Hi foci, it's been a long time.
Some of you (Bo and Marco I hope ;) might remember me : my name is Denis. I
posted on this mailing-list until a year ago when I started my service in
the army (which is now over). I thought this month's topic was very
appropriate for me to re-enter this
conversation, so after a month of lurking around in the archives (I've
checked what you've been up to ;), here I am.
> In order to bring a pragmatic element into the discussion, state how
> Lila has affected our lives from a personal perspective.
It is a mistake, I believe, to assign a unique cause to the different
moments and movements of a human life. Life is mostly influenced by the
momentum of little odds and bits that probably don't make too much sense to
those who haven't lived them. But anyway, a little introspection cannot
hurt... :)
In retrospective, I guess both of RMP's books *had* an impact on my life (to
which extent I can only make suppositions), but where ZAMM must have had
mostly moral and emotional effects, Lila was the one that probably got me
thinking the most.
In fact, for a long time a wasn't sure I *wanted* to read RMP second book.
It seemed to me that ZAMM didn't need any sequel, and I didn't want to find
out if financial incentives had finally turned my prefered author into a
"$elf-help guide" writer. And also, finding 'Lila' in France wasn't exactly
easy, be it in French or English.
So more than 3 years passed before I finally found Lila in a New Orleans
bookstore (I was on vacations). Before soon, I was arguing with an imaginery
RMP all again... :)
For the first time I could see how much of what I had read or thought about
since I read ZAMM, could fit in the structure of the MoQ. While I'm no
longer as enthousiastic about "the levels" as I once was, I still feel the
MoQ is on the right track.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, is that for the first time a
metaphysical system recognize itself for what it is : a belief system.
Something which value is determined by its utility (the Pragmatism RMP was
talking about) and, most important, its intellectual beauty. Finally
religion, art and science were reconcilied both in their aim (Good), and
their source (Quality, intuition of value), if not in their methods. The
MoQ, for me, became the lense with which I was finally able to observe the
sum of my knowledge and discern some order and harmony in it. Perhaps its
greatest benefit is to give back some meaning to an increasingly complicated
and absurd world.
I can't say it has affected the *events* of my life, though. The important
decisions I had to take were prior to my reading of Lila, and since then
I've never used 'Lila' or the MoQ as a moral guide for any decision of mine.
Lila as been an intellectual guide, pointing out similarities and important
details, and generally getting me interested about this world by making it
less mundane and bleak.
But I'm careful not to let it become another static prison, and I'm
carefully avoiding the self-contradictory "rational morality" Pirsig is
preaching about : if moral decisions come from a sense of Quality, and
rationalisation is what follows it, trying to put them in reverse will only
spawn low-Quality answers.
As a side effect, I must say that Pirsig's ideas made me more critic and
skeptic than ever : when you understand how much of what you "know" is made
of ingrained belief, how the power of rhetorics is basically "making" the
world, and how easy it is to confuse a sense of Quality with baser instincts
(as the sixties and seventies have amply demonstrated), you have to think
twice about everything, MoQ included.
That will be all for now. It was a real pleasure to talk to you all again.
Denis
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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