[MD] How to experience Dynamic Quality

[david buchanan]

David H said to dmb:
...I tend to shy very much away from any analogies involving 'the present'.   This is where I think the MOQ and James differ and this difference is Pirsig's addition to James pragmatism which gives it strength.  Pirsig's addition is the distinction between defined quality and undefined quality.  If I take two things and say x stands for past, and x stands for future, and according to you, o stands for Dynamic Quality.  Then I draw, what you have just described, on this post below: x o x    Is that then Dynamic Quality there in the middle? Or say, for instance, I draw the wave which you describe and put a 'dot' where Dynamic Quality represents the 'spot' between the past and the future, is that then Dynamic Quality? No, of course it isn't.  Dynamic Quality isn't anything.  I agree that 'present moment' could be an analogy for Dynamic Quality, but taking that analogy any much further than that, by say putting static quality 'next' to it, makes me cringe a little because Dynamic Quality isn't anything.

dmb says:
DQ isn't anything? I think DQ isn't any "thing", which is to say it is not an entity or a substance or a metaphysical abstraction. But it's something. It is an event, a process, an occurrence. This is another reason I like the wave analogy. In the case of actual waves in lakes and oceans, contrary to common sense, the water doesn't really move all that much. The wave is energy moving through the water and the big ones can cross entire oceans. But if you could pick out one water molecule and watch what happens to it as the wave goes by, you'd see that the molecule moves in a small circle and ends of inches from where it started. (I saw a videotaped illustration of this.) So anyway, it this analogy DQ is not a isolatable thing wedged in the middle between two other things. The analogy is all about a continuous, liquid motion. In fact, one of James's most famous analogies is "the stream of experience". Even back in his psychology book, before he'd written his essays in radical empiricism, he had said that rivers and streams were the best analogies for consciousness and experience. 


David H said to dmb:
Yes I would agree with that.  So long as we agree that the Hippies are mostly Romantics who reacted against, and some are still reacting, Classical scientific ugliness.  Anything with true quality has both a Romantic and Classic aspect to them.  Quality combines the two.

dmb says:
Yep. And in a very similar way, we want DQ and sq to be combined, to work together. This is another point we can see illustrated in the wave analogy, wherein the Dynamic, living present is working hand in hand with the static patterns of our memories and plans, our knowledge and goals. Those static patterns are objectionable only to the extent that they fail to serve the ongoing process of experience. If they dominate, suppress, lead you astray, make you crash and burn or otherwise fail to guide further experience, then you've got some re-thinking to do. It's time to get some new truths. But when they work well, as in the case of Andre's star athlete, you don't even have to think. And there is no time for deliberation anyway. There's a book called "How We Decide" that's full of examples from the most recent scientific research into this area of consciousness. (It's a popularization of the science, very easy to read.) It opens with the same sort of example, a professional Quarterback, who makes the big bucks EXACTLY because he can make the play without thinking. He's gotta be able to read the whole field at once and make a split second decision and then he's gotta have an arm too, of course, but that's not what sets the stars apart. Good throwing arms aren't all that rare, but the ability to reliably and successfully act without thinking, under tremendous pressure (National television) and in the face of physical danger (bunch of 300 pound monsters want to kill you on every play). That's what earns millions. That calm, skilled, effective concentration - even in the center of a storm - is applicable to any number of activities. I think this is why it makes sense to have such very, very broad definition of art as any high quality endeavor. It need not involve paint brushes or the fine arts at all, so that philosophers, mechanics and quarterbacks can be artists too. This notion of getting DQ and sq to work together, I think, serves as the basic model for any kind of artfulness, any kind of excellence. Once or twice Pirsig refers to these as the quality of freedom and the quality of order. Without DQ nothing can change and without sq nothing can last. To cling to DQ all by itself is to cling to chaos, he says, and clinging to static patterns alone is clinging to stale death.