[MD] Freewill

[david buchanan]

Dave T said:
Remember the passage about hearing a new song on the radio being indicative of DQ? Doesn't that put the kibosh on your last statement? Or was RMP was mistaken? Oh I know, it's only any analogy.



Steve replied:
... With respect to listening to music, it is more like the absurdity of deciding whether to play song A over song B on your iPod at a given moment because song A is somehow the more _dynamic_ and therefore _free_ option.



dmb says:

That seems like an awfully strange way to construe the point Pirsig was making. I'm sure he did not mean to suggest that the song itself is somehow more dynamic than all the other songs. The experience is dynamic because the song is new to you, because you are hearing it for the first time. It's like the bad writers who couldn't think of anything to say because they couldn't think of anything to imitate or mimic. the cure for this stuckness, this lack of creative freedom, was cured by getting these dull student to look freshly with their own eyes. How different is that from hearing freshly with your own ears? 

In the hot stove example, Pirsig says the negative face of Quality that gets you off the stove is not some crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction. It is an immediate empirical reality. In that sense, following DQ is not otherworldly, precious or rare. It's the capacity to respond to the primary empirical reality without getting confused by a lot of abstractions. It's about being present right here and right now. 

On top of all that, why is it absurd to decide on song A over song B? It might be a rather trivial example of following an undefined sense of betterness and it's hard to imagine that such a choice would be very important. But why can't a simple thing like that be conceived in terms of following DQ? I've been surprized and blown away by songs that weren't particularly new to me or anyone else. It's not the freshness of the song so much as the way you take. When you put fresh ears on a thing it really is quite striking how different that experience is. But it's not unconscious or automatic, it's just unpremeditated and spontaneous, which isn't the same thing at all.