[MD] The other side of Value

[david buchanan]

John said to Andre:

I take issue with you in the same way I take issue with Marsha. ...I dispute you both concerning what I see as a distinction between unknowable and indefinable. ...Many things cannot be defined, and yet they can be known.  Love for instance.  UFO's, ghosts, the wind, spirit.  We have terms for many known phenomena in human experience that we cannot fully define.  As I pointed out to Marsha, the very basic tenet of the MoQ is that while Quality cannot be defined, you do know what it is. ...I think perhaps my disagreement with you (and Marsha) might very well hinge upon our various semantic distinctions of "known" and "defined". So let me make my position perfectly clear. Defined refers to boundaries.  When something is defined, we know where it starts and we know where it stops.  Known however can refer to things that we can't define, but yet we realize in some nebulous way.  You must admit this, or Pirsig's key point  - you can't define Quality but you can know it - is just completely ridiculous.


dmb says:
I'd make a few qualifications but mostly I agree with John. 

Dynamic Quality is "known" in the sense that it is directly lived and felt in experience. Pirsig calls it is the primary empirical reality, direct everyday reality, the immediate flux of life and other terms that indicate a basic familiarity. In German and other languages they have two different versions of the term "know" to distinguish between knowing in this sense and "knowing" in the verbal, conceptual sense of the word. There is also a related distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, which is basically the difference between skill and knowledge. 

I don't think this has anything to do with UFOs, ghosts or spirit, however. Some words and concepts are very rich in meaning and have many definitions and some ideas are vague and quasi-fictional. But DQ isn't like that. Lots of words are real fuzzy and flexible, words like "love" and "religion" and "justice". But DQ isn't like that either. The idea, I think, is that directly lived experience itself can never be captured by words and concepts. As James would say, the flux of life to too rich and overflowing, too complex and abundant to ever be fully described or conceptualized. This, I think, describes the relationship between DQ and sq, between experience and concepts, between life and words. We KNOW both of them and the latter operates in relation the former. The common assertion they make, James and Pirisg, is that ideas are always secondary and subservient, which is to say ideas are derived from experience and their purpose is to serve life. 

"Quality doesn't have to be defined.... Quality is 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. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics.....A 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity." 

“... 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. ... This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self' or any "object" to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. ... It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed."