[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
...if one is making statements (crazy sounding or not), one is no longer working without the glasses. As soon as you start talking, you are interpreting and you've got some glasses on. Your question asks for an uninterpreted interpretation. You question is nonsense...


Steve replied:
...The people with the glasses on are hearing what the person without glasses on is saying, and they think he sounds crazy.  ...I am perfectly fine with taking that fragment about seemingly but not actually crazy things said by someone with the glasses off as an offhand remark that shouldn't be taken too seriously.



dmb says:

You are repeating the same nonsense. Saying things and having the glasses off are two different things. You keep asking about the "crazy things said by someone with the glasses off" and I keep telling you that saying things means you don't have the glasses off anymore. As soon as you start talking you've got the glasses on. 

Taking the glasses off is one of many analogies for DQ, which is distinguished from static intellectual interpretations. We can see this in the other terms used for DQ; Pirsig's "pre-intellectual experience", James's "pure experience" or "immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories" or the Zen Buddhist's "natural pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting" or Dewey's "infinitely complex situational whole" or David Granger's "unanalyzed totality of experience" or 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. In each case we see that these descriptive terms are negative. They tell us what DQ is NOT and what it's not is verbal, conceptual, intellectual or interpretive. In other words, if you're talking then you're wearing glasses.


The difference between wearing SOM glasses and wearing MOQ glasses is that the latter admits that the glasses aren't reality, that you can't see reality through the glasses because reality is what you experience prior to interpretations. As Pirsig explains it, mystics "share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided." Notice the similarities between terms like "undivided," "undifferentiated," "unanalyzed," "pre-discriminatory" and "uninterpreted"? In other words, if you're talking then you're wearing glasses.


"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)