Hi Matt, I like the "laundry list" idea. Anything too systematic or definitive would destroy it (the ineffable DQ), but archetypical examples would be useful.
(PS - Personally, I see it something like "potential" for significant outcomes, rather than a decided outcome or defined outcomes to choose between - avoiding those "known" static patterns ahead of time, as you put it. Suspension of belief / disbelief. BTW - since read Iain McGilchrist I can't help but see left vs right brain behaviour in all of this. Suppressing the left-brain to give the right-brain a chance.) Ian On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 > 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
