Ron said: As far as DQ, you captured my conception of it quite adequately, whether or not you agree with it, or, it coincides with Pirsigs formulations seems almost secondary to that. I feel it links enough of Pirsigs ideas to qualify as within his line of thinking for my own acceptance and , hopefully, it seemed to breed a new direction of discussion which you seemed interested in. I think this aspect held the most promise.
Matt: The nature of this conversation unveils itself--I don't remember what this conception is of yours that I captured well. Do you want to state it again, in a new thread, and perhaps we can pick up and move with that? Matt had said: I perceive Dan's response, what I take to be a dialectically produced attempt to avoid the problem Steve wanted to highlight in the face of Ron's formulation, as further highlighting what Steve sees as the problem in holding that DQ is both a placeholder/je-ne-sais-quoi "AND" the Good. The problem might be best put in terms of the indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis: 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? The thesis suggests there's going to be no answer, but what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good? Well, I guess just that it is a placeholder necessary to fully explain the evolutionary paradigm of Deweyan evaluative experience. So that, sometimes our experience of good is an implicit rejecting of past-evil, but sometimes it's an implicit rejecting of now-good. 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. Ron: What interested me was your evaluation of rejecting past evil, rejecting now good and an aim towards a future better-ness in Deweyan terms and how this links to Wittgensteins Philosophy as theraputic regarding DQ being both a placeholder and the Good. Particularly how this relates to the mythos of the hero's journey and following DQ. J.Campbell writes:"The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Never the less-and here is a great key to understanding of myth and symbol- the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotton dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension , either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero." He adds: "There must always remain, however, , from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistancy between wisdom brought forth from the deep and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence." ... 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
