[MD] Know-how - an aside

[Platt Holden]

All:

These quotes from ZAMM suggest that Quality is a strictly individual event,
solely dependent on an individual's life experiences. It's like breathing.
Everyone
knows what breathing is, but each individual has a different breathing
experience,
especially the experience of the first and last breaths.

Individual uniqueness is a dominant theme of the MOQ, demonstrated by the
author's attention to the differences that mark the personalities of
Phaedrus,
Rigel, Lila, Dusenberry, John Wooden Leg,  and other individuals whose
understanding  of Quality varies mightily. That such disparity
gives ammunition
to Pirsig's critics goes without saying.

Platt


On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Mary <marysonthego at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Marsha and Steve,
>
> On Behalf Of MarshaV
> > Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 2:28 AM
> >
> > Hi Steve,
> >
> > Since I still cannot find the words I'm looking for, I think I'll speak
> > the words I have.  This is a beautiful post.  The quotes from ZMM are
> > still as beautiful as I first remembered them. They are equal to my
> > experience with the guitar and or listening to Mozart's Sinfonia
> > Concertante.  When I was hopelessly lost somewhere between Philosophy
> > East and Philosophy West, they were the ecstatic joy of finding a way
> > home.  And reading these quotes this morning made my heart quicken.
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> >
> >
> > Marsha
> >
> [Mary Replies]
>
> Steve, like Marsha, I found joy in these quotes.  Clear and powerful
> imagery.  I enjoy your interpretation of them too.
>
> They remind me of something I've been toying with for a while.  The idea
> that the MoQ can be understood in many ways, depending on where you have
> been already when you encounter it.  That's what's uncanny about Pirsig's
> construction.  It can be interpreted in many lights and all are valid.
>
> Thanks,
> Mary
>
> Steve:
> Really? You can distinguish the static and dynamic aspects of reality in
> practice? DQ/sq is the the first cut and a clean one as metaphysics, but
> we've been talking about epistemology here. We are talking about knowledge,
> and in doing so we are supposing a distinction between a knower (the
> "taker"
> with the buckets) and what is known (the stream).  People have different
> experiences because they bring to experience different sets of static
> patterns. In our moment to moment experience we cannot completely
> distinguish the static from the dynamic. As soon as we start talking about
> a
> person _having_ an experience whether in terms of giving or taking, the
> dynamic and static aspects of that experiences are conflated to the point
> that it is impossible to say where the dynamic part ends and the static
> part
> begins.
>
> Remember this bit on relativism from ZAMM?
> "Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had
> always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is
> shapeless,
> formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize.
> Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms.
> The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the
> Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated
> in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues
> to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build
> up
> our language in terms of these analogues.
> We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''
>
> The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to
> it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing
> that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us
> because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their
> differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish
> between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon,
> he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time
> seeing the law of gravity.
>
> This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students
> arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions.
> They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge.
> But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems
> out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students'
> ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.
>
> In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him.
> People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because
> people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two
> people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically
> every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain
> just
> speculation.
>
> In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:
>
> ``Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true
> precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of
> philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking
> something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody
> else
> means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and
> predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because
> Quality
> is so simple, immediate and direct.
>
> ``The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our
> environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism
> to its environment' ...
>
> ``In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
> environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth
> and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language,
> philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues
> reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of
> truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not
> accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to
> invent the analogues is Quality.
> Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to
> create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
>
> ``Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it
> within the world we have created, is clearly impossible.
> That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining
> something less than Quality itself.''
>
>
> Steve:
> In the above, the buckets are the analogues (later, the static patterns).
> The stream is DQ, but it is not all of reality, it is only the dynamic
> aspect of reality. It is constantly defined and never exhausts definition,
> so it is undefinable. Reality is the collection of all the analogues in
> addition to the buckets. The buckets aren't something outside of reality
> that merely take from reality.
>
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