Hey Dan, Matt said: You go on to say that you think "Dynamic Quality comes before the coin" of better/worse in the MoQ. I still don't think that is a correct apprehension of how Pirsig describes the MoQ. But as this is an issue of scholarship, the task of amassing evidence and counter-evidence is yet the task not done.
Dan said: It seems apparent (to me) that RMP equates Dynamic Quality with pre-intellectual experience. I take the prefix "pre" to mean before. That's why I said Dynamic Quality comes before the coin. Intellectually, we decide what's better or worse, after the Dynamic moment has passed. Matt: Yes, DQ is pre-intellectual experience. And I took it that Pirsig was saying that evaluative responses were our root experiences, and therefore pre-intellectual in nature, which means low/high evaluations are pre-intellectual though the _words_ "low" and "high" come later. Dan said: If Dynamic Quality is seen as synonymous with experience, then I am not so sure that there is a longitudinal evolutionary history outside a personal history. In ZMM RMP talks about the law of gravity and how it did not exist before Newton "discovered" it. What he seems to be saying is that the law of gravity (personal history) and gravity (longitudinal evolutionary history) are one and the same. In fact, when I asked him about this in LILA'S CHILD he responded along the lines of: How could they not be the same? So I will leave you with the same question... Matt: The trouble with this line of thought is that in Lila, Pirsig will talk about how some intellectual patterns are of high value (like distinguishing between subjects and objects was for a time, and still can be). I think the endgame of the ZMM ghosts passage is more complex than you're allowing here, because I think Pirsig in the end would argue that while it is silly to think that gravity existed before Newton made it up--because intellectual patterns are incumbent upon people making them up--on the other hand it is internal to the correct functioning of that intellectual pattern that it be true for all previous time, in the past. Not all intellectual patterns have this flavor, but a lot of the one's out of the natural sciences do. (Principally, I think, because a lot of the stuff in "nature" was around before we personally were.) So how could evolutionary history not be the same as personal history? Two distinct reasons. 1) one should make a distinction between "persons" and "not persons": rocks have histories, too, which means that though persons write the rocks' histories, persons should make a distinction between their own history and rocks' histories. 2) one should make a distinction between one's "I" and everyone else's "I," with the recognition that a lot of previous, now-dead I's have been around. The point here is that the current crop of I's we see walking around are the inheritors of the evolving intellectual patterns created by people like Newton. So we should make a distinction between _my_ personal history (born in Wisconsin, 1980, etc., etc.) and the histories of _groups_ of persons that extend beyond the range of a single person's lifespan (like the US, born in Pennsylvania, 1776, etc., etc.). My "shoulds" denote that I think these are high quality static intellectual patterns. We can, for example, blur the distinction between persons and not-persons, and between personal-history and group-history. Good insights have come from so doing (as Pirsig did in the ghosts passage). But I think the outcome is often a better understanding of relevant differences, not the obliteration of the distinctions. For if "the law of gravity (personal history) and gravity (longitudinal evolutionary history) are one and the same," then why didn't gravity die with Newton? Because of his ghost, right? Well, there you have the distinction: group-history as ghost-history. Our ghost-histories aren't our own first-personal experiential-DQ, they are what we drag with us from past first-persons' experiential-DQs. That's why I made the distinction between experiential-DQ and evolutionary-DQ. I want to find just the right way of putting their relationship. Matt 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
