David Swift said to Andre: ...If we can't define Quality, there must be a reason. Have you guys already discussed this to death? Can you give me some dates in the archives? ...Being new here I naturally want to start at definitions, can you help with references or explanations?
dmb says: Yea, the undefinable nature of Dynamic Quality has been discussed here at length and it can be found throughout Pirsig's books. Chapter 9 of Lila speaks to this, for example. "When A. N. Whitehead wrote that 'mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language.' he was writing about Dynamic Quality. DQ is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new". This is also the chapter where he illustrates this with the hot stove example. The idea is to show how DQ is not some speculative metaphysical entity but rather refers to actual experience. In that sense, we all already know it from experience. And yet it isn't something we can define. Definitions and concepts are static and follow from DQ. "When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the font edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, 'This stove is hot,' and then make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation." The thing to notice here is that these descriptions tell us WHY we can't define it. It is PRE-intellectual, too obscure for existing LANGUAGE. But because this is a category of actual experience, DQ is also called the primary empirical reality. It's the first thing you know and so it's ahead of definition, prior to the conceptualizations and distinctions we later assign to the situation. DQ is also too thick and rich for words and concepts so that, in some sense, definitions are what we use to reduce experience to manageable proportions. And this is right where the mysticism fits in. In chapter 5 he explains that philosophical mystics throughout history "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. The Native American church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it..." The pre-intellectual nature of DQ can also be seen in the radical empiricism of William James, which Pirsig had arrived at independently, was recognized by a reviewer of ZAMM and which Pirsig adopts in Lila, explicitly in chapter 29. There he quotes James saying that this primary empirical reality is 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. Notice again how concepts follow from a more fundamental and immediate experience. "In this basic flux of experience," Pirsig writes, "the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, [or hot stove and burning ass] have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction". In this sense, DQ is nothingness but not in the sense that reality is entirely absent. Instead, it is experience as directly known, prior to the divisions and distinctions imposed by our definitions and conceptualizations. Pure experience is undifferentiated, undivided experience while words and ideas chop reality into the ten thousand things, the static reality of culture, language and world view. In that sense, DQ is no-thing-ness. Even so-called physical things are discrete entities, with distinct borders, which can be distinguished form every thing that it is not and so in a very basic verbal sense, even rocks and trees are conceptual and depend upon agreed cultural definitions. DQ is pre-verbal and pre-intellectual in the sense that not even these basic perceptions are among the static quality that follows from the primary empirical reality. So when you absolutely need a definition, define it as undefinable. And if somebody demands to know why it's undefinable, tell them it's because the term refers to the kind of experience that comes in the moment before definitions. It's the reality you know before you have time to think about it. It's the reason you jump off the hot stove even before you can even think 'hot stove' or 'jump off'. "Phaedrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static intellectual attachments of the past." Thanks,dmb _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_howitworks_022009 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/
