Greetings Philosophers:
Do we have-- like our physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and
smell--an inborn, instinctive moral sense?
Throughout �Lila,� Pirsig gives hints that such is indeed the case.
In the famous hot stove example, he says, �This value is more immediate,
more directly SENSED than any �self� or any �object� to which it might be
later assigned.� (Emphasis added here and all following quotes.)
Pirsig explains the brujo�s behavior: �He was just following some vague
SENSE of betterness that he couldn�t have defined if he wanted to.�
He describes Dynamic Quality: �When he is a few months old the baby
studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the
same SENSE of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music
and heart attack in the previous examples.�
Moral sense also plays a part in sex: �In all sexual selection, Lila chooses,
Dynamically, the individual she wants to project into the future. If he excites
her SENSE of Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another
generation, and he lives on.�
He ascribes a moral sense to intellectual and biological patterns: �Just as
the patterns of intelligence have a SENSE of disgust about the body
functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila�s patterns of biology have a
disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don�t like it. It turns them off.�
Why is the free enterprise system good? Pirsig explains: �Some of them
seem to SENSE there is almost something mysteriously virtuous in a free
enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but
they don�t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the
socialists do.�
In chapter 20, he leaves little doubt about our possessing an intuitive moral
sense: �There was �something wrong�something wrong�something wrong�
feeling like a buzzer in the back of his mind. It wasn�t just his imagination. It
was real. It was a primary perception of negative quality. First you SENSE
the high or low quality, then you find reason for it, not the other way around.
Here he was SENSING it.�
He explains creative people: �But sometimes it�s Dynamic where your whole
being SENSES that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That�s what
drives the really creative people��
These examples add up to a fairly strong case for the existence of moral
sense that�s able to �see� and respond to patterns of values that make up
reality. Lest there be any doubt, Pirsig spells it out in no uncertain terms in
his �Subjects, Objects, Data and Values� paper:
�In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight, hearing,
smell and taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical tradition
here in saying that the senses are the starting point of reality, but�all
importantly�it includes a SENSE of value. Values are phenomena. To
ignore them is to misread the world. It says this SENSE of value, of liking or
disliking, is a primary SENSE that is a kind of gatekeeper for everything else
an infant learns. At birth this SENSE of value is extremely Dynamic but as
the infant grows up this SENSE of value becomes more and more influenced
by accumulated static patterns. In the past this biological SENSE of value
has been called �the subjective� because there values cannot be located in
an external physical object. But quantum theory has destroyed the idea that
only properties located in external physical objects have reality.�
When you stop to think about, this is really an astounding paragraph. The
entire world of subjectivity�the world of personal opinions and prejudices,
likes and dislikes�is BIOLOGICAL? My admiration for Rachmaninov�s Third
Piano Concerto stems from a visceral response of my cells or genes?
As radical as the idea may seem, belief in a innate moral sense has been
expressed by some of the world�s greatest philosophers including Buddha,
Plotinus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, Herbert Spencer
and William James. Darwin also believed that humans possessed an innate
moral sense which separates us from the rest of the animals. But Immanual
Kant, who many modern thinkers hold up as the last word in secular moral
matters, claimed that belief in a moral sense was a fallacy. That most
biologists today agree with Kant is hardly arguable. (Am I right, Jonathan?)
How many of us here in this group believe that our bodies, before sensing
anything else, sense values? That the nature of our experience is primarily
moral?
I don�t know about you, but it�s a tough nut for me to swallow. Those logical
positivists have me brainwashed pretty good.
Platt
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