Wednesday 9 July 2008

Throwing out the Whore

Today I want to develop some of my earlier thoughts about Lila and the metaphysics of quality.

I still think there is an important sense in which the character Lila represents or stands for the Female in Pirsig's work. She is the only fully felt, and fully expressed female character - and this is true in spite of what I believe is Pirsig's "cheating": where he weaves in an implausible plot-line about Lila plotting to kill him and steal his boat. (This, to me, is a cheap manoeuvre to make the central character into a seriously crazy person - in contra-distinction to the seriously misguided and chaotic person who is otherwise embodied in the person who lives, breathes, fucks, drinks, thinks, dreams and does the washing up throughout the remainder of Lila's pages).

As the only real woman in the combined 2 volumes of Zen and Lila, and the only person to have a plausible perspective on the spiritually emaciated half-person who is offered to us under the various names of Phaedrus, "I" and "the author" - we should not allow or accept, in my opinion, that Lila be dumped in a lunatic asylum never to be heard from again.

This could seem like me carping about a purely fictional element - but I think Lila carries real philosophical truth, and real Quality of the highest level, that has been dumped out of the boat, and by implication dumped out of the universe. We really can't afford to lose her. Without her, we have a skewed philosophy, and Pirsig's opus becomes part of the Problem we are facing, rather than part of the Solution (as we used to say this in the good old 1960s).

I want to try to develop this further. If we buy into Zen and Lila as an adequate account of the entire situation (metaphysical, factual, historical) as of 1992 - we are buying into a fractured and incomplete universe. The Mother has been chucked out. The Whore has been dismissed as a potential murderess, thief and lunatic. There is no Madonna, since she was never invited into the story in the first place. This is a universe that is majorly deprived, and we are left with a sad and broken male thus lost and abandoned in the universe - who has axes to grind and things to prove about himself, and a hatred for the "winners" in life's game (a psychic "move" which Nietsche depicted very well - Nietsche, a philosopher whom I am otherwise quite unhappy about and certainly would not accept as any sort of role model - but who well depicted this psychic move in his phrase "ressentiment". Which boils down to a kind of hatred of the strong, on the part of the inadequate weakling).

This is not meant to be any sort of attack on Robert Pirsig himself, who I think is a wonderful and honest writer. (And a far better philosopher than Friedrich Nietsche.) I am talking about the psychic and spiritual universe which Pirsig has embodied in the writing he has chosen to share with us.

The question is: what sort of skewed universe is this, that excludes the Female principle to this extent, and leaves us vaguely resentful and unhappy because we are not really being fed and nurtured in the way our biological nature constantly whispers in our ear that we are entitled to?

I shall try to develop these thoughts further, in later posts.

PS please don't forget to visit me at www.apesangelsandoutlaws.com

Friday 27 June 2008

new web-site

I now have a comprehensive web-site with very much more material, on a range of subjects - at www.apesangelsandoutlaws.com.

Please visit me there!

new website

I now have a comprehensive web-site with very much more material, on a range of subjects - at www.apesangelsandoutlaws.com.

Please visit me there!

Tuesday 19 February 2008

Levels of Quality (Process and Reality)

In “Lila” Robert Pirsig outlines four distinct levels of “quality” - which also correspond to stages of evolution. He names these material, biological, social and intellectual . A large part of his book is devoted to working out the implications of how these different levels work, and how they come into conflict with one another.

I date my own first experience of Quality (apart from the inarticulate, felt sense of it in early childhood) to the year 1968; and I recognize its emergence - in a range of different contexts - both before and after I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . I take it as something “there” to be discovered and explored by each of us from our own place in the world. And thus I have been attempting to think about if, on parallel lines to Pirsig, for many decades past.

For me there was always a context for Quality: it was the quality of connection with another human being, the quality of the ambience in a roomful of people, quality in music heard, and quality as the experience of the zone when playing music myself. I could also recognize Quality emerging out of biological levels of human connection, and Quality as an aesthetic or artistic kind of experience.

But these four levels! Is Pirsig’s to be taken as a first approximation, or as some kind of definitive statement? For me there is a question that cannot be avoided, of how we can go about resolving alternative formulations. For instance: I see intellectual activity as one form of social or cultural activity; this, for me, does not argue for it as a distinct level . I wonder what to do with my impulse to resist Pirsig’s mapping in this respect? What the implications are, of counting “intellectual” as a distinct level in its own right? What would the consequences be, in any case, of a mistaken categorisation ?

Again: I have taken a great interest in Benedetto Croce’s distinctions between “Aesthetic, Philosophical, Practical (utilitarian) and Ethical” levels(1)n. What would be the conceptual apparatus needed, to open a dialogue between the different formulations?)

I do not find an answer to these questions within the intellectual structure of Lila . For me, it does not help, to set up a “Metaphysics of Quality” in apparent opposition to a “Subject-Object Metaphysics”. I suspect that the very idea of “Subject-Object Metaphysics” is confusing, in that it melds together two very distinct commitments. There is, in the first place, the everyday, common-sense experience of “things in the world” - which all of us do our best to grapple with as best we can. And there is the pernicious and rigid metaphysical doctrine which Pirsig rightly rejects - but which I do not see as notably rampant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pirsig’s sharp polarisation encourages his followers to indulge in rash judgments: condemning or ignoring a wide range of philosophers who do not fit in comfortably with these two disjunctive types of Metaphysics.

An example of this, close to my own heart, is the whole current of “Classic American” philosophy (Peirce, James, Whitehead, Dewey, Mead, Randall, Buchler) - which seems to me entirely sympathetic to a sense of “quality” pervading the whole universe, but which has been severely neglected by Pirsig and his readers.

I notice that at the end of Lila , Pirsig emerges with what is for him a key insight: “Good is a noun !” This caused me to start thinking: nouns normally exist in relation to verbs, adjectives, prepositions and so forth. Also “Quality” is so intensely bound up with qualities of ..... of things, or actions, of emotions.... (in other words, the context that I was referring to earlier. If we are making Quality a noun that stands alone, then I need some reassurance that a Metaphysics of Quality isn’t seeking to exclude such things as actions, processes and relations; or isn’t subordinating them, trying to account them less of a reality than the Quality which pervades them.

Let us agree that the Subject-Object metaphysics is indeed a pernicious reductionism - that it tries, insanely, to reduce the entire universe to a collection of “objects” that exist in an apparently sterile relationship to an imaginary “subject”. It certainly seems to me (and here I refer to the trend of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and the later positivist axis) that the main current of “modern philosophy” has tended to subordinate actions, processes and relations as being “merely subjective” or at best an inferior sort of reality to the Objects with which it is concerned. I do not accept this; I do not want things, qualities or relationships placed in subordinate relationships or argued out of existence; I want my metaphysics to co-ordinate my experiences of things, of qualities, of actions, processes and relations - all as meaningful facets of complex reality which is unfolding through time. Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality is ambiguous in this respect, but he does seem to imply at times that “quality” is more real than the other aspects of the web of our experience. Then it starts to look like a reductionism too. And I have no wish to trade one reductionism for another one.

Whether we are talking nouns, verbs or adjectives, I need the context of an unfolding pattern of activity, in order to make sense of the parallel emergence of biological quality out of an underlying material quality; and of social quality emerging out of an underlying biological quality. In my own research into these matters I, like Pirsig, have departed from a Subject-Object metaphysics. But I have leaned towards depicting lived experience as a kind of landscape : one whose geography is made up of elements which appear to us in the diverse forms of fact (either perceived, or thought), of feeling , and of the actions which we initiate in the context this landscape.

This is the frame of reference that has enabled me to understand very much better, the parallel universes of materiality, biology and sociality - and this has included the essential question of the process by which one level may have emerged from the next level down. How, for example, the level of biology actually arose out of a domain of material quality; and how social quality arose from a domain of biological quality.

At first sight, this tracing of the emergence of one level out of the level below it could appear to be vain speculation indeed - since we are trying to understand something which presumably happened in the remote regions of historical time. There is another way to look at it, however, which is to see this as a process of continuous creation - such that the biological is continuously re-emerging from the material - and in the same way, the social is continuously emerging from the biological. From this vantage point, we can reasonably start to wonder: what is happening - at the material level which embodies the animal organism - which creates in real time the living process with its unique qualities, its aspirations and its successes and failures. So again, the focus shifts to activity and the qualities of the activity - not on “quality” as a noun sufficient unto itself.

This points towards a distinct domain of exploration which Pirsig may be seen as pointing towards, but - at least in his published work – he has not entered into to any significant extent. It is to imagine a kind of resonance - of these layers, these intellectual, social and biological qualities, happening simultaneously within each moment of experience. It also implies the emergence in real time, of each level of quality out of the immediately subterranean level of process - that level of process which engenders it now - but also must have engendered it for the very first time in some lost, primordial time of evolution. When I read the narrative sections of “Lila” with their very sensitive evocation of the subtleties of relationship of two people reading and mis-reading each other, I feel it is honest and true to the real interplay of these simultaneous layers of quality.

In the academic world - in the discipline of Cognitive Biology, in fact - there is a prototype for this model of higher-level properties emerging in real time, in a particular view of the living process which was first conjectured by the Chilean neuro-scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. They pictured the life process as having a very specific power: that of creating itself out of the simpler components which it can obtain from its immediate environment. It is, in effect a “self-winding” process - whose product is the very organisation that is managing the construction, or winding, process. Capturing, as it goes, the very energy which will drive the energy of capturing(2).

This leaves life, on our horizon, as essentially mysterious and wonderful - but also as deeply and intricately material . It is a higher level of process, with Quality that is specific to this particular level of functioning, as compared with the purely material (the kinetic, the chemical and the electro-magnetic) processes which subserve it.

In later sections of my study I have tried to trace out the emergence of “higher” levels, out of the of biological quality as it is outlined by Maturana and Varela. These levels have come out differently than Pirsig’s. My best understanding of this, is that the differences need to be resolved by research and not primarily by philosophical argument. But the nature of the research, and how it relates to the philosophy, opens up a whole new dimension of question and answer. Clearly, it needs to be postponed for another day.

NOTES
(see: CROCE, Benedetto (1912) What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

see the relevant chapter in: WINOGRAD and FLORES (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition - which also contains many other references.

Wednesday 16 January 2008

Lila, Quality and Relationships in the Making

What we Win, and what we Lose
Lila has Quality. That’s what the author said to the prude, way early in the book. And right near the end the voice of his higher self tells him that this action - of standing up for Lila in the way he did - was ”the one moral thing he’d done on the whole trip”; that is what saved him.

So Phaedrus is “the winner”….. “…By default.”

One of the consequences of winning, it appears, is that you are saved from “a lifetime of Lila.” Richard Rigel the prude, whom Lila seems to have an unaccountable trust, affection and respect for, has to all intents and purposes won the fair lady. And yet that higher (or sarcastic, cynical) Phaedrus makes the confident claim that Rigel "has had it. From here on he’s putty in her hands."

So an important aspect of Phaedrus’ victory is that he has escaped from the relationship.

I always felt the book could not really end there. There would have to be a sequel, because Lila’s perspective on the situation couldn’t be allowed to just disappear up river to the lunatic asylum. Because, as of the end of the book we have in our hands, we are left with Phaedrus’ definitions of Lila seeming to prevail over Lila’s definitions of Phaedrus.

During the course of the narrative, we are invited to participate in the perspectives of both people. We hear Phaedrus’ speculations on the wing. Lila has Quality. Yes. But on the other hand, this Quality is seemingly confined to a level called “biological”. At the level of Social Quality, Phaedrus doesn’t think Lila amounts to anything much… and at the Intellectual level: she’s nowhere!

Except there’s something else:

But Dynamically… There’s something ferociously Dynamic going on with her. All that aggression, that tough talk, those strange bewildered blue eyes. Like sitting next to a hill that’s rumbling and letting off steam here and there… It would be interesting to talk to her more.

Unfortunately, he botches this conversation somewhat – he is a bit too greedy for information, and doesn’t give very much of himself in return. He is not very sensitive to the quality of “grilling” that he is putting into the exchange. He doesn’t seem to appreciate how she might feel that her interlocutor has cut her, dried her, grilled her and is now about ready to eat her up.

Even so, with the help of serious quantities of Scotch she later comes to make such tender love with him that it takes him hours of metaphysical speculation to attenuate the memory - that he really connected with another human being. Still later, after he has let go of his "intellectualizing" (Phaedrus’ word), he comes to a different conclusion: That was the only good thing that had happened all day, the way their bodies paid no attention to all their social and intellectual differences and had carried on as if these “people” that “owned” them didn’t exist at all. They had been at this business of life for so long.

All this is wonderful, to my mind, in portraying phases and perspectives of a relationship in the making – in the story of “a trip” that is co-created by its several participants. But I am somewhat disturbed by the talk of “winning”, and who has “won” at the end – even with the reassurance that Lila has somehow won control over our despised Richard Rigel. And most especially, I am concerned that we have lost Lila’s perspective on the situation altogether.

The Quality of our relationships in the making: this is what I shall take as my starting definition, for the collaborative enquiry which I would like this blog to become. I think that Robert Pirsig has offered us some basic categories which can facilitate our exploration. We are invited, it appears to me, into a whole other world, that we can co-create and explore together – if we can only find a way to maintain that sense of co-creation. To me, this means we have to guard against one person’s definition prevailing over the other. We have to be able to fight, as Phaedrus and Lila fought, without anybody having “to win”. If, in the story of Phaedrus and Lila, a genuine confrontation of perspectives was not possible – and if a parting of the ways was unequivocally the best outcome for both – still I want to hold out the hope that future meetings may carry the possibility of a richer and more genuine exchange. We need to make love with one another, not only at biological but also at social and intellectual levels. Or die.

I think the enquiry is already going on, in a million ways, in a million different locations. Pirsig’s stark opposition of a Metaphysics of Quality as against Subject-Object Metaphysics leaves, on my map, a vast excluded middle of ambiguous enterprises which are effectively seeking Quality even if they do not speak explicitly about it. One such enterprise, founded by the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in the 1980s is
Community Building and I shall have more to say about this in later postings – as well as several other fruitful methods which I have happened upon at different stages of my own quest – all pointing in a similar, hopeful direction.