Hey Dave, DMB said: How do I know when I am following DQ? That's like asking how do I know when I'm grooving on it, digging it, in the zone. You just know from your own experience.
Matt: But are we not sometimes wrong about what we feel is going on in our experience? Your answer is, roughly, that we "just know" when we are following DQ. But the reason I've been bringing the thesis I've dubbed the "indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy" to bear on this issue is because it seems to me that that idea in Pirsig undercuts the certainty otherwise endowed to "just knowing it." Perhaps I have a greater regard for the idea of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls an "epistemological crisis," the idea that occasionally our understanding of what we have been experiencing during our lives has been wrong--radically wrong. (If you've seen Luc Besson's movie about Joan of Arc, that's what she was suffering from at the hands of Dustin Hoffman.) This idea means that what those "concrete examples" mean, that you place primacy on, is exactly the kind of thing that gets thrown into uncertainty. All of your responses to my rhetorical questions about stuckness were _external redescriptions_ of those experiences that don't take seriously the first-person judgment of those experiences. They don't take seriously _precisely_ the thing that it seems you want me to otherwise take more seriously. Most prominently in this category is your explanation of faith-based religiosity as "usually a matter of very deliberately choosing to walk the well-worn path." That is an external judgment about that person's experience. What happens when that person, in all honesty and sincerity, says, "No, I feel God in my heart and this is what He wants from me"? Why is the response "Your wrong--you just feel that way because you were taught to feel that way" not a violation of the sovereignty of their direct experience of their own lives, to which you have no access? MacIntyre, however, explains these crises as breakdowns in the concepts through which we've viewed the world. And "following DQ" is ontologically not a conceptual experience, so-called. Does this then make following DQ immune to retrospective revision? Only, I think, if "grooving," "digging," or "unstuckness" are sufficient criteria for telling the difference between Dynamic Quality and degeneracy. But isn't that section of Pirsig punching up the fact that the Hippies _thought_ that their groovin' and diggin' was Dynamic, but it turns out it was slavish to biological static patterns? And wouldn't your description of the faith-based amount to the fact that they _think_ they are groovin' and diggin' the Dynamic as religious saints do, but it turns out they are slavish to social static patterns? It seems to me that grooving and digging _are_ immune to retrospective revision, but that does not also make whether one is or is not "following DQ" so immune. I think Pirsig would agree that acting like a heretical saint, raging against established forms, does not a saint make. However, the even more difficult problem I am trying to highlight is that _feeling_ like one _is_ actually a saint does not either make one a saint. 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
