I'm not sure who said to dmb:
If static latches are never-changing, somebody should be able to name one.
...Nothing we can name is permanent, ergo 'ever changing' is completely
correct. Maybe some things just take longer to change than others so that they
appear to be permanent? Permanence is an illusion just like subjects and
objects are an illusion.
dmb says:
The problem with this complaint is that nobody said that static patterns are
never-changing or permanent. From the time of Plato and up until Einstein, thee
Truth and the universe was believed to be eternal and permanent. That is not at
all what Pirsig means by static patterns. Mountains and the sun are stable
enough that we can climb mountains and plant crops each year but that doesn't
mean they'll last forever. Stars are born and they die. Mountains rise and
erode away. Words and concepts evolve over time. Static quality is the quality
of order and stability. The meaning of our terms is not eternal but that
doesn't mean they are ever-changing because if they were it wouldn't be
possible for this sentence to have any meaning to anyone. Truths are not
ever-changing. They are provisional and plural. They work until they don't
anymore, until something better comes along. That's static latching; the
process of trading an old truth in for a new one. Static patterns preserve evolu
tionary advances and they become the platform for future advances. Click,
click, click. That's static latching.
To say that static patterns are ever-changing is to say there is no stability
and all the evolutionary advances just slide right back down. To treat static
quality as if it were dynamic is to say "Hurray!" for devolution, degeneration,
and destruction.
Again, "static" does NOT mean eternally fixed and permanent. It just means
"stable" or "enduring". It's the force that preserves the various species of
the good. You won't live forever but you hope that you lungs, heart and liver
remain in tact for a few decades. The stability of yourself as an organism is
absolutely necessary to live. Social level static patterns provide a different
kind of stability, obviously, but their dissolution would be a disaster too.
And so it is with philosophical concepts. New ideas come along all the time and
some of them stick. But that evolutionary movement wouldn't be possible without
a great deal of stability from which to launch a new idea.
Pirsig's artful mechanic has to care, has to have a feel for the work and he
has to be open to dynamic solutions when he's really stuck, for example, but he
simply cannot function at all without also mastering a huge set of static
patterns. The parts of the bike and tools he uses have to be made and handled
with great precision. Without this stability the machine would fly apart and
there could be no cross-country road trips. And this bike is a metaphor for any
self-consistent system of rationality and he says the real bike you're working
on is yourself. The artful mechanic isn't just the one who recognizes the
symptoms of when his engine is running to rich or lean, he also knows when his
head and heart and hands aren't working together properly and recognizes the
symptoms when his thoughts are too this or that. He handles words and concepts
with the respect and precision they demand. I mean, artful bike repair is a
metaphor for the way we ought to take care of what we feel a
nd think and believe. Those are the static patterns we're working on here, as
opposed to the much simpler task of fitting together pieces of inter-related
metal parts.
To say that static patterns are ever-changing is to say that we can built a
motorcycle out of butter and steam. That'll never work and it makes a big mess
too.
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