dmb said to Marsha:
Part of the problem is that you define static patterns as ever-changing. That's
like defining stable to mean unstable. It's just plainly wrong. There is DQ and
there is sq and "ever-changing" is a good description of just one of them and
it isn't the latter. There is a 50-50 chance of getting that right but you blew
it.
Marsha replied:
Think about patterns. They are not individual independent things. They are
value events. Some patterns are repeated millions of times. Each event is
slight different dependent on an individual's unique history and the immediate
dynamic experience. When I state patterns are ever-changing that is what I
mean. The static event has a beginning, a middle and an end, and each static
event is different. They are ever-changing. Depending of the circumstances,
a pattern may be broad or tight. It can be so much more or so much less than a
dictionary definition, but SOM needs exact definition, intellect desires exact
definition, and they are related. This is why I understand the MoQ to be
beyond intellectual patterns, and like QP beyond common sense and beyond
language. I believe RMP to have given us the MoQ in an intellectual form
because it is all he had available, BUT he is pointing beyond what an
intellectual pattern can express.
dmb says:
Look, that's exactly what I was complaining about. You're describing static
quality in terms of "events" and as "ever-changing". But that's how Pirsig
characterizes dynamic quality. There is static and dynamic and you need BOTH.
There is the value of order and stability and then there is freedom and growth.
You're taking all the order and stability out of the MOQ and since the MOQ is
itself a set of static intellectual patterns, this destabilizes the meanings
and definitions that make up the MOQ. That's not really relativism. It's more
like intellectual vandalism.
DQ is rightly characterized as an event, a process, as the ongoing flux of
life. This is CONTRASTED with the static patterns of quality which are derived
from this cutting edge of experience. Static intellectual truth are
provisional. They evolve, sometimes quickly and sometimes over the course of
centuries. But that doesn't mean they are ever-changing. It just means they
evolve and develop. "Provisional" truths exists presently and function as
truths precisely because they are stable and ordered and they are open to
revision at some later time if and when such a revision is warranted. I mean,
to say truth is provisional does not mean that it's fluid or in flux. Static
concepts need a certain level of stability or they can't function as concepts.
That's why they're called STATIC patterns. They're ordered and stable and
finite. This is not a problem and is actually quite necessary. It's only a
problem is these stable tools become rigid and inflexible and not open to
revision.
Otherwise, intellectual static patterns are the most evolved, most open to
dynamic change and the most moral level of all. If you construe the MOQ in such
a way that this highest level of static quality is undermined and destabilized,
the cause of freedom and growth has also been undermined.
That's one reason why we need definitions and concepts and words to make sense
and add up. This is the highest species of static good, not something to be
undermined or demonized or conflated with the disease from which it suffers.
When Pirsig says that thinking takes you away from reality, he's saying that
static patterns take you away from DQ. He's saying there is a difference
between concepts and DQ, not that concepts are evil things to be gotten rid of.
He's just saying that concepts are derived from something too rich and thick
and overflowing and fluid to be captured. Concepts are taken from experience
the way a bucket of water can be taken from a continuously flowing river. It
doesn't represent the river so much as it isolates some small finite portion.
As the bucket's wall puts borders around a small part of the river, a concept
puts borders around a small portion of experience. The river and the bucket are
both full of water and so they are not ontologically distinct
. So it is with concepts. They are derived from quality and they are quality,
the difference being that one is dynamic and the other is static.
Static is good. Stale is bad. Dynamic is good. Degenerate is bad. It's about
balance, see, and your reading puts these two out of balance.
Oh, that's right. You don't care what I think.
Never mind.
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