Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

  Apparently whatever caused that engine overheating was gone. He sure couldn’t reproduce it now. He shut off the engine and the boat eased forward toward the anchor.

  The sun across the water was getting on to the end of the afternoon and he began to get a slightly depressed feeling. Not the best of days. He noticed a seagull pick up an oyster or a clam or something from the sand on the shore and fly up into the sky and then drop it. Another seagull was homing in and diving to take it away from him. Pretty soon they set up a real screeching. He watched them for a while. Their fighting depressed him too.

  He noticed on one of the other boats at anchor there was someone aboard. If he stayed up on deck they might start waving and want to socialize. Not something he wanted to do. He picked up his stuff and went below.

  It had been a long week. God, what a week! He needed to get back to the old life. That whole city and all its karmic problems, and now on top of it Lila and all her karmic problems, were just too much. Maybe he should just take it easy for a while.

  On the pilot berth was the tote bag with all the mail. At last he could get started with that, a good diversion. He opened up the leaf of the dining table, put the tote bag on top of it and took out the top bunch of letters and spread them out.

  For the rest of the afternoon he sat with his feet propped up on the table, reading the letters, smiling at them, frowning at them, chuckling at them and answering each one that seemed to call for it, telling them no when they wanted something with as much grace as possible. He felt like Ann Landers.

  He heard Lila stirring once or twice. Once she got up and used the head. She wasn’t that catatonic. This quietness and boredom of a boat at anchor was the best cure in the world for catatonia.

  By the time it was dark he began to feel stale at answering mail. The day was done. It was time to relax. The light breeze of the day was now completely gone, and except for a slight rock of the boat now and then everything was still. What a blessing.

  He took the kerosene lamp from its gimbaled mounting, lit it and placed it near the galley sink. He made another meal out of the left-over food from Nyack and thought about Lila some more, but didn’t reach any conclusion except the one he had already reached: there was nothing to do but wait.

  When he brought in Lila’s food he saw the plate and glass he’d brought in earlier were empty. He tried again to talk to her but she still didn’t answer.

  He felt it getting colder now that the sun was down. Rather than start up the heater tonight he thought he’d just get into the sleeping bag early. It had been a long day. Maybe make a few slips on these new books on William James.

  These books were biography. He’d read quite a bit of James' philosophy. Now he wanted to get into some of his biography to put some perspective on it.

  He wanted particularly to see how much actual evidence there was for the statement that James' whole purpose was to unite science and religion. That claim had turned him against James years ago, and he didn’t like it any better now. When you start out with an axe like that to grind, it’s almost guaranteed that you will conclude with something false. The statement seemed more like some philosophological simplification written by someone with a weak understanding of what philosophy is for. 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.

  Phædrus removed the bag of mail to the pilot berth, then placed the kerosene lamp on top of the icebox where it would be over his shoulder and he could read by it, then sat down and began to read.

  After some time he noticed the lamp had become dim and he stopped reading to turn up the wick.

  Some time later he got his little wooden box from the pilot berth to make some slips about what he was reading.

  In the hours that continued he made a dozen of them.

  At another time he looked up from his reading and listened for a moment. There was not a sound. A little tilt of the boat now and then, but that was all.

  There was nothing in what he was reading that suggested James was some kind of religious ideologue interested in proving some foregone conclusion about religion. 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' 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.

  However, as James grew older his thoughts did seem to get more and more general. This was appropriate. If you don’t generalize you don’t philosophize. But to Phædrus it seemed that James' generalizations were heading toward something very similar to the Metaphysics of Quality. This could, of course, be the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where Phædrus' own intellectual immune system was selecting those aspects of James' philosophy that fit the Metaphysics of Quality and ignoring those that didn’t. But he didn’t think so. Everywhere he read it seemed as though he was seeing fits and matches that no amount of selective reading could contrive.

  James really had two main systems of philosophy going: one he called pragmatism and the other radical empiricism.

  Pragmatism is the one he is best remembered for: the idea that the test of truth is its practicality or usefulness. From a pragmatic viewpoint the squirrel’s definition of around was a true one because it was useful. Pragmatically speaking, that man never got around the squirrel.

  Phædrus, like most everyone else, had always assumed that pragmatism and practicality meant virtually the same thing, but when he got down to an exact quotation of what James did say on the subject he noticed something different:

  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.

  'Truth is a species of good.' That was right on. That was exactly what is meant by the Metaphysics of Quality. Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality.

  James had tried to make his pragmatism popular by getting it elected on the coattails of practicality. He was always eager to use such expressions as cash-value, and results, and profits, in order to make pragmatism intelligible to the man in the street, but this got James into hot water. Pragmatism was attacked by critics as an attempt to prostitute truth to the values of the marketplace. James was furious with this misunderstanding and he fought hard to correct the misinterpretation, but he never really overcame the attack.

  What Phædrus saw was that the Metaphysics of Quality avoided this attack by making it clear that the good to which truth is subordinate is intellectual and Dynamic Quality, not practicality. The misunderstanding of James occurred because there was no clear intellectual framework for distinguishing social quality from intellectual and Dynamic Quality, and in his Victorian lifetime they were monstrously confused. But the Metaphysics of Quality states that practicality is a social pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social values since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one.

  The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low-level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phædrus didn’t see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality’s classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement.

  The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.

  In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, James had condensed this description to a single sentence: There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing. Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phædrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.

  What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James' pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is value. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession.

  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 small-pox 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.

  But the Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality — the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one — is another matter altogether. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.

  Anyway, all this certainly answered the question of whether the Metaphysics of Quality was a foreign, cultish, deviant way of looking at things. The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth-century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the Metaphysics of Quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with.

  Phædrus supposed he could read on into all this James material but he doubted that he would find anything different from what he had already found. There is a time for investigation and there is a time for conclusion and he had a feeling that that latter time had come. His watch showed it was only nine-thirty but he was glad the day was done. He turned down the wick on the kerosene lamp, blew it out, placed it in its wall-holder and then settled down into the sleeping bag.

  Good old sleep.

  30

  He awoke to a tugging motion. There was a low sound of wind and a lapping of water. The wind must have changed direction. He hadn’t heard that for a long time. The boat was tugging a little to port, then after a time tugging back to starboard… and then after another long time another tug to port again… On and on. The portlights showed an overcast sky.

  Loneliness was what he always associated with these sounds and motions of the boat. A boat out on anchor exposed to a steady wind is almost always in some lonely place, a place only boats can get to.

  It was a relaxing sound. Gray skies and wind mean a kind of day when it’s pleasant not to go anywhere, just putter around the cabin fixing up things that you’ve been putting off, studying charts and harbor guides and planning where you will be going.

  Then he remembered that today he was going to go into town and try to get some food.

  Then he remembered Lila. Maybe today he’d find out if she was any better.

  He got out of the sleeping bag. When he put his feet down on the cabin sole he didn’t get the usual shock. The cabin thermometer showed 55 degrees. Not bad.

  The ocean was doing that. The lakes and canals back inland would start icing up in a month or so, but he doubted whether this water would freeze at all. The tides and currents would keep it moving. Certainly on the other side of this hook the ocean never froze, so he had escaped that danger. He could always get out. The ice couldn’t get him any more.

  He stepped up the ladder, pushed open the hatch and put his head out.

  It was beautiful. Gray skies. South wind. Warm wind with an ocean smell in it. The other two boats that had been at anchor were gone.

  The curve of the hook concealed Manhattan and Brooklyn. All he could see across the bay to the west was a barge at anchor and a high-rise apartment from another world miles away.

  He suddenly felt a wild freedom.

  The change in the wind had placed his boat a little closer to shore now and he noticed something he hadn’t paid much attention to yesterday. The shore was piled with debris. There were plastic bottles, an old tire and, farther off, what looked like old creosoted telephone poles half buried in the sand next to a boat hull with its transom knocked out. Sandy Hook seemed like some final resting place for all the junk of civilization that had come down the Hudson River.

  He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. He’d really slept. He went back below, rolled up the sleeping bag and put away the books and slips from last night’s reading. He built a new fire, noting there were only about two days of charcoal left. When the fire was going he went to the chart table and opened the second drawer down. He pulled out all the Hudson River charts, gathered them into a pile and carried them to a bin above the settee berth where he stored them. He wouldn’t be needing those again. To take their place he brought out a roll of charts from Sandy Hook to Cape May and the Delaware River. At the chart table he unrolled them and studied each one.

  The coast had many little criss-cross marks showing wrecks. Rigel had warned him not to get caught off the New Jersey shore in a northeaster. But it looked like an easy three days to Cape May if the weather was good, with an easy run to Manasquan Inlet and a longer one to Atlantic City.

  Phædrus folded the charts and placed them in the chart table drawer. He prepared a simple breakfast for himself, ate it, and then made one for Lila.

  When he brought it in she was awake. The swelling of her face didn’t seem to have gone down much but she was looking at him again, really looking at him now: making contact.

  Why is the boat swinging? she said.

  It’s all right, he said.

  It’s making me dizzy, she said. Stop the boat from swinging.

  She’s not only talking, he thought, she’s complaining. That’s real progress. How does that eye feel? he asked.

  Awful.

  We can put hot rags on it or something.

  No.

  Well, here’s breakfast, anyway.

  Are we at the island?

  We’re at
Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

  Where is everybody?

  Where?

  On the island, she said.

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, but something told him not to ask.

  It’s not an island, it’s a spit of land. There’s nobody here, at least on this part. Just a lot of junk lying around.

  You know what I mean, she said.

  He sensed there was a problem coming up. If he rejected what she was telling him then she’d reject him. He didn’t want that. She was trying to reach out to him now. He should try to meet her halfway.

  Well, it’s almost an island, he said.

  Richard is coming.

  Rigel?

  She didn’t say anything. He supposed she must mean Rigel. There weren’t any other Richards.

  Rigel said he was going to Connecticut to sell his boat, Phædrus said. This is New Jersey now, so he won’t be coming this way.

  Well, I’m ready, Lila said.

  That’s good, he said. That’s very good. I’m going down the road to try to find some groceries. Do you want to come along?

  No.

  OK. You can rest here as long as you feel like, he said. He stepped back and closed the door.

  Ready for what, he wondered, as he entered the main cabin. They want to superimpose their movie on you. It’s like talking to some religious nut. You can’t argue with her, you’ve just got to find some common ground. She was sure a lot better but there was a long way to go.

  He wondered if it was safe to leave her here alone. There wasn’t much else he could do. It was a lot safer than at a dock where she might start to interact with people on other boats. God knows what would happen then.

  The chart showed a road right next to shore here where he could hike or hitchhike about three miles south to a place called the Highlands of Navesink that might have a grocery store.