[MD] Defining Dynamic Quality

[david buchanan]

Matt, Ant, DM and all MOQers:

I don't mean to hijack Ant's thread, but I think "defining dynamic quality" 
might be a good way to take up that "anti-metaphysical" issue with Matt. 
Maybe that was Ant's intention? There was a quote from Northrop that seemed 
to broach the subject pretty well. Let it serve to remind...

“There is nothing in common between Brahman and ultimate reality as 
conceived by Democritus, Plato or Aristotle. The atoms of Democritus, the 
ideas of Plato and the forms of Aristotle were definite determinate things, 
the very antithesis of the unspecifiable Brahman. Also the Democritean 
atoms, the Platonic ideas and the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover were concepts 
by postulation, whereas Brahman, besides being indeterminate, is a concept 
by intuition.” F.S.C. Northrop, “The complementary Emphases of Eastern 
Intuitive and Western Scientific Philosophy,” in Charles A. Moore, ed., 
‘Philosophy East and West’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 
176

You may recall that I'd emphasized the first phrase; "there is nothing in 
common" and asserted that it was important for Matt to see why they have 
"nothing in common". As I understand it, Pirsig rejects Plato's move to make 
DQ into a fixed thing, an intellectual static pattern, a Platonic idea, but 
he is doing so in order to restore DQ as an unfixed no-thing, as Brahman. I 
think that Matt is following most postmodernism in rejecting these Platonic 
ideas for different reasons, with different consequences, and certainly 
without the wish to restore Brahman. And, as I understand it, quite a lot 
depends on whether of not "a thorough rejection of Platonism would still 
look the same" either way, as Matt wondered in last Sunday evening's 
"Language Games" post. I mean, if Brahman has nothing in common with 
Platonic ideas, then we can reject one without rejecting the other. This is 
how I can assert that we both reject mere metaphysics, but that this 
rejection is not relevant to DQ. In fact, rejecting the Platonic idea can be 
a step toward understanding what Brahman/DQ is NOT. It has nothing in common 
with ideas, which are static, fixed things. We say that DQ can be described 
but not defined because definitions put intellectual limits on things. We 
reject the move that would misconstrue DQ as a "defininite, determinate 
thing" because they "have nothing in common".

I'm never gonna tell you you ought to believe in Brahman, Matt, or that you 
ought to become a Buddhist. I'm not even ambitious enough to suggest that 
any of this has anything to do with a more complete picture of reality or a 
fusion of East and West. Not yet. At this point, my only aim is to try and 
discuss the reasons for understanding DQ as Brahman rather than as a 
Platonic ideal or anything like that. This will probably be hard enough.

One of the complicating factors, I suppose, is that Plato didn't really get 
it so wrong. His interpreters certainly made it worse, but I think mysticism 
was still alive in Plato. I think it informs his views profoundly and that's 
why its so easy to mistake mysticism for mere metaphysics. Wilber is 
convinced that Plato only needs to be read properly and that Plato himself 
didn't actually did turn DQ into a fixed, rigid thing. I'll also remind you 
that Plotinus and the MOQ are very similar...

"Plotinus had held the Ascending and Descending currents together admirably, 
expressing and polishing the original Platonic nonduality. And the nondual 
school of Plato/Plotinus would have almost certainly carried the day - as 
essentially similar Nondual systems of Shankara and Nagarjuna would do for 
Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively - were it not for one overwhelming and 
utterly decisive factor; the entrance on the scene of mythic-literal 
Christianity." Ken Wilber SES p360

I don't mean to add a whole new layer of complications, but strongly suspect 
that interpreting Platonism is gonna matter here. The point is really just 
that Plato can be seen more than one way. And maybe rejecting the tainted 
Plato can help clear the way to see a mystical Plato, one whose idea of 
Quality wasn't so far off after all. Maybe he never meant to nail it down, 
maybe he knew it was naughty to try and did it anyway, like Pirsig. I tend 
to think that bad metaphysics is the result of misunderstanding mystical 
statements. I think Plato and like-minded people of his time knew what they 
were talking about, but very few of his subsequent readers did. I think it 
became mere metaphysics in the same historical process that gave us theism, 
materialism and all those other nasty forms of essentialism.

Let me put it this way. Mere metaphysics, assertions without evidence, is 
what you get when you confuse references to states of consciousness with 
references to pre-existing ontological realities. Its what you get when 
descriptions of experience are taken as descriptions of external realms or 
territories. Its what you get when you confuse modes of perception with 
speculative entities. So the idea here is to reject that confusion, to say 
yea, let's get rid of pre-existing realities and the speculative entities 
because that's not what our terms refer to. But let's keep the experience. 
That is what we're talking about.

And the Wilber quote also points out that we don't have to go East to find 
the kind of mysticism that will lead to a proper understanding of DQ, but 
the Western stuff is either very ancient and fragmented or "half-baked", as 
Wilber describes them. He asserts that there is a Western tradition, a 
Western Vedanta, but it turn a wrong turn long ago and never fully 
recovered. This is the blindspot that Pirsig refers to. Maybe its more like 
a cycloptic vision rather than fully blind, but the idea is basically the 
same. Similarly, Peter Kingsley thinks Parmenadies, Socrates teacher, was a 
mystic but that it went bad shortly after that too. Of course you're already 
familiar with Pirsig's attempt to locate this missing factor among the 
ancient sophists and, hopefully, my own attempts to locate this same 
tradition in Orpheus. To be fair, its not so much that the West made a 
mistake whereas the East did not. Its more like they each picked a different 
direction and excelled as a result. The los is just the flip side of that 
same coin. You know, gains in one area often entail a loss elsewhere.

How did Plotinus get to be so darn fabulous? How is it that this ancient 
figure could resemble contemporary East-West synthesizers like Wilber, 
Pirsig and Northrop?

"Alexandria of the third century was extraordinary for the cross-currents of 
intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual teachings that poured in, 
literally, from all over the world - there has probably been nothing else 
quite like it in the history of the West. Clement and Origen were fellow 
townsmen of Plotinus. In Alexandria, one had direct access to at least the 
following teachers or their schools: the Goddess cult of Isis, Mithra 
worship, Plutarch, the Neo-Pythagoreans, the Orphic-Dionysian mysteries, 
Apollonius of Tyana, the extraordinary Jewish mystic Philo, Manichaeanism, 
the all-important Stoics, Numenius, the great African novelist Apuleius, 
much of the Hermetic writings, the Magi, Brahmanic Hinduism, early Buddhism, 
and virtually every variety of Gnosticism - not to mention two of the most 
imprtant founders of Christianity.    It is only a slight exaggeration to 
say that Plotinus took the best elements from each school and jettisoned the 
rest and, based on his own profound contemplative experiences, fashioned the 
whole thing into what can only be called an awesome vision, as coherent as 
it is beautifully compelling." Ken Wilber SES p.343

How's that for starters?

Thanks,
dmb

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