Thanks for playing along, gents. Just about everyone seems to be reading it the
same way I do. Ant totally nailed it, of course, and it seems safe to consider
my hunch pretty well confirmed. I was fairly confident already but we always
gotta watch out for the Cleveland Harbor Effect and other kinds of confirmation
bias. I'll take a turn playing the game too. My additions are bracketed in the
passages below:
...experiences come whole [undivided or undifferentiated], pervaded by unifying
qualities [Quality as an aesthetic continuum] that demarcate them within the
flux of our lives [what James and Pirsig call "the immediate flux of life"]. If
we want to find meaning [intellectual quality], or the basis for meaning, we
must therefore start with the qualitative unity [undivided Quality or Dynamic
Quality] that Dewey describes. The demarcating pervasive quality is, at first,
unanalyzed [Quality is pre-intellectual experience], but it is the basis for
subsequent analysis, thought, and development. Thought [intellectual
experience] starts from this experienced whole [begins with DQ], and only then
does it introduce distinctions [static concepts and definitions] that carry it
forward as inquiry.
It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties, and
relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience
["subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something
more fundamental" (Lila 364)]. What are primary are pervasive qualities of
situations ["the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our
later reflection with its conceptual categories" (Lila 365)], within which we
subsequently discriminate objects, properties, and relations.
Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human experience
is not atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a "situation," by
which he meant, not just our physical setting, but the whole complex of
physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions that constitute any given
experience—experience taken in its fullest, deepest, richest, broadest sense.
[Compare that whole sentence (above) to Pirsig's: "If you compare the levels of
static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a forest, and if
you see the different patterns sometimes in competition with each other,
sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but always in a kind of tension
that will shift one way or the other, depending on evolving circumstances, then
you can also see that evolution doesn't take place only within societies, it
takes place within individuals too. Lila then becomes a complex ecology of
patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality." (Lila 360)]
Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience [subjective
idealism], nor is it a mere window to objective mind-independent reality
[scientific objectivity]. Mind is a functional aspect of experience [mind is a
process, not a thing] that emerges when it becomes possible for us to share
meanings [evolved as language], to inquire into the meaning of a situation, and
to initiate action that transforms, or remakes, that situation [betterness is
the purpose of social and intellectual static quality].
The pervasive quality of a situation is not limited merely to sensible
perception or motor interactions [pre-intellectual experience is not merely raw
sense data]. Thinking is action, and so "acts of thought" also constitute
situations [there is a dynamic cutting edge of experience even within the
static conceptual world] that must have pervasive qualities. Even our best
scientific thinking stems from the grasp of qualities ["the MOQ also says that
DQ [is] the value force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a
laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one..
It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (Lila 365-6)]
[And finally, my favorite....]
The crux of Dewey's entire argument is that what we call thinking,
or reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without the felt
qualities of situations: "The underlying unity of qualitativeness regulates
pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and relation; it guides
selection and rejection and the manner of utilization of all explicit terms."
["The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious "whatever
you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. ... It is the source of
subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not
capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness; THE ORDERING PRINCIPLE
OF ALL SCIENTIFIC AND RATIONAL THOUGHT which destroys capriciousness, and
without which no scientific thought can proceed." (Pirsig in ZAMM)]
Now I'm hoping this forms the basis of some good discussion. It offers a fresh
terms and a new look at the MOQ's central terms and distinctions.
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