Steve, Ron, Dan, Ron said: It's what the majority of the arguement has been about, the idea of DQ being a place holder for the indefineable AND an explanation of the Good and the beautiful.
Steve said: I think calling DQ the Good is problematic given the hot stove scenario for explaining it as negative value in that case. ... RMP: "Yes, my statement that Dynamic Quality is always affirmative was not a wise statement." Ron said: When the negative face of Quality, emerges as conflicting types of Good it most certainly is a wise statement. Dan said: Robert Pirsig is not backtracking... he is expanding on his premise that Dynamic Quality is synonymous with experience. Experience begins as the unguarded moment and static quality evaluations arise from there... evaluations of positive and negative, good and evil, right and wrong. Matt: Dan suggested that Steve took Pirsig out of context (as a form of "backtracking"), but I'm not sure he did, for I think what Steve was saying is that there is a problematic conflict between the two parts of Ron's "AND" conjunction, and that the "placeholder" portion is a function of making DQ "synonymous with experience" (more specifically, _direct_ experience), which is what the hot stove analogy most explicitly brings to bear. (This becomes particularly clear when Dan clarifies that he disagrees, in a manner, with Ron's interpretation of DQ as the Good.) So, in this sense, Pirsig was "expanding on his premise" to the detriment of DQ being "an explanation of the Good and the beautiful" (in Ron's words, and while withholding actual judgement on Ron's words). Ron's further articulation of what he means by "Good" seems thoroughly Deweyan, as essentially "the good is simply a rejected evil." DQ functions as a necessary explanation of the Good, I take it, _because_ it is a placeholder. Dewey's formula defines what we take to be good as _solely_ backward-looking, i.e. at rejected static patterns in favor of _this_ static pattern (whatever we've demarcated as "good" right now). The evaluative term "good," for Dewey, is then implicitly a two-place predicate, where it's shape is always determined by what it is rejecting. Ron's version, however, is a three-place predicate: rejected-good/now-good/future-better. Dan seems to object to this formulation, however, saying "better and worse are evaluations made afterwards." I find this curious as an attempt to accurately describe Pirsig's view (which is what Dan seems primarily concerned with), for it seems to suggest that _valuing_ is not our connection to reality. Dan does consistently pull out this ramification in this context, however, by _reverting_ Pirsig's adaptation of Whitehead's formula back to Whitehead, as a "dim apprehension of we know not what." Whitehead says "things too obscure," but Pirsig's dim apprehension must be "betterness," musn't it? (Dan's formula, too, seems to reverse the idea that DQ is a kind of knowing, in Bertrand Russell's formula of distinguishing "by acquaintance" from "by description"--for "we know not what" would make sense as static-knowing, but as DQ-knowing, we _do_ know what it is: betterness.) I perceive Dan's response, what I take to be a dialectically produced attempt to avoid the problem Steve wanted to highlight in the face of Ron's formulation, as further highlighting what Steve sees as the problem in holding that DQ is both a placeholder/je-ne-sais-quoi "AND" the Good. The problem might be best put in terms of the indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis: if I want to always be following DQ as much as possible, how do I know whether I'm dimly apprehending Dynamic Quality or apprehending dimly with static patterns? The thesis suggests there's going to be no answer, but what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good? Well, I guess just that it is a placeholder necessary to fully explain the evolutionary paradigm of Deweyan evaluative experience. So that, sometimes our experience of good is an implicit rejecting of past-evil, but sometimes it's an implicit rejecting of now-good. And we won't know the difference in our own experience until much later, for the experience of dimness, we might say, is a necessary condition, but definitely not sufficient. After all, some people are just dim. 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
