John asked:
[Lila's abandoned doll] raises the question of "acquired quality". Can objects
sometimes have, or acquire, quality? ...Do "things" have feelings? That has
always been an important question for me, and I have always answered, "Yes".
Pirsig wrote: "Something about this doll was giving it all kinds of Quality the
manufacturer had never built into it. Lila had overlaid a whole set of value
patterns on top of it and those values were still clinging to it. It was almost
like some religious idol."
John continued:
You can explain it away by saying that this was just a convenient way of saying
that "Quality was in the immediate flux of experience that created Phaedrus'
reality in which this doll was experienced as an inorganic pattern of value."
I don't think so. I think Pirsig wrote what he meant and meant what he wrote.
There's something about writing about an experience that makes it real.
There's something about a person sharing a personal history with an inanimate
thing that makes it more than a "thing". It takes on character and value and
"feelings". It evolves. It takes on Quality. ...The other way an SOM
"object" can become an MOQ object is through relationship with someone who
values it. The doll was not the product of a craftsman, so it was only an SOM
"object" when some child received it. Then it may have begun to "acquire"
Quality in relationship to that child. But that relationship must have been
transient, because the doll ended up in the river. It was Lila who gave it
value and significance. In Lila's brief but intense care it became imbued with
Quality. ...Pirsig points out another way something becomes an MOQ carrier of
Quality: Sanctification. When an object is ritualized, it is made
transcendent. It partakes of Dynamic Quality. Pirsig does not embrace
theistic religion, but he shows great understanding of it and great reverence
for all that is Dynamic in it. Oliver Cromwell, the Christian, destroyed
countless religious icons in England. Pirsig the atheist would not have done
so. Pirsig understood their meaning as symbols that pointed beyond themselves.
Cromwell saw them as idols that were substituted for God. Perhaps both were
right and moral.
dmb says:
As we can see in the scene that Dan provided, at first Lila knows her child is
dead. "She's dead," she tells the Captain, "I killed her." "I didn't cover her
right and she smothered," Lila said. "That was long ago."
But this line of questioning was more than her fragile mind could handle. And
she so snaps, and she enters into a psychotic delusion.
"We're ready to go now," Lila said. She got up strangely, as if she was
carrying something heavy all wrapped in her arms. ...Lila smiled at him. "We're
all going together," she said. He looked at her face carefully. It was serene.
"She came back to me," Lila said, "from the river."
And one of the things Pirsig wants to do is look at the nature of insanity
through his MOQ lens. The following quotes should be enough to sketch out what
Pirsig is saying ritual, idols, religion, insanity and which parts are sticky
static stuff and which part is Dynamic. Maybe I'll add some thought later, but
this selection of quotes should do most of the explaining all by themselves...
"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."
"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."
"There are three ways she can go, he thought. First, she
can go into permanent delusions, cling to this doll and whatever
else she's inventing, and eventually he'd have to get rid of her.
It would be tricky, but it could be done. Just call a doctor at
some town they came to and have him look at her and figure out
what to do from there. Phædrus didn't like it, but he could
do it if he had to. ..Not
very moral. If it went that way she'd probably spend the rest
of her life in an insane asylum, like some caged animal."
"Her second alternative, he thought, would be to cave
in to whatever it was she was fighting, and learn to "adjust."
She'd probably go into some kind of cultural dependency, with
recurring trips to a psychiatrist or some kind of "social
counselor" for "therapy," accept the cultural "reality"
that her rebellion was no good, and live with it. In this way
she'd continue to lead a "normal" life, continuing her
problem, whatever it was, within conventional cultural limits.
"The trouble was, he didn't really like that solution
much better than the first."
"What he thought was, that in addition to the usual solutions
to insanity—stay locked up or learn to conform—there
was a third one, to reject all movies, private and cultural, and
head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all."
"That's why the absence of suffering last night seemed
so ominous and her change to what looked like suffering today
gave Phædrus a feeling she was getting better. If you eliminate
suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution.
Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the
negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All
these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering
individuals like Lila."
"So the third possibility that Phædrus was hoping
for was that by some miracle of understanding Lila could avoid
all the patterns, her own and the culture's, see
the Dynamic Quality she's working toward and then come back and
handle all this mess without being destroyed by it. The question
is whether she's going to work through whatever it is that makes
the defense necessary or whether she is going to work around it.
If she works through it she'll come out at a Dynamic solution.
If she works around it she'll just head back to the old karmic
cycles of pain and temporary relief."
"An insane delusion can't be held by a group at
all. A person isn't considered insane if there are a number
of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed
to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe
him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion."
"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".
"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,
Phædrus 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."
"The current subject-object point of view of religion,
conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that
religious mysticism and insanity are the same. Religious
mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious
Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking
deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance.
It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only
because there are so many people involved."
"The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism
with Dynamic Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost
right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity.
The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics
have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual
patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic
has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas
the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure
Dynamic Quality.
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