All POVs (without free will),
Welcome Owen, with your challenge no one seems to have picked up. "It is the obligation of
the determinists to prove to me why this freewill that I seem to be experiencing is actually an
illusion, and so far I have not been convinced." If Pirsig is right, and experience is primary,
how is it we can judge some experiences (such as selfhood and free will) to be illusory? (The
existentialists actually saw the issue of choice as the painful determining feature of
humankind, the rock bottom experience that cannot be avoided.) This is to me just a variant
of the question Pirsig fails to answer; how do we separate the saviours from the
degenerates? The debate on free will seems to have moved from ugly shouting to muted
semi- agreement to intellectual gymnastics, with ultimate stalemate as all you patterns of
value writhe in terminal confusion. How do I discriminate a quality response from this lot?
Not that I am saying this is a pseudo question, as I do take fantasy to be a meaningful term.
Pirsig has an answer to this, though it will not be a popular one. "Well, if I get around all
these gumption traps, will I then have the thing licked? The answer, of course, is no ...
You've got to live right too ... The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself."
(ZMM Ch 26) Zen and the art of self maintenance! ZMM can be read as the recovery of a
self, and the subsequent recovery of relationships. That is the power of the novel, in my view.
That this seems not to fit with the metaphysics of Lila is really not a problem. Pirsig was sadly
captured by a rather noxious meme which caused him to spend umpteen years agonising
over intellectual issues rather than get on with working on himself. Working on himself would
have involved dialogue, something he obviously found difficult. (I won't bore you with the
quotes again relating to how he got sidetracked from American Indians to anthropology and
metaphysics - its in the book.)
There is a sense in which the 'little editor' self is a fantasy, and the mystics are no doubt right
to critique it, though sadly they have not been able to provide me with experiences to convert
me to their view. Like Owen, my experiences which I label self and freedom of choice are at
least as real as my other experiences, and are often most powerful and disturbing. Telling me
they are illusory does not change that. I would like to believe that I am just a part of the
universe which is unfolding as it should, but when I wake up in the night remembering some
obligation left undone, it is my clear impression that I, myself, am culpable. And I worry how
the injured party will in future treat 'me'. I am even so self-bound that I wonder as I write
these words how various 'others' involved in this discussion will respond, and if 'I' will be
flamed. Help! Release me from my nasty memes. Restructure my patterns, please. I long to
be selfless, like you'all.
Lyell Watson in 'Dark Nature' explores morality from an evolutionary perspective, as I guess
Pirsig does. Watson says "By its very nature, a complex society creates calculating beings -
ones who recognize the consequences of their own behavior, who predict the response of
others, and who measure the net profit and loss in everything that happens." I'm happy to call
this selfhood. Another useful term is agency. Agents are self conscious, and an important
locus of value for an agent relates to this self. An agent conflates the biological organism, the
social actor, and the thinker, with their often conflicting moralities, into a whole, a whole that
acts, and whose actions have consequences of great complexity. New York is not an agent,
hence the Giant analogy is flawed. In fact I would go so far as to assert that morals, hence
quality, are meaningless concepts without agents. Pirsig reifies "Quality". Its some sort of
'ether' that somehow explains the universe, like phlogiston explained fire before chemistry
developed better explanations. When Pirsig explores organismic quality with its focus on
survival of the organism, or social quality, where right and wrong is linked to actual agents,
he is on the right track. He just gets carried away with all his system building, and spoils a
promising start.
There is little doubt that the self is an emergent arising from consciousness and intellect as
these have evolved in humans. Self awareness can be painful, and it is not surprising many
people would rather escape this pain. Self is indeed marked by separation. The really big
question is whether separation is best handled by avoiding it, seeking to numb down the
awareness that goes with it, and seeking solace in mystic union, or by accepting separation
as real, the mind as real in its own domain, choice as real as it seems to be, and moving on
to explore contact, dialogue and encounter, respecting my self as much as those other
selves with whom I appear to share a planet. I like the thought of transcending the ego
constriction of my self, and I'll let you know when I find the way, but I don't wish to, nor can I,
simply deny my experience of self as an agent, whose choices count.
John B
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