Robert M. Pirsig has written two books on Quality; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; An Inquiry into Morals and Lila; An Inquiry into Values. In Lila, he outlines what he calls the Metaphysics of Quality, or Metaphysics of Value, in which the universe is composed of only Quality. However, when we begin to view the universe as only Quality, troubling aspects begin cropping up concerning the role of the concepts of Good and Evil, probably because of the way we have learned to "agree" on what these concepts are in the first place. (See Pragmatism, Precession and the Metaphysics of Quality, a previous paper.
We can define evil in many ways, but always it is in seeming opposition to the good. Can we say evil exists as itself only? For example, one of the ways we normally define evil is by equating it to the death of the biological entity. This would seem the ultimate evil, the opposite of life. What we must ask first, however, is just what is this thing we call death? Is death in itself inherently evil? We know that if we live, death is necessary, but do we then automatically know that evil is also necessary?
In Lila, Pirsig may have touched on an answer in Chap. 29: If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila.
Pirsig explores the nature of evil by following the dark thoughts of a woman named Lila as she stumbles her way through the nightmare-side of reality. If we look upon suffering as evil, then evil will always be with us. But by looking at suffering as the negative side of the face of Quality, then it becomes a matter of defining just what "evil" really is. Is death the ultimate evil?
Death is the apparent end of suffering, the end of evil if you will. Death is the absence of life, but life is not the absence of death. It would seem then that death cannot be considered at all in any manner. It may indeed be a perceived evil, or a lack of life-force, but it is this very lack which prevents further analysis. Death is a moot point for the living.
If death is not evil, how about suffering? Certainly suffering is normally thought of as an evil thing. Yet according to the Metaphysics of Quality, those who do not suffer, do not survive. It is suffering that drives evolution. Suffering is the negative face of Quality, but that doesn't mean it's evil as opposed to good, the positive side of Quality. The Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that suffering is a drive to Dynamic freedom, and without it, static patterns of value would simply grow old and die.
Again, in chapter 29 of Lila, Pirsig writes: ...he began to think about Lila again. She's what you would call a "contrarian." "You're a loner, just like me," she had said...that stuck in his mind because it was true. But what she meant was not just someone who's alone, but a contrarian, someone who's always doing everything the wrong way, just out of pure willfulness, it would seem.
He'd gotten the word out of his anthropology reading. It indicated there's more to contrarians than just individual "wrongness." That brujo was a contrarian.
Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they are supposed to be doing, that's the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it's degenerative negativism, where the biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it's an ego pattern that says, "I'm too important to be doing all this static stuff."
Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its own. This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can't get off and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you off and devours you. The degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way. Drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like.
But sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That's what drives the really creative people...the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like...the feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody built around them, they are going to die.
But they aren't being contrary in a way that is just decadent. They are way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They're fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns.
With his Metaphysics of Quality, Pirsig has done away with conventional morality based on either good or evil and replaced it with one that focuses on both good and evil, in one sense. But in a larger sense, the two concepts can perhaps be better viewed as complementary to each other. When Pirsig talks of contrarians, he is not labeling them as "evil" doers, but rather as Dynamic complements to existing static patterns of values.
In the Metaphysics of Quality, good and evil are no longer seen as opposite of one another, but as complementary to each other. To the extent that one seeks Dynamic freedom from biological forces of value, only a degenerative condition will result. But to the extent one seeks Dynamic freedom from intellect forces of value, a regeneration will occur as previously held ideals are destroyed to make way for new ones to grow.
The biological and intellect levels are separated by the social level, and mediated by our cultural attachments or agreements. It would seem that it is here that the notion of good and evil arises, as it is our cultural influences that determine just what it is that we perceive as good and evil. Our Western civilization has been built on the foundation of determinism, which Pirsig traces back to the ancient Greeks. It is culturally of value for us to be able to determine right from wrong, good from evil, and this deterministic way of thinking is taught to us from the time we are born into the world, and is very difficult to let go of.
Even modern warfare can be traced directly back to the ancient Greeks. Before the Greeks, warfare was a non deterministic activity, with nothing really being settled in a firm or settled manner. With the rise of the Greek civilization, warfare became what we in the West think of as modern warfare...decisively deterministic by dominating and vanquishing all enemies.
It's interesting to note that the peoples of the Far East do not view warfare in such a deterministic manner. Chinese generals, when interviewed about the war in Viet Nam and their victories over other invading forces, including the United States, all gave credit to The Art of War, written 2500 years ago by a warrior named Sun Tzu, in which warfare is taught as a holistic event where no clear winner emerges unless one uses the enemies own strength against them.
War is not evil in itself, nor is it good. War contains both measures of each...a Dynamic burst of forces that drives human evolution coupled with a systematic destruction of old values results in unlooked-for, newly emergent technologies and innovations that would never have arisen without war.
In the Art of War, Master Sun says: Therefore those skilled at the unorthodox are infinite as heaven and earth, inexhaustible as the great rivers. When they come to an end, they begin again, like the days and the months; they die and are reborn, like the four seasons.
Here in the West, we shun the unorthodox as a rule. Perhaps that's one reason that quantum theory is so little understood. Niels Bohr's framework of complementarity was meant to be a more expansive way of generalizing reality. Bohr wrote:
...here again we are not dealing with contradictory but complementary pictures of phenomena, which only together offer a natural generalization of the classical mode of description. The Philosophy of Niels Bohr; The Framework of Complementarity
U.G.Krishnamurti is a man who has written and spoken much about the nature of reality and how we perceive the "us" that makes each one of us what we are. He writes:
What is thought? You don't know a thing about it; all that you know about what you call 'thought' is
what you have been told. How can you do anything with it -- mould it, control it, shape it or stop it?
You are all the time trying to do something with it because somebody has told you that you must
change this or replace that, hold on to the good thoughts and not the bad thoughts. Thoughts are
thoughts; they are neither good nor bad. As long as you want to do something with whatever is
there, you are thinking. Wanting and thinking are not two different things. Wanting to understand
means there is a movement of thought. You are adding momentum to that movement, giving it
continuity.
The concept of the intellect as being directed by an underlying destructive force of value is confirmed by U.G., as he is known among his aquaintances. It is the social level of the Metaphysics of Quality that controls and dominates our realities that we build, and creates the "me" that views it. The social level is directed by underlying creative value forces, complementary to the intellect.The senses function unnaturally in you because you want to use them to get something. Why should
you get anything? Because you want what you call the 'you' to continue. You are protecting that
continuity. Thought is a protective mechanism: it protects the 'you' at the expense of something or
somebody else. Anything born out of thought is destructive: it will ultimately destroy you and your
kind. (Compiled by James Brodsky from conversations in India and Switzerland 1973)
First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life...Third, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the intellectual order over the social order...Finally, there's a fourth Dynamic morality which isn't a code.
It's out of this struggle between conflicting static patterns that the concepts of good and evil arise. Lila Chapter 13
What may seem to be conflicting static patterns may actually be conflicting forces of value, the dance of li-la between creation and discreation. Let's look at these forces as two riders approaching one another, one on a black horse, one on a white horse. They are both Dynamic knights who live in a magical kingdom. The riders know that the mounts they ride are neither good nor evil, though one's name is Good and the other's is Evil. And in this kingdom, once these horses have met, they can never part again, but instead become entangled with each other, thus when one makes a move, the other mirrors it. And should one disappear, the other does as well, only to reappear together to renew their conflict, never alone. The knights are entangled not only with each other, but each with his own mount as well, for that is how the knight sees. The horses carry their riders through time and space, and construct the entire reality of the knights. Yet neither the horse nor the knight realize this is so, for that is how it has always been, and always will be.
Let me try to put this concept into a diagram. Using the concept of value forces in the Metaphysics of Quality perhaps it's a little easier to see that any point of view is complementary in nature, and is therefore correct. Here is a admittedly crude diagram of what I think is a good representation of just what complementarity is. Let each oval represent the magical horses themselves, each capable of perceiving and relaying the information to the riders, represented by the large oval at the bottom, who are joined together by their social agreements.
First of all, let there be a firefly in the box at the top of the diagram. Each observer, A & B, can perceive side to side in the box, but neither has any depth perception. In order to tell where the flash of the firefly occurs, they each must communicate together in an unambiguous way...in other words, they must pre-determine what they are going to communicate and in what terms. The box is divided into halves, a Left and a Right, symbolized by l and r, and the two observers will communicate by stating on which side of the line the flash occurs.
The Quality Event occurs when this information is assimilated and can result in one of four possibilities in the experiment, in either the left-right, left-left, right-left, or right-right quadrant of the box. If no event occurs, it lies not in the experiment but outside at any point we should choose to pick. The experiment is set up solely to record the flash of the firefly. If no flash occurs, the experiment will never take place. No event exists as complementary to the Quality Event, existing in non-actuality.
Now the problem facing us is how do we put good and evil into that box. In order to do that, we must first have a set of rules to work with, just as in the simple experiment with the firefly. When it comes to morality however, the rules are much more complex than are the rules for the little diagram I drew. Still, for the sake of simplicity, it's possible to switch left/right for good/evil in the diagram like this:
Here we see "agreements" being formed between the observers. Good and evil do not really exist in the box at all (nor did left and right) but in the perceptions of the observers, and if they both agree something is good, then it is good, and if they both agree something is evil, then it is evil. But in neither case is what is being observed an object, nor is the observer a subject, but both are tied together into the Quality Event in such a way that they complement one another and only exist as one another in twain.
This is why we are allowed to switch the concepts of left/right with the concepts of good/evil. And even though we have formed different agreements on what possesses left-ness and what possesses evil, still the two are linked, as are right-ness and good, as Pirsig talks about in Lila.
Looking again at the diagram with good and evil, the No Event could be considered death, totally outside our range of perception. The oval at the bottom of the diagram contains all the levels of the Metaphysics of Quality, and each pair of letters can be looked at as value forces, although at the inorganic level there is no way to be sure of what is happening at all. Force of Value can be viewed sequentially, and I have attempted to explain this further in my previous paper Force of Value in the Metaphysics of Quality and perhaps these papers will make more sense together than apart.
In summary, I have taken a simple demonstration and used it to show how we view the complementarity of good and evil in our universe. The underlying Value Forces are directing each static level in seemingly contradictory fashion, but in fact they are complementary to each other. These forces are creation and discreation, or good and evil, or right and left, however we choose to look at them, they will appear in that way. One will never appear without its complement to actuality.
Putting this into the context of Force of Value in the Metaphysics of Quality, these value forces are complementary, and yet because they are migrating to Dynamic Quality, or rather are Dynamic in nature, they super-impose themselves upon static patterns of value as forces of creation and destruction. This is the driving force of Quality, identified as Planck's constant and the Uncertainty Principle. This causes a resonance within the four static patterns of value and result in the moral hierarchy of the Metaphysics of Quality and the contradictory nature of the levels themselves.
When we focus exclusively upon static quality patterns of value, we fail to consider Dynamic Quality whatsoever, and label this "good" and that "bad". We fail to consider the workings of what is unknowable to us, undefinable Dynamic Quality, and focus instead on only that which we can form agreements with in terms of good and evil. Questions arise though, taking that course of action, creating the platypus of good and evil, like the question concerning why evil exists at all, if everything is Quality. I would answer as William Blake did:
"The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow."
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This page is a work in progress and will be added to frequently. Thanks for reading!
Last updated 2/27/99
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