Ian, Dave,
Ian said:
I hadn't realized the blank page idea had come from Third Wave
Dave. I like it as an expression of DQ - I have tended to refer to it as
"pure potential" - in the blank-slate / tabula-rasa sense (an old idea
I picked up from Pinker).
Matt:
I'm not sure where the blank page analogy for DQ ultimately derives
from (whether, for example, Dave T. had picked it up from someone
else) or when, but Dave T. suggested it on Sept. 11 in this thread
based on Pirsig's SODV paper. I can't remember if I had been
specifically thinking about the SODV paper version of DQ when I was
thinking about whether or not a full description of DQ's relationship
to the picture of static patterns I was filling out would affect that
picture (this was on 9/10), but Dave T.'s post expressed very well
and in the same vocabulary what it should've been had I tried to
include it. (And Dave is correct in assuming that I have very little
truck with pre-Kantian empiricist versions of tabula rasa, though
there are ways of domesticating the metaphor. And in this sense,
I have suspicions about Pinker's attempt, though without very much
experience with him. In regards to Dave's opening remarks about
the bad connotations of "blank," for myself, I cannot help but think
of the good connotations associated with Eastern notions of
"no-mind" or "beginner's mind.")
In what follows, I'd like to try to again explain the relevance of the
metaphysical slogan "we don't _have_ static patterns, we _are_
static patterns" as a way of meeting Dave's objections. I modulated
SQ in the expression to "standards" as a way of expressing the
first-person point of view. The slogan expresses the fact that we do
not _have_ the acculturation of our upbringings, but we rather _are_
that acculturation--which includes then everything we've learned
about what and how to value. This I was simply calling "standards."
In the version of the conceptual story that I'd like to tell (which I'm
pretty sure marks the beginning of what Dave finds contentious and
wrong-headed, but I'm still not convinced of), we look out at the
world through these static patterns (think of the glasses analogy).
>From the _third-person_ point of view, the metaphysical position of
explaining how everything fits together in a coherent vision of reality
(e.g., Quality divided into SQ/DQ, then SQ divided into four
compartments, etc., etc.), it appears as though a person could
choose to either follow static patterns or Dynamic Quality. But this
is, I think, a mistake, a misleading practical suggestion based on a
misunderstanding of just what the metaphysics means. This is the
importance of the slogan, for it clarifies what it means to _be_ in the
first-person mode attempting to choose courses of action. What it
means is to have one's glasses on--one can't stand to the side of
those glasses and see _just what is_ the DQ choice, and then choose
it. One cannot _choose_ to "freshly see," it is something that just
happens. (Dave uses the vocabulary of "force" in his final
paragraph's description, but I'm not sure there is an important
difference on the scale of choosing what we are practically to do, as
both "force" and "just happens" suggest they are both, in important
ways, outside of one's control.) There is no sure-fire route to
choosing DQ--that's the lesson of the indeterminacy of
DQ/degeneracy thesis.
In this fuller version of the picture of static patterns and DQ, then,
what I would like to say is that the leading edge of experience (DQ)
is at the very edge of those acculturated glasses. However, we have
no independent access to that leading edge except _through_ the
glasses: one cannot go around the glasses (I am here disbarring
what Pirsig extrapolates from this metaphor in Lila: that it is possible
to take the glasses off--an even fuller version of this picture would
explain why).* Further, since I take the leading edge metaphor to be
an epistemological description of access, what it has access to is the
entire world, and so I feel willing and free to call this whole world by
Dave's appropriated Deweyan version of DQ: "infinitely complex
situational whole." (By "free" I mean that I do not see what in my
philosophical positioning would make such an agreement with Dewey
incompatible with my positioning.) We are always in contact with it,
but it is through the glasses. So what is a DQ experience on this
model? I would render it as a small hole in the glasses, a crack in
them that exposes the non-glassed world to the eye (there's a way,
I think, of extrapolating this metaphor carefully at this point to include
Emerson's "dilated eye" into it, though I shall pass over it). It is this
fragment of unglassed light in the midst of the rest of the glass (as
the eye takes in everything through the rims of the glasses) that
produces the "fresh seeing," a fresh seeing that is both static and
Dynamic interpenetrating.
The most important analogy that doesn't seem to have a very good
method of inclusion is the hot stove, which Dave brought up as his
mode of indicating what I'm missing in order to reformulate a mode
of practical creativity that he thinks I'm, thus, debarred from. On
this I have to repeat the confession that I have no readily available
answer for what to do about that (mentioned in that 9/10 post), for
how to include the hot stove. The hot stove analogy is one of my
least favorite parts of Pirsig's philosophy. However, what I don't
quite see is what the necessary connection is between the hot stove
analogy and Dave's description of creativity. It strikes me that one
should be able to move directly from Granger's Deweyan version of
Pirsig to Dave's last paragraph, and that my version of what
"immediacy" means does nothing to violate Granger or Dewey. It
does, I think, struggle with the hot stove, but this is only telling on
the topic of practical creativity if it can be shown how
hot-stove-immediacy augments those notions of "fresh seeing" and
"dilated eye" and the like in such a way that forces my position to
concede that it cannot, then, accommodate a Pirsigian notion of
"fresh seeing." What I don't understand, in other words, is how the
hot stove analogy adds anything to "free seeing" or does any
conceptual work that isn't performed by other Pirsigian analogies.
How is the hot stove _necessary_ to understanding what Pirsig
means in terms of shaking up dull people to fresh sight? Why is it
that if I ignore the hot stove analogy, I'm not allowed to formulate
versions of "shut down her tendency to imitate, to follow instructions,
to adhere to the abstract rules and the like," as Dave put it? It
cannot be, I take it, solely because it is an available analogy that
Pirsig deploys. If an analogy is to have a necessary conceptual
impact on the whole of a person's philosophy, the meaning of that
philosophy would have to be demonstrably altered by its removal. In
this restricted case, what is the conceptual malformation of "freshly
seeing" that occurs when we do not use the hot stove to explain what
freshly seeing means?
Matt
*An extrapoloation of the train analogy of ZMM might help to make
plausible my contention that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses.
If we think in those terms, the front edge of the train is DQ and
everything behind it--i.e., the train--is SQ. If we posit a person
moving about the train (don't worry about what this metaphysically
corresponds to), then the only way to get up to that leading edge is
by being right behind it, on the train. If one thinks to get around the
train to the front, the only way I can imagine doing so is to leap off
the train. But if this train is moving fast, as I imagine it is, that
means death. (If it doesn't mean certain death, it also means no
front edge of the train, as it sweeps past you: can you run as fast as
a train?) This analogy, then, explains the relationship between small
self and Big Self in a way that distinguishes a bad death of the small
self from a good death. Leaping from the train is leaping away from
your small self into the terra incognita of Big Self, but it is a pure and
total death, or movement into pure chaos. Enlightenment, however,
keeps your small self in its capacity to live and move in
society/static-patterns, though _solely_ (as I read it) as a vehicle to
pursue Big Self _at the front of the train_, not _off_ the train.
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