[MD] Mind-body practice

[david buchanan]

Krimel asked:
Where does Pirsig say that the pursuit of knowledge takes us away from Dynamic Quality?

dmb says:
Pirsig says many times and in many ways that DQ can't be defined intellectually and that reality is fundamentally dynamic. He's not saying that education is evil or that science is naughty. He more or less opens and closes Lila with this intellectual-mystical distinction. Its one of the major themes in both books, even before DQ was invented. In fact, some of the names for DQ describe it in terms of a negative relationship to intellect; pre-intellectual experience, pre-linguistic experience, undifferentiated experience, pure experience, etc.. 

“Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language: that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation” (LILA, page 63). 

“Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too ‘scientific’. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food” (LILA 63). 

“Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding" (LILA 64).
     
"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called ‘Quality’ in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions” (LILA 64).

I'd also point out that this is exactly where mysticism meets radical empiricism...

“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy …was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subject and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical of psychical: it logically precedes this distinction” (LILA 365).
 
“What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James’ pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is values. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, that pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience, The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. …Value is at the very front of the empirical procession” (LILA 365).

 “The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the Metaphysics of Quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with” (LILA 366).

I'm also fond of the quotes on the difference between mystical experience and the religious clap trap that grows up around it, which makes the same basic point about eating the menu.

In any case, its safe to say that Quality plays a central role in Pirsig's thinking and so you've asked one of the key questions.

There's one more point to add. It's a negative one. I'm pretty sure that Pirsig never said that DQ is the stuff that "wiggles".

Thanks,
dmb




_________________________________________________________________
Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.
http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_122007