[MD] On Balance: Dewey, Pirsig and Granger

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

All,

I've been holding off dialogue over David Granger's book as I am only about
halfway through it. (By the way, I heartily recommend it. It should be
available by now in your local library, or via interlibrary-loan at your local
library. Please give it your time, its worth it.)

The notion of "balance" is something a few of us have been discussing lately,
namely "balance" between Dynamic and static forces as being integral to
evolution and freedom. From LILA, "That's the whole thing: to obtain static and
Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don't have the static patterns of
scientific knowledge to build upon you're back with the cave man. But if you
don't have the freedom to change those patterns you're blocked from any further
growth." The goal is to "create a stable static situation where Dynamic Quality
can flourish".

In the Introduction to his book, "Dewey, Pirsig and Lived Experience", David has
a very eloquent section on "balance". I relate it below, hoping he does not
mind the lengthy quotation.

"Importantly, according to Dewey and Pirsig, these incidents [moments of
aesthetic immediacy and experience] presuppose that human beings are active
participants in a world that manifests certain basic characteristics or traits.
In a world substantially different from our own, they argue, consummatory
satisfactions of this sort would be virtually impossible. This is because the
consummations are contingent upond environments that are marked by change and
flux, or what Pirsig calls "Dynamic Quality", in conjunction with periods of
rest and stability, Pirsig's "static quality". Dewey describes it this way:

'There are two sorts of possible worlds in which esthetic experience would not
occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative; it would not
move toward a close. Stability and rest would have no being. Equally is it
true, however, that a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of
suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where
everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envision with
pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected
on the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the
actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and
culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is
capable of esthetic quality.'

Need or desire and its fulfillment would simply not exist in either of these
alternative worlds. There must be a productive mixture of contingencies and
regularities:

'The live being recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium with his
surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of
intensest life. In a finished world, sleep and waking could not be
distinguished. In one wholly perturbed. conditions could not even be struggled
with. In a world made after a pattern of ours, moments of fulfillment punctuate
experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals.'

Maintaining his bike now provides Pirsig with a wealth of those venerable
moments."