I've been waiting to read this book for a long, long time. I bought this copy of Lila shortly after it came out in paperback almost 20 years ago and wanted to jump right into it since I was so transfixed, and transformed, by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have told a couple of groups now that not only was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance my favorite book of all time, it was also the most important. What's not to love about: "You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine."? And it's a book that I've both reread a couple of times and listened to recently. It's held up well each time. That's kind of what made Lila an intimidating presence on my bookshelf, for what else could it be but a let down. It certainly has garnered that reputation over the years. Many reviewers talk about how much they enjoyed ZAMM and then slam Lila because it is not ZAMM.
And that kinda describes my reaction, too. I enjoyed Lila, to be sure, and found the story of Phaedrus having to deal with her one way or another to be fairly compelling. There's even a sinister quality with Jamie and Fatso that give a hint of a detective novel. It's one of the few times that Pirsig steps out of Phaedrus' consciousness and into another character, a bit strange in a book prety much devoted to Phaedrus' philosophizing. He does it with Riegel, once, and he does it more effectively with Lila, especially when she is trying to get back to the boat and begins a psychotic episode. Phaedrus' decision to care for her until she cures herself, regardless of how long that takes, gives a depth and a reality to all the sermonizing going on in his head. It also gives an ironic twist to all his thinking since he really is pretty naieve about what's going on with her.
The question that drives the book, of course, is "Does Lila have Quality?" which Riegel asks him the night after he picks Lila up in a bar, and Phaedrus is forced to justify his reasons after he tells Riegel yes. His response then becomes the whole Metaphysics of Quality, from the first moment of insight on a peyote high with Dusenberry to his final pronouncement that Good is a noun.
And I got lost in there somewhere. One of my annotations says: "pure experience = pure value? what does this mean?" It's the heart of quality--of the Metaphysics of Quality-- in that precognitive moment of awareness before the subject/object dualism of conceptions and things come to the fore, before the intellectual patterns give birth to our awareness of things. Is it the Tao? But then, aren't the Tao and Quality really just abstractions for a physiological process of sensory intake? Or is it more than that? Pirsig brings in religious mysticism and dharma and rta to make metaphors for this preintellectual event that suggests so much more than physiology. It has value, and, he suggests, something almost supernatural or mystical, comparing it to the dharmakaya light. He calls it Dynamic Quality and keeps insisting that it is higher on the evolutionary scale than intellectual or social or biological or material patterns of matter. As a matter of fact, it drives evolution. "Because Quality is morality…They're identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. That just seems too big of a leap for me to take right now. What to make of a sentence like this: "if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value, and that value is synonymous with moral, then it all begins to make sense." That's just it. It doesn't all begin to make sense for me. Sometimes I wondered that all of his ratiocinations weren't really just rationalizations for judgements that he had already made.
Then, as in ZAMM, Pirsig uses this value driven system as a means of social criticsm--a paralysis of moral patterns in the modern world that MOQ could set right if given the chance. Plato, of course, said the same thing, that when philosophers are made kings then all would be right with the world. And these philosophers were specially qualified because they knew the Good--and that brings us around to the final sentence of the book: Good is noun. I just don't get it.
Author: Pirsig, Robert
Date Published: 1991
Length: 468 pp
print
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