Struan Hellier (struan@clara.net)
Sun, 22 Mar 1998 06:31:04 +0100
Hi to the Lila Squad,
I first read ZMM in 1987 whilst on a motorcycle trip across Europe and
Africa which lasted almost a year, wore a tent to shreds and generally
changed the life of a young man trying to make sense of the world.
Lila, I read in 1993 and for the last few years it has sat on my shelf
being regarded with detached curiosity. I never actually got round to
really thinking about what it was proposing until recently. To my utter
disappointment I have come to the conclusions expanded in my essay
below which I hope you might like to publish on your web site. (perhaps
with this introduction)
It pained me to write it and I sincerely hope that some kind person out
there can convince me I'm wrong. Believe me, this essay was not written
as a final denunciation, instead its purpose is more to allow others the
opportunity to point out why I've missed the point and to put me right.
Equally, whatever conclusions I finally arrive at with regards to the
Metaphysics of Quality, as works of fiction both these books will remain
for me an exceptional achievement.
Kind Regards,
Struan Hellier
Lila; Quality Without Morality. by Struan Hellier.
A few weeks ago I revisited Pirsig’s books in an attempt to understand
how the Metaphysics of Quality might be applied to practical moral
dilemmas. I thought that the best way of testing it as a theory would be
to look at its practical consequences for mankind. After all this is the
system which for Doug Renselle is a "profound discovery" which "I see
world legal structures eventually adopting." Such a grandiose claim,
needed looking into and so look into it I did.
It soon became clear that this was simply emotivism in disguise. Pirsig
cleverly picks and chooses which level of evolution to apply in which
context and in doing so exposes the complete futility of his quest for a
new ethic. There is nothing here beyond the ‘boo/hurrah’ of his own
feelings, the discarding of a dualist metaphysics and determinism, both
of which were abandoned long ago by modern scientific philosophy, and
lastly, the complete misunderstanding of modern physics itself.
Pirsig repeatedly says things like, "If one adheres to the traditional
scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an
inescapable corollary." The problem here is that nobody does adhere to
this. The whole point of Heisenburg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ was the
complete destruction of any deterministic theory of the universe and so
Pirsig is attempting to navigate a problem that simply does not exist
and has not existed for over half a century. He makes comments such as,
". . . if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to
deny the truth of science," and yet we know that in fact the very
opposite is true. The determinist had to, and did, let go of that
position because the truth of science required them to do so.
But as Pirsig himself points out, the MoQ has much more to say about
ethics. Or does it?
In the context of the American civil war Pirsig claims that, "an
evolutionary morality argues the North was right in pursuing that war
because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body," and
so the hundreds of thousands of lives were justifiably lost because the
higher level of evolution (society) prevailed over the lower level
(biology).
In the next paragraph and in the context of capital punishment, Pirsig
goes on to claim that in the case of a criminal who does not threaten
the, "established social structure," it is plain that, "what makes
killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological
organism. He is not even just a defective unit in society. Whenever you
kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too."
What seems to utterly evade Pirsig is the fact that the hundreds of
thousands who died in that civil war were also a, "source of thought
too," and that therefore by his own criteria the war was morally wrong
because the ideas lost through these deaths were at a higher
evolutionary plane than the nation they were sacrificed for. And here
the philosophy becomes even more muddled because it would be possible to
argue (as Pirsig hints at) that the ideas of equality which drove the
war on were morally superior to the nation and the ideas of those who
defended it. But by what criteria do we decide which ideas take
precedence? The MoQ has nothing to say on this matter and yet this is
one huge part of ethics. Perhaps this is why, ‘real philosophers,’ have
little to say about the MoQ and it simply boils down to the fact that
the MoQ has little to say about them or their subject.
Far from being in a position where it is possible to say that, "I see
world legal structures eventually adopting this ethical system," we are
looking at a structureless mish mash of nonsense. In practical terms,
how could we possibly advocate a system which could allow the killing of
a mental retard to provide organs for a genius who would die without
them, simply because the genius appears to be on a higher evolutionary
level? Or the destruction of millions of Jews by the Nazi party because
their biological bodies and possibly even their (static) society and
traditions were dominated by the dynamic intellectual idea of a super
race. This is utterly bizarre and surely no system of ethics can work on
such an arbitrary criteria.
The fact is that Persig is using an ethical system based upon pure
emotivism to pick and choose which value layers he chooses to read into
any given context, in a vain attempt to give rational credibility to his
emotional urges and it is by this method that he is able to fit, "all
the moral conflicts of the world . . . . . (into) this kind of
framework".
The objections raised here (and they are by no means exhaustive) are
thus two fold.
First, the MoQ seeks its credibility by trying to be at least as
credible as a determinist theory of nature and in doing so measures
itself against a discredited world view. It succeeds but only in the
sense that it becomes equally incredible.
Second, the MoQ utterly ignores the relationship of ideas in ethics and
the presence of each value layer in the human being, to the extent that
it has almost nothing to say about morality. If person A kills person B
then the MoQ might say that person A was justified in killing person B
because person A did it to protect his nation state which is of more
value that the biological entity of person B. Alternatively it might say
that person A was wrong to kill person B because the source of ideas
that constitutes person B was of more value than (for example) the
nation state person A was defending. I’m sure we could all come up
with a whole host of other scenarios within this context and we can have
no way of choosing one over the other within the framework given.
For these reasons alone the Metaphysics of Quality is of no concern to
anyone seeking an ethical framework.
Struan Hellier
struan@clara.net - all comments are sincerely welcomed, especially if
they
disagree with the author.
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