Hi Dave,
Dave said:
Leaving aside my particular accusations for a moment, wouldn't you
agree that misconstruing or misunderstanding a thinker's central term
will almost certainly preclude the possibility of producing any good
interpretations? And even if I agreed that you have a much more
liberal sense of what counts as a legitimate translation, wouldn't you
still agree that there is a limit so that some translations are not
legitimate? And how would it work to say freedom is following
compliments we pay to sentences? I just don't see how to construe
DQ that way and still make sense of the MOQ in general or, for
example, the way it reformulates determinism and freedom.
Matt:
On the first question: "preclude" is not the word I would use. (I've
read too much Harold Bloom to think that good interpretations aren't
the paring away of extraneous stuff in earlier thinkers.) However,
I'm not conceding it shouldn't be possible to try and imagine the
situational-intentions of the thinker in question through enough to
get what he or she thought they were doing. It's the beginning of
interpretation in close reading and biographical/intellectual history,
for sure (and that for the second question). And, from my
perspective, Steve's trying to reboot from the ground floor
understanding of just what Dynamic Quality means by taking
seriously Pirsig's formulation of what freedom as "following DQ"
means. I'm not sure what that means either, and none of the
usual understandings of DQ seems to satisfy me either. That
suggests that no one has quite gotten the whole of what Pirsig
meant by "Dynamic Quality," and that we've all be half-assin' for a
while.
But that's me, and I have no ability to follow through on forwarding
a chain of thought to repair distances and offer a whole ass or
anything. But it seems to me that Steve, whether or not his
understanding of DQ wins the day or not, is pressing an important
concern, relative to getting Pirsig right, that has not been
satisfactorily inquired into about what Pirsig means by Dynamic
Quality. You keep jumping to a conclusion about Steve's overall
understanding of Pirsig that seems like bad inquiry-manners. It'd be
like telling Einstein that he was full of shit for not immediately
knowing what the "c" stood for. Inquiry and processing
thought-chains takes time, and you're doing a disservice by "closing
the book," as it were, in what seems to me a too rapid and dogmatic
fashion. That doesn't mean stop pressing back: it just means you're
skipping down to the same bottom of the spreadsheet in every post,
rather than (what seems to me the more promising mode of
engagement) limiting yourself more often than not to the local
disagreement (rather than the global one). Everyone knows what is
at the bottom of your spreadsheet. But the bottom is built out of
what happens at the top, and you might be too restless to get to the
bottom and missing opportunities to get the top right.
On the third, Pirsig question ("freedom as following a compliment"):
that's not what Steve meant, but it's a fair question to ask about
what Steve (or I) is intending to do with that pithy, counter-intuitive
slogan. All we need to do is differentiate different senses in which
Pirsig uses DQ. I once outlined a project for myself to itemize them,
but I peeterd out. The hypothesis is that Pirsig did not mean one
uniform, rigid thing by DQ, but that it served a number of functions
in different contexts (though its function in different contexts will
likely have a similar quality, if you will). The insight comes from
Pirsig, as he describes, e.g., sex as DQ in the biological context and
that first time you heard that one awesome song that one time, in
the context of music. In the context of wanting help in practical
inferences, DQ plays the role of a compliment (so this theory goes),
because it is entirely antithetical to the idea of DQ to say that you
static-pattern-"know" ahead of time that X is better and not
degenerate. The indeterminacy of DQ thesis creates this role for
DQ.
What this local creation of "one use of DQ" from Pirsig cries out for
is a systematic supplementation of a laundry list of uses, thereby
moving us forward in "what Pirsig means." I have not the will power
or time to do this myself, but it would the larger stage to perform on
in order to isolate what a thinker's central term really meant to the
thinker. It would be a boon for every Pirsigian, not just one
interpretation or another's.
Matt
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