Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals,
Like ZAMM, Lila is a narrative interwoven with his thoughts, and though the ultimate focus of the narrative, i.e. this unhinged and unpleasant woman that Pirsig hooks up with while cruising around aimlessly on his boat, serves as a case study for his considerations of Quality, a lot of the details of the boat trip itself are easily skimmable, so unlike ZAMM, where I let myself be immersed in the motorcycle trip as described and only later went back to carve out the philosophical ideas, I will freely admit to merely skimming the narrative sections of this book, and even through a few of the discursive parts, to try to get to the central ideas. As in the case of ZAMM, when you do this you reduce Lila to a 50-page-or-so tract with a handful of ideas and thoughtful discussion. Some of of the key ideas from Lila were brought up during our episode, and Dave has sketched out some others in some of his comments on this blog. I plan to pick out a couple for more extensive discussion here over the next days.
As our commenter Derek pointed out, something gets lost when you skip the setting: riding on a motorcycle or sitting on a boat at night are great settings to be alone with your thoughts, to face the wide world in all its mysteriousness, etc. However, I don’t think the particular setting you’re contemplating in is particularly tied to the result. I’ve stayed up many a late night songwriting, or fiction writing, or philosophy writing… it’s just a creative time for me, and the particular quality of the particular night doesn’t affect the content of what I produce so much as what might be most bugging me and/or inspiring me at the time. So no, I don’t think that going light on the boating/driving parts in Pirsig’s boats will keep you from getting his philosophic message. If you think that the driving parts are just beautiful writing, like Cormac McCarthy describing the plains of Mexico or [insert a comparable literary example you can relate to], then by all mean, feast on the book in full. I’m no literary critic, certainly, but for my purposes, ZAMM could have been edited down quite a bit before the majesty of the road and the towns and all that would have been removed from the experience for me. There is a definite literary effect of sheer length, however; the feeling of a journey taken, with the weariness, isolation, and homesickness that entails. So yes, given the way I’ve skimmed Lila, I’m sure there’s some literary effect of that sort I’m not getting.
What I did get from Lila is some insightful commentary on ZAMM, but also some old-guy-crotchetiness and resentment. More on that in part two.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Timely.
I’ve never encountered your podcast before. I am an attorney currently pursuing a philosophy M.A. out of personal interest–Pirsig was the writer primarily responsible for my studying philosophy as an undergraduate, and I quite successfully drew from Lila for a couple different jurisprudence papers in law school (and, weirdly enough, one of my professors last semester was a professor of Pirsig’s as well). Right now I’m taking a course on emergence (drawing primarily from the Metaphysics of Mind text by Jaegwon Kim) and I’m sort of stunned that I’d never encountered this stuff before–and that other Pirsig devotees have focused so much on the parallels in pragmatism but delved rarely, if ever, into emergence theory.
The primary modern emergence texts are much more analytically developed than Pirsig’s work, but almost all of them post-date Lila by at least a couple years–pointing mostly to British Emergentism as the intellectual precursor to modern emergence theory. It is interesting to me that this should be so, especially since of course none of these texts refer to Pirsig at all.
Anyway, poking around Google for others who had recognized the parallels between Pirsig and modern emergentism led me here. I look forward to hearing more of what you have to say about it.
have you read any of Gregory Bateson’s work?
I would bet that Pirsig has, maybe DB knows or could ask him.
If there is a mood-altering literary effect, I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. But, in a much less elusive way, Pirsig uses the people and places in the narrative to illustrate his philosophical points, the structure of his metaphysics, etc.. Lila, Rigel and the Captain represent the biological, social and intellectual levels, for example. They travel trough the tight canals north of Kingston as he talks about old world rigidity and he’s heading out toward the ocean during discussions of dynamic freedom – and the narrative is full of other fairly obvious symbolism like that.
Sadly, I suspect a lot of readers do exactly the opposite. They enjoy the narrative but skim or skip the philosophy parts. Pirsig considers Lila to be the more serious book. One of his aims was to dispel the notion that ZAMM is just a cult book and pay his due respect to the philosophologists. This is why we find the identification with James’ pragmatism and radical empiricism. So the philosophical substance is the crucial essence, but the narrative is part of it too.
It’s worth mentioning that Lila is quasi-autobiographical. Pirsig had actually encountered critics like Rigel, the priggish lawyer who accuses Pirsig of selling relativism to the nation just when we didn’t need it. After Pirsig became famous, strange women really did throw themselves at him. And he really did love to sail. He and his wife crossed the Atlantic at least once. It’s sort of interesting, I think, the way he talks about the country and its history as he moves through it by sail, the old-fashioned way.
the idea, which I don’t share, is that literature can give a kind of virtual experience by which we are learning by doing as opposed to a kind of abstract learning about, and here is where all of the embodiment/skill talk comes in to play (with some irony that of course the skills/experiences of reading are not the same skills as other doings). Reading/writing about say playing music, cooking, or even being compassionate is not the same as playing, cooking, or being in relation to a flesh and blood person. What many of these writers want is not just to give you new information but a new way of seeing the world, a kind of gestalt-shift. I think we have all known brilliant professors of philo who don’t show much sophia or phronesis in their live, in even areas for which they might be considered experts. There are echoes of this is the much bemoaned theory/practice gap.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_kierkegaard.html