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.
Ham adds: Except for your amazing news that "James and Dewey are ...looking closely and critically at SOM" (I assume from DQ Heaven), this comparison is pretty much on target. It might be helpful to mention that I reserve "existence" for experiential (objective) reality, assuming that what does not exist (Essence) simply "IS". In existential terms, Essence "is absolutely". Eckhart's concept of God was "perfect Is-ness". Everything else is the "appearance of being" derived from the reduction (negation) of Essence. (It is this concept, which is not part of Pirsig's metaphysics, for which I am accused of "theism".) Thus, as regards your third sentence, I would say that, in Essentialism, experience is Value (or value-sensibility) transformed by the intellect into discrete phenomena distributed in space/time. I refer to such phenomena as "essents" to distinguish differentiated objects and events from the undifferentiated Whole. Localization of objectivized value is the function of the brain, which is derived like everything else in existence from the primary Sensibility/Otherness dichotomy. (Incidentally, I did not model my ontology after James, Dewey, or Pirsig, and accept no responsibility for any comparisons made with their ideas.) Thanks for the analysis, David. --Ham 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/
