[MD] BeTteR-neSs (undefined or otherwise)

[david buchanan]

Dan said:
We cannot think of Dynamic Quality as a mover. Dynamic Quality must be kept concept-free.


Mark replied:
Why is this?  What puts DQ out of the bounds of metaphysics?   By labeling Dynamic Quality as concept free, aren't you pointing towards a concept?  How do you get around this, by not talking about it?  Are you suggesting that we should not discuss DQ?  If DQ is concept free, what is it besides concept free?  Please explain, I thought we were discussing concepts.



dmb says:

DQ can't be defined because the term refers to experience prior to conceptualization. It is direct and immediate awareness, the empirical reality you know before you can think about it. Obviously, definitions are not pre-conceptual. To define something is to put limits on it. To distinguish one idea or thing from another requires distinctions, the drawing of lines and borders. But DQ is undivided experience or pure experience or undifferentiated experience. 

This is the first and most basic distinction in the MOQ. This is the DQ/sq split. There is no way to properly understand the MOQ without first grasping the distinction between concepts (static quality) and reality (Dynamic Quality). 


"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.  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. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. Ametaphysics must be divisible, definable, and know able, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity." (Lila, chapter 5)