[MD] The Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics

[Andre Broersen]

Mary to virtually everybody (and mind):

I suppose, but I have the uneasy feeling we aren't talking about quite the
same thing.

Andre:
Mary, this is an interesting post you planted and touches on some things 
I have been wondering about lately. It is getting late here at the 
moment but still want to give you an initial reaction and share some ideas.
I am beginning to think we are not talking about the same thing. As 
mentioned to Platt, we are talking 'past' eachother.

Mary:

Pirsig makes a distinction between Static and Dynamic Quality
yet maintaining that both are still Quality.  Sort of like the difference
you might make between a book on the shelf and one yet to be written.

Andre:
This is where I got uneasy feelings. You are immediately pre-supposing that the 'end result' will be a book...yet to be written.

Mary:
One is defined and knowable and one is not.  How else would you refer to a book that's yet to be written but as a book, since if it ever is realized it will be as, well, a book?

Andre:
This continued the uneasy feeling. You are pre-determining something that has yet to be determined. You have already applied the knife.

Mary:
When he's discussing the analytical knife, this DQ/SQ split isn't what he's
talking about.  We never see that split.  All we see is the static fallout,
the SQ.

Andre:
This is unfortunate Bodvar terminology (sorry Mary but I do not like it). It is misleading as it seems to completely miss the next point you are making:'He's trying to get us to take a grip on how we handle the experience, the SQ.

No! The experience IS DQ it is pre- intellectual, pre-language.

The 'experience of SQ is inorganic/organic/social and intellectual patterns of value. To be clear: No DQ.

Mary:
And next comes the confusion: If there is a difference between DQ and SQ what do you think it is?
And you continue:Well, what does that mean, especially when he says that all is Quality, all is Value,
all is Morals?

Quality is the same whether you put an "S" in front of it or a "D".  Whether you can define it
or not.  Whether you experience it or not.  There is no split.

Andre:

This is why it caught my interest Mary and I think that there is a difference...and I really hope that dmb and Anthony can chime in here as well. (Anthony's PhD contains 2 chapters: one on Pirsig's idea about Quality and one on Pirsig's ideas about Value...I cannot access them at the moment but this alone seems to suggest a difference).

Here is my take: the 'split' you talk about further in your post, the 'stuff you take away' from DQ happens pre-intellectually, pre-language. This is adding to the pile of sand you have already scooped up from the endless beach.

The split occurs through (e)valuations (hence quality)of abstracting those 'bits' of experience that 'fit' our boxcars...that fit our own train which of course is mediated through pre-existing analogies of inorganic, organic, social and intellectual pattens of value.

Mary:
You don't have any choice about the split between Dynamic and Static.

Andre:
As Dan suggests, you cannot not have a choice about this. This is the heart of the confusion, and I will reiterate dmb's words again: Bodvar's interpretation leads you to such nonsense.It leads to to a no-win, no choice situation. Actually, come to think of it, it makes you quite dead! (What makes you get out of bed in the morning?)

Mary:
You can't make a lot of decisions about the unknown, can you?

Andre:
"Now it comes! Because Quality is the GENERATOR of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, 'Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.' ...Men invent RESPONSES to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've go to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It HAS to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is  known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues. These fill the boxcars of the train of consciousness."  (ZAMM, page 351, near the end of chapter 28. Emphasis is Pirsig's) (thanks dmb!)

Mary:
Why did he go to such lengths to incorporate DQ into his
metaphysics if he couldn't even define it?  Makes him sound like a crackpot
or a mystic, right?

Andre:
Yes, this depends on what cultural perspective you use. The 'West' would use the former.

Mary:
He did it because he had no choice. You can't have Static Quality without
Dynamic Quality to bring it into existence.  To formulate his metaphysics he
had to work backward, rejecting one assumption at a time.

Andre:
He had no choice in the sense that he did not like himself at all... (as you put it in another post... steeped in SOM). He saw the sorry state the world is in and the sorry state that he was in and decided to do something about it.(because there was more to his (read the human!) experience of the world than SOM provided/recognised).

Mary:
Let's say you can stand in your kitchen, if you are so inclined, and
spend a whole day carefully peeling one layer at a time off an onion until
it isn't an onion anymore.  It isn't anything.  Your hand is empty.  Without
Dynamic Quality, that's what the MoQ would be like.  Without Dynamic
Quality, where would Static Quality come from?

Andre:
No-thing. Quality, The Tao,The Formless, Emptyness (within which there is great working)

Mary:
...I'm getting tired and that discussion will have to be for another day.

Andre:
Same here Mary. I enjoyed responding to this post. Interested to hear your comments...and some of the other's I requested. This is very important.