[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[david buchanan]

John said:
I didn't know that the MoQ postulated one dq realm, one sq.  I thought the MoQ postulates one realm - experience.  This realm of experience can be sliced and diced innumerable ways,  but the best way we see to divide it, that is, the highest quality explanation we can come up with right now, is that experience has a dynamic aspect and a static aspect.  The dynamic we term DQ, the static sq.    In this metaphysics, experience is generated by Quality.  There is no pre-valuation of anything.  Until something is valued, it doesn't exist. That's the MoQ, and why, in MoQ terms, unpatterned is a fallacy.

dmb says:
Predictably, I'm going to suggest that the best way to understand the difference between dynamic and static is through radical empiricism. Dynamic experience is unpatterned in the sense that it is prior to conceptualizations or static patterns. You can think of DQ as unpatterned value. Pirsig's remark about things not existing until they are valued refers to static valuations. But the hot stove example shows how we experience the negative value of the situation and respond to it even before we think of the situation in terms of concepts like stoves and heat. Northrop, James, and Dewey all have their own terms for this distinction but the idea is the basically the same as Pirsig's. Such a variety of terms really helps you see what they're getting at. The unpatterned experience, for example, can be called the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the pre-conceptual reality, the primary empirical reality, pure experience, pre-reflective experience, immediate experience, noncognitive experience, pre-verbal experience, the immediate flux of life and the cutting edge of experience. All these terms are contrasted with experience that is static, conceptual, verbal, cognitive, reflective, intelligible and differentiated. The idea is that we operate with both ways of knowing, even though most of us are barely aware of our preconceptual awareness. It's been denigrated and pushed into the background as part of "just" what you like. We've been taught not to do just what we like, which results in a kind of numbing and deadening of this noncognitive category of experience. It's been dismissed as unimportant for historical reasons. I mean, radical empiricism serves as a basis for the reintegration of the affective domain into our rationality and into our philosophies. 



"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part."  (ZAMM p. 294)

“Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. …The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy …seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.…Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale.  …To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best diving power?" (William James in ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)

Thanks,
dmb 		 	   		  
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