Hi Dave, DMB said: The similarities between their terms, labels and ideas are so obvious to me that I'm really quite stunned by your baffled reaction. When this is added to the fact that you almost always delete all the evidence and the explanations from your responses, it does seem like you are simply being contemptuous, disingenuous and evasive. Why do you refuse to engage the substance of this debate? How many times have you bailed out?
Matt: Me, bailed out? I asked you to explain your line of reasoning and you called me disingenuous. I didn't want to assume I understood your line of reasoning, so I requested it. All I know is that your conclusion didn't scan with my understanding of any of the principle players on the field. But you don't give me your line of reasoning, you give me quotes, which is like saying (as you do say), "See? See?" But I don't see what you do. So explain it to me. It'd be like getting a paper from a student with just quotes. I know what _I_ think it means, I want to know what _you_ think it means. However, since I know your answer is "it means you and Rorty are incompatible with Pirsig," what I'm really requesting is a more patient explication about how you've come to that conclusion (on this particular issue). (And really, it shouldn't even be about Rorty. It should be about me.) (And by the way, your post seems to be all about implying that I don't understand, as I quote you above, "the similarities between" Pirsig, James, and Dewey, and maybe others, but when has that ever been at issue between us? _That_ seems to be downright disingenuous, but I should rather take your word. And that means that we really have been talking way _way_ past each other.) So, what I've posted below is where things ended, the post you responded with your assertion that I'm being disingenuous. In that post I tried to patiently explain how I handle (I think just about) all of your arguments from the posts before. In fact, I tried in the post to explicitly note that I believed I was trying to say something about everything since you've often asserted that I'm being "evasive" because I "ignore" the substance of your responses, and I'm self-conscious about this repeated assertion on your part (though I think there's no real substance to it; I believe it's a function of your distrust of my seriousness and sincerity). To ready us for the below, I responded to your assertion/argument/label that I'm disingenuous with an argument that I'm not, providing evidence and a mode of interpreting my remarks as genuine, sincere attempts to engage you in dialogic conversation: "if I was being disingenuous when I said that 'I don't get how I've rendered DQ as trivial, inert, or meaningless,' that would mean I _did_ very well understand how I was doing this. But I gave reasons for why I thought you _might_ be thinking this, even acknowledged its plausibility given a different context, but tried to rebut its plausibility in this context" (Oct. 5). If that does not describe an attempt to conscientiously engage with the substance of someone's remarks, then the Graduate Program I belong to is filled with idiots. And perhaps that will be the conclusion you are forced to make given the assumptions and conclusions about me that you refuse to reexamine. You say above that I "almost always delete all the evidence," which I take it to mean that you object to the fact that I often do not respond to each one of your lines, line by line, in the order that you gave them. That seems to me silly. There's nothing wrong with the line by line style, especially for email exchanges, but that's not how, for example, essays are written. I take up your arguments in the manner I see as cogent, and we have an archive (if the archive isn't fast enough, do what I do: save relevant posts). Why must I repeat everything you said, when people can go back and look at it? I just repost relevant portions. I have no idea how you see this as contemptuous or evasive. If you don't trust my intentions, there's no point in talking to me. I try and trust your intentions, which is why I continue. I'm beginning to think I shouldn't trust your intentions. You can take up anything you'd like below, and I'll try and engage as best I can with my limited time and energy, but if you just want to continue on with the scornful attitude and how obviously I'm disingenuous, evasive, etc., then don't bother. I'm here to talk seriously, and if you want to reboot the conversation, good; if you want to continue to complain, which is often something I've resorted to to express my own dismay (which ironically mirrors yours), then we shouldn't bother talking for now. There would just be no point. If, however, it's difficult to take up anything down there because it alludes heavily to material that _had_ been fresh in our minds then, but is somewhat lost to the passage of time, then that makes sense as a reason not to pick up again from that point. I can't remember that well either where I was at those moments, and what we were exactly talking about. Post from Oct. 4 ---------- Matt said [on 9/29]: An extrapoloation of the train analogy of ZMM might help to make plausible my contention that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses. If we think in those terms, the front edge of the train is DQ and everything behind it--i.e., the train--is SQ. If we posit a person moving about the train (don't worry about what this metaphysically corresponds to), then the only way to get up to that leading edge is by being right behind it, on the train. If one thinks to get around the train to the front, the only way I can imagine doing so is to leap off the train. But if this train is moving fast, as I imagine it is, that means death. (If it doesn't mean certain death, it also means no front edge of the train, as it sweeps past you: can you run as fast as a train?) This analogy, then, explains the relationship between small self and Big Self in a way that distinguishes a bad death of the small self from a good death. Leaping from the train is leaping away from your small self into the terra incognita of Big Self, but it is a pure and total death, or movement into pure chaos. Enlightenment, however, keeps your small self in its capacity to live and move in society/static-patterns, though _solely_ (as I read it) as a vehicle to pursue Big Self _at the front of the train_, not _off_ the train. DMB said [on 9/30]: DQ is fragment of light that comes through a crack or small hole in the static glasses? The only way to DQ is to leap off the train and into death and chaos? Maybe you don't agree that these are problematic characterizations. Maybe you don't see exactly why I find them so objectionable but they are exactly the sort of thing I'm criticizing. These are the kinds of characterizations that portray DQ as something trivial, inert or meaningless. Matt: Yeah, I don't get how I've rendered DQ as trivial, inert, or meaningless in my version of the glasses analogy, or train analogy. Though I do understand that that has been your claim about what I do with DQ for these many years, in whatever I try and do with DQ. I understand why those three epithets seem relevant in response to the "DQ as compliment" slogan, but I don't think your assimilation of my every handling of DQ to that response is sensitive to my own distinctions in context. Think of it this way: most recently, I've been talking about Dynamic Quality. The slogan, however, is better spelled out this way: "the phrase 'Dynamic Quality' is a compliment we pay to past experiences that have proven to be direct experiences of Dynamic Quality, and not degenerate or mistakenly static." These are two different contexts of rendering DQ's many sides, and I see the epithets as only having purchase in one of them. (And since the slogan is not at issue presently, I pass over my estimation of that plausible objection.) My version of the train analogy was meant to articulate how chaos fits together with Dynamic Quality. (I must also add here that your assimilating "a crack in the glasses" to "jumping off the train" is a reading mistake on your part, or an injudicious collapse of a distinction I wanted to maintain. I'm unclear about whether that was an honest mistake or intentional, but if it was intentional, I'm unclear as to what legitimates the collapse.) I don't see what is "jarring" or "incongruous," as you say, between the work Pirsig sees DQ as handling and my version of what that work is. And you don't really offer an explanation of the incongruity, except what I have to infer is the difference between what your impression of the _magnitude_ of the "primary" in "primary reality" is and the opposite impression of magnitude from my word "fragment" (when describing the glasses analogy).* However, I can't help but perceive that as a superficial rhetorical difference in the words, and not the conceptual position I was describing. After all, a "fragment" of molten lava burns the shit out of you. A more congenial understanding of these "fragments" would understand them to be quite powerful as they are. This, then, dovetails with the train analogy: taking off the glasses would blind your eyes (bad death/chaos), just as leaping from the train would kill you. A direct engagement with my conceptual position, rather than haggling over the analogies and metaphors with which we work, I think would address what I've gotten wrong in this relationship between DQ and chaos, or as I put it otherwise, "good" or "bad" death. I'm not sure I've obviously screwed up this relationship, but it was what I was trying to draw into the picture of our understanding of Dynamic Quality as it is elaborated by analogies that didn't, explicitly, seem to have it in view as they were deployed in Pirsig's writings. DMB said [on 9/30, different post]: This helps to reinforce the idea of man being a participant in the creation of all things, the measure of all things, and it helps to put the landscape analogy back in it's original context. But I also think this helps to push back against Matt's contention that we have limited access to DQ, that it can only be seen through a crack in the glasses or by jumping off the train and into death and chaos. I think the idea here is that DQ is the endless landscape of OUR awareness. We not only have access, we are inseparable from it. It is in that sense that Quality has us, rather than the other way around. Matt: I'm unclear where the pushing occurs. For one, I reject the premise that I've suggested that "we have limited access to DQ." I've, rather, tried to describe the difference between DQ and chaos. (And what I take to be the unwarranted assimilation of "a crack in the glasses" to "jumping off the train" occurs again here.) And secondly, I do not see how the slogans in the last two sentences are unavailable to either of my analogies: we, with our glasses, are inseparable from the landscape (just, I might add, as we are in _Pirsig's_ use of the analogy, which if there were a push would seem to hit Pirsig in the same way); we-the-train are inseparable from the tracks. DMB said [on 10/4]: Okay, gents. Let me try this another way. Matt: You quoted a lot of David Scott after this, but I was entirely unclear as to its purport, how it intersected with the conversation between Ron, Dan, Steve, and myself. Too oblique, one might say. Matt *There are two other objections, though I only take up the "magnitude" implication. A second objection is roughly that I can't understand Quality/DQ as the "source and substance of everything" or as a "focal point." However, I don't understand how my analogies can disbar those conceptual understandings. Pirsig has to deploy many analogies to describe DQ in order to see its many sides, and we generally don't ask how, e.g., the tracks the train runs on is the source of the train or how the world on the other side of the glasses is the substance of the glasses. One has to modulate to different analogies to explain what seems absurd from the inside of the (wrong) analogy. This doesn't mean that analogy comparison and contrasting can't highlight interesting conceptual valences, but I do think that this particular objection finds no solace in my elaborated analogy itself. One would have to, rather, assume previously that I do not or cannot hold that Quality/DQ is the source and substance of everything. However, as I have conceded several times recently, the perpetual difficulty for me, and the third of the objections, is the hot stove analogy. At present, however, I'm not sure I can't take it into account, only that I haven't yet done so though also expressed a dislike for it. I'm not trying to be cagey, only precise. For on the one hand, it is my responsibility, if I want to claim to have supplied a full and complete interpretation of how Pirsig's philosophy fits together, to take the hot stove analogy into account somehow. But on the other side from this, it isn't clear to me that I _cannot_ do this. I.e., I haven't a sense of _how_ you've leveled the hot stove analogy _as_ an objection. It looks to me, rather, that you were taking advantage of known facts about my distaste for it (or simply not revealing what precisely the shape of its problem is for me). Your objection there seems to have been that I _haven't_ accounted of it, rather than that I _can't_. And, I confess again, I don't have that account yet, but it's only a damning objection in the "can't" form. (In the "haven't" form it is rather an ongoing suspicion.) It's not your responsibility to tell me what my problems are, but you can't take advantage either of things I've sensed as potential problems, but not given any definition to. It would be a boon to me if you did help give that definition, but I haven't yet a sense of what that shape is. 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
