Matt's "indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis" says:
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? ...what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good? Well, I
guess just that it is a placeholder... 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.
dmb says:
You're asking about following DQ and how that differs from the following the
static or conceptual, right? It seems to me that this is the topic of every
major analogy and example Pirsig offers. To say it's central to the MOQ would
be an understatement. I think the point of all the various analogies is pretty
well summed up by the James quote that Pirsig uses at the end of chapter 29.
They both assert the same distinction between static and Dynamic. There must
always be a discrepancy between static concepts and dynamic reality, they both
say. This distinction is the key to understanding Pirsig's hot stove example,
the train analogy, the endless landscape analogy, the artful motorcycle
mechanic, the dull student who was forced to see freshly, the reformulation of
free will and determinism, the re-thinking of the evolutionary process, the
formation of scientific hypotheses, ect.. This central theme runs throughout
both books. Pirsig was already talking in terms of static and dynamic back in
ZAMM:
"..One doesn't cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational
basis for rejecting them. Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas
you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas
that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after
century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential
nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic quality
you never get stuck. ...classical, structured, dualistic subject object
knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for
the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. THAT is what
carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're both with, although
you ARE born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just
'intution', not just an unexplainable 'skill' or 'talent'. It's the direct
result of contact with basic REALITY, Quality, which dualistic reason has in
the past tended to conceal." (ZAMM 284)
dmb resumes:
To the extent that one is controlled by static patterns, one is stuck. To the
extent that one follows DQ, one never gets stuck.
And doesn't Pirsig use the same language when he gives us the hot stove
example?
"When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality
situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think,
"This stove is hot," and then make a rational decision is to get off. A 'dim
perception of h knows not what' get him off Dynamically. Later he generates
static patterns of thought to explain the situation. A subject-object
metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare
and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite
direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of thought itself.
...it would be the mystic students who would bet off the stove first. The
purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to
bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static,
intellectual attachments of the past."(LILA 116)
"I keep talking wild theory, but it keeps somehow coming out stuff everybody
knows, folklore. This Quality, this feeling for the work, is something known in
every shop. ..it's exactly the this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much
trouble to induce: through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like.
Your mind is empty, you have a 'hollow flexible' attitude of 'beginner's mind'.
You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of
reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment not to be feared
but cultivated." (ZAMM 285)
David Scott, by way of William James, says the same thing about the relation
between static concepts and dynamic reality: The Buddhist's meditative
"techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of
‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization’." Or again, as James
puts it, ‘the essence of life is its continuously changing character [DQ]; but
our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed [sq]" Before or underneath this
secondary conceptualisation and discrimination [sq] comes what James dubs
primary, or ‘pure’, experience [DQ]. As James explains, ‘pure experience [DQ]
is the name I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material
to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’ [Pirsig quotes these
lines in Lila.] What is pure experience [a.k.a. Dynamic Quality]? Scott says
t, "James’ ‘pure experience’ is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural
pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting, which Zen traditionally calls
one’s ‘original face’ and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’ . The sacredness of the
mundane in Zen also compares with James’ view that ‘pure experience’ is nothing
‘but another name for feeling or sensation’ [direct everyday experience]. James
says, "there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made, there
are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the thing experienced. If you ask
what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same.
‘It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness,
brownness, heaviness or what not.’ Experience is only a collective name for all
these sensible natures and save for time and space (and if you like for
‘being’) there appears no universal element of which all things are made".
We can talk about this same stuff in Dewey's terms too. We can say that
Pirsig's "primary empirical reality" is the same as Dewey's "infinitely complex
situational whole" or that Pirsig's "endless landscape of awareness" is the
same as Granger's "unanalyzed totality of experience" and Northrop's
"undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". All these various ways of referring to
Dynamic Quality are not just arbitrary labels, of course, they are descriptive
terms. My purpose is not to dazzle you with my awesome philosophical vocabulary
but to shine light on Pirsig's central term. We have the advantage of not only
harmonizing the examples an analogies in both of Pirsig's books but also
harmonizing all that with the language of a half dozen other philosophers, all
of whom are some combination of pragmatist, radical empiricist and Buddhist.
C'mon gents, I'm dishing up a twelve course meal here. Does this not help?
"Dewey's conception of experience is directly contingent upon the idea of
quality. In Experience and Nature, he tells us that 'quality' constitutes the
'brute and unconditioned isness' of empirical events. As Pirsig likewise
suggests, qualities are much more that mere states of conscousness. Rather, the
establish the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate,
concrete conditions of human life and activity. Immediate sense qualities are
what we live in and for. 'The world in which we immediately live, that in which
we strive, succeed, and are defeated,' Dewey argues, 'is preeminently a
qualitative world'. This means that 'all direct experience is qualitative, and
qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious." (David
Granger 27)
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