[MD] Hot Stoves and What To Do About Them

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
I'm not saying that _all_ response to DQ is necessarily involuntary. I'm just wondering if it _can_ be involuntary. If hopping off the hot stove is an example of following DQ, and if we take "free will" to be captured in Pirsig's claim that we are free to the extent that we follow DQ, then it seems that "free will" is at least sometimes a misnomer in talking about human freedom since it isn't always willed.

dmb says:
Okay. But I'm still saying that we can't rightly describe Dynamic responses as unconscious or involuntary, not even in the case of the hot stove example. That description construes the MOQ's freedom as an automatic physiological response, as merely a reflex action.
I'd also point out that we cannot rightly impose a narrow or overly specific definition of "will" when talking about the MOQ's of freedom. Pirsig is attaching freedom to DQ, not the rational deliberations of the Cartesian self or any like that. That would be asking the MOQ to answer to the very thing it has already rejected.

Steve said:
I'm still not sure where you stand on the question at hand. Is hopping off a hot stove as Pirsig described it in Lila a willed action or not?


dmb says:
The first time he brings up the hot stove example (Lila 66), he hasn't yet introduced the distinction between static and Dynamic (Lila 115). 

The first time he uses it, he is making a very important point. He is refuting the traditional (SOM) empiricist's notion idea that morals and values aren't real because they aren't empirically verifiable. Values, he says, "are the ESSENCE of experience. Values are MORE empirical, in fact, than subjects and objects." (Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig's) And he is describing the hot stove experience in terms that reflect this attack on the old, positivistic empiricism. He's making an important point about the distinction between concepts (oaths) and reality (experience).

"This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low values, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here." ...It [low quality] is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed. (Lila, 66. Emphasis is Pirsig's)

He brings up this example again after explaining static good and Dynamic good by way of the Brujo story, the story of a Dynamic agent of evolution. "If you asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood what you were talking about. He was just followings some vague sense of 'betterness' that he couldn't have defined if he had wanted to." (Lila 114) "After many months of thinking about it, he [Phaedrus] was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging MOQ" (Lila 115)

"During the next few months that Phaedrus reflected he began to transpose the static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the hot stove first discovers his how-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not... make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought [oaths] to explain the situation.   A subject-obejct metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive an negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself.  ...it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first." (Lila 116)

Then, when we get to Pirsig's reformulation of free will and determinism, he puts it in this same context, wherein "moral judgements are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world." (Lila 156) Value goes all the way down so that "the MOQ postulates that they've [inorganic pattens] done so [created life] because it's 'better' and this definition of 'betterness' - this beginning response to DQ - is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based." (Lila 157)

This is perfectly consistent with the way he describes biological evolution as a series of "spur of the moment decisions". Since he is using the word "decision" to describe the choices made by animals in general, talks about the behavior of atoms in terms of preferences and choices and value and since he even describes the amoeba's movement away from low quality situation in contrast to the reasons it might give afterward if it could talk, I think it's quite clear that Pirsig's notion of freedom and morality cannot rightly be conceived as anything like the reflective will of a rational deliberator. It's more like responses become more responsive and responsible as evolution proceeds, the higher you go on the moral hierarchy. It's not conceptual or intellectual or static but that's because this response is more immediate and primary and in the living moment, not because it's unconscious or automatic. It's about being attuned and aware and sensitive to the pre-reflective aesthetic charge of the situation, whether it be positive or negative. It's about really Being There in the flux of life in a living, breathing, concrete way. 

To the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality...