Dan Glover, with Introduction and Annotations by Robert M. Pirsig
Lila's Child chronicles an Internet discussion group centered
around Robert M. Pirsig's second novel, Lila. Robert Pirsig
provides an introduction and over a hundred annotations which
can be found nowhere else. A "can't miss" for Robert Pirsig fans!
Dan Glover lives and works in northern Illinios.
It was fortunate I stayed out of this online discussion of my
books, Lila, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Not many writers get to read a body of criticism of their work as
intense and diverse as this. It could never have achieved its
insights and discoveries if I'd been participating in it, dominating
others with my "expert" opinion.
One of the most valued members of this group has written that
this discussion should not even be published at all because it is
not a finished work. Much of what is said here sounds
amateurish and mistaken. People will laugh at it, it was said,
because it sounds so ill-informed. I believe "crap" was the word
used. I don't agree with this at all but think that the objection is
an important one that needs a close examination.
What we see in the following pages is what I would call "real
philosophy" rather than "philosophology." This term,
philosophology, is one I find myself using all the time to make a
point that most academic philosophers seem unaware of: that
when they speak of the ideas of such famous philosophers as
Plato or Hegel they are giving us a history of philosophy, an
"ology" of philosophy, not philosophy itself. Philosophy itself is
opinions of the speaker himself about the general nature of the
world, not just a classification someone else's opinions.
This may seem a minor point but I remember hearing many
years ago how a professor of art, Jerry Liebling, was outraged
when he heard that an Art Historian told one of his students that
he should give up painting because it was obvious the student
would never equal the great masters. At the time I didn't see
what Liebling was so upset about but as the years have gone by I
understand it better. Liebling loathed this attitude of Art
Historians because, while they thought they were preserving the
standards of art, they were in fact destroying them. Art is not just
the static achievements of the masters of the past. Art is the
creative Dynamic Quality of the artist of the present. Neither is
philosophy just the static achievements of the masters of the
past. Philosophy is the creative Dynamic Quality of the
philosopher of the present.
There are similarities to chess. Both are highly intellectual
pursuits in which one tries to manipulate symbols within a set of
rules to improve a given situation. In chess, one can benefit
greatly by studying the games of the masters. In philosophy, one
can also benefit greatly by studying the writings of the great
philosophers. But the important point here is that studying chess
masters is not chess itself and studying philosophy masters is not
philosophy itself.
The real chess is the game you play with your neighbor. Real
chess is "muddling through." Real chess is the triumph of mental
organization over complex experience. And so is real
philosophy.
Although what we see on these pages could be classed as
philosophological, that is, the study of someone else's work,
what we see is dominated by the philosophy of the members:
nothing is cut and dried, nothing is asserted with mind-numbing
scholarly precision, no big reputations are at stake, there is just
the happy process of thinking about things. The participants
don't always get it right and no one expects them to. They are
just trying out different ideas against each other just to see how
they work out. The fact that everyone knows that everyone else
might be wrong makes it much more interesting, and as you read
along you see that the thinking gets better and better.
Personalities emerge: there is Magnus, dour at times but
insightful and to the point; Bodvar, loyal, honest, and combative
for what he believes in; Hugo, brilliant and discriminating;
Maggie, putting things into a social perspective; Platt, hitting
bulls-eyes like a Zen archer; Horse, solid as a rock; Doug, ahead
of the pack with a suitcase full of Dynamic acronyms; Ant, who
is doing his Ph.D. on the Metaphysics of Quality, and has to face
academic opposition head-on. There are many others and you
can discover them for yourself.
Dissenters also abound: there is Donny, who wants to put the
MOQ in a larger philosophological context. There is Keith, who
is such a model of courtesy and fairness and care that you
immediately pay close attention to what he says. His questions
go to the root of the difficulty many people have in
understanding the MOQ. And there is Struan, Keith's mirror
image, who makes an art form out of the personal insult. It's
been said in philosophy that, "Where there is no heat there is no
light." Struan has generated plenty of both.
But if dissenters didn't exist we would have to invent them
because no set of philosophic ideas is worth much until it is
tested by dialectical opposition. In the usual printed academic
essays dissent comes weeks or months later in the form of
reviews. But here, on the Internet, affirmation and dissent appear
together. If a writer tries to belittle someone else in the manner
of a polished literary critic, he can find himself belittled right
back three minutes later. It makes for more careful criticism.
After reading through these and many other comments, I've
concluded that the biggest improvement I could make in the
MOQ would be to block the notion that the MOQ claims to be a
quick fix for every moral problem in the universe. I have never
seen it that way. The image in my mind as I wrote it was of a
large football field that gave meaning to the game by telling you
who was on the 20-yard line but did not decide which team
would win. That was the point of the two opposing arguments
over the death penalty described in Lila. That was the point of
the equilibrium between static and Dynamic Quality. Both are
moral arguments. Both can claim the MOQ for support. Just as
two sides can go before the U.S. Supreme Court and both claim
constitutionality, so two sides can use the MOQ, but that does
not mean that either the Constitution or the MOQ is a
meaningless set of ideas. Our whole judicial system rests on the
presumption that more than one set of conclusions about
individual cases can be drawn within a given set of moral rules.
The MOQ makes the same presumption.
Finally, you will see that throughout the discussions I've added
notes of my own. With them has comes the question, "Why
make them?" Having done so well so far by staying out of this
discussion, why don't I just continue the good work and keep
staying out of it?
One justification for the notes is that there are questions raised
here that only I can answer and this is probably the only time and
place that I can answer them. But beyond this are a lot of
comments that can only be classified as kibitzing.
A kibitzer is the guy who stands behind your shoulder in a chess
match and tells you all the great moves you could have made if
only you were as smart as he is. Not a very popular thing to do,
but that is surely what is being done here. I have tried to keep it
to a minimum and passed over much that I disagree with where it
does not seem to destroy the Metaphysics of Quality, but it's still
kibitzing.
After worrying about this for weeks, I finally found an alibi.
Kibitzers only interrupt current chess games and current
conversations. These discussions are now several years old and
getting older every year. They're historical. I am not talking
about current philosophy but about the philosophy of the past.
That makes me not a kibitzer but a philosophologist. As
everybody knows, philosophologists are not kibitzers but
responsible dedicated well-liked respectable people!
