[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Matt's "indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis" says:
If I want to always be following DQ as much as possible, how do I know whether I'm dimly apprehending Dynamic Quality or apprehending dimly with static patterns? ...what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good?  Well, I guess just that it is a placeholder...  And we won't know the difference in our own experience until much later, for the experience of dimness, we might say, is a necessary condition, but definitely not sufficient.


dmb says:
You're asking about following DQ and how that differs from the following the static or conceptual, right? It seems to me that this is the topic of every major analogy and example Pirsig offers. To say it's central to the MOQ would be an understatement. I think the point of all the various analogies is pretty well summed up by the James quote that Pirsig uses at the end of chapter 29. They both assert the same distinction between static and Dynamic. There must always be a discrepancy between static concepts and dynamic reality, they both say. This distinction is the key to understanding Pirsig's hot stove example, the train analogy, the endless landscape analogy, the artful motorcycle mechanic, the dull student who was forced to see freshly, the reformulation of free will and determinism, the re-thinking of the evolutionary process, the formation of scientific hypotheses, ect.. This central theme runs throughout both books. Pirsig was already talking in terms of static and dynamic back in ZAMM:

"..One doesn't cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic quality you never get stuck. ...classical, structured, dualistic subject object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. THAT is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're both with, although you ARE born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just 'intution', not just an unexplainable 'skill' or 'talent'. It's the direct result of contact with basic REALITY, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal." (ZAMM 284)

dmb resumes:

To the extent that one is controlled by static patterns, one is stuck. To the extent that one follows DQ, one never gets stuck.

And doesn't Pirsig use the same language when he gives us the hot stove example? 


"When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, "This stove is hot," and then make a rational decision is to get off. A 'dim perception of h knows not what' get him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation. A subject-object 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 thought itself. ...it would be the mystic students who would bet off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past."(LILA 116)


"I keep talking wild theory, but it keeps somehow coming out stuff everybody knows, folklore. This Quality, this feeling for the work, is something known in every shop. ..it's exactly the this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce: through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a 'hollow flexible' attitude of 'beginner's mind'. You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment not to be feared but cultivated." (ZAMM 285)

David Scott, by way of William James, says the same thing about the relation between static concepts and dynamic reality: The Buddhist's meditative "techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of ‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization’." Or again, as James puts it, ‘the essence of life is its continuously changing character [DQ]; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed [sq]" Before or underneath this secondary conceptualisation and discrimination [sq] comes what James dubs primary, or ‘pure’, experience [DQ]. As James explains, ‘pure experience [DQ] is the name I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’ [Pirsig quotes these lines in Lila.]  What is pure experience [a.k.a. Dynamic Quality]?  Scott says t, "James’ ‘pure experience’ is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting, which Zen traditionally calls one’s ‘original face’  and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’ . The sacredness of the mundane in Zen also compares with James’ view that ‘pure experience’ is nothing ‘but another name for feeling or sensation’ [direct everyday experience]. James says, "there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made, there are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the thing experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same. ‘It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness or what not.’ Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures and save for time and space (and if you like for ‘being’) there appears no universal element of which all things are made".


We can talk about this same stuff in Dewey's terms too. We can say that Pirsig's "primary empirical reality" is the same as Dewey's "infinitely complex situational whole" or that Pirsig's "endless landscape of awareness" is the same as Granger's "unanalyzed totality of experience" and Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". All these various ways of referring to Dynamic Quality are not just arbitrary labels, of course, they are descriptive terms. My purpose is not to dazzle you with my awesome philosophical vocabulary but to shine light on Pirsig's central term. We have the advantage of not only harmonizing the examples an analogies in both of Pirsig's books but also harmonizing all that with the language of a half dozen other philosophers, all of whom are some combination of pragmatist, radical empiricist and Buddhist. C'mon gents, I'm dishing up a twelve course meal here. Does this not help?

"Dewey's conception of experience is directly contingent upon the idea of quality. In Experience and Nature, he tells us that 'quality' constitutes the 'brute and unconditioned isness' of empirical events. As Pirsig likewise suggests, qualities are much more that mere states of conscousness. Rather, the establish the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate, concrete conditions of human life and activity. Immediate sense qualities are what we live in and for. 'The world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated,' Dewey argues, 'is preeminently a qualitative world'. This means that 'all direct experience is qualitative, and qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious." (David Granger 27)