On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Dan Glover <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Dan, Thank you for your comments. I will present a few at the bottom.
> Hi Mary > > "After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of > two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic > division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality. > > "It certainly felt right. Not subject and object but static and > Dynamic is the basic division of reality. 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. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of > reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. > It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It > contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only > perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static > quality itself-any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to > contain and kill the ongoing free force of life. > > "Static quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake > of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a > component of memory. Good is conformity to an established pattern of > fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical. Static > morality is full of heroes and villains, loves and hatreds, carrots > and sticks. Its values don't change by themselves. Unless they are > altered by Dynamic Quality they say the same thing year after year. > Sometimes they say it more loudly, sometimes more softly, but the > message is always the same." [LILA] > > Dan comments: > > I see nothing here about permanence, absolute, or the truly static. In > fact, RMP goes to great pains throughout LILA explaining how both > Dynamic and static are needed. Experience is seen as synonymous with > Dynamic Quality. Static quality is the memory of that Dynamic > experience. > > I am unsure why, but as long as John has been here he's been seemingly > intent on discrediting the work of Robert Pirsig without showing any > sense that he actually understands that work. He mocked RMP's > Copleston annotations. Maybe to prove he was more intelligent than > RMP? He insisted on introducing Royce's Absolute as equivalent to > Dynamic Quality when it clearly isn't by any stretch. > > I like John so please don't take this as mean-spirited. I do tend to > get irritated though that as intelligent as he is he just doesn't seem > to get it. But maybe that's his game. Maybe I am just being played. > Who knows? > > Thank you, > > Dan [Mark] I like what you said, Dan, apart from the disparaging of Pirsig part. That gets kind of old after a while. In my opinion, the division between static and dynamic is presented to convey a separation between what appears to be, and what lies beneath. This is discussed at great length in the Vedic scriptures, in Buddhism (including Zen), and in Taoism. Of course Christianity touches on this as well in the Trinity. What perhaps differs is the rhetoric which distinguishes these on a temporal basis; if not temporal, then through movement. If not either of these, then we could be speaking of some kind of force as compared to that which the force is acting on. This is where the difficulty in appreciating the rhetoric may come in. As presented by John, the term static depends on what time frame we are speaking of. If instead we use the movement analogy, it would depend on a reference point. In this latter case, dynamic could be more still than static. The analogy in physics of separating matter from forces may be useful. A force can only be measured through the behavior of matter, there is no other reference for a force. Getting a little more simple, we can ask whether mass creates gravity or gravity creates mass. In such a case, we are looking for a creator, as Ham would say. Using the paragraph that Dan presents above, the gravity would create the mass, and mass is simply a result. This would be akin to saying that static quality is a product of dynamic quality. However, in such a case I would not see static quality as being the nemesis of dynamic quality, but its children. So, from an intuitive perspective, how do we apply this? Are the static and dynamic really a Yin Yang dialectic? One way that I see of doing this, is to view objects and concepts and emotions as being an expression of Quality. Such things cannot encompass Quality, in the same way that mass does not encompass gravity. Switching the viewpoint around, I could say that mass expresses gravity in the same way that the sun expresses sunlight. This does not mean that sunlight is the sun, in the same way that the wind is not air, but its expression. So, the question would be then, why does Pirsig choose to call this static thing quality? This may be due to the original premise that Quality can be rhetorically divided into a static and a dynamic component, so both must be quality. Now, I know that Ham has a problem with this, so instead I will rely on the analogy from physics, that of energy. According to Einstein, we can create a mathematical analogy where energy and mass are the same thing, thus all is energy (or mass I guess). It is important, however, to distinguish between an analogy from physics and one from metaphysics, since both come from different places. If we view Quality as some kind of energy, or some force/matter entity, then the analogy is lacking. The only way that I see of tackling Quality, is from the spiritual perspective, where we imagine good and bad angels, or some like analogy. This may be somewhat difficult for the West to do, since we immediately think of the material. Since I am going long here, I will leave it at that. Cheers, Mark > 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/md/archives.html > 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/md/archives.html
