Lila's Child

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 t