Hello everyone On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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"),
Dan: Yes, I did suggest that Steve took RMP's statement out of context as a form of backtracking. If I understand Robert Pirsig's response, it is more a going forward, not backward. It is a more expanded way of understanding Matt: > 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. Dan: That's interesting for I read Steve's words a bit differently. He seemed to be bringing negative value into the hot stove experience before anything was decidedly negative. A hot stove itself isn't negative value and it isn't positive value until thinking makes it so. One will certainly find oneself in a negative value situation if they sit upon a hot stove. But that evaluation comes later, after the leap off. The direct experience of the hot stove is a purely Dynamic moment when one knows "something" and yet they don't know what it is they know. Matt: > (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). Dan: I both agreed and disagreed with Ron on the premise that Dynamic Quality while being undefined and concept-free is also seen as infinitely definable and full of concept. It is inexhaustible. However, once a static evaluation has arisen, we find Dynamic Quality to be neither this nor that. Dynamic Quality isn't always affirmative although it may seem so in static quality retrospective evaluation. Dynamic Quality comes before the evaluation. >Matt: > 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.) Dan: I'd say that within the MOQ intellectually valuing reality isn't our connection with reality. Dynamically valuing reality comes first. That is our primary connection. The intellect is always secondary. >Matt: > 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? Dan: I don't know that I was attempting to avoid the problem so much as I was attempting to show the problem doesn't exist if one takes the time to go back and read the entire exchange in LILA'S CHILD between RMP and DG. Rather than taking one sentence and using it to oppose what Ron is saying and to say Robert Pirsig is backtracking, it seems better to look at the more expansive picture: anytime we talk about Dynamic Quality in static quality terms others may take what is said and oppose it. So... ultimately... isn't it better just to see for ourselves? >Matt: > 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. Dan: I'd say that "dimness" is perhaps how we Dynamically experience reality. We don't know it as intellectually good or evil, affirmative or negative, until afterwards... we're always looking back. Isn't that what RMP's train analogy tells us? Thank you, Dan 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
