Commentary on Chapter 5 of Lila - An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
(Direct quotes from Lila in italics)
This chapter begins with a statement that should clarify how Phaedrus, and by osmosis, Pirsig identifies Quality, and makes the ambiguous and undefinable Quality a bit more of something that we can actually work with.
Quality was value. They were the same thing
This statement is necessary not only to using Pirsig’s metaphysics by conceptualizing Quality in the real world. By understanding that the practical application of Quality is value, much opens up in terms of being able to discuss Quality more rationally. But Phaedrus has been through hell and back for this insight. Poor Kluckhorn, the anthropologist, has an inkling that there is something to value that is not measurable in the objective sense. And unlike Phaedrus, he has not seen the way through is beyond the wall of the cultural immune system. He is still thinking that he can remain behind these walls and practice value-added anthropology. There is some key he is looking for that will fit into this:
culture must include the explicit and systematic study of values and value-systems viewed as observable, describable, and comparable phenomena of nature.
But the word “value” itself has implications. Science has gleefully (value btw) freed itself from the bonds of subjectivity, of primitive superstition. But with that liberation, something went down the drain. Anthropology, in our 19th century scientism, so eager to make that last move to overcome nature, was holding fast to its new dogma of objectivity – that golden key to truth. As in reverence to a wise old man, they put this professor Emeritus in a beautiful stone hall, and go about their business, calling on him when they need him:
[values] were relegated to a special set of intellectual activities called "the humanities" included in the "spiritual science" of the Germans. Values were believed to be eternal because they were God-given, or divinely inspired or at least discovered by that soul part of man which partakes somewhat of divinity, as his body and other bodies and tangibles of the world do not.
Kluckhorn was so close when he said:
whether they were well-defined or not everyone agreed with what they were in actual practice.
But he’s subservient to the system. Therefore the obvious reality you and I see shining forth, is glossed over. Not ready to leave the system, but to stay in the system, he has to overcome the pushback on its own terms.
As long as the cultural configurations, basic value attitudes, prevailing mores or whatnot are taken as the starting point and principal determinant, they have the status of unanalyzed assumptions. The very questions that would enable us to understand the norms tend not to be asked, and certain facts about society become difficult if not impossible to comprehend.
Carefully parse this next paragraph, because within here you will find the sneaky tactics of postmodernism:
Mores, determinants, norms… these were the jargon terms of sociology into which they converted things they wanted to attack. That’s how you know when you’re within a walled city, Phædrus thought. The jargon. They’ve cut themselves off from the rest of the world and are speaking a jargon only they can really understand.
Like the fortified cities of the past, these august disciplines have a certain security, and they know it. So within this barrier, the revenge can be wrought. All the former powers of religion, the irritants of superstition, the bullies and cads can all be made to submit in this ivory tower. Intellect won, and it now the purse strings – metaphorical and actual. If you want to enter, answer the riddle and agree to follow the code. In this case, the code is “objectivity first”…while underneath the puppet master is guiding the show with its own values: nothing is simple, simplicity is deceptive, it leads you to believe in superstition that the universe is, in fact, simple. That would be regressive. God is dead. Emotion is for children. Values are vague. The universe is far more complicated that you hope and will require endless study to arrive at certainty. But no fear, we are just the boys to perform this arduous task.
But to keep up the ruse, this means value must be defined withing the language of this system. Pirsig calls this definition a lead balloon:
Value orientations are complex but definitely patterned (rank-ordered) principles resulting from the transactional interplay of three analytically distinguishable elements of the evaluative process — the cognitive, the affective, and the directive elements — which give order and direction to the ever-flowing stream of human acts and thoughts as these relate to the solution of common human problems.
In counter to the claim made by anthropologists that values are too “vague” to be determined, Pirsig notes that that is not the case at all, after all, are values vague in the voting booth? When tax time rolls around? and neither does Kluckhorn who points out that:
values are not the least vague when you’re dealing with them in terms of actual experience. It’s only when you bring back statements about them and try to integrate them into the overall jargon of anthropology that they become vague.
The “actual experience” of value is beyond doubt. ZaMM explored this extensively. Phaedrus proved that the higher Quality essay would be recognized by the majority of students, that Quality itself is a reality.
It’s hard enough to talk about Indians alone without having to resolve a metaphysical dispute at the end of each sentence.This should have been done before anthropology was set up, not afterward.
So a metaphysics does need to be set up then, to be able to instigate a value-based anthropology on the foundation of a value-based metaphysics. This is how Phaedrus realizes that all that work he’s done identifying Quality as base reality now needs to be codified into a usable metaphysics.
Metaphysics would be the expanded format in which whites and white anthropology could be contrasted to Indians and Indian anthropology without corrupting everything into a white anthropological walled-in jargonized way of looking at things.
And there’s a nice description of metaphysics in this chapter to get us started:
It asks such questions as; Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our consciousness of it? Is reality ultimately reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially spiritual or material? Is the universe intelligible and orderly or incomprehensible and chaotic?
One of the problems that Phaedrus knows he’s going to encounter by trying to put together this metaphysics, besides the fact he’s moving away from objective, value-free way of looking at things is that metaphysics itself is not respected. It’s not respected by positivists or by mystics. Positivists find it too ephemeral, it cannot be measured, and only that can be measured is true reality. The mystics believe you should not try to codify experience. So you have one group thinking metaphysics are too airy-fairy, and the other thinking we need not write about it. To try to pin it down is to try to divide the nature of undivided reality. So Phaedrus is going to get it from all sides…thankfully, he’s going to do it anyway. You could say, thankfully for us, it’s a compulsion.
Phædrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located.
Basically he addresses the two oppositions thusly:
To the mystics, he says…your insistence on purity is an impurity of sorts since insisting on purity is itself impure. Pragmatically, living life in all its imperfection is also reality, and part of that imperfection would be that compulsion we have to understand…part of that understanding is having at least some kind of description of metaphysics that we can work with in our actual day-to-day reality.
It’s easier to win an argument against the positivists: Quality is absolutely a thing. In fact, the mystic objection of defining metaphysics can be used in this case to refute the positivists.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus had called Quality in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience
And as an experience, in this case of pain, there is no doubting pain…low quality. It happens. It is an event that is as tangible and reproducible as any solid scientific observation. In fact, it is that experience of high or low quality that inspires hypotheses and subsequent experiments. Quality is the primary reality from which comes all mystical experience, and all scientific truth. That meeting of subject and object during the Quality event is what makes everything happen.
What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent — fabulously more coherent — when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world… but showing that, of course, was a very big job