Ham said: This may be a silly question, and I know it's been discussed before, but I have always been confused about Pirsig's use of "static" for S/O patterns and "dynamic" for the Quality that supports them. And I suspect that I'm not alone in this confusion. I've been told that DQ is dynamic because it gives rise to patterns (or at least encompasses them), but that doesn't seem to properly describe the unchanging foundational Quality, or the fact that most patterns are experienced as changing or evolving in some away.
Steve replied: This is an interesting question. I don't think we should make too much of dynamic/static as changing versus staying the same. I think that in the phrase "static patterns of value" static is redundant, static just means patterned as in "analogues upon analogues." Dynamic means unpatterned but to just say that could confuse it with chaos. Dynamic quality isn't chaos but rather pure experience unfiltered through a web of analogues. dmb says: It might help to look at the difference between Ham's unchanging foundation and Steve's unfiltered experience. I think Ham's confusion is a consequence of trying to understand Dynamic Quality as some kind of foundational reality, as something that exists on its own apart from experience, as if DQ were a simple substitute for SOM's objective reality or Kant's things-in-themselves. But in the MOQ, experience IS reality and the terms "static" and "dynamic" both characterize experience. William James also used these terms to characterize experience. As he put it, experience is like the movements of a bird, full of flights and perchings. Dewey's work in art and aesthetics gets at this idea pretty well too. All three of these guys (Pirsig, James and Dewey) are radical empiricists and they're all looking closely and critically at SOM. It's no good trying to understand static and dynamic without first understanding that. Dewey's distinction between recognition and perception might be helpful here. For Dewey, "recognition" is something like static quality and "perception" is dynamic. "The difference between the two is immense", he says in his ART AS EXPERIENCE. "Recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely." "In recognition we fall back as upon a stereotype, upon some previously formed scheme. Some detail or arrangement of details serves as cue for bare identification. It suffices in recognition to apply this bare outline as a stencil to the present object". "Bare recognition is satisfied when a proper tag or label is attached, 'proper' signifying one that serves a purpose outside the act of recognition - as a salesman identifies wares by a sample." Sadly, says Dewey, these "non-esthetic" kinds of experience are so common and pervasive "that unconsciously they come to be taken as norms of all experience. Then, when the esthetic appears, it so sharply contrasts wi th the picture that has been formed of experience, that it is impossible to combine its special qualities with the features of the picture and the esthetic is given an outside place and status." Its worth pointing out that for Dewey the aesthetic experience is not confined to the fine arts. He talks about the aesthetic experience of a thinker and a moral actor, for example. Just as in the MOQ, any kind of experience could count as dynamic - hearing a new song, formulating a hypothesis, fixing a bike or getting your life turned upside down by a storm. In this case it refers to a high degree of engagement, a heightened sensitivity to whatever is being experienced. When "perception replaces bare recognition ...consciousness becomes fresh and alive". Dewey even uses words like "care" and "love" to characterize the flavor and intensity of involvement that this entails. And interestingly, he says that the artist is guided by unifying "quality" that is neither capricious nor routine. The artist or thinker selects and shapes her material through the entire process on the basis this quality, by "whatever carries the idea forward". In fact, he says, this level of engagement is always felt as "emotional and guided by purpose". This feeling is so inherent and integral to the aesthetic experience, says Dewey, that "there is, therefore, no such thing in perception as seeing or hearing PLUS emotion". He's careful to spell out that this is not "emotion" in the conventional sense. I think he's talking about what Pirsig would call "quality" or "value". As Dewey points out, the dynamic has given it "an outside place and status". So we hardly know what to call it or how to talk about it. But these guys put it at the center of things, despite our culture's blind spot to it. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
