John said to Andre:
I take issue with you in the same way I take issue with Marsha. ...I dispute
you both concerning what I see as a distinction between unknowable and
indefinable. ...Many things cannot be defined, and yet they can be known. Love
for instance. UFO's, ghosts, the wind, spirit. We have terms for many known
phenomena in human experience that we cannot fully define. As I pointed out to
Marsha, the very basic tenet of the MoQ is that while Quality cannot be
defined, you do know what it is. ...I think perhaps my disagreement with you
(and Marsha) might very well hinge upon our various semantic distinctions of
"known" and "defined". So let me make my position perfectly clear. Defined
refers to boundaries. When something is defined, we know where it starts and
we know where it stops. Known however can refer to things that we can't
define, but yet we realize in some nebulous way. You must admit this, or
Pirsig's key point - you can't define Quality but you can know it - is just
completely ridiculous.
dmb says:
I'd make a few qualifications but mostly I agree with John.
Dynamic Quality is "known" in the sense that it is directly lived and felt in
experience. Pirsig calls it is the primary empirical reality, direct everyday
reality, the immediate flux of life and other terms that indicate a basic
familiarity. In German and other languages they have two different versions of
the term "know" to distinguish between knowing in this sense and "knowing" in
the verbal, conceptual sense of the word. There is also a related distinction
between knowing-how and knowing-that, which is basically the difference between
skill and knowledge.
I don't think this has anything to do with UFOs, ghosts or spirit, however.
Some words and concepts are very rich in meaning and have many definitions and
some ideas are vague and quasi-fictional. But DQ isn't like that. Lots of words
are real fuzzy and flexible, words like "love" and "religion" and "justice".
But DQ isn't like that either. The idea, I think, is that directly lived
experience itself can never be captured by words and concepts. As James would
say, the flux of life to too rich and overflowing, too complex and abundant to
ever be fully described or conceptualized. This, I think, describes the
relationship between DQ and sq, between experience and concepts, between life
and words. We KNOW both of them and the latter operates in relation the former.
The common assertion they make, James and Pirisg, is that ideas are always
secondary and subservient, which is to say ideas are derived from experience
and their purpose is to serve life.
"Quality doesn't have to be defined.... Quality is direct experience
independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible,
undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but
a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible,
definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics.....A 'Metaphysics of
Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity."
“... quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical
abstraction. It is an experience: It is not a judgment about an experience. It
is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. ... This
value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self' or any "object"
to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. ... It is
the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and
oaths and self are later intellectually constructed."
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