dmb said: Yes, Krimel, DQ has a negative face. Chaos and confusion and degeneracy ensues when things are too dynamic. ...This negative aspect of DQ has been part of the MOQ since the day it was published. Sitting on hot stoves is no picnic, for example.
Krimel replied: Unbelievably, dmb and I seem to have found some common ground. Before it turns to quicksand, who will join us in admitting that DQ is not always "Good" or even "good"? dmb says: If DQ is not always good and does have a negative face, we can get at the idea of "betterness". All these things go together, after all, simply because betterness depends of knowing what's good and what's not so good. As in the hot stove example, the negative quality of the situation is immediately felt and there is immediate movement to address that negative situation. In that sense, the movement toward betterness is very basic and spontaneous. It is an uncalculated response based on the immediately felt quality of the situation. It's useful to think of James's description of "pure" experience here. He says it is a, "plain, unqualified actuality, a simple THAT, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought". Compare that to Pirsig's language in the hot stove example, where he says any person will verify that, "he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the VALUE of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is not a judgment about experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. ...This value is more immediate, more directly sensed that any 'self' or any 'object' to which it might be later assigned. It is more REAL than the stove. ...It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed." Now both of these descriptions portray the cutting edge of experience as pre-intellec tual, as prior to cognitive assessments, and yet the overall quality of the situation is certain, positive or negative as the case my be, and spontaneously guides our response in such a way that it can be justified in conceptual terms after the fact. And guys like Pirsig and Dewey talk about the quality of the whole "situation" because the distinction between the subject's burning butt and the temperature of the metal object which is said to be the cause of that burning has not yet entered into it. This example, of course, is meant to show how DQ is at the front edge of all experience. It's what you know in direct everyday experience, before you even know that you know it. Paradoxically, this immediate sense of quality exists even at the front edge of thought itself. Ideas have an immediately felt quality even before we can put it in conceptual terms, before we can find static, post hoc reasons to justify that quality. Thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Get more out of the Web. Learn 10 hidden secrets of Windows Live. http://windowslive.com/connect/post/jamiethomson.spaces.live.com-Blog-cns!550F681DAD532637!5295.entry?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_domore_092008 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/
