23 : What is Metaphysics?

These next few selections are from Robert Pirsig’s follow up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila that came about about 15 years later. It took me a while to read this second book but when I did, I wish I’d read it earlier. We’re still laying down the foundation for our pyramid of philosophy, and these are some crucial limestone blocks. Into the Mystics we go.

Metaphysics is what Aristotle called the First Philosophy. It's a collection of the most general statements of a hierarchical structure of thought. On one of his slips he had copied a definition of it as 'that part of philosophy which deals with the nature and structure of reality.' It asks such questions as, 'Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our consciousness of it? Is reality ultimately reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially spiritual or material? Is the universe intelligible and orderly or incomprehensible and chaotic?'

You might think from this primary status of metaphysics that everyone would take its existence and value for granted, but this is definitely not so. Even though it has been a central part of philosophy since Ancient Greek times it is not a universally approved field of knowledge.

It has two kinds of opponents.

The first are the philosophers of science, most particularly the group known as logical positivists, who say that only the natural sciences can legitimately investigate the nature of reality, and that metaphysics is simply a collection of unprovable assertions that are unnecessary to the scientific observation of reality. For a true understanding of reality, metaphysics is too 'mystical.' This is clearly the group with which Franz Boas, and because of him modern American anthropology, belongs.

The second group of opponents are the mystics. The term mystic is sometimes confused with 'occult' or 'supernatural' and with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past. This mysticism, Dusenberry thought, is the absolute center of traditional Indian life, and as Boas had made clear, it is absolutely outside the domain of positivistic science and any anthropology that adheres to it.

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too 'scientific.' Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food.

Phaedrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located.

Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.

It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or 'zero,' or 'space' for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with 'nothing.' 'Zero' and 'space' are complex relationships of 'somethingness.' If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.

What made all this so formidable to Phædrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times.

A part of it said, 'Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but trouble. You're just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going to make ten-thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who've already said reality is something else.'

The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, 'Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting.' This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.

But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born — and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.

- from Lila by Robert Pirsig