Purple (Pirsig)

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Lila - Or an Attempt on Morality is a cross-genre work by the US writer Robert M. Pirsig , which uses autobiographical, narrative-novel-like and philosophical-scientific elements to unfold the plot of the novel on the one hand, while this external plot in turn of the imaginary main character Phaedrus provides examples and impulses for the development of the actual core topic, the metaphysics of quality . Like Pirsig's first book, Lila is characterized by the clear presentation of complex philosophical topics. Pirsig's aim and claim is to investigate the contradictions and causes of problems in human existence and to test his findings through empirical and analytical studies. His texts are therefore quite philosophical in terms of content, while the impulses for the formation of theories are taken from empirical everyday experience and the derived statements have to prove themselves in the external framework of everyday reality told at the same time. This combination of rational science, which Pirsig called " Chautauqua " in his first book Zen and the Art of Servicing a Motorbike , is what makes Lila's special charm and intellectual claim .

Narrative structure

External act

As in Pirsig's first book ( Zen and the Art of Maintaining a Motorcycle ), the main storyline is a journey through parts of America. In the beginning of winter, Pirsig travels ("When he went on deck for the first time yesterday, he slipped and found his balance again, and then he saw that the whole boat was covered with ice", p. 11) from Lake Superior towards Atlantic. On the way to Kingston Pirsig stops at Troy and meets two former acquaintances, the lawyer Richard Rigel and his companion Capella , in a bar near the pier . In this bar, Pirsig met a woman named Lila . Lila and Rigel have known each other since school, but while Rigel obviously rejects Lila due to her sexual self-indulgence, Lila seems to have an ambivalent and aggressive, but nevertheless affectionate relationship with Rigel. In the bar there is an argument between Lila and some of those present, including Rigel. The first brief acquaintance between Pirsig and Lila ends, probably under the influence of alcohol, in the cabin of Pirsig's boat. From the one-night stand, Lila's stay on his boat for a long time develops, unintentionally by Pirsig.

During their time together, Pirsig quickly noticed Lila's psychotic-depressive mental state, which resulted in sudden, explosive aggressions and her emotional isolation (Lila: “Nobody knows Lila!” (P. 4) “'My God, he could drive you crazy ! A fool. A complete fool, that's him. Yes! A fool and fake fifty [...] He doesn't know anything. "Her hands shook. Oh-oh. She knew what that meant. She took the handbag off the bunk, opened it and took out the pills. ”(p. 151) Although Pirsig appears friendly to Lila, the relationship between the two remains tense: Lila's latent hostility towards men also transfers it to Pirsig, which ultimately leads to an escalation of the The situation ends and Lila flees the ship: "They just want to drag you into the dirt! They are all completely crazy, and they try to take it out on you until you are completely crazy too." (P. 322f.)

With no money or other possessions, Lila then wanders through New York and suffers psychosis and hallucinations until she returns to the boat after an odyssey lasting several hours. In the meantime, her state of aggression has turned into completely defensive and indifferent. Sitting on the deck of the boat, she notices a doll in the dirty river water: “The little hand reached out to her from the water. It was a baby's hand! She could see the little fingers. The little body was stiff and cold. The eyes were closed. She washed the foam from her body and saw that the baby was still whole. The fish hadn't eaten anything. But it wasn't breathing. Then she picked up her sweater from the floor of the cockpit and swaddled the baby in it and hugged him. And she rocked the baby back and forth until she noticed that the cold was draining from his body. ”(P. 329)

When Pirsig returns to the boat, he finds Lila in a catatonic state. He rejects his spontaneous impulse to hand her over to a psychiatric clinic and instead decides to take care of Lila himself: On the one hand, he knows the standard procedures in psychiatric clinics very well from his own experience and therefore knows that Lila only keeps her there, but never would be cured. In addition, Pirsig is a terrific scientist and thinker and has recognized the hopelessness of psychological methods through his transcendent experiences as well as through his own psychotic episode and his recognized talent for analytical thinking: “They weren't drugs, he thought. That was something really serious. He recognized the way she put her words, the word salad. He himself was once accused of speaking like that. ”(P. 354)

Pirsig prepares to take Lila with him on his sea voyage and to take care of her when Rigel unexpectedly reappears. Lila asks Rigel to take her with him on the pretext that Pirsig wants to kill her. Just as unexpectedly as Lila got on Pirsig's boat, she disappears again from his sphere of life. An imaginary dialogue between Pirsig and the doll that Lila left behind sums up the plot: “An idol, that was this doll. The idol of a single man's abandoned religion. [...] Once they have been ritualized and worshiped, these idols change their inherent values. You can't throw them in the trash any more than you can throw church statues in the trash. [...] This doll represented Lila's innermost values, the real Lila, and she said something about her that completely contradicted everything else. ”(P. 449). “He thought about it for a while, and then a question crossed his mind. <What would you say> he asked the idol, <what if we were in India now?> He waited a long time, but got no answer. Then after a while he heard a voice in his mind that didn't seem to be his own: <Everything has come to a happy end.> A happy end? Phaedrus thought about it. <I wouldn't call it a happy ending,> he said. <I would call it an open ending.> <No, this is a happy ending> said the other voice, <because everyone gets what they want. Lila gets her beloved Rigel. Rigel gets his above all beloved feeling of your own righteousness and you get your above all beloved dynamic freedom.> <How can you then say that it will be a happy ending when you know what is happening now to Lila [in psychiatry] ? He will destroy her!> <No>, said the idol, <He will not be able to harm her. From now on she has him under her control. He's done. From now on it's wax in her hands.> <No>, said Phaedrus, <he is a lawyer. He doesn't lose his head so easily.> <He doesn't need to either. He's already lost it. She will use what he understands by morality against him.> <How?> <By becoming a repentant sinner. She will reassure him again and again what a wonderful, highly moral person he is and that he saved her from your clutches. And what can he do? How can he deny that? He cannot deny it, and that will inflate his moral self like a balloon, and once the air is out he will go to her to be morally straightened up. "Goddamn it, thought Phaedrus. What an idol! Sarcastic, cynical. Almost angry. Everything that he was basically himself? Maybe. A dope comedian, that idol. A solo entertainer. No wonder someone dumped it in the river. <You won, you know>, said the idol, <... without a fight when you told Rigel that purple was quality. And the only reason you said that was because you couldn't think of any of your usual intellectual answers>. "(P. 452) (In the quotations, sentence structures have been partially adapted to the need for the citation form)

Inner action

The book combines the external framework plot (= the boat trip through parts of the United States) with an internal plot level, which is largely reproduced as a thought speech by the main character Phaedrus. On the way to the Atlantic, Pirsig, whose analytical personality is the narrative character Phaidros , follows the old trade routes on which goods were exchanged in Victorian times. The old mansions from the Victorian era reflect the inner state of mind and values ​​of Victorian society and show oversized decorations on building facades that fit the overdrawn language and way of thinking of their residents. More than anything, Victorians valued and respected social etiquette; good, situated demeanor was the epitome of morality and honor, whereby these values ​​had stiffened to such an extent that society deprived itself of its own further development through its static worldview and world perception. The statics, which the conservative Victorians particularly praised, ensured that society lost its capacity for cultural regeneration. The burgeoning science increasingly questioned the Victorians 'claim to moral absolutism, as Pirsig shows with the effects of works such as "Coming of Age in Samoa" by Margaret Meads, which led to the dissolution of the Victorians' dogmatic morals and legitimacy for the Victorians withdrawn for the promulgation of moral catalogs: M. Meads described in the book that in the Samoan culture, promiscuity (premarital sex) is not socially sanctioned, but that does not lead to society degenerating, but evidently to be very beneficial for it Growing up as a teenager and proving to be an asset to society. The test of strength between the Victorian officials and the new caste of scholars, according to today's experience, was won by scholars. They relativized the moral rules of their society according to the standards of scientific knowledge and thus ensured that change in values ​​that was commented on by the elderly as a "decline in values", but celebrated by the younger ones as the "liberation of the individual from the dictates of society". Science seemed to be able to provide the opportunity to question valid moral systems, but as Pirsig describes, the result was not an improvement in the state of society, but a burgeoning degeneration of society, which was accompanied by increasing violence and increasing crime. The old, Victorian standards of values ​​were not dynamic enough, not adaptable enough, that the developments of the time eroded and overtook them. However, the social degeneration set in because science could not perform its actual task, which it was now fulfilling: It was unable to justify value judgments on a rational basis because the underlying metaphysical assumption assumes that "values" and “Morals” are unreal, irrational and ultimately subjective phenomena that can neither be measured nor causally deduced. Since the valid philosophy of science (epistemology) accordingly rejects the existence of values, the consequence of the dissolution of Victorian values ​​was not that the moral ideals were changed, but that a moral vacuum was created and "the world became a meaningless and worthless place in the universe "(P. 254) degenerated.

Pirsig's particular merit lies in having presented an alternative model to epistemology in Lila , which enables an empirically founded value theory ("metatheory of quality") and, on the basis of this theory, allows the analysis and making of value decisions.

The novel combines several narrative techniques. So it is partly conceived as a reported thought speech of the main character Phaedrus by Pirsig himself, who undertakes considerations and analyzes on an epistemological level and develops the metaphysics of quality in the course of the book. The external framework serves as an experimental framework in which the argumentation steps and statements of the metaphysics of quality are checked and illustrated. Pirsig himself reports autobiographically about his impressions that he collects during the trip. Pirsig also continues the ideas of his second half of identity, Phaedrus .

Figures (partial persons) and their configuration

Pirsig used in Lila a fourfold perspective on his main character: Phaedrus represents one old, only as a latent memory fragments personality part. The skipper is recent, but is not recognizable as an intellectual in social groups. The writer describes the same person (namely PIRSIG), but from the perception and assessment of his fellow men. The narrator himself is identical to the author; He reports from and from the various figural perspectives, takes up their assessments and actions and continues them in thought in order to derive his 'metatheory of quality' from their world of experience.

  • The partial character PHAIDROS has an autobiographical background and is a strictly scientifically and analytically thinking type with Pirsig, whose thirst for knowledge clearly bears destructive forms and for this part of the personality is dominant in everyday life. Phaedrus, however, is not a conformist, but an intelligent lateral thinker who relentlessly attacks and refutes scientific authorities (e.g. Aristotle) ​​and conservative thought structures. Phaedrus draws the impetus for his criticism from the Far Eastern philosophies of Zen Buddhism.
Phaedrus represents an earlier phase of PIRSIG's life, which ended in a psychotic episode of PIRSIG in 1961 and was ended by a court-ordered electroconvulsive therapy. Pirsig reports on Phaedrus' thought processes and cognitive steps as a person who has become a stranger to him, whose characteristics and psyche must be reconstructed by himself (sometimes with great effort) and can only be partially remembered by him. This gives the narrator a limited view of the character.
  • The SKIPPER occurs when the narrative depicts social settings with multiple characters. The skipper is always described impersonally, the narrator has no insight into the thoughts and motives of this character.
  • The NARRATOR (who looks identical to the author) creates the connections and relationships between the characters Phaedrus, the skipper and himself. PIRSIG reports on their actions and mental life from the perspective of an outsider. PIRSIG's attitude towards his sub-characters is interested and compassionate, but hardly judgmental.

Metatheory of Quality

An essential point of the metatheory of quality mentioned above is the knowledge that life develops along the basis of "ambivalent systems". Ambivalent systems are conditions that are open to development (i.e. not determined and therefore not clearly foreseeable in their further development), which are characterized by the fact that they have a wide range of possible results and combinations. Life and evolution are in a reciprocal state of dynamic creation of something new, which is statically secured in phases in order to be able to take the evolutionarily achieved new state as the starting point for further evolution. The "dynamic quality" remains largely undefined by Pirsig, as in his first book "Zen", while Pirsig shows and analyzes the static achievements of that dynamic force.

Evolutionary stages

The core point of Pirsig's metatheory is the statement that ambivalent systems form transition points from one evolutionary level to the next higher level. Each new stage of evolution develops structures that promise liberation from previous constraints (laws of nature or determining factors). Pirsig names four stages of evolution in LILA: inorganic (carbon), biological (cell networks), social (social value alliances), spiritual (). With this, PIRSIG rejects the previous metatheoretical framework of subject-object dualism and supplements the previous epistemological framework with the concepts of the biological and the social. The fact that the links between the material (inorganic) and spiritual evolutionary stages that have been overlooked so far are available means that the relationships between the individual stages can be recognized. Here it can be seen that two successive stages of evolution are not harmonious, but rather hostile:

Examples

  • Inorganic: carbon

Thus, the carbon occupies a position within the PSE that gives it the greatest ambivalence to enter into connections with the other elements of the PSE. Carbon combines with the groups of non-metals as well as with metals and halogens; it also combines with itself in several chemical and plastic forms. The biological structures are based on this ambivalence of carbon. You use its ambivalence to achieve your own goals and link it to several 10,000 molecules. Due to this new form of organization, the inorganic value systems are overcome: Biological structures oppose the laws of nature such as gravity and thermodynamics that cannot be circumvented for inorganic structures.

  • Protozoa

According to the endosymbiotic theory, the first higher cells arose from incomplete digestion of functional individual groups, which today continue to exist as so-called "compartments", separate vacuoles in the recent single cells and which carry the cell membrane that prevents (s) their phagocytosis. These first forms of cooperation increased the chances of survival of the organizational forms that had previously coexisted separately, later similar cells joined together to form cell association structures in order to gain further advantages (cf. Volvox spec .: mobility).

  • Societies

The association of individuals to form social groups eliminated some of the problems that organisms had previously struggled with. Variations arose for the exchange of the genetic information relevant to survival between individuals and also forms of varying this information. Examples of sexual processes are the conjugation between algae and bacteria via plasmids or the karyogamy of fungi, but also reproduction with the help of germ cells on the way z. B. human sexuality through opposite sex partners. Sexuality solved the problem of genetic defects: until now, radioactivity and other mutation-inducing factors posed a threat to species existence, while mutation now created a useful range of genetic varieties whose usefulness could be decided dynamically. The individual fate of the individual was thus subordinated to the general social goal.

  • ghost

The appearance of mind and thinking represents the appearance of a further evolutionary stage, which in turn used the most ambivalent existing preliminary stages of evolution as its basis. Just as up to now all stages of evolution had the goal of overcoming their existing constraints and restrictions, the efforts of the spiritual form of organization are aimed at evaluating the rules and "laws" applicable to its existence - and above all the possibilities for overcoming them: science is the attempt to explore the realities, laws and conditions of the world and to describe them through research and teaching. The definition of science according to Popper reflects this scheme of evolution in the sense of the "search for development opportunities": this is dedicated to the goals of finding solutions to problems and "reducing evil and suffering".

Implications for Human Existence

As Pirsig shows, the four stages of evolution are not set up harmoniously with one another, but rather pursue the self-interested realization of one's own stage at the expense of the other stages. Higher levels contain all the evolutionary structure levels below and therefore also contain all conflicts that rage between the levels. So is z. For example, sexuality (like many other biological expressions of life) is socially restricted through social shame, while sexuality is at the same time an instinct of human nature that the individual himself can hardly tame. At the same time his mental level is able to localize the pressures imposed on him by society, to examine their usefulness and to look for ways to circumvent them. Since every level is self-interested, the way out found by the spirit can torpedo current social regulations and lead to the collapse of previous social structures.

History of origin

Lila was created 17 years after the first work Zen and the art of maintaining a motorcycle . It was considered by the author to be the more significant of his two works.

expenditure

  • Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Bantam Books, 1991, ISBN 0-553-07873-9
  • Purple or an essay on morality. From the American by Hans Heinrich Wellmann

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Streitfeld: Zen and the Art of Pirsig. The Washington Post , October 21, 1991, accessed May 26, 2020.