Lila by Robert Pirsig: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Robert Pirsig published Lila: An Inquiry into Morals in 1991, seventeen years after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had sold in the millions and made him one of the most widely read philosophical writers alive.

The narrator is Phaedrus again, the name Pirsig uses for the self who does the thinking. He is sailing a small boat down the Hudson toward the sea, alone, working on a book. In a bar he meets a woman named Lila Blewitt, who comes aboard, and whose hold on reality deteriorates over the following days until she is unreachable.

Around that thin narrative Pirsig constructs a complete metaphysics. The chapters alternate between the boat and the argument, in the same structure as the first book, and the ratio has shifted heavily toward the argument.

The Question It Is Built On

Early in the book, an acquaintance says of Lila that she has no quality, and Phaedrus finds himself unable to let the remark go.

It becomes the organising question. Does Lila have Quality? She is uneducated, promiscuous by the standards of the people judging her, unstable, and heading toward a psychotic episode. By any social measure she is a failure. And Pirsig's whole philosophy rests on Quality being the fundamental term, so if he cannot answer the question about one specific human being, the system is empty.

The device works better than it sounds. It keeps an abstract metaphysics anchored to a person the reader can see, and it forces Pirsig to say what his system actually implies about somebody rather than about a category.

It also carries a difficulty the book never fully escapes. Lila is examined throughout by a man who has decided she is a philosophical problem, and she is given very little opportunity to be anything else. Readers have found this uncomfortable, and the discomfort is a legitimate response rather than a misreading.

Dynamic and Static Quality

The first book had argued that Quality is prior to the split between subject and object. Neither in the observer nor in the thing observed, Quality is the event in which the two meet, and both are abstractions from it.

Lila takes that claim and asks what follows. If Quality is the fundamental reality, what is its structure?

Pirsig's answer divides it in two.

Dynamic Quality is the undefined leading edge: the moment something is recognised as better before anyone can say why. It cannot be defined, because defining it would make it static. It is the source of everything new.

Static quality is what happens when Dynamic Quality is captured and held. Patterns, habits, institutions, laws, species, atoms. Static quality preserves what has been found and prevents the constant loss of every advance.

The relationship is the interesting part. Dynamic Quality without static patterns dissipates immediately and leaves nothing. Static patterns without Dynamic Quality calcify into rigidity that eventually kills what it was preserving. Every functioning thing is a negotiation between the two, and the negotiation never resolves.

The Four Levels

Static quality then divides into four levels, in the order they appeared.

Inorganic. Physical and chemical patterns. Atoms, crystals, planetary orbits.

Biological. Life. Patterns that maintain themselves against the inorganic, using it and constrained by it.

Social. Groups, customs, institutions, ritual, the whole apparatus by which humans organise each other.

Intellectual. Ideas, reason, the capacity to hold beliefs about things and evaluate them.

Two rules govern the structure. Each level is built out of the one below and could not exist without it. And each level is in conflict with the one below, because the higher pattern needs to constrain the lower to survive.

The examples are vivid. A cell is made of molecules and spends its existence preventing those molecules from doing what chemistry would otherwise make them do. A society is made of biological organisms and spends its existence restraining biological drives. Intellect is carried by societies and spends much of its energy criticising the societies that carry it.

Morality in One Sentence

Here is the claim the book exists to make, and it is stated as flatly as this: it is moral for a higher level to dominate a lower level, and immoral for a lower level to destroy a higher one.

Pirsig then runs it through cases, and the results are startling for how much they explain.

Killing a germ to save a person is moral, because a biological pattern is being defended against a lower biological threat. A doctor performing that act needs no further justification.

A society restraining an individual's biological impulses is moral in the same structural way, which is why every society has such restraints and why the restraints feel like oppression from below.

The one that does the most work is the fourth level against the third. Intellectual patterns overriding social ones is moral on this account, which licenses the critic against the custom, the reformer against the institution, and free inquiry against orthodoxy.

He applies this to the American 1960s at length, and the reading is his most quoted. The counterculture, on his account, was intellect attacking social patterns and winning, then discovering that it had no patterns of its own to put in their place, and collapsing back toward biology. A generation that had defeated social quality found itself with nothing between it and appetite.

The Chapter About Fame

One sequence is unlike anything in the first book and is worth reading on its own, because Pirsig turns his own system on his own life.

Phaedrus has written a famous book. People approach him. A film producer wants to option it. Strangers write letters explaining what he meant. He is invited to speak as an authority on subjects he does not consider himself an authority on.

His analysis of this is characteristically structural. Celebrity, he argues, is a social pattern that attaches itself to an intellectual achievement and then feeds on it. The society that notices a good idea converts the person who had it into a role, and the role has requirements that have nothing to do with thinking. A person who accepts the role stops producing the thing that earned it.

The passage where he describes being unable to write for years afterwards is the most personal writing in the book and the least self-pitying. He is not complaining about success. He is examining a mechanism, using himself as the specimen because he is the case he has data on.

There is an obvious application beyond authors. Any person whose competence gets noticed is offered a social pattern in exchange for it, and the exchange is rarely presented as a choice. Pirsig's account of why that trade degrades the original capacity is the most immediately usable thing in the book for a reader who will never write a metaphysics.

The Anthropology Chapters

The strongest sustained writing in the book is a long attack on twentieth century anthropology, and it lands.

Pirsig's target is the discipline's commitment to value-free description. An anthropologist is trained to record what a culture does without judging it, on the ground that judgement imports the observer's prejudices. Pirsig argues this produced a field that could describe everything and say nothing, and that the doctrine was adopted for reasons of scientific respectability rather than because it was true.

His claim is that a competent observer of another culture is perceiving Quality constantly, noticing that certain practices work and others do not, and that the discipline's central rule forbids reporting the most important thing they have seen.

Behind the argument is a personal encounter he describes in detail. Pirsig knew the anthropologist Verne Dusenberry, who worked with Native people in Montana, and through him attended a Native American Church peyote ceremony. Pirsig describes the experience as opening something he spent years working out afterwards.

The Indigenous Argument

Out of that encounter comes the book's most contested historical claim, and an honest review has to separate its parts.

Pirsig argues that the American character was shaped by centuries of contact with Indigenous societies, that ideas of individual liberty, dislike of hierarchy and informality of manner entered American life from that contact, and that standard histories treat America as a purely European derivation and have written the influence out.

The broad claim, that sustained contact between colonists and Indigenous peoples shaped colonial society in ways that were later minimised, has real support and is taken seriously by historians of early America.

The strong version is a different matter. The thesis that the Iroquois Confederacy's political structure directly shaped the United States Constitution circulated widely in the 1980s and was acknowledged in a 1988 congressional resolution. It is rejected by most historians of the founding, most prominently by Elisabeth Tooker, on the grounds that the documentary evidence connecting the two is thin and that the resemblances are general.

Where the System Strains

Three problems, and they are structural rather than incidental.

The levels are asserted. Pirsig presents four and gives no argument for why there are four rather than three or six, or why the divisions fall where he places them. The scheme is plausible and it is not derived from anything.

The ranking does the moral work and is not independently justified. The whole ethics depends on higher being better, and the reason given is that the higher levels emerged later and are more evolved. That is an ordering in time converted into an ordering in value, which is exactly the move that needs defending and does not get it.

The fourth level's licence is never limited. If intellect overriding society is moral, the rule sanctions any idea against any custom, and Pirsig does not supply a brake. He clearly does not want the conclusion that any intellectual programme may dismantle any social arrangement, and nothing in the system stops it. Regimes that dismantled social patterns in the name of ideas are the obvious counter-case and the book does not address them.

Professional philosophy has largely ignored the Metaphysics of Quality. That is partly snobbery about a system developed outside the academy and published as a novel, and partly because the system's weakest joints are exactly the ones philosophers are trained to test.

What Happened in Between

Something belongs in this review that Pirsig does not discuss in the book, because it explains its temperature.

Chris Pirsig, the eleven-year-old on the back of the motorcycle in the first book, was stabbed to death during a robbery outside the San Francisco Zen Center in November 1979. He was twenty-two.

Pirsig wrote about it in an afterword added to later editions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it is among the most difficult things in his work. Millions of readers had followed that boy across the American West and then learned in a few pages what happened to him.

Lila was written after that. The man on the boat is alone, examining a woman he cannot help, building a system in which value is structural rather than personal.

Who Should Read It

Read it if the first book left you wanting the philosophy worked out rather than gestured at. This is that book and there is no other.

Read the anthropology chapters even if you skip the rest. They are the best writing in the book and the argument about value-free description applies well beyond anthropology.

Read it for the four-level model, which is genuinely useful as a way of sorting conflicts even if you reject the moral ranking built on top of it.

Do not read it expecting the first book. Do not cite its history without checking. And be prepared for the treatment of Lila herself, which many readers find harder to forgive than any of the philosophical problems.

For adjacent reading, see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the first half of the project, and Mind and Cosmos for another independent attempt to argue that the standard picture is missing something.

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