[MD] The Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 10:57 AM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> dmb said:
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> .., the analytic knife has to cut somewhere so that even the DQ/sq distinction counts as a pair of opposites.
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> Dan said:
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> I suspect that to count "it" as a pair of opposites with static quality is to subordinate Dynamic Quality. So let me ask: what exactly is a DQ/sq distinction? and how does it count as a pair of opposites? do you have examples?
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> dmb says:
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> "Actually the issue before him was not whether there should be a metaphysics of Quality or not. There already is a metaphysics of quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in fact a metaphysics in which the first division of Quality - the first slice of undivided experience - in into subjects and objects. Once you have made that slice, all of human experience is supposed to fit into one of these two boxes. The trouble is, it doesn't. What he had seen is that there is a metaphysical box above these two boxes, Quality itself. And once he'd seen that he also saw a huge number of ways in which Quality can be divided. Subjects and objects are just one of the ways." (Lila, page 108)
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> This quote from chapter 9 of Lila explains, I think, that any number of dualism can be produced by using the analytic knife. That's what I mean by "pairs of opposites". Any intellectual distinction will produce paired terms that define each other, the way "up" means "not down" or "cold" means "not hot".

Dan:
I think this is the source of my discomfort: pairs of opposites define
each other. So if we take Dynamic and static as pairs of opposites, we
can define each by the other, right? And Dynamic Quality defined is
static quality. But static quality defined is not Dynamic Quality.



dmb:
 In the same way, "dynamic" means "not static" and vice versa. Since
this is an intellectual distinction within a metaphysical system, both
terms are subordinate to undivided Quality itself. Please notice also
that undivided quality is contrasted with any such pairs of opposites,
which ARE divided.

Dan:

So you're saying Dynamic Quality and static quality are intellectual
distinctions, divided pairs of opposites in a metaphysical system,
contrasted with undivided Quality. That sounds right.

But doesn't Robert Pirsig say that Dynamic Quality in LILA refers to
the Quality of ZMM? I thought I read that somewhere. If so, how can
Dynamic Quality and static quality be contrasted with itself
(undivided quality)?

>dmb:
> "...American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world's classic intellectual form. It is something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phaedrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the MOQ." (Lila, page 109)
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> This is where he tells the story of the Brujo of Zuni, New Mexico.
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> "Phaedrus thought that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way, made deep and broad sense, and justified the enormous feeling of drama that it produced. After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality. It certainly felt right. Not subject and object but static and Dynamic is the basic division of reality. When A.N. Whitehead wrote that 'mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language', he was writing about Dynamic Quality. DQ is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that motivated the Brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good us freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself - any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to co
>  ntain and kill the ongoing free force of life." (Lila, page 115)

Dan:

Looking at 'it' as a term synonomous with experience, Dynamic Quality
is both undefined and infinitely defined. The question is: where does
the Dynamic/static distinction belong? I would say, since Dynamic
Quality is pre-intellellectual in nature, the distinction belongs at
the moment of intellectualization. How does that count as a pair of
opposites, though?

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>
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> Mary agreed with Platt:
> The so-called Dq/Sq split is not really a split for us at all since we cannot perceive DQ.
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> Dan replied:
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> We perceive Dynamic Quality all the time. And no, Platt isn't on target. Not even in the ballpark.
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> dmb says:
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> I agree with Dan on both counts. It's way off to say we cannot perceive DQ. DQ is undivided experience, pre-conceptual experience and we know it directly all the time. It is felt and known in every moment of experience, it is the leading edge of experience. It is the reality you know before you have time to think about it or define it or divide it into concepts. And of course this distinction is "for us". It is predicated on our experience as it is known and felt and lived every day.

Dan:

Right. And some people are more "open" to the Dynamic Quality right in
front of us. Robert Pirsig states that a mystic would probably respond
to sitting on a hot stove more quickly than would an intellectual.
There are ways to cultivate Dynamic Quality -- caring, mindfulness,
recognizing value -- just as there are ways to cultivate static
quality --believing the world is composed of only subjects and objects
and devoid of value.

I value Platt's input a great deal. I think he does himself a
diss-service, however, by adhering so strictly to Bodvar's SOL. I
think that's all he sees. No more surprises for Platt.

Sad,

Dan