Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his idea of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower of Aristotle. Psychology Today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone was right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the comparison with James interested him most because it looked like there might be something to it.

  It was also very good philosophological news. James is usually considered a very solid mainstream American philosopher, whereas Phædrus' first book had often been described as a cult book. He had a feeling the people who used that term wished it was a cult book and would go away like a cult book, perhaps because it was interfering with some philosophological cultism of their own. But if philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the Metaphysics of Quality is an offshoot of James' work, then that cult charge was shattered. And this was good political news in a field where politics is a big factor.

  In his undergraduate days Phædrus had given James very short shrift because of the title of one of his books: The Varieties of Religious Experience. James was supposed to be a scientist, but what kind of scientist would pick a title like that? With what instrument was James going to measure these varieties of religious experience? How would he empirically verify his data? It smelt more like some Victorian religious propagandist trying to smuggle God into the laboratory data. They used to do that to try to counteract Darwin. Phædrus had read early nineteenth-century chemistry texts telling how the exact combination of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water told of the wondrous workings of the mind of God. This looked like more of the same.

  However, in his rereading of James, he had so far found three things that were beginning to dissolve his early prejudice. The first wasn’t really a reason but was such an unlikely coincidence Phædrus couldn’t get it out of his mind. James was the godfather of William James Sidis, the child prodigy who could speak five languages at the age of five and who thought colonial democracy came from the Indians. The second was a reference to James' dislike of the dichotomy of the universe into subjects and objects. That, of course, put him automatically on the side of Phædrus' angels. But the third thing, which might also seem irrelevant, but which was doing more than anything else to dissolve Phædrus' early prejudice, was an anecdote James told about a squirrel.

  James and a group of friends were on an outing somewhere and one of them chased the squirrel around a tree. The squirrel instinctively clung to the opposite side of the tree and moved so that as the man circled the tree the squirrel also circled it on the opposite side.

  After observing this, James and his friends engaged in a philosophic discussion of the question: did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? The group broke into two philosophical camps and Phædrus didn’t remember how the argument was resolved. What impressed him was James' interest in the question. It showed that although James was no doubt an expert philosophologist (certainly he had to be to teach the stuff at Harvard) he was also a philosopher in the creative sense. A philosophologist would have been mildly contemptuous of such a discussion because it had no importance, that is, no body of philosophical writings existed about it. But to a creative philosopher like James the question was like catnip.

  It had the smell of what it is that draws real philosophers into philosophy. Did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? He was north, south, east and west of the squirrel, so he must have gone around it. Yet at no time had he ever gone to the back or to the side of the squirrel. That squirrel could say with absolute scientific certitude, That man never got around me.

  Who is right? Is there more than one meaning of the word around? That’s a surprise! That’s like discovering more than one true system of geometry. How many meanings are there and which one is right?

  It seems as though the squirrel is using the term around in a way that is relative to itself but the man is using it in a way that is relative to an absolute point in space outside of the squirrel and himself. But if we dop the squirrel’s relative point of view and we take the absolute fixed point of view, what are we letting ourselves in for? From a fixed point in space every human being on this planet goes around every other human being to the east or west of him once a day. The whole East River does a half-cartwheel over the Hudson each morning and another one under it each evening. Is this what we want to mean by around? If so, how useful is it? And if the squirrel’s relative point of view is false, how useless is it?

  What emerges is that the word around, which seems like one of the most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns out to be relative and subjective. What is around depends on who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time you use it. The more you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are relative to the observer.

  We are always in the position of that squirrel. Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space and dimension. Persons like James and Einstein, immersed in the spirit of philosophy, do not see things like squirrels circling trees as necessarily trivial, because solving puzzles like that are what they’re in philosophy and science for. Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider.

  That includes the consideration of people like Lila. This whole business of insanity is an enormously important philosophical subject that has been ignored — mainly, he supposed, because of metaphysical limitations. In addition to the conventional branches of philosophy — ethics, ontology and so on — the Metaphysics of Quality provides a foundation for a new one: the philosophy of insanity. As long as you’re stuck with the old conventions, insanity is going to be a misunderstanding of the object by the subject. The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The only problem is how to change the subject’s mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality.

  But with a Metaphysics of Quality the empirical experience is not an experience of objects. It’s an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources, not just inorganic patterns. 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.

  Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated, and when they are, an immune system takes over in ways that are analogous to a biological immune system. The deviant dangerous source of illegal cultural patterns is first identified, then isolated and finally destroyed as a cultural entity. That’s what mental hospitals are partly for. And also heresy trials. They protect the culture from foreign ideas that if allowed to grow unchecked could destroy the culture itself.

  That was what Phædrus had seen in the psychiatric wards, people trying to convert him back to objective reality. He never doubted that the psychiatrists were kind people. They had to be more than normally kind to stand that job. But he saw that they were representatives of the culture and they were always required to deal with insanity as cultural representatives, and he got awfully tired of their interminable role-playing. They were always playing the role of priests saving heretics. He couldn’t say anything about it because that would sound paranoiac, a misunderstanding of their good intentions and evidence of how deep his affliction really was.

  Years later, after he was certified as sane, he read objective medical descriptions of what he had experienced, and he was shocked at how slanderous they were. They were like descriptions of a religious sect written by a different, hostile religious sect. The psychiatric treatment was not a search
for truth but the promulgation of a dogma. Psychiatrists seemed to fear the taint of insanity much as inquisitors once feared succumbing to the devil. Psychiatrists were not allowed to practice psychiatry if they were insane. It was required that they literally did not know what they were talking about.

  To this, Phædrus supposed, they could counter that you don’t have to be infected with pneumonia in order to know how to cure it and you don’t have to be infected with insanity to know how to cure it either. But the rebuttal to that goes to the core of the whole problem. Pneumonia is a biological pattern. It is scientifically verifiable. You can know about it by studying the pneumococcus bacillus under a microscope.

  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’s no such thing as a disease of patterns of intellect. There’s only heresy. And that’s what insanity really is.

  Ask, If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? Insanity always exists in relation to others. It is a social and intellectual deviation, not a biological deviation. The only test for insanity in a court of law or anywhere else is conformity to a cultural status quo. That is why the psychiatric profession bears such a resemblance to the old priesthoods. Both use physical restraint and abuse as ways of enforcing the status quo.

  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.

  Like police, who live in two worlds, the biological and the social, psychiatrists also live in two worlds, the social and the intellectual. Like cops, they are in absolute control of the lower order and are expected to be absolutely subservient to the upper order. A psychiatrist who condemns intellectuality would be like a cop who condemns society. Not the right stuff. You have as much chance convincing a psychiatrist that the intellectual order he enforces is rotten as you have of convincing a cop that the social order he supports is rotten. If they ever believed you they’d have to quit their jobs.

  So Phædrus had seen that if you want to get out of an insane asylum the way to do it is not to try to persuade the psychiatrists that you may know more than they do about what is wrong with you. That is hopeless. The way to get out is to persuade them that you fully understand that they know more than you do and that you are fully ready to accept their intellectual authority. That is how heretics keep from getting burned. They recant. You have to do a first-class acting job and not allow any little glances of resentment get in there. If you do they may catch you at it and you may be worse off than if you hadn’t tried.

  If they ask you how you’re feeling you can’t say, Great! That would be a symptom of delusion. But you can’t say, Rotten! either. They’ll believe it and increase the tranquilizer dosage. You have to say, Well… I think I may be improving a little bit… and do so with a little look of humility and pleading in your eyes. That brings the smiles.

  In time this strategy had brought Phædrus enough smiles to get out. It made him less honest and it made him more of a conformist to the current cultural status quo but that is what everyone really wanted. It got him out and back to his family and a job and a place in the world again and this new personality of a conforming, role-playing, ex-mental patient who knew how to do as he was told without protest became a sort of permanent stage personality that he never dropped.

  It wasn’t a happy solution, to always role-play with people he had once been honest with. It made it impossible to ever really share anything with them. Now he was more isolated than he had been in the insane asylum but there was nothing he could do about it. In his first book he had cast this isolated role-player as the narrator, a fellow who is likable because he is so recognizably normal, but who has trouble coping with his own life because he has destroyed his ability to deal honestly with it. It was this isolation that indirectly broke up his family and led to this present life.

  Now, years later, his resentment against what had happened in the hospital had lessened, and he began to see that there is, of course, a need for psychiatrists just as there is for cops. Somebody has to deal with the degenerate forms of society and intellect. The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don’t start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don’t start with psychiatrists. If you don’t like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.

  Who do you start with then?… Anthropologists?

  Actually that’s not such a bad idea. Anthropologists, when they’re not being self-consciously objective, tend to be very interested in new things.

  The idea had first come to Phædrus in the mountains near Bozeman, Montana, where he first began reading anthropology. It was there he read Ruth Benedict’s implication that the way to correct the brujo’s problem in Zuni would have been to deport him to one of the Plains tribes where his temperamental drives would have blended in better. What about that? Send the insane to anthropologists rather than psychiatrists for a cure!

  Ruth Benedict maintained that psychiatry had been confused by its start from a fixed list of symptoms instead of from the case study of the insane, those whose characteristic reactions are denied validity in their society. Another anthropologist, D. T. Campbell, agreed, saying, Implicitly the laboratory psychologist still assumes that his college sophomores provide an adequate basis for a general psychology of man. He said that for social psychology these tendencies have been very substantially curbed through confrontation with the anthropological literature.

  The psychiatrist’s approach would have analyzed the brujo’s childhood to find causes for his behavior, shown why he became a window peeper, counseled him against window-peeping, and, if he continued, possibly confined him for his own good. But the anthropologist on the other hand could study the person’s complaints, find a culture where the complaints were solved and send him there. In the brujo’s case anthropologists would have sent him up north to the Cheyenne. But if someone suffered from sexual inhibition by the Victorians, he could be sent to Margaret Mead’s Samoa; or if he suffered from paranoia, sent to one of the Middle Eastern countries where suspicious attitudes are more normal.

  What anthropologists see over and over again is that insanity is culturally defined. It occurs in all cultures but each culture has different criteria for what constitutes it. Kluckhohn has referred to an old Sicilian, who spoke only a little English, who came to a San Francisco hospital to be treated for a minor physical ailment. The intern who examined him noted that he kept muttering that he was being witched by a certain woman, that this was the real reason for his suffering. The intern promptly sent him to the psychiatric ward where he was kept for several years. Yet in the Italian colony from which he came everybody of his age group believed in witchcraft. It was normal in the sense of standard. If someone from the intern’s own economic and educational group had complained of being persecuted by a witch, this would have been correctly interpreted as a sign of mental derangement.

  Many others reported cultural correlations of the symptoms of insanity. M. K. Opler found that Irish schizophrenic patients had preoccupations with sin and guilt related to sex. Not Italians. Italians were given to hypochondriacal complaints and body preoccupations. There was more open rejection of authority among Ita
lians. Clifford Geertz stated that the Balinese definition of a madman is someone who, like an American, smiles when there is nothing to smile at. In one journal Phædrus found a description of different psychoses which were specialized according to culture: the Chippewa-Cree suffered from windigo, a form of cannibalism; in Japan there was imu, a cursing following snake-bite; among Polar Eskimos it is pibloktog, a tearing off of clothes and running across the ice; and in Indonesia was the famous amok, a brooding depression which succeeds to a dangerous explosion of violence.

  Anthropologists found that schizophrenia is strongest among those whose ties with the cultural traditions are weakest: drug users, intellectuals, immigrants, students in their first year at college, soldiers recently inducted.

  A study of Norwegian-born immigrants in Minnesota showed that over a period of four decades their rate of hospitalization for mental disorders was much higher than those for either non-immigrant Americans or Norwegians in Norway. Isaac Frost found that psychoses often develop among foreign domestic servants in Britain, usually within eighteen months of their arrival.

  These psychoses, which are an extreme form of culture shock, emerge among these people because the cultural definition of values which underlies their sanity has been changed. It was not an awareness of truth that was sustaining their sanity, it was their sureness of their cultural directives.

  Now, psychiatry can’t really deal with all of this because it is pinioned to a subject-object truth system which declares that one particular intellectual pattern is real and all others are illusions. Psychiatry is forced to take this position in contradiction to history, which shows over and over again that one era’s illusions become another era’s truths, and in contradiction to geography, which shows that one area’s truths are another area’s illusions. But a philosophy of insanity generated by a Metaphysics of Quality states that all these conflicting intellectual truths are just value patterns. One can vary from a particular common historical and geographical truth pattern without being crazy.