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The historical significance of urban centers
The impact of cultural and technological advances
The role of urban centers in shaping society
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991) is a continuation of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Phaedrus, the author's alter ego, spends his days on a boat working on philosophy. He meets Lila in a bar, has a one-night stand with her. A common friend challenges Phaedrus to explain why a woman like Lila has value.
This question and the events that follow serve as the background for Pirsing to describe The Metaphysics of Quality as a theory of reality: incorporating Sophism, East Asian & indigenous American philosophy.
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Dynamic quality cannot be defined. It can only be understood intellectually through the use of analogy.
When an aspect of Quality becomes repeated, it becomes static. Pirsig defines 'Static quality' patterns as everything which can be defined.
Ev...
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Represents a collection of the most general statements of the hierarchy of thought. What Aristotel called the first philosophy. It deals with questions like:
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Pirsig postulates that everything that exists can be assumed to be a value or quality. "Quality" or "value" cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it, namely due to the fact that quality (as Pirsig explicitly defines it) exists always a...
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In the book, the main character had his ideas written down on slips of paper. As he recalls "the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember. It was to help him forget it."
The analogy he used is that of a 🍵 tea cup. To pour new tea you have to get rid of old te...
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Without Dynamic Quality, the organism cannot grow.
Without Static Quality, the organism cannot last.
Both are needed.
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Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value.
Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to ...
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Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new.
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Pirsig then divides static quality into inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, in ascending order of morality (based on evolutionary order):
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