Steve said to dmb:
I'm not saying that _all_ response to DQ is necessarily involuntary. I'm just
wondering if it _can_ be involuntary. If hopping off the hot stove is an
example of following DQ, and if we take "free will" to be captured in Pirsig's
claim that we are free to the extent that we follow DQ, then it seems that
"free will" is at least sometimes a misnomer in talking about human freedom
since it isn't always willed.
dmb says:
Okay. But I'm still saying that we can't rightly describe Dynamic responses as
unconscious or involuntary, not even in the case of the hot stove example. That
description construes the MOQ's freedom as an automatic physiological response,
as merely a reflex action.
I'd also point out that we cannot rightly impose a narrow or overly specific
definition of "will" when talking about the MOQ's of freedom. Pirsig is
attaching freedom to DQ, not the rational deliberations of the Cartesian self
or any like that. That would be asking the MOQ to answer to the very thing it
has already rejected.
Steve said:
I'm still not sure where you stand on the question at hand. Is hopping off a
hot stove as Pirsig described it in Lila a willed action or not?
dmb says:
The first time he brings up the hot stove example (Lila 66), he hasn't yet
introduced the distinction between static and Dynamic (Lila 115).
The first time he uses it, he is making a very important point. He is refuting
the traditional (SOM) empiricist's notion idea that morals and values aren't
real because they aren't empirically verifiable. Values, he says, "are the
ESSENCE of experience. Values are MORE empirical, in fact, than subjects and
objects." (Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig's) And he is describing the hot stove
experience in terms that reflect this attack on the old, positivistic
empiricism. He's making an important point about the distinction between
concepts (oaths) and reality (experience).
"This low 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. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone
who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least
ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths
to describe this low values, but the value will always come first, the oaths
second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not
follow.The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally
inherited blind spot here." ...It [low quality] is the primary empirical
reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later
intellectually constructed. (Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig's)
He brings up this example again after explaining static good and Dynamic good
by way of the Brujo story, the story of a Dynamic agent of evolution. "If you
asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he probably wouldn't
have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood what you were talking
about. He was just followings some vague sense of 'betterness' that he couldn't
have defined if he had wanted to." (Lila 114) "After many months of thinking
about it, he [Phaedrus] was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and
static good, which became the basic division of his emerging MOQ" (Lila 115)
"During the next few months that Phaedrus reflected he began to transpose the
static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly
unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier
example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of
Quality. When the person who sits on the hot stove first discovers his
how-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does
not... make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim perception of he knows not
what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought
[oaths] to explain the situation. A subject-obejct metaphysics presumes that
this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when
possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold
to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive an negative, even
the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. ...it would be the mysti
c students who would get off the stove first." (Lila 116)
Then, when we get to Pirsig's reformulation of free will and determinism, he
puts it in this same context, wherein "moral judgements are the fundamental
ground-stuff of the world." (Lila 156) Value goes all the way down so that "the
MOQ postulates that they've [inorganic pattens] done so [created life] because
it's 'better' and this definition of 'betterness' - this beginning response to
DQ - is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be
based." (Lila 157)
This is perfectly consistent with the way he describes biological evolution as
a series of "spur of the moment decisions". Since he is using the word
"decision" to describe the choices made by animals in general, talks about the
behavior of atoms in terms of preferences and choices and value and since he
even describes the amoeba's movement away from low quality situation in
contrast to the reasons it might give afterward if it could talk, I think it's
quite clear that Pirsig's notion of freedom and morality cannot rightly be
conceived as anything like the reflective will of a rational deliberator. It's
more like responses become more responsive and responsible as evolution
proceeds, the higher you go on the moral hierarchy. It's not conceptual or
intellectual or static but that's because this response is more immediate and
primary and in the living moment, not because it's unconscious or automatic.
It's about being attuned and aware and sensitive to the pre-reflective aesthe
tic charge of the situation, whether it be positive or negative. It's about
really Being There in the flux of life in a living, breathing, concrete way.
To the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality...
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