Squad,
Apologies to David for my blatant plagiarization in the first three
paragraphs but it turned out to be just what I needed to get started. I'm
finding this an incredibly difficult exercise, given the amount of time
I've spent reading and studying LILA you'd think it'd be easy, but it isn't
at all. Anyway I've had a good go at it and it's late and I can always
revise it later...
Diana
Metaphysics? I guess its safe to say that Aristotle wrote the first
metaphysical treatise in the 4th century BC. But since then the word has
worked its way into the popular imagination, as in "Groovy Seth's New Age
Metaphysical Bookstore and Aroma therapy Center". To save you looking it
up, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the underlying
principles of reality -- the framework of all phenomena. There are three
disciplines within metaphysics: cosmology, epistemology and ontology.
Briefly, these are concerned with the nature and origins of the natural
universe, human perception and cognition, and the nature of existence
itself.
Believe it or not, Robert M Pirsig, creator of the Metaphysics of
Quality, makes it all kind of fun. He only wrote two books, both novels:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance written over twenty years ago and
Lila, published in 1991.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) is
quasi-autobiographical story of a cross-country motorcycle trip from the
upper midwest to the Pacific coast. Along the way, Pirsig takes us on a
philosophical journey from ancient Greece, through the European
Enlightenment and all the way up to contemporary America, weaving in Zen
Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies along the way.
For all its philosophical content, ZMM is a breeze of a book about
feeling good and being true to yourself. Why should reality be so
complicated that only a handful of academics can understand it? Pirsig
asks. If that's the case then anyone without a phd should be certified
insane. Reality isn't in a book, he says, and it certainly isn't something
that a few self-appointed "experts" have a monopoly on. Reality is direct
experience. It is the here and now, and we all know it well.
With an attitude like that it's not surprising that he is such a
popular philosopher amongst lay people and so unpopular amongst academics.
ZMM is the biggest selling philosophy book of all time. More people have
bought it than Plato's Republic or Kant's Discourse on Reason. Yet, to
date, there are only a couple of university courses on Pirsig's work.
When we meet Pirsig again in his second book, Lila, it is the late
eighties. The sixties are just a memory and a rather embarrassing one at
that. Nobody believes in that stuff any more. You look out for yourself and
grab what you can ... if you're smart that is.
Pirsig wants to talk about morality now. Quite probably nobody
wants to listen to him, but a person on a moral crusade doesn't worry about
that. He is going to tell you anyway.
He keeps on referring to the Victorians. He isn't always flattering
but he's in awe of them. He recalls their grace and sureness. They were the
last society to have a firm moral structure and it gave them stability.
After the twenties scientists became too clever and decided that morality
is just "what people think". Science replaced philosophy as our tool for
knowing about the world and, as science couldn't find any location for
morality, it was decided that it wasn't there after all. We pretty much
threw morality away after that.
And that, says Pirsig, is how everything got messed up.
Now everyone seems to be guided by an 'objective', 'scientific'
view of life, he complains. "No two people can ever really communicate
except in the mode of ship's radio operators sending messages back and
forth in the night. A scientific intellectual culture has 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
... Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so
encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it,
descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and
futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian
'virtue' ever was."
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig's greatest joy is
fixing and tuning-up his motorbike. You get the impression that he likes
maintaining it even more than he likes riding it. In Lila our hero is the
same: half nerd, half prophet. But instead of his bike, he decides that the
mind set of the Western world needs fixing.
But first there's a problem. His crusade is against the
intellectualization of reality, yet Pirsig's great talent is his intellect.
Surely if he takes on the task he'll only make things worse. A static
metaphysics won't take you closer to a Dynamic understanding of reality, it
will take you further away from it.
The moral thing seems to be for Pirsig to leave it alone. He should
follow the mystics and use meditation to strive for no-mind and
connectivity. And to a certain extent he has done. Pirsig has studied in
India, practised za zen and even set up the Zen centre in his home town.
But his intellect keeps creeping back. Telling the intellect not to write a
metaphysics is like telling a fat man to stay out of the fridge, he argues,
and, in any case, being deliberately non-intellectual is also a kind of
static pattern. With that, he lays down his method for the MOQ. With cold,
hard rationality, Pirsig will use intellectual patterns to lead you through
reality, mysticism and all, and if you can understand why that's the right
thing to do then you can understand the MOQ.
It all comes down to morality Pirsig claims. The idea that there is
no such thing as right and wrong is nonsense. Of course some things are
better than others and it is perfectly obvious. It is good that we should
have safe inner cities, it is good that we should respect human rights, it
is good that people dance and have fun now and again.The Metaphysics of
Quality is often described as a Copernican shift and indeed it is because
Pirsig's morality stretches right down to trees, rocks and the smallest
particles. It is all moral patterns he states. When you switch to morality
as the centre of the universe suddenly every trivial thing that you've
ignored before becomes critical. When you write an essay, it is a moral
exercise, clean your house, eat, sleep, die -- these are all moral
exercises and they should be done with righteousness. And, when plants
respire, the earth quakes and particles pop in and out of existence, it is
all because it is moral to do so as well. It might sound like a far cry
from the wind-in-my-hair freedom of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, but it is all leading up to a pure Zen mysticism, only via a
path that rationalists can understand. With morality back at the center of
our lives suddenly we are not living in a pointless intellectual desert any
more, but a world of meaning and purpose. The separation of one individual
from another is not inevitable but merely one possibility. And to become
moral, all we have to do is try.
"The Zen monk's daily life is nothing but one ritual after another,
hour after hour, day after day, all his life," he writes. "They don't tell
him to shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten dharma. They
want him to get those patterns perfect! ... 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."
And so he goes, from the sublime to the garage floor.
In the only way he knows how, he rolls up his sleeves, gathers up
all the world's knowledge, lays it out on an old sheet and starts sorting.
Life and biology into this pile; history, science and mathematics into that
one. Sometimes he finds parts that he thought were important are useless
ornamentation. Other times he finds bits that didn't seem to have any
function are actually essential to the whole machine. Piece by piece he
rebuilds our intellectual paradigms and uncovers the secret of the universe
on the way. Wacky, eccentric, megalomaniac: you could call Pirsig all these
things (and many people have). But he's having the time of his life.
To free himself from his intellectual prison, he must master it
with such proficiency that it becomes an unconscious part of his nature.
That is, he must spin an intellectual web that it is more perfect than any
that have gone before, because that is the only way he can empty his
intellectual cup. The metaphysics of quality is that web and it is both
mystic and intellectual -- the rational escape from rationality.
In one chapter Pirsig compares himself to a particular South American
shaman, or brujo. By all accounts this man really existed and his struggle
to change his society has been documented in anthropological reports. This
brujo was a troubled man - at odds with his people politically and
socially. Yet he was also the precursor of changes which ultimately were
for the good of his tribe. "He may never have seen it as anything other
than a personal struggle," writes Pirsig. And, I suppose, Pirsig built the
Metaphysics of Quality to resolve his own personal struggles too. Yet in
doing so he's created an escape route from the intellectual brick walls of
the twentieth century. And, through his two novels, those of us who are
curious enough can follow him through.
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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