Hello everyone On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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."
Dan: I'd say yes, we are sometimes wrong about what we feel as far as experience goes. According to the MOQ, there are different levels of experience and by mistaking one for the other confusion arises. From LILA: "James had tried to make his pragmatism popular by getting it elected on the coattails of practicality. He was always eager to use such expressions as "cash-value," and "results," and "profits," in order to make pragmatism intelligible to "the man in the street," but this got James into hot water. Pragmatism was attacked by critics as an a to prostitute truth to the values of the marketplace. James was furious with this misunderstanding and he fought hard to correct the misinterpretation, but he never really overcame the attack. "What Phaedrus saw was that the Metaphysics of Quality avoided this attack by making it clear that the good to which truth is subordinate is intellectual and Dynamic Quality, not practicality. The misunderstanding of James occurred because there was no clear intellectual framework for distinguishing social quality from intellectual and Dynamic Quality, and in his Victorian lifetime they were monstrously confused. But the Metaphysics of Quality states that practicality is a social pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social values since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one. "The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement." [page 417] Dan comments: The hippies were "just grooving, man... digging it" but they didn't realize what they were grooving on was not a Dynamic forward leap in evolution but rather a regression to biological values. Their ideals were doomed from the start. Everyone was grooving on how great it was telling The Man to go fuck himself but no one wanted to do the dishes. >Matt: > 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? Dan: Yes, exactly. >Matt: > 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. Dan: I don't know anything about being a saint. I suspect one must give oneself completely over to whatever feelings they have in regard to the Dynamic sense of whatever God they might believe in, but then there is the problem of convincing others you are who you say you are. That might not happen until five hundred years after you're burned at the stake. Thank you, no. Myself, I am not so grandiose a sinner as to believe I'll ever be a saint. I tend to disagree that "grooving and digging" are immune to retrospective revision. All intellectual patterns are continually revised Dynamically as new information becomes known. It seems to me that it is impossible to tell the Dynamic individuals from the degenerates before hand. Only in retrospect can we do so. I believe that's the whole point in LILA of how New York City retains its greatness. Thank you, Dan PS Great discussions, btw. Thank you everyone. 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
