Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

As a second year economy student, I joint a class introduction to philosophy and was asked about my motivation. Economics is about costs versus benefits but what and when are benefits beneficial? When they have values, I wanted to dig into values..Very interesting was the response, you should go into the library and find information on that subject. This introduction was my last encounter with philosophy teaching. Pirsig dug into it and impressed me with his thoroughly classification of the various stages of moral/quality with as farrest in evolution dynamic intellectual moral. It makes one wonder how long it will take before human kind will consider this as superior in dealing with the world.

What can I say about this book? I may as well recommend Amazon.com to you. If you liked Zen, read this book. It's a similar kind of book. It's not plot-driven. There is something of a plot, but mostly it is the author just thinking about ideas, and they are interesting ideas. If that suits you, you'll love it. If you prefer action books or thrillers or suspense or just any of the typical novel genres, either keep an open mind or probably this book isn't for you.

Lila is the second of Robert Pirsig's books and was widely considered a disappointment when it came out. Part of the problem with this is that is lacks the character driven narrative of father and son the weaves throughout Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It also lacks a satisfactory ending to the story compared to Zen - and the characters, from Phaedrus and Lila all the way down are far less likeable. In many ways, Lila was a story - as a novel - that could never live up to the impact that ZAAMM has had on so many people. It's much colder and so much more analytical.Having said that, Lila should be approached from a different perspective. It was never meant to be a ZAAMM kind of story and is not a novel that is going to provide a satisfactory summing up. But if you take the time to read and re-read it, and if you agree with Pirsig's philosophical theories...it becomes quite compelling. It provides a framework for better understanding the role that "Quality" - which is not definable via language - can play in a world dominated by scientific reason.If you enjoyed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but were disappointed with Lila, I encourage you to give this enquiry another chance.

Mr Pirsig's model reconciles Morals and Quality - this book is the final piece making the Metaphysics of Quality a complete, elegant, practical model. Extremely talented, the writer demonstrates how philosophy drives - or may drive - your own life choices without any attempts to lecture the reader. I'm grateful to Mr Pirsig for giving me a solid foundation I feel so safe to build upon.

It reads well enough in retrospective. It’s a good read if coupled with a read on modern physics and how they relate to oriental cosmogony.

I am really enjoying this sequel to "Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance." It's intriguing, educational and entertaining.

Only a few times in a lifetime does one find a book that actually means something. In his two novelosophies, he has completely and forever altered the fundamental assertions of science, by showing how flawed the scientific method is. He has undercut 125 years of anthropology by clearly demonstrating that the refusal to allow value judgements even when coming from THAT culture's value system is nonsense. The fact that the metaphysics of value would have been our value system except for an accident of history in ancient Greece is very well detailed.Don't read my junk, but do go read BOTH of Robert Pirsig's books.

I tried this book because I liked the Mage the ascension line (game books which deal with alternate realities, paradox, etc.) and the authors noted that Pirsig's books influenced them. I figured the Zen book was about using a trip/motorcycles as a metaphor for life or something but since this one mentioned morality (which also interests me), I figured that I'd start here. Here are my problems with the book...1.As someone noted in another review, you shouldn't read this book without reading "zen" first. I figured that this book would cover completely different ground but apparently it just continues on with subjects that were discussed in the zen book so you may get lost starting here.2.On paging through a sample version of the book I saw notes about Indian/Native American spirituality, Victorians, science, morality, and so forth and thought this is the kind of book that I would really like. The section on Indians mostly involves whining about anthropologists. The parts about Victorians blame them, religions in general and the field of traditional morality for every wrong in life. Victorians take the blame for the massacre of Native Americans, the world wars, and pretty much everything else.3.If you're looking for what Pirsig refers to as social-biological morality with rights and wrongs and "civilized behavior" this is only really useful if you want an opposing viewpoint. according to the book, social morality is a waste of time and based on Victorian points of view and anyone who doesn't hate Victorians and their moral codes is an extremist right winger, a religious fundamentalist or stupid.4.a point that annoyed me at first is that either the author or character seems to be an extreme hypocrite. He complains about anthropologists arguing over the meaning of a simple word then does it himself. He puts down others for not thinking as they do and then he does it himself. He says at first that quality can't be defined then gets upset when no one understands what it is. He saves himself however by noting these flaws and lessens the hypocrisy.5.The character of Phaedrus (what Midwesterner is named Phaedrus?, I think he might have explained that though) is extremely unlikeable although the author seems to know it and comments on it.6.Much of the story is a waste of time. The main character picks up a barfly then the author rants about anthropologists for an endless amount of time before talking about his card catalogue system and process of writing. Eventually the barfly Lila wakes up then the author talks about science for awhile. A few chapters later they have breakfast.7.Grammar. I'll admit my grammar sucks and part of my problem reading this book is because sometimes when the author is talking about metaphysics (for example) he is referring to the main character's book "Metaphysics of quality" and so on. In other cases he is giving new meaning to other words (like quality) which the reader already has a definition for (that is completely different from Pirsig's). Plus, although I hadn't read the previous book and reading it might've made this one easier to process, sentences like: "writing a metaphysics is a degenerate activity" is a little jarring. How about "writing ABOUT metaphysics is a degenerate activity"?8.Other reviewers have complained about a key idea: that Pirsig's morality seems to be mostly about psychological advancement (in a way). Basically, if you had to save either an "evil" mad scientist (although calling him evil just because he wants to kill people is wrong and is a Victorian viewpoint) OR some children with little potential for higher advancement, the "moral" thing to do is to save the scientist because his thoughts are more valuable and evolved even if he is homicidal. (The fact that the scientist may do more harm than "good" and that social morality may lead him to more productive/ evolved discoveries is unimportant. Social morality/ control is wrong/ Victorian).When dealing with his ideas and many of the complaints about Pirsig personally, I think maybe people are judging the author when he might just be throwing out hypothetical ideas. Given the choice, he may still do the "socially moral" thing... save the children. The character of Phaedrus also may have parts of Pirsig in him but that doesn't mean that they are the same.... Overall, I say I'd keep the book because it discusses ideas (even if I don't agree with them all) but because I strongly disagree with many ideas and the "story" itself is almost nonexistent, I don't see myself reading it again. If anything I'll refer back to the dog eared pages. In short: its something to get you thinking and create a discussion. If that's not what you are looking for, don't bother with this book!

An interesting read that allows you to dive deep in the the Metaphysics of quality.

It's a journey worthwhile to take..

As with his former book, "Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance" Robert Pirsig requires serious attention when reading. His philosophy is worth taking the effort to understand. It needs to be read of couple of times (for me) to get over the story telling and to absorb, understand and digest his language and arguments. Well worth the read.

Lila is the natural extension and continued exploration of the metaphysical concepts first discussed in Zen and the Art... Personally I have never before come across a set of ideas that so completely accurately explain the fabulously complex nature of the human condition. What really scares me is that many critcs review it as "insufficiently entertaining", particularly when compared to the more "exciting" Zen and the Art! Perhaps they might be better served seaching in the "adventure" section.Pirsig is going to become acknowledged academically posthumously because the worlds intellectual elite are simply too "culturally immune" to cope with the implications of his genius. The ideas in both his books are quite literally..."it all"

Dear fellow readers of "Lila", be advised to bring with you a lot of "gumption" or you might get "stuck"."Lila" is not simply Part II of "Zen or the art of motorcycle maintenance", it's an essay on morals as a system that can be devided in 4 evolutionary layers: inorganic, biological, social, intellectual. That's important because on every layer you find an urge to preserve the current state in a "static pattern". To preserve the actual state can be seen as valuable, as a quality.On the other hand, there is also a dynamic quality which tries to attack the actual evolutionary level either from above, that is from a higher evolutionary level, which is good, or from a lower evolutionary level, which is bad. And of course that's the main question: to decide what is good and what is bad. With its four layers and five transitional states, the metaphysics of quality do a lot to escape oversimplified judgements.Nevertheless, this questioning of the status quo is a quality in itself, a dynamic quality, it's good. The problem is that a person or a group or on object with dynamic quality tends to get in trouble with authorities, institutions, the powers that be.-Pirsig says that a political system can be judged by the way how it reacts on dynamic quality. A democratic society is relatively permissive to different kinds of anomies except for violence. Because of that it seems the best system in the sense of a metaphysics of quality, as it leaves a lot of space for change and improvements.But Pirsig is not only an original philosophical thinker, but also a trained scientist, so he won't speculate on what might be. In this sense the moral system according to the metaphysics of quality becomes the "motorcycle" of his first book. From a dynamic point of view it's a running system, it's more than the parts it contains. So what you can actually do is, while driving, listening to the sounds of the system, keeping your eyes open for anything that seems odd, that sounds "unround". In this case the system needs maintenance, the sooner the better.And in the case of system maintenance it's always a good advice to keep in mind: "The assembly of japanese bicycles requires a deep peace of mind."In my opinion "Lila" is not the only good, readable book on metaphysics, ethics and social science. Foucault had a lot to say on how societies since the medieval dealt with so called mentally ill persons. Dworkin has written very good books on evolutionary theory, which are understandable for every intereseted reader. Walter Benjamins "aura" seems to equal Pirsigs "quality" in a lot of aspects, not only in that it is hard if not impossible to provide a concept or definition of it. For Kant "quality" is one of four functions in judgement: "quantity", "quality", "relation" and "modality". As function of judgement (Funktion im Urteil) it has three categories: reality, negation and limitation. They (the three categories) all deal with degrees of reality (Wirklichkeit), which is an important advantage to the metaphysics of quality, because you can't, in my opinion, give a degree of an imagination or a value. In this sense only real things can be judged by degree: the intensity of the blue colour of the ink I'm writing with, for example. I think that this distinction is very important in a practical, moral sense: We don't want a jury to say to a person who is accused to have committed a crime: He kind of did it. According to the judgement, who actually did, what has been investigated, it has to be: "Yes" or "No". The guilt on the other hand is a question of degrees: intentional, unintentional, sane, unsane, circumstances etc.What I liked in "Lila" was the authenticy of the story, Pirsigs reflections and of his personal search for truth.I think that Pirsig puts to much weight on the questions concerning the subject-object dichotomy, while the subject part of it is still in the dark. Aristoteles says that soul ist form. Not much more from the Neo-Platonists, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes or Kant. The problem is not, that quality is undefined, it's "soul" that still nobody has defined sufficiently.