Greetings, Matt --
[Matt to Steve on May 15]:
... I'm not sure that anybody really has read "pre-intellectual"
as "social/bio/inorganic." Thinking about it that way, however,
does tend to make us face what exactly we mean by DQ.
Pirsig did not say "DQ is pre-static experience." There may
or may not be an important reason behind this. However,
it does cause us to face up to the idea of what it means to be,
say, pre-subatomic particles. ...
But what could it mean to be pre-electrons? We might be
able to extend our understanding of "pre-" to "pre-social,"
getting back to biological instincts, but pre-lightwaves?
What does it mean to be in touch with something that is
before any "thing"? Why is it we don't melt away when
this happens? How come we only talk about the
nothingness of our culturally constructed "self" rather
than the brief, or permanent, obliteration of our bodies?
Why are descriptions of enlightenment not accompanied
by on-looker reports of how the person faded away
before their eyes?
Well stated, as usual Matt, and the questions you pose are worthy of
discussion.
As a follower of this forum with no special reason to patronize the Quality
thesis,
I'd like to address two of the issues you've raised.
Although Pirsig did not say "DQ is pre-static experience," he did call
Quality
"the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" and he equated it with "pure
experience".
Perhaps the reason he didn't posit this pure experience specifically as
"dynamic"
is that it would contaminate the "unpatterned" nature of his primary
reality.
As for "what it means to be" something other than human, such as
a sub-atomic particle or lightwave, I think it's important to realize
that "being" is not intrinsic to self-awareness--even in "human beings".
Organic being is a contingency of cognizant life, not its essence.
We borrow beingness from an external reality in order to exist
as an individuated self with the capacity to "be-aware".
There is no rational justification (outside of fantasy) for imputing
awareness to inanimate objects. This is where the Quality (value)
thesis falls apart, in my opinion.
Awareness of Quality or Value is the core self of man. Although I'm
willing to accept human value-sensibility as "pre-intellectual",
it happen to
agree with Pirsig jat
In fact,
no.
Matt said:
If you're not saying this above, Steve, you come close to
using this formula in the third paragraph: "knowledge-that
= intellectual know-how".
Steve said:
What I was trying to set up was knowledge-that as the
static aspect intellect and knowledge-how as the dynamic
aspect of intellect. By analogy, on the biological level, the
static aspect is DNA encoding while the dynamic aspect is
biological know-how.
Matt:
Hunh. I guess I would need to know what, exactly,
intellectual know-how is, as distinguished from
knowing-that. For instance, in your analogy, I have no
sense of what "biological know-how" stands for. Static
latching is DNA encoding, dymanic bio is _____. You
gestured, but I don't know what the gesture was to.
Similarly, I would prefer propositional knowing-that to be
equated to a "knowing-how-to-use-sentences." I don't
know what it means to distinguish the two as different
aspects. I have a feeling, though, that if one approached
the philosophy of language with the distinction, it would
reintroduce thickets we don't want (like Saussure's
synchronic/diachronic distinction, which produces his talk
about "conventional arbitrariness" that has infected
literary theorists to this day, and constantly baits them
for relativism charges).
Steve said:
I would say that knowledge-how is DQ and knowledge-that
is the intellectual sq static latching of DQ
Matt:
So: intellectual know-how might be "using sentences" and
latching knowing-thats might be "true sentences"?
The work of Robert Brandom--which I take to be a
"rhetoric all the way down" philosophy of language--suggests
that the inferential pathways between sentences, which is
to say the network that supports a sentence's
taking-to-be-true, is never static, but always in use. We
might say that to truly take the semantic, non-epistemic
turn with respect to truth, one needs to turn in all notions
of "static" with respect to lifeforms: a latch is less a latch
than a rubberband. Inferential moves between sentences
are always potentially in flux. The word "true" is static and
absolute with respect to how it functions in a language,
but that tells you nothing about which sentences are true,
which is to say, which ones to latch.
Better than rubberband even is Quine's self as a web of
belief. Web is nice because if we visualize "life" as instead
of a river, but an open space of air with a nice breeze
blowing through, picture the web in that space, unattached,
and how it undulates in the breeze, maintaining a unity, but
not static, always flexing. That's the picture of the
linguistic self that happens in post-pragmatic philosophy of
language I think. And with this picture, I think we need a
revised notion of what "static" could mean. For when you
say, "the give and take between dynamic and static," what
could that mean if, strictly speaking, "dynamic" is a stand-in
for "no-thing"? And think about "give and take"--isn't _that_
the dynamism?
I think it might be better in general to drop the notion of
"static" entirely. What works better for Pirsig's purposes is
a "pattern-pattern" tension, with the undulating tension
being the dynamic bit. We can isolate patterns, but the
purpose of isolation will always be directed towards
"where's the tension here?" Finding the tension will be
finding the dynamism, finding the sweet spot that can be
broken. Mark/Squonk liked to talk about coherence, but I
think that conceptualizes the area in the wrong way.
Your yin/yang reference, and the non-existence of a
dynamic or static "in and of itself" is, I think, spot on, but
once we reach that point, I think it might be time to hand
in our "static" cards. Dynamic Quality and patterned
quality. That's all we need.
Matt
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