Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

In his undergraduate days Phædrus had given James very short shrift because of the title of one of his books: The Varieties of Religious Experience . James was supposed to be a scientist, but what kind of scientist would pick a title like that? With what instrument was James going to measure these varieties of religious experience? How would he empirically verify his data? It smelt more like some Victorian religious propagandist trying to smuggle God into the laboratory data. They used to do that to try to counteract Darwin. Phædrus had read early nineteenth-century chemistry texts telling how the exact combination of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water told of the wondrous workings of the mind of God. This looked like more of the same.

However, in his rereading of James, he had so far found three things that were beginning to dissolve his early prejudice. The first wasn’t really a reason but was such an unlikely coincidence Phædrus couldn’t get it out of his mind. James was the godfather of William James Sidis, the child prodigy who could speak five languages at the age of five and who thought colonial democracy came from the Indians. The second was a reference to James' dislike of the dichotomy of the universe into subjects and objects. That, of course, put him automatically on the side of Phædrus' angels. But the third thing, which might also seem irrelevant, but which was doing more than anything else to dissolve Phædrus' early prejudice, was an anecdote James told about a squirrel.

James and a group of friends were on an outing somewhere and one of them chased the squirrel around a tree. The squirrel instinctively clung to the opposite side of the tree and moved so that as the man circled the tree the squirrel also circled it on the opposite side.

After observing this, James and his friends engaged in a philosophic discussion of the question: did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? The group broke into two philosophical camps and Phædrus didn’t remember how the argument was resolved. What impressed him was James' interest in the question. It showed that although James was no doubt an expert philosophologist (certainly he had to be to teach the stuff at Harvard) he was also a philosopher in the creative sense. A philosophologist would have been mildly contemptuous of such a discussion because it had no importance, that is, no body of philosophical writings existed about it. But to a creative philosopher like James the question was like catnip.

It had the smell of what it is that draws real philosophers into philosophy. Did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? He was north, south, east and west of the squirrel, so he must have gone around it. Yet at no time had he ever gone to the back or to the side of the squirrel. That squirrel could say with absolute scientific certitude, That man never got around me.

Who is right? Is there more than one meaning of the word around ? That’s a surprise! That’s like discovering more than one true system of geometry. How many meanings are there and which one is right?

It seems as though the squirrel is using the term around in a way that is relative to itself but the man is using it in a way that is relative to an absolute point in space outside of the squirrel and himself. But if we dop the squirrel’s relative point of view and we take the absolute fixed point of view, what are we letting ourselves in for? From a fixed point in space every human being on this planet goes around every other human being to the east or west of him once a day. The whole East River does a half-cartwheel over the Hudson each morning and another one under it each evening. Is this what we want to mean by around ? If so, how useful is it? And if the squirrel’s relative point of view is false, how useless is it?

What emerges is that the word around, which seems like one of the most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns out to be relative and subjective. What is around depends on who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time you use it. The more you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are relative to the observer.

We are always in the position of that squirrel. Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space and dimension. Persons like James and Einstein, immersed in the spirit of philosophy, do not see things like squirrels circling trees as necessarily trivial, because solving puzzles like that are what they’re in philosophy and science for. Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider.

That includes the consideration of people like Lila. This whole business of insanity is an enormously important philosophical subject that has been ignored — mainly, he supposed, because of metaphysical limitations. In addition to the conventional branches of philosophy — ethics, ontology and so on — the Metaphysics of Quality provides a foundation for a new one: the philosophy of insanity. As long as you’re stuck with the old conventions, insanity is going to be a misunderstanding of the object by the subject. The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The only problem is how to change the subject’s mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality.

But with a Metaphysics of Quality the empirical experience is not an experience of objects. It’s an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources, not just inorganic patterns. When an insane person — or a hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture — advances some explanation of the universe that is completely at odds with current scientific reality, we do not have to believe he has jumped off the end of the empirical world. He is just a person who is valuing intellectual patterns that, because they are outside the range of our own culture, we perceive to have very low quality. Some biological or social or Dynamic force has altered his judgment of quality. It has caused him to filter out what we call normal cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his.

Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated, and when they are, an immune system takes over in ways that are analogous to a biological immune system. The deviant dangerous source of illegal cultural patterns is first identified, then isolated and finally destroyed as a cultural entity. That’s what mental hospitals are partly for. And also heresy trials. They protect the culture from foreign ideas that if allowed to grow unchecked could destroy the culture itself.

That was what Phædrus had seen in the psychiatric wards, people trying to convert him back to objective reality. He never doubted that the psychiatrists were kind people. They had to be more than normally kind to stand that job. But he saw that they were representatives of the culture and they were always required to deal with insanity as cultural representatives, and he got awfully tired of their interminable role-playing. They were always playing the role of priests saving heretics. He couldn’t say anything about it because that would sound paranoiac, a misunderstanding of their good intentions and evidence of how deep his affliction really was.

Years later, after he was certified as sane, he read objective medical descriptions of what he had experienced, and he was shocked at how slanderous they were. They were like descriptions of a religious sect written by a different, hostile religious sect. The psychiatric treatment was not a search for truth but the promulgation of a dogma. Psychiatrists seemed to fear the taint of insanity much as inquisitors once feared succumbing to the devil. 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.