Marsha asked dmb:
Perhaps static patterns of value are "relatively" static like James's pure
experience is "relatively" pure?
Ant McWatt replied:
Perhaps it would be better to think of static patterns (i.e. patterned quality)
as relating to anything that can described with words while Dynamic Quality
(i.e. Unpatterned Quality) relates to what is known (such as love and beauty)
but beyond words (so - to borrow one of Northrop's suggestions - DQ is best
represented by fine Art - the less representational, the better - Northrop was
especially thinking of the large use of white space in traditional Japanese Art
of mountain scenery). So, if you want to have a better grasp of DQ, visit
your local (Fine) Art gallery!
dmb says:
Yes, I think it works well to substitute patterned and unpatterned - especially
in this case. Watch what happens to Marsha's sentence when this substitution is
made:
"Perhaps patterns of value are "relatively" patterned like James's unpatterned
experience is "relatively" unpatterned?"
I think the question is so ill-concieved that it's impossible to answer. But it
might be helpful to explain what James meant by saying that pure experience is
never literally pure (except in rare cases) and I think Pirsig's train analogy
illustrates the idea pretty well.
Marsha's question implies that static quality is relatively Dynamic and Dynamic
Quality is relatively static, apparently taking James to mean that immediate
experience is "never literally pure" in the sense that it's mixed into or
blended with static concepts. That's not what James meant and the consequences
of blending the two is that it blurs a very important distinction, confuses and
conflates the MOQ's key terms and, as we saw, leads to contradictory nonsense.
To my ears, it's like asking if "perhaps hot is relatively cold and up is
relatively down?"
In the train analogy comes from ZAMM but I think its safe to talk about it in
terms of sq and DQ anyway. DQ is the front edge of that moving train but all
the box cars are full of static quality. We want to retain the distinction so
that it would be wrong to say the leading edge of experience is within the
boxcars and it would be some kind of train wreck to suggest the the box cars
are out in front of the boxcars or their content. But what we DO want to see is
in this analogy is that the whole train is moving. Along with the leading edge
of experience (DQ or pure experience), the static quality is moving along that
track too. They are distinct and yet they alway operate together so that you
bring the whole world of static patterns to each moment of experience. That's
what James was getting at too.
James said, "only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs,
illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal
sense of a that which is not yet any definite what...." James is saying that in
the overall process of consciousness, the immediate flux of experience always
includes an organizing, sorting aspect of consciousness, one that almost
immediately fills pure experience "with emphases ... salient parts [that]
become identified and fixed and abstracted" so that experience always arrives
as already "shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and
conjunctions." In other words, we always understand the cutting edge in terms
of what's in the boxcars. As soon as pure experience comes, it's filled up with
a whole world of analogies, static patterns, the interpretive structures of
language through which we engage the world. Those box cars are moving along the
track too in an ongoing process.
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