropology without corrupting everything into a white anthropological walled-in jargonized way of looking at things.

  Whew! What a job! He wondered if he was biting off ten times as much as he could possibly chew. This could fill a whole shelf full of books. A whole corridor of shelves! But the more he thought about it the more he saw that the only alternative was to quit entirely.

  There was a sense of relief though. Metaphysics was an area of study that had interested him more than any other as an undergraduate philosophy student in the United States and later as a graduate student in India. There was a sense of opening up after the endless tangles and nettles of unfamiliar anthropology. He had finally landed in his own brier patch.

  Metaphysics is what Aristotle called the First Philosophy. It’s a collection of the most general statements of a hierarchical structure of thought. On one of his slips he had copied a definition of it as that part of philosophy which deals with the nature and structure of reality. It asks such questions as, Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our consciousness of it? Is reality ultimately reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially spiritual or material? Is the universe intelligible and orderly or incomprehensible and chaotic?

  You might think from this primary status of metaphysics that everyone would take its existence and value for granted, but this is definitely not so. Even though it has been a central part of philosophy since Ancient Greek times it is not a universally approved field of knowledge.

  It has two kinds of opponents. The first are the philosophers of science, most particularly the group known as 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. For a true understanding of reality, metaphysics is too mystical. This is clearly the group with which Franz Boas, and because of him modern American anthropology, belongs.

  The second group of opponents are the mystics. 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. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past. This mysticism, Dusenberry thought, is the absolute center of traditional Indian life, and as Boas had made clear, it is absolutely outside the domain of positivistic science and any anthropology that adheres to it.

  Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too scientific. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food.

  Phædrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that 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.

  Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye 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 central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus had called Quality in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. 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.

  Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn’t any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a Metaphysics of Quality is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.

  It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or zero, or space for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with nothing. Zero and space are complex relationships of somethingness. If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.

  What made all this so formidable to Phædrus was that he himself had ins
isted 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.

  A part of it said, Don’t do it. You’ll get into nothing but trouble. You’re just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You’re going to make ten-thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who’ve already said reality is something else.

  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.

  But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That’s the degeneracy fanatics are made of. 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.