Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

Where was Lucky?

She looked for him and she didn’t see him. She called, but he didn’t come. She looked into the river to see if he had started to swim back to the island but all she could see was lights far away all blurred by the rain.

After she stepped over the railing onto the boat she sat down in the cockpit. Oh it felt so good to sit down again! Her teeth were chattering and her clothes were all soaked all the way through but it didn’t matter now. All she had to do was wait for the Captain and they would go to the island.

A wake came across from somewhere out on the river. She could see it coming by the way the lights moved from on top of the waves. It lifted up and rocked the boat against the dock and then after a while it died down.

The water beside the boat was mucky-looking with a lot of junk in it. There were pieces of old plastic bottles, and dirty swirls of foam and a sponge and some branches and a dead fish caught on one of the branches. The fish was turned up on its side and was partly gone. Then the fish and the branch moved on by and she could smell the fish. Then the branch came back again and the whirlpool caught it and it went down into the center of the whirlpool and disappeared.

The junk went round and round in a whirlpool. It looked like the whirlpool was sucking all the junk to the bottom of the river. She remembered watching some fish once and how one of them kept turning on its side and the others tried to take bites out of it. Then it straightened up again. But after a while it went over on its side again and then it couldn’t straighten up at all. Then the others started to eat it and it didn’t struggle any more.

She hoped they wouldn’t bite Lucky when he swam back to the island. When you slow down the fish eat you up alive. You can’t do anything that makes them think you’re slowing down, or they’ll come after you.

They wouldn’t dare bite Lucky.

She wished the Captain would come.

She was so tired of this side of the river. She’d even swim if she had to. She didn’t know how long the Captain would take to come and she didn’t want to wait any more.

Lila took off her sweater. That felt better with it off.

Then she put her hand down into the water.

The water felt warm! It was real warm in the river. If she swam to the island she wouldn’t be cold any more.

She looked at the water again.

She didn’t want to be cold any more. She was so tired of fighting it. Just to give up. Just to let go.

Just to let go. Toward that hand in the water. The hand was sticking up out of the water where the branch had been, reaching for her to take it. The hand came close to her and then a little whirlpool in the water carried it away. It was like a baby’s hand sticking out of the water. A baby’s hand.

The little hand was reaching up out of the water. It was a baby’s hand. She could see the little fingers. The hand was just farther than she could reach going into the whirlpool. Then it came closer and she caught it, and her heart held still as she brought it up out of the water.

Its little body was all stiff and cold.

Its eyes were closed. Thank God. She cleaned off the scum from its body and saw that none of the baby seemed to be gone. The fish had not eaten any of it yet. But it was not breathing.

Then she took her sweater from the cockpit floor and put it in her lap and wrapped the baby in it and held it close. And she rocked the baby back and forth until she could feel some of the coldness go out of it. It’s all right, she said. It’s all right. You’re all right now. It’s all over. You’re all right now. No one’s going to hurt you any more.

After a while Lila could feel the baby’s body becoming warm against her own. She began to rock it a little back and forth. Then she began to hum a little song to it that she remembered from long ago.

Does Lila have Quality? The question seemed inexhaustible. The answer Phædrus had thought of before, Biologically she does, socially she doesn’t, still didn’t get all the way to the bottom of it. There was more than society and biology involved.

Phædrus heard some voices in the corridor become louder and closer, then fade away again.

What had happened since the end of the First World War was that the intellectual level had entered the picture and had taken over everything. It was this intellectual level that was screwing everything up. The question of whether promiscuity is moral had been resolved from prehistoric times to the end of the Victorian era, but suddenly everything was upended by this new intellectual supremacy that said sexual promiscuity is neither moral nor immoral, it is just amoral human behavior.

That may have been why Rigel was so angry back in Kingston. He thought Lila was immoral because she’d broken up a family and destroyed a man’s position in the social community — a biological pattern of quality, sex, had destroyed a social pattern of quality, a family and a job. What made Rigel mad was that into this scene come intellectuals like Phædrus who say it’s unintelligent to repress biological drives. You must decide these matters on the basis of reason, not on the basis of social codes.

But if Rigel identified Phædrus with this intellect-vs.-society code and the social upheavals it has produced, he certainly picked on the wrong person. The Metaphysics of Quality uproots the intellectual source of this confusion, the doctrine that says, Science is not concerned with values. Science is concerned only with facts.

In a subject-object metaphysics this platitude is unassailable, but the Metaphysics of Quality asks: which values is science unconcerned with?

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.

What the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that it is only social values and morals, particularly church values and morals, that science is unconcerned with.

There are important historic reasons for this:

The doctrine of scientific disconnection from social morals goes all the way back to the ancient Greek belief that thought is independent of society, that it stands alone, born without parents. Ancient Greeks such as Socrates and Pythagoras paved the way for the fundamental principle behind science: that truth stands independently of social opinion. It is to be determined by direct observation and experiment, not by hearsay. Religious authority always has attacked this principle as heresy. For its early believers, the idea of a science independent of society was a very dangerous notion to hold. People died for it.

The defenders who fought to protect science from church control argued that science is not concerned with morals. Intellectuals would leave morals for the church to decide. But what the larger intellectual structure of the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that this political battle of science to free itself from domination by social moral codes was in fact a moral battle! It was the battle of a higher, intellectual level of evolution to keep itself from being devoured by a lower, social level of evolution.