After some time I finished reading the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Robert Pirsig’s Lila. In general, it’s a much different book, because it explores the Metaphysics of Quality from a much more analytical point of view. Whereas Z&AMM built it from the ground up, Lila takes what has already been built, holds it up to the light, and examines it from many different angles.

Unlike other book notes, I didn’t take bullet-points, but just marked interesting quotes with bookmarks. So, the rest of this post will mainly consist of quotes from the book that I found interesting.

On notetaking

Early on, Pirsig describes his process of constructing his system of metaphysics by taking notes on slips of paper and putting them in a big tray. This is very reminiscent of the zettelkasten method of notetaking, which is not new, but the way of presenting it here seems to me quite novel.

There’s an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it. It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new … on and on in an endless circular pattern. (p. 22)

This is pretty interesting as a note-taking system, because here the process of “capture,” presented as a somewhat cathartic braindump onto the paper, is distinct from “categorisation.” Yet, in most notetaking processes that I saw, they require some kind of categorisation as a part of writing the note down: even deciding which folder in your Obsidian vault a note goes into is categorisation, and it should be avoided until you are ready to categorise.

Categorisation is a distinct process from capture and is done when you’re idle. Pirsig describes it like this:

Eventually this belief was justified. Periods started to appear when he just sat there for hours and no slips came in—and this, he saw, was at last the time for organizing. He was pleased to discover that the slips themselves made this organizing much easier. Instead of asking “Where does this metaphysics of the universe begin?”—which was a virtually impossible question—all he had to do was just hold up two slips and ask, “Which comes first.” This was easy and he always seemed to get an answer. Then he would take a third slip, compare it with the first one, and ask again, “Which comes first.” If the new slip came after the first one he compared it with the second. Then he had a three-slip organization. He kept repeating the process with slip after slip.

Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the index card together with its related topic slips. The trays on the pilot berth now had about four or five hundred of these tabbed index cards. (p. 24)

Reading this inspired the post system on this blog, and the reason why jots are just identified by their publication date: jots are pure capture, notes are something in between and articles are fully formed, “index-tabbed” thoughts.

On saying what you know

That limits me in a lot of ways. There’s so much I can’t say. But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know little and say a lot. … Don’t you agree? (p. 33)

On Indian habits

The nucleus of this intellectual web was the observation that when the Indians entered the teepee, or went out, or added logs, or passed the ceremonial peyote, or pipe, or food, they just did these things. They didn’t go about doing them. They just did them. There was no waste motion. When they moved a branch into the fire to build it up they just moved it. There was no sense of ceremony. They were engaged in a ceremony but the way they did it there wasn’t any ceremony. (p. 39)

This reminds me of a certain Benedictine adage on the implementation of the motto of Ora et labora: treat your work tools as if they were sacred objects. This way, in everything you do, you are meticulous and careful. Even when you’re resting, it’s evident that it’s done with piety, and without wasting any motion or movement. (See Wil Derkse’s The Rule of Benedict for Beginners)

On anthropology

This goes on from a critique of anthropology as a “science” trying to analyse data of the lifestyle and culture of “savage” people without passing judgment and generalisation.

Data without generalization is just gossip. And as Phaedrus continued on and on that seemed to be the status of what he was reading. It filled shelf after shelf with volume after dusty volume about this savage and that savage, but as far as he could see, anthropology, the “science of man,” had had almost no guiding effect on man’s activities in this scientific century.

Whacko science. They were trying to lift themselves by their bootstraps. You can’t have Box “A” contain within itself Box “B,” which in turn contains Box “A.” That’s whacko. Yet here’s a “science” which contains “man” which contains “science” which contains “man” which contains “science”—on and on. (p. 55)

On the opposition to metaphysics

It has two kinds of opponents. The first are the philosophers of science, most particularly the group known as logical positivists, who say that only the natural sciences can legitimately investigate the nature of reality, and that metaphysics is simply a collection of unprovable assertions that are unnecessary to the scientific observation of reality. For a true understanding of reality, metaphysics is too “mystical.” This is clearly the group with which Franz Boas, and because of him modern American anthropology, belongs.

The second group of opponents are the mystics. The term mystic is sometimes confused with “occult” or “supernatural” and with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reahty is undivided. (p. 63)

On the definition of zero

This leads from the idea that Quality is an undefinable concept and yet here, Phaedrus is trying to define it.

It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or “zero,” or “space” for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with “nothing.” “Zero” and “space” are complex relationships of “somethingness.” If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone. (p. 64)

This is a quite interesting quote from the point of view of computer science, since in computer science we had to invent various kinds of ways to represent absence of information since “zero” does not do a good job of it. There are a number of “empty” elements - an empty string, an empty list, a Nothing constructor of a Maybe type. And, of course, the big one: null.

On the subject-object split

One of the more important passages that elucidates Pirsig’s central idea that there is something above subject and object.

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. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths¹Marginnote oaths1I am guessing that by oaths Pirsig means something like expletives or curses. ↩ to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.

The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths.

Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any “self” or any “object” to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed. (p. 66)

On cheap moralists

A rather common occurrence on the internet and in broader culture these days.

There are so many kinds of problem people like Rigel around, he thought, but the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There’s an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn’t matter what the moral code is—religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals—they’re all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same. (p. 83)

More on the subject-object split

The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. “Quality” is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there. (p. 98)

This is also why I am increasingly avoiding the use of the words “objective” and “subjective,” because they are now loaded with a value judgment: what is “objective” is good, what is “subjective” is bad. “Arbitrary” is a better substitute for “subjective,” and “objective” doesn’t need to be mentioned at all.

On the origin of dualist thinking

Rather interesting way of tying some things in. The last paragraph in the excerpt is also the core idea of Surfaces and Essences.

But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.

Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were a single jump. This is similar to the way one drives a car. The first time there is a very slow trial-and-error process of seeing what causes what. But in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn’t even think about it. The same is true of objects. One uses these complex patterns the same way one shifts a car, without thinking about them. Only when the shift doesn’t work or an “object” turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of subjects and objects as primary. We can’t remember that period of our lives when they were anything else.

In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as “before” and “after” and between “like” and “unlike” grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live. (p. 119-120)

On counteracting entropy

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It’s a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can’t turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun’s heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That’s a scientific fact.

The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process.? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn’t the sun’s energy. We just saw what the sun’s energy did. It has to be something else. What is it? (p. 140-141)

On degeneracy and prophecy

This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution. (p. 223-224)

On curiosity about others

He never talked straight, but she could tell he was picking on her in his mind all the time for things she said. Trying to treat her so “nice.” He always wanted to know what she thought but he’d never tell her what he thought. Always playing around the edges. That’s what she couldn’t stand. She never should have told him that stuff about nerds like him. That’s what did it. Nerds like him couldn’t stand to hear that. (p. 232)

Something of a problem when adopting a world-view so contrary to what is more commonly accepted is that one has to do a lot of play acting, otherwise one comes out as a lunatic or someone on the spectrum. Almost everyone else’s world-view is interesting to me on an intellectual level: why has one come to believe things that one believes in? But it feels offensive to ask sometimes, even if the circumstances are right—it feels “nerdy.”

On celebrity

You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell. (p. 254)

Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns. Now he was getting it. This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn’t. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive biological patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.

None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.

Funny how a question can just sit there and then suddenly, at a time you least expect it, the answer starts to unfold. (p. 256)

On Victorians

Those Victorians seemed to light Redford up too. He’d made a lot of films about that era. Something about them probably interested him as it does many other people. The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously. Something about their rigid convictions about what was right and what was wrong might appeal to anyone brought up in laid-back Southern California of the forties and fifties. Redford seemed to be a rather Victorian person himself: restrained, well mannered, gracious. Maybe that’s why he lives here in New York, He likes the Victorian graciousness that still exists here in places. (p. 261)

On cultural relativism

These books were legitimate anthropological documents but they were also political tracts in the new shift from social to intellectual dominance, in which the reasoning ran: “If we have seen scientifically that they can have free sex in Samoa and it doesn’t seem to hurt anybody, then that proves we can have it here and not hurt anybody either. We have to use our intellect to discover what is right and wrong and not just blindly follow our own past customs.” The new cultural relativism became popular because it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect over society. Intellect could now pass judgment on all forms of social custom, including Victorian custom, but society could no longer pass judgment on intellect. That put intellect clearly in the driver’s seat.

When people asked, “If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can say what is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever know what is right and what is wrong?” the answer was, “That’s easy. Intellectuals will tell you. Intellectuals, unlike members of studiable cultures, know what they’re talking and writing about, because what they say isn’t culturally relative. What they say is absolute. This is because intellectuals follow science, which is objective. An objective observer does not have relative opinions because he is nowhere within the world he observes.”

Good old Dusenberry. This was the same hogwash he had denounced in the 1950s in Montana. Now, with the added perspective on the twentieth century provided by the Metaphysics of Quality, you could see its origins. An American anthropologist could no more embrace non-objectivity than a Stalinist bureaucrat could play the stock market. And for the same kind of ideological, conformist reasons. (p. 276-277)

More on Victorians

Of all the “vices” none was more controversial than premarital and extramarital sex. There was no depravity the Victorians condemned more vehemently and no freedom the new intellectuals have defended more ardently. Scientifically speaking, sexual activity is neither good nor evil, the intellectuals said. It is merely a biological function, like eating or sleeping. Denial of this normal physical function for some pseudo-moral reasons is irrational. If you open the door to premarital sex you simply allow freedom that does nobody any harm. (p. 279)

This is the only fragment that I personally find quite objectionable, since it is not directly qualified in any way and feels like taking a passage out of an Ayn Rand book. The social order against extramarital sex is in place mainly because, despite being a biological pattern, sex has consequences that have serious social significance.

On the fallacy of scientism

Gravitation is an inorganic pattern of values. Is science unconcerned? Truth is an intellectual pattern of values. Is science unconcerned? A scientist may argue rationally that the moral question, “Is it all right to murder your neighbor?” is not a scientific question. But can he argue that the moral question, “Is it all right to fake your scientific data?” is not a scientific question? Can he say, as a scientist, “The faking of scientific data is no concern of science?” If he gets tricky and tries to say that that is a moral question about science which is not a part of science, then he has committed schizophrenia. He is admitting the existence of a real world that science cannot comprehend. (p. 298)

On the decay of society

At this point in the book the central definition of static quality as a collection of patterns in hierarchical orders (inorganic, biological, social and intellectual) is established.

What’s at issue here isn’t just a clash of society and biology but a clash of two entirely different codes of morals in which society is the middle term. You have a society-vs.-biology code of morals and you have an intellect-vs.-society code of morals. It wasn’t Lila Rigel was attacking, it was this intellect-vs. -society code of morals.

In the battle of society against biology, the new twentieth century intellectuals have taken biology’s side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons and guns and police and the military. But when the intellectuals in control of society take biology’s side against society then society is caught in a cross-fire from which it has no protection. (p. 300)

On the paralysis of morals

Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement for the paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this destruction to go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis of moral patterns. Morals can’t function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that dominates present social thought. These subject object patterns were never designed for the job of governing society. They’re not doing it. When they’re put in the position of controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values, and when they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result isn’t progress. The result is social catastrophe. (p. 305-306)

On Rousseau

The idea that, “man is born free but is everywhere in chains” was never true. There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget the fact and turn upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done. (p. 307)

On intellectual priors

The Victorians didn’t really believe in those old Puritan biological restraints the way the Puritans did. They were in the process of breaking away from them. But they paid them lip-service and the old “spare the rod and spoil the child” school of biological repression was still in fashion. And what one notices, when one reads the works of the children of those traditions, is how much more decent and socially mature they seemed than people do today. The 1920s intellectuals strove to break down the old social codes, but they had these codes built into them from childhood and so were unaffected by the breakdown they produced. But their descendants, raised without the codes, have suffered. (p. 308-309)

This is essentially the idea proposed by historian Tom Holland in Dominion—those who break down the old Christian social order in favour of ultraprotestant postmodern secularism fail to notice that those who grow up in this world don’t have the social codes that they’d had. So, the options are that either the liberal social order reaches escape velocity and is universally adopted worldwide and everyone lives happily ever after, that it decays and recedes into barbarism, that we have a global return to Christianity, or that we lose to an external threat that has never had those social codes.

On insanity

At this point in the story Lila has had a mental breakdown, which seems to be a theme in Pirsig’s books. In Z&AMM it was the author’s past self, now he sees how it looks from the outside.

Now he saw her the same way others had seen him years ago. And now he was behaving exactly the way they did. They could be excused for not knowing better. They didn’t know what it was like. But he didn’t have that excuse.

It’s a legitimate point of view. It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.

Of course she’s unimportant. Of course she’s a waste of time. She’s causing an interruption of other more important purposes in life. No one admits it, but that’s really the reason the insane get locked up. They’re disgusting people you want to get rid of but can’t. It’s not just that they have absurd ideas that nobody else believes. What makes them “insane” is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else. (p. 318)

On the study of philosophy

“Philosophologists” here is a derogatory term on students of the history of philosophy, or those who do derivative work from the work of “real” philosophers. The philosopher mostly spared the treatment is William James.

As an author, Phaedrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn’t like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse. Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what you want to say. The catch here is that by the time you’ve read what all the great philosophers of history have said you’ll be at least two hundred years old. A second catch is that these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what they missed. (p. 323)

On psychiatry

The entire latter part of the book almost has a vibe of The Consolation of Philosophy—the author is trying to find philosophical solutions to mental problems.

Psychiatrists were not allowed to practice psychiatry if they were insane. It was required that they literally did not know what they were talking about.

To this, Phaedrus supposed, they could counter that you don’t have to be infected with pneumonia in order to know how to cure it and you don’t have to be infected with insanity to know how to cure it either. But the rebuttal to that goes to the core of the whole problem. Pneumonia is a biological pattern. It is scientifically verifiable. You can know about it by studying the pneumococcus bacillus under a microscope.

Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There’s nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There’s no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn’t an “object” of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself. There is no such thing as a “disease” of patterns of intellect. There’s only heresy. And that’s what insanity really is. (p. 328)

More on insanity

If objects are the ultimate reality then there’s only one true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds to the objective world. But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low-quality set of intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of it. (p. 356)

On the value of insanity for society

And Lila’s battle is everybody’s battle, you know? Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They’ve taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they’re solving problems for the culture as well. (p. 360)

On the difference between religion and insanity

I don’t even know what to make of this fragment, but it is interesting to consider.

Thus, when sane grown men in Italy and Spain carry statues of Christ through the streets, that’s not an insane delusion. That’s a meaningful religious activity because there are so many of them. But if Lila carries a rubber statue of a child with her wherever she goes, that’s an insane delusion because there’s only one of her.

If you ask a Catholic priest if the wafer he holds at mass is really the flesh of Jesus Christ, he will say yes. If you ask, “Do you mean symbolically?” he will answer, “No, I mean actually.” Similarly if you ask Lila whether the doll she holds is a dead baby she will say yes. If you ask, “Do you mean symbolically?” she would also answer, “No, I mean actually.”

It is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. With equal force it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a baby you will never understand Lila. She’s a culture of one. She’s a religion of one. The main difference is that the Christian, since the time of Constantine, has been supported by huge social patterns of authority. Lila isn’t. Lila’s religion of one doesn’t have a chance. (p. 372)

Perhaps the most famous quote from Z&AMM doing the rounds on various trendy “quote” sites, and the first thing that pops up when you look up “Robert Pirsig quotes” is this, which at face value sounds like Dawkinsian nonsense:

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

However, few consider the follow up in Lila:

That isn’t a completely fair comparison, though. If the major religions of the world consisted of nothing but statues and wafers and other such paraphernalia they would have disappeared long ago in the face of scientific knowledge and cultural change, Phaedrus thought. What keeps them going is something else.

It sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal footing for comparison, but his point was not to undercut religion, only to illuminate insanity. He thought the intellectual separation of the topic of “sanity” from the topic of “religion” has weakened our understanding of both. (p. 372-373)

On quality of Japanese electronics

An interesting consideration since this is also something that is echoed in the Benedictine tradition—doing good work and making good things is a moral order.

In the past the mystics’ traditional low regard for inorganic static patterns, “laws of nature” has kept the scientifically derived technology of these cultures poor, but since Orientals have learned to overcome that prejudice times have changed. If one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it. (p. 384)

On rituals curing insanity

This is something that one can also hear in early lectures from Jordan Peterson and in examples from his clinical practice.

…And to Lila.

Where to start with her? That was the question. The ṛta interpretation of Quality would say that more ritual is what she needs— not the kind of ritual that fights Dynamic Quality, but the kind that embodies it. But what ritual? She wasn’t about to follow rituals of any kind. Ritual was what she was fighting.

But that could be an answer. Lila’s problem wasn’t that she was suffering from lack of Dynamic freedom. It’s hard to see how she could possibly have any more freedom. What she needed now were stable patterns to encase that freedom. She needed some way of being reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living. (p. 386)