Lila: An Inquiry into Morals [Paperback]

Lila again has Phaedrus as the central character, though this time he speaks in the third and not the first person singular, and he is presented as the author of the earlier book. This time he is travelling on a sailing boat instead of on a motor-cycle - and although at one point the sailing boat is used to underline the fact that he is a loner, it is not otherwise used as a trigger for an investigation into the nature of things as the motor-cycle had been used in the previous book. The tension and suspense of the first book is missing, and from that point of view Lila is less gripping than Zen was. The reason for this is not that Pirsig's narrative skills have deserted him, but that, whereas Zen had ended with Phaedrus' solution to the problem of what was the ultimate nature of reality, Lila merely works out some implications of this solution. In order to make the later book a self-contained work, the conclusions which Phaedrus had reached in the first book need to be restated. Pirsig is too much of a craftsman to do this by mere repetition of what he had said in Zen; even so, those who have read the earlier book will perhaps feel a certain sense of déja vu.

What, then, had Phaedrus discovered as the ultimate nature of reality? He had felt that the two modes of western thinking, the classical and the romantic, were both unsatisfactory. The romantic, which will not come to grips with the underlying meaning of phenomena, is basically superficial. The classical mode, with its analytical procedures, often destroys what it investigates. The romantic mode stresses the subjective impact on the observer; the classical stresses the objective nature of the things observed. Both are part of what, in Lila, Phaedrus calls the subject-object metaphysic; and the concept that the world can be understood in terms simply of subject and object has been deeply embedded in western thought ever since classical Greek philosophy. However, the pre-classical Greeks, through their concept of arete, held out the possibility of a richer understanding. Phaedrus translates arete as "Quality" (and sometimes as "Value"), and it is by Quality that the conclusions reached by the classical or the romantic processes need to be judged.

What had, in the first book, driven Phaedrus into temporary insanity was the difficulty of defining what exactly this Quality was. If you are capable of responding to Quality, you know what it is. It is what you perceive in a work of art (in the romantic mode) or in the elegance of a rational construct (in the classical mode); and where it is absent, the art or the rational construct convey a defective understanding of the world. But because (as Phaedrus believed) this Quality is pre-intellectual, it vanishes the moment you try to pin it down by definitions; and if you cannot define it, you are at the mercy of the scoffing of such as Rigel (another character in Lila).

Besides, Quality is perceived in different ways by different cultures. Is it therefore a purely relative concept? Phaedrus thinks not. In Lila he conceives it in evolutionary terms. The relativism, therefore, is not absolute: in all societies Quality is that which leads to improvement. It is therefore Dynamic (always spelt with a capital D) and not static.

Phaedrus describes evolution as going through four phases: the inorganic; the biological; the social; and the intellectual. Mankind originates at the biological level. The biological level then "invents" the social level, and it does this for the benefit of the biological level; therefore every development that leads from the lower to the higher level has Dynamic Quality, and, in that context, has Moral Quality, too. Nothing that threatens to sacrifice a higher to a lower level is moral.

At the social level new patterns or codes are developed which eventually become static. The social codes regulate the society and so protect it from slipping back to a lower level; but at the same time their rigidity is often intolerant of intellectual criticism. That intolerance is immoral when intellectual criticism is Dynamic, i.e. when it is trying to move mankind along to a higher level than the social one. Intellectual criticism is, however, degenerative and lacking in Moral Quality if, as it were, it allies with the biological level against the social level and would thereby produce a slipping back rather than a moving forward. In this connection Phaedrus has a trenchant analysis of the hippy culture of the 'seventies.

In fact, the applications of Phaedrus' rather abstract scheme constantly enliven the book. The Metaphysics of Quality is applied to such varied subjects as the work of anthropologists; sexual behaviour; the megalopolis; the free market; the cult of celebrity; the making of movies based on books; Victorian "hypocrisy"; the significance of the New Deal and of fascism; Islamic fundamentalism; cultural discrimination; the nature of mental illness and the attitudes of psychiatrists.