Mark said:
I am really not sure what dmb means by the distinction between concepts and
reality. Concepts are a part of my reality.
Marsha said:
Perhaps dmb means the distinction between concepts and direct perception. Or
perhaps he means the difference between conceptual & perceptual experience and
the undifferentiated with no information whatsoever. I don't know, but
concepts are a part of my reality too.
dmb says:
If you're really not sure what this distinction means then you really don't
understand the MOQ's first and most basic distinction. And yet both of you
spend a lot of time pretending that you do understand the MOQ.
It's not that you need to understand what I mean by the distinction but rather
what Pirsig and James mean to say.
This is Pirsig quoting William James in LILA, at the end of chapter 29:
" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the
former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.'
Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic
subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."
In other words, there must always be a DISTINCTION between static concepts and
the directly experienced reality, because concepts are NOT a flowing flux while
pre-intellectual experience is dynamic and flowing. The DISTINCTION between
static and dynamic is the most basic line drawn in the MOQ.
There is plenty of textual evidence that shows the importance this distinction.
"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something
more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
In this basic flux of experience [DQ] the distinctions of reflective thought
[sq], such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind
and matter have not yet emerged in the forms [sq] which we make them. Pure
experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds
this distinction."
"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual
abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense
that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these
things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't
any metaphysics."
"In the past Pheadrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality
alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that
these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of
anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since that which does not
change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias
weakened his own case. Life cannot exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no
staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality is to cling to chaos. He saw that
much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying what it is not rather
that futilely trying to define what it is... Slowly at first, and then with
increasing awareness that he was going in a right direction, Phaedrus' central
attention turned away from any further explanation of Dynamic Quality and
turned to the static patterns themselves" (Robert Pirsig in Lila).
"Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand
blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless,
provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from
degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this
world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order,
preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the
other."
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