Hey Ron,
Matt said:
I perceive Dan's response ... 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.
Matt:
I have to admit that this was an impromptu innovation to solve
the problem before me, and I'm not quite sure what it's full
consequences are. Nor did I systematically canvass the
possibilities available, which I notice better now. For example,
the indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy does not, in fact, cover
fully the possibilities of in-the-moment experience. To chart
three responses:
Static responses ------- Dynamic Responses
| |
-------------------------- |
| | |
Reject Past-Evil Reject Past-Evil Reject Now-Good
(Degenerate) (Latch Enforcement) (Dimly perceived betterness,
eventual
good/static latch)
The point, I think, of distinguishing "rejecting of past-evil" from
"rejecting of now-good" is that the true Dynamic leap forward
without a net--for the leap must produce its _own net_ (i.e.
static latch)--is a rejection of something we perceive _rightly_
as a current good, a static latch that works, but it is rejected for
as-yet not completely understood reasons and, more importantly,
possibilities. Dimly perceiving Dynamic Quality, I think, must be at
the same time a concession that the future of this perception is
unsure, as it is by its nature the leaving-behind of the
sure/static/stable/known.
This was just to further riff off the original formulation. Ron,
you then said
Ron said:
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.
Matt:
So, to clarify the terms of what I was suggesting, I think the
"rejecting now good" is the "aim towards a future betterness."
(I think you'd divided the two in a series of three, but I'm not
sure. Or to what effect.)
Did I talk about this Deweyan version in connection to the bits
about Wittgensteinian therapeutic model of philosophy? I can't
recall now, or what I had made of it. But perhaps it was along
the lines of how, once one understands the Pirsigian point that
one cannot ever be out of touch with reality, then one will see,
too, that though Dynamic Quality isn't easily apprehended, no
intellectual pattern could get in the way of your ability to. This
was Steve's point that SOMists, despite having a bad philosophy,
are just as likely to be able to get in touch with Dynamic Quality
in their lives, for that's part of the Pirsigian precept in ZMM: stay
loose so you don't lose gumption. The monkey gets his hand
caught in the rice-trap, but he could get out.
Is he likely to get out? Probably not. Why? Because he's a
monkey (largely) guided by instinct. This further extrapolation of
the analogy suggests that it does, indeed, matter what kind of
intellectual patterns we have. For as I've extended it, the
"monkey" stands in for a specific set of intellectual patterns. A
"human," with his hand in the rice-trap, might be much more
likely to get out because he can calm himself and figure out what
is causing the problem. The "human," in this case, stands in for a
different set of patterns, one that _enables_ greater facility with
problems. So: is it indeed the case that some intellectual patterns
better _enable_ Dynamic Quality?
I think we have to answer yes, despite my initial formulation of
"no intellectual pattern could get in the way of your ability to be
in touch with reality." For, is it not also a consequence of Pirsig's
understanding of evolution that, e.g., _some_ biological patterns
and _not others_ enabled the creation of an entirely new kind of
static patterns (i.e., social)?
I'm not sure if the conundrum I've walked into is fake, or how to
walk out of it. However, perhaps it is the case that abstract
philosophy is meant to be largely therapeutic because it is when
our concretely used intellectual patterns become abstracted away
from their moments of deployment in our regular lives that, when
bandying them about against each other in the abstract, they
occasionally cause us to forget about our regular lives because of
the real conundrums that appear (think of Descartes' faux inability
to know anything practically until he solved a theoretical problem;
and compare that to Pirsig with cigarettes burning into his
knuckles). They _are_ real conundrums, and they can be solved
by overturning the intellectual chess board, affecting a Copernican
shift in understanding. But those shifts are hard to come by, and
in the mean time there's much Dynamic experience in the world
one is avoiding by focusing on this one narrow, little corner of the
vast terrain. Perhaps that's why we should remind ourselves that
we aren't actually out of touch with reality, and need a little
Wittgensteinian therapy to help us put down the fly-bottle. (I'm
not sure if that mixing of Wittgenstein's metaphors obscures,
elucidates, or inadvertently highlights.)
Ron quoted some Campbell:
"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."
"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."
Matt:
You'll have to forgive me, but I don't prefer to use Campbell's
formulations. (He seems a tad too reductionistic to me, though in a
different way, I think, than in my avoidance of Jung. Though, I'm
not terribly well-versed in either.) I rather Harold Bloom and
Northrop Frye's, but all four have very similar ways of talking about
this phenomena-set.
In Bloom's formulation, the Romantic poets--who are our great
mythos-creators of Western Individuality--marked the "internalization
of quest romance." The Arthurian romances of the medieval period
and Greek and Roman epics (recently resurfaced during the
Renaissance) pictured these heroic ubermensch, striding off in
search of adventure. As the world closed in around poets through
the march of industrialization (birthed with capitalism, and cycling
with the population explosion), and martial feats became less an
applicable metaphor, the Romantic bent turned inwards, so that no
longer was the heroic overcoming of obstacles an _external event_,
but what happened to people on the inside. The obstacles became
housed in our mind--dogma, prejudice, conventions, etc.
This way of stating the the hero's journey, as one into oneself, I think
more effectively let's us see the real problem with seeing a divorce
from the heroic quest for Dynamic Quality in the Spirit Realm and
"the standpoint of normal waking consciousness": it's the problem of
cigarettes burning down into your knuckles. Pirsig could quite have
replied that he was in quest of something more important than the
ephemera of friends, family, and jobs. And he would've been right.
It is more important, or rather _bigger_, in some sense, and it gives
sense to the notion of _sacrifice_ that comes along with the hero's
job. But the rhetoric of heroism--which Pirsig's scene quite
effectively deflates--is best theorized by Emerson, who called for the
Oversoul, yet at the same time remarked darkly, "I shun father and
mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation." "Whim" was Emerson's word for the indeterminacy of
DQ/degeneracy.
Matt
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