Ham said: With all due respect to Pirsig, he has presented us with a conundrum. He suggests a term for the fundamental metaphysical reality that, by his own admission, cannot -- indeed, MUST not -- be defined, although it is existentially understood to be man's sense of the relative value, significance or worth of an experience.
dmb says:I posted quite a lot about why Dynamic Quality can't be defined earlier today. As you'll be able to see from that, hopefully, it is a mischaracterization to call DQ "the fundamental metaphysical reality". It's not quite right to think of it as "man's sense" either. Pirsig's own phrase, "the primary empirical reality" characterizes it pretty well. But calling it a "fundamental metaphysical reality" gives it an a priori, ontological status, a claim that is avoided by calling it an empirical reality. To put it in the simplest terms, DQ is experience itself, an event, and not a thing. This empirical event is characterized as primary because it is the first and most basic kind of experience, the cutting edge of every moment. This is why it can't be defined. It's what you know ahead of definitions. And finally, it can't rightly be understood as limited to man's sense of value because DQ is the force by which we evolved, predates us by forever, and extends to the experience of every living creature and beyond. See, the MOQ is radically empirical. It says experience is reality. This is not to say that reality is the thing we experience or that it is encountered in experience. I mean, the primary empirical reality has to be understood outside of the subject-object framework. _________________________________________________________________ It’s the same Hotmail®. If by “same” you mean up to 70% faster. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_AE_Same_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/
