dmb said to Matt:
The similarities between their terms, labels and ideas are so obvious to me
that I'm really quite stunned by your baffled reaction.
Matt replied:
..., 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.
dmb says:
I'm asking you to look at the similarities between their terms because they all
have descriptive labels for DQ and its relation to sq. But every time you
respond those terms disappear. I keep putting them on the table for discussion
and you keep taking them off. If we are talking past each other, it's because
you refuse to keep those terms on the table. They do not appear in this
response either, so you've done this three or four times. I'm asking you to
address the similarities between the various names and descriptions of DQ
because substance of the dispute is about DQ.
Matt said:
..."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. ...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. ...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.
dmb says:
It would be silly to repeat everything and it's even sillier to suppose that
I'm asking you to do that. It's also very, very silly to suggest that there is
nothing wrong with deleting the points you're allegedly responding to. If
nothing else, all the readers are faced with the unnecessary complication of
trying remember and/or figure out what the point was, what the terms were,
etc.. As a respondent, you should be reading carefully enough to identify the
main ideas and terms anyway. I assume that you want to respond to the main
ideas and main points, rather than some irrelevant tangent or an added joke.
Obviously, the substantial remarks should be duplicated in your response to
them. Doing anything less is to practice obfuscation, don't you think? I do.
Matt said to dmb:
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,.. 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.
dmb says:
Exactly. It's difficult because your comments are aimed at material that was
deleted. That's why you shouldn't take it off the table when you respond. What
possible purpose could be served by this disappearing act, except to obscure
and hide things? If you're going to respond at all, I honestly can't think of
any reason to delete the other guy's point.
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. ...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.
dmb says:
If your contention is that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses, then your
contention is that one cannot have access to DQ. That renders DQ meaningless,
trivial and inert. If we have no access, then it can have no meaning, no
importance and no effect. Thus your contention renders DQ meaningless, trivial
and inert.
Matt said:
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.
dmb says:
So you're saying there is a difference between DQ itself and the term "DQ" and
the Rorty slogan only refer to the term and not the experience that the term
refers to. The problem is that the TERMS for DQ are static and intellectual.
Since that's the case, Rorty's slogan can only make sense when it's applied to
static quality but we're supposed to be talking about something that's always
described in CONTRAST to static quality. At best, your use of Rorty's slogan is
misleading and inappropriate. In the original, Rorty's slogan is about "truth"
and if we apply it to Pirsig's notion of truth it is much less of a conceptual
train wreck because in both cases we are talking about static intellectual
good. But as a rendering of DQ itself or even the term "DQ", it just doesn't
work.
The main idea here is that DQ is empirical reality itself, experience itself,
and there will always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, between
direct experience and our subsequent descriptions of it. In the context of
talking about the hot stove example, Pirsig says DQ "is an EXPERIENCE. It is
not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The
value itself is an experience. ...Later the person may generate some oaths to
describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths
second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.
(Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig's) "The negative esthetic quality of the hot
stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a
static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the hot stove
first discovers his how-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is
Dynamic. He does not... make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim percep
tion of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static
patterns of thought [oaths] to explain the situation."
You see how Rorty's slogan would fit here? A compliment we pay to sentences
would be a judgement about experience, a description of experience, the oaths
generated after the fact, the static patterns of thought generated later.
Matt said:
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.)
dmb says:
What distinction did you want to maintain? What does chaos have to do with
anything? Are you NOT using the glasses and the train analogies to talk about
the same thing, namely DQ? And did you not say "one cannot go around the
glasses" and did you not say that one will face death and chaos unless one
stays on the static train? In both cases, are you NOT saying DQ is
inaccessible? Are you NOT saying that static quality is all we really have?
You've still given me no reason to think that this reading is a mistake.
Matt said:
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.
dmb says:
Seriously??! As you see it, there is only a superficial rhetorical difference
between a "fragment" and an "endless landscape of awareness"? As you see it,
there is no jarring incongruity between blinding your eyes and seeing freshly?
There is no important conceptual distinction involved so that a "fragment" is
more or less the same as the "unanalyzed totality" or the "undifferentiated
continuum"? Well, as you mention, the difference in power and magnitude is
quite obvious. But even more than that, your characterizations are
approximately the opposite of Pirsig's and of the other philosophers who talk
about these same ideas. You don't have to know anything about philosophy to see
that a "fragment" and a "totality" are not at all the same. Any speaker of
english will know that direct seeing is the opposite of blinding your eyes. How
can you fail to see the jarring incongruity there? Seriously, if you don't get
that point, tell me why you don't see it because I'm honestly baffle
d by that. It's literally unbelievable.
More to the point, the fragment's lack of scope and power cannot be overcome by
simply saying it's a fragment of something powerful. If we want a hot lava
analogy, a fragment of lava is still lacking in scope and power because DQ
would more properly be compared to the totality of the earth's molten core- or
something. I mean, the idea is simply that words and concepts chop things in to
analyzable parts or fragments while DQ is the whole situation, the
undifferentiated totality. The terms used by the various philosophers are
negative descriptions. In each case, conceptual and "fragmented" is exactly
what they say it is NOT.
That's one of the reasons I'm annoyed when you delete all the various terms for
DQ that I put on the table. I'm trying to show the jarring incongruity between
those terms for DQ and your descriptions of DQ. This process is frustrated -
and not helped - by their disappearance.
Matt said:
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 says:
Chaos? How is a discussion of chaos going to do anything other than complicate
the issue. I mean, isn't chaos what you get when you try to get by on DQ all by
itself without any static patterns? Isn't that an entirely different can of
worms, one that would depend on first having a firm grasp on the very
distinction in dispute? Leaving that aside for now...
DQ itself can't be defined and so it is something we can talk about only
indirectly. That why Pirsig and the other philosophers employ metaphors,
analogies, imagery and other forms of figurative speech and that is why they
use negative terms that describe what DQ is not. The metaphors and negative
philosophical labels both have meaningful content, despite their limitations.
In both cases, they are among the specific rhetorical means of overcoming that
relatively narrow and square form of rationality. The various images speak to
us more than the words, you know?
Pirsig says experience is like a moving train. James says experience is like a
flowing stream or a line of fire burning its way across an open field. They
don't talk like that to be flowery or pretty. It's poetry and the substance of
their meaning is the same. What is the substance of that meaning such that
these images can all be referring to it? They're all ways of saying it's
dynamic, no? The impression of movement in a definite direction is totally
unmistakable, no? Common meanings emerge just as clearly when we compare the
various philosophical terms for DQ. A side by side examination of the terms
very quickly produces a list of obvious synonyms. The experience they're all
talking about is pure or direct or immediate or primary (list of synonyms) in
the sense that it is as yet unanalyzed, pre-intellectual, undifferentiated,
undivided, pre-conceputal or pre-verbal (another list of synonyms). There are
so many synonyms, so ways to say it, that misunderstanding it seems alm
ost impossible. And of course we want our understanding of the philosophical
terms to be not only consistent with but also supportive of our reading of the
metaphors. We want to whole deal to harmonize, right? It's coming from all
sorts of directions but we are basically just talking about one central term.
Matt said:
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.
dmb says:
That's a very strange standard. Why do the quotes have to intersect with
everyone's comments in the conversation. Isn't it more than enough to say
something relevant about the topic of the conversation? That particular
complaint seems quite trivial, forced and fake. More to the point...
David Scott was talking about DQ in Jamesian and Buddhist terms. Your
accusation that the quotes were "too oblique" is nowhere near plausible. DQ is
the main topic and the quotes illuminated the main topic. Again, I think it's
wrong in all kinds of ways to delete this stuff when you reply. Keeping track
of the simplest things becomes a big hassle when you do that. I'm supposed to
defend words that are not here, for example. Maybe I'll track that down later
and defend their use later, but I already explained the purpose of putting a
variety of terms on the table. That's what Scott was doing too.
Matt said:
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. ...One
would have to, rather, assume previously that I do not or cannot hold that
Quality/DQ is the source and substance of everything.
dmb says:
No, I really only have one objection and I think that's just another version of
it. It's just one more way to say you're making DQ into something much smaller
and less important than Pirsig and the other philosophers intend. I mentioned
Quality as "the source and substance of everything," "the endless landscape,"
and as "the unanalyzed totality of experience" to suggest an infinity where you
suggest a fragment (yes, even if it is a powerful, molten hot, fragment).
Matt said:
... 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. ...it isn't clear to me that I
_cannot_ do this. ...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.)
dmb says:
You ought to take the hot stove analogy into account and you CAN account for it
but you don't like the example and you have not taken into account so far. The
result is the same regardless of whether you can't or you won't account for it.
Either way, you do not have exactly what I accuse you of not having, which is a
coherent understanding of DQ. This is not a suspicion, Matt. It's a conclusion
based on the things you say about DQ.
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