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? David Swift (DS) says: Thanks David Buchanan (DB). for the tour. It's really useful to know where you guys are and are not drawing from. I'm interjecting some comments below between your references as a response. But overall I wonder if you are not philosophizing instead of doing philosophy. I would rather talk about our direct experiences and try to understand what they are. 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. DS says: Pirsig says that Whitehead was talking about DQ, Whitehead only says that he doesn't have words to describe his experience. Others (Hobbes, Hume, Locke and Kant) have had non or pre-verbal experiences and they didn't describe them as DQ. It feels like Pirsig's experience may have been cut to fit his MoQ. dmb: 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. DS says: He may not know what gets him off the stove but I suggest it's the feeling of pain. Science has names for all the receptors in the skin and has traced a nerve path from pain receptor to muscles that doesn't go by way of the brain. dmb: 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". DS says: I hear you but I'm not necessarily buying. The way I see it there are two language levels: the feeling level of direct experience (Pirsig calls DQ) and the words as symbols for feelings that verbalizers use when reflecting on past experience (SQ). The feeling level used by animals and pre or non verbal humans (read babies and primitives) is preverbal but not necessarily preintellectual. We have no way of knowing and it would be arrogant to suggest that nonverbal people are also bereft of intellect. dmb: 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. DS: While I agree that "words and ideas chop ." it does not necessarily follow that pure experience is undifferentiated. I experience non verbal sights and sounds and can still tell the difference between them. dmb: 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. DS: In my experience all experience comes before verbalization. dmb: 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 DS: No, thank you. It's useful to know where you're coming from, but way too much unquestioned quoting and not enough what's he talking about for me. Again, it seems to me that Pirsig's experience has been tailored to his MoQ. If you're curious about where I'm coming from: http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/9781847184047-sample.pdf Page 1 of the Introduction will tell you why I'm here. 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/
