Krimel asked:
Where does Pirsig say that the pursuit of knowledge takes us away from Dynamic
Quality?
dmb says:
Pirsig says many times and in many ways that DQ can't be defined intellectually
and that reality is fundamentally dynamic. He's not saying that education is
evil or that science is naughty. He more or less opens and closes Lila with
this intellectual-mystical distinction. Its one of the major themes in both
books, even before DQ was invented. In fact, some of the names for DQ describe
it in terms of a negative relationship to intellect; pre-intellectual
experience, pre-linguistic experience, undifferentiated experience, pure
experience, etc..
“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” (LILA, page 63).
“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” (LILA 63).
“Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can
say good-bye 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" (LILA 64).
"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus 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” (LILA 64).
I'd also point out that this is exactly where mysticism meets radical
empiricism...
“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy …was his radical
empiricism. By this he meant that subject and objects are not the starting
points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts
derived from something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate
flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of
reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject
and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make
them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical of psychical: it
logically precedes this distinction” (LILA 365).
“What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James’ pragmatism and his radical
empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects
spring is values. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical
empiricism into a single fabric. Value, that pragmatic test of truth, is also
the primary empirical experience, The Metaphysics of Quality says pure
experience is value. …Value is at the very front of the empirical procession”
(LILA 365).
“The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth
century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism,
which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a
social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday
experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the
Metaphysics of Quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at
experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism
has not been able to cope with” (LILA 366).
I'm also fond of the quotes on the difference between mystical experience and
the religious clap trap that grows up around it, which makes the same basic
point about eating the menu.
In any case, its safe to say that Quality plays a central role in Pirsig's
thinking and so you've asked one of the key questions.
There's one more point to add. It's a negative one. I'm pretty sure that Pirsig
never said that DQ is the stuff that "wiggles".
Thanks,
dmb
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