[MD] Taking words Seriously

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dave,

DMB said:
The similarities between their terms, labels and ideas are so obvious 
to me that I'm really quite stunned by your baffled reaction. When 
this is added to the fact that you almost always delete all the 
evidence and the explanations from your responses, it does seem 
like you are simply being contemptuous, disingenuous and evasive. 
Why do you refuse to engage the substance of this debate? How 
many times have you bailed out?

Matt:
Me, bailed out?  I asked you to explain your line of reasoning and you 
called me disingenuous.  I didn't want to assume I understood your 
line of reasoning, so I requested it.  All I know is that your conclusion 
didn't scan with my understanding of any of the principle players on 
the field.  But you don't give me your line of reasoning, you give me 
quotes, which is like saying (as you do say), "See?  See?"  But I don't 
see what you do.  So explain it to me.  It'd be like getting a paper 
from a student with just quotes.  I know what _I_ think it means, I 
want to know what _you_ think it means.  However, since I know 
your answer is "it means you and Rorty are incompatible with 
Pirsig," what I'm really requesting is a more patient explication about 
how you've come to that conclusion (on this particular issue).  (And 
really, it shouldn't even be about Rorty.  It should be about me.)

(And by the way, your post seems to be all about implying that I don't 
understand, as I quote you above, "the similarities between" Pirsig, 
James, and Dewey, and maybe others, but when has that ever been 
at issue between us?  _That_ seems to be downright disingenuous, 
but I should rather take your word.  And that means that we really 
have been talking way _way_ past each other.)

So, what I've posted below is where things ended, the post you 
responded with your assertion that I'm being disingenuous.  In that 
post I tried to patiently explain how I handle (I think just about) all of 
your arguments from the posts before.  In fact, I tried in the post to 
explicitly note that I believed I was trying to say something about 
everything since you've often asserted that I'm being "evasive" 
because I "ignore" the substance of your responses, and I'm 
self-conscious about this repeated assertion on your part (though I 
think there's no real substance to it; I believe it's a function of your 
distrust of my seriousness and sincerity).  To ready us for the below, 
I responded to your assertion/argument/label that I'm disingenuous 
with an argument that I'm not, providing evidence and a mode of 
interpreting my remarks as genuine, sincere attempts to engage you 
in dialogic conversation: "if I was being disingenuous when I said 
that 'I don't get how I've rendered DQ as trivial, inert, or 
meaningless,' that would mean I _did_ very well understand how I 
was doing this.  But I gave reasons for why I thought you _might_ be 
thinking this, even acknowledged its plausibility given a different 
context, but tried to rebut its plausibility in this context" (Oct. 5).  If 
that does not describe an attempt to conscientiously engage with the 
substance of someone's remarks, then the Graduate Program I 
belong to is filled with idiots.  And perhaps that will be the conclusion 
you are forced to make given the assumptions and conclusions about 
me that you refuse to reexamine.

You say above that I "almost always delete all the evidence," which I 
take it to mean that you object to the fact that I often do not respond 
to each one of your lines, line by line, in the order that you gave 
them.  That seems to me silly.  There's nothing wrong with the line 
by line style, especially for email exchanges, but that's not how, for 
example, essays are written.  I take up your arguments in the 
manner I see as cogent, and we have an archive (if the archive isn't 
fast enough, do what I do: save relevant posts).  Why must I repeat 
everything you said, when people can go back and look at it?  I just 
repost relevant portions.  I have no idea how you see this as 
contemptuous or evasive.  If you don't trust my intentions, there's no 
point in talking to me.  I try and trust your intentions, which is why I 
continue.  I'm beginning to think I shouldn't trust your intentions.

You can take up anything you'd like below, and I'll try and engage as 
best I can with my limited time and energy, but if you just want to 
continue on with the scornful attitude and how obviously I'm 
disingenuous, evasive, etc., then don't bother.  I'm here to talk 
seriously, and if you want to reboot the conversation, good; if you 
want to continue to complain, which is often something I've resorted 
to to express my own dismay (which ironically mirrors yours), then 
we shouldn't bother talking for now.  There would just be no point.  
If, however, it's difficult to take up anything down there because it 
alludes heavily to material that _had_ been fresh in our minds then, 
but is somewhat lost to the passage of time, then that makes sense 
as a reason not to pick up again from that point.  I can't remember 
that well either where I was at those moments, and what we were 
exactly talking about.

Post from Oct. 4
----------
Matt said [on 9/29]:
An extrapoloation of the train analogy of ZMM might help to make 
plausible my contention that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses.  
If we think in those terms, the front edge of the train is DQ and 
everything behind it--i.e., the train--is SQ.  If we posit a person 
moving about the train (don't worry about what this metaphysically 
corresponds to), then the only way to get up to that leading edge is 
by being right behind it, on the train.  If one thinks to get around the 
train to the front, the only way I can imagine doing so is to leap off 
the train.  But if this train is moving fast, as I imagine it is, that means 
death.  (If it doesn't mean certain death, it also means no front edge 
of the train, as it sweeps past you: can you run as fast as a train?)  
This analogy, then, explains the relationship between small self and 
Big Self in a way that distinguishes a bad death of the small self from 
a good death.  Leaping from the train is leaping away from your small 
self into the terra incognita of Big Self, but it is a pure and total death, 
or movement into pure chaos.  Enlightenment, however, keeps your 
small self in its capacity to live and move in society/static-patterns, 
though _solely_ (as I read it) as a vehicle to pursue Big Self _at the 
front of the train_, not _off_ the train.

DMB said [on 9/30]:
DQ is fragment of light that comes through a crack or small hole in 
the static glasses? The only way to DQ is to leap off the train and 
into death and chaos? Maybe you don't agree that these are 
problematic characterizations. Maybe you don't see exactly why I 
find them so objectionable but they are exactly the sort of thing I'm 
criticizing. These are the kinds of characterizations that portray DQ 
as something trivial, inert or meaningless.

Matt:
Yeah, I don't get how I've rendered DQ as trivial, inert, or 
meaningless in my version of the glasses analogy, or train analogy. 
 Though I do understand that that has been your claim about what I 
do with DQ for these many years, in whatever I try and do with DQ.  I 
understand why those three epithets seem relevant in response to 
the "DQ as compliment" slogan, but I don't think your assimilation of 
my every handling of DQ to that response is sensitive to my own 
distinctions in context.  Think of it this way: most recently, I've been 
talking about Dynamic Quality.  The slogan, however, is better spelled 
out this way: "the phrase 'Dynamic Quality' is a compliment we pay to 
past experiences that have proven to be direct experiences of 
Dynamic Quality, and not degenerate or mistakenly static."  These are 
two different contexts of rendering DQ's many sides, and I see the 
epithets as only having purchase in one of them.  (And since the 
slogan is not at issue presently, I pass over my estimation of that 
plausible objection.)

My version of the train analogy was meant to articulate how chaos 
fits together with Dynamic Quality.  (I must also add here that your 
assimilating "a crack in the glasses" to "jumping off the train" is a 
reading mistake on your part, or an injudicious collapse of a 
distinction I wanted to maintain.  I'm unclear about whether that 
was an honest mistake or intentional, but if it was intentional, I'm 
unclear as to what legitimates the collapse.)  I don't see what is 
"jarring" or "incongruous," as you say, between the work Pirsig sees 
DQ as handling and my version of what that work is.  And you don't 
really offer an explanation of the incongruity, except what I have to 
infer is the difference between what your impression of the
 _magnitude_ of the "primary" in "primary reality" is and the opposite 
impression of magnitude from my word "fragment" (when describing 
the glasses analogy).*  However, I can't help but perceive that as a 
superficial rhetorical difference in the words, and not the conceptual 
position I was describing.  After all, a "fragment" of molten lava burns 
the shit out of you.  A more congenial understanding of these 
"fragments" would understand them to be quite powerful as they are.  
This, then, dovetails with the train analogy: taking off the glasses 
would blind your eyes (bad death/chaos), just as leaping from the 
train would kill you.

A direct engagement with my conceptual position, rather than 
haggling over the analogies and metaphors with which we work, I 
think would address what I've gotten wrong in this relationship 
between DQ and chaos, or as I put it otherwise, "good" or "bad" 
death.  I'm not sure I've obviously screwed up this relationship, but 
it was what I was trying to draw into the picture of our 
understanding of Dynamic Quality as it is elaborated by analogies that 
didn't, explicitly, seem to have it in view as they were deployed in 
Pirsig's writings.

DMB said [on 9/30, different post]:
This helps to reinforce the idea of man being a participant in the 
creation of all things, the measure of all things, and it helps to put 
the landscape analogy back in it's original context. But I also think this 
helps to push back against Matt's contention that we have limited 
access to DQ, that it can only be seen through a crack in the glasses 
or by jumping off the train and into death and chaos. I think the idea 
here is that DQ is the endless landscape of OUR awareness. We not 
only have access, we are inseparable from it. It is in that sense that 
Quality has us, rather than the other way around.

Matt:
I'm unclear where the pushing occurs.  For one, I reject the premise 
that I've suggested that "we have limited access to DQ."  I've, rather, 
tried to describe the difference between DQ and chaos.  (And what I 
take to be the unwarranted assimilation of "a crack in the glasses" 
to "jumping off the train" occurs again here.)  And secondly, I do not 
see how the slogans in the last two sentences are unavailable to 
either of my analogies: we, with our glasses, are inseparable from 
the landscape (just, I might add, as we are in _Pirsig's_ use of the 
analogy, which if there were a push would seem to hit Pirsig in the 
same way); we-the-train are inseparable from the tracks.

DMB said [on 10/4]:
Okay, gents. Let me try this another way.

Matt:
You quoted a lot of David Scott after this, but I was entirely unclear 
as to its purport, how it intersected with the conversation between 
Ron, Dan, Steve, and myself.  Too oblique, one might say.

Matt

*There are two other objections, though I only take up the 
"magnitude" implication.  A second objection is roughly that I can't 
understand Quality/DQ as the "source and substance of everything" 
or as a "focal point."  However, I don't understand how my analogies 
can disbar those conceptual understandings.   Pirsig has to deploy 
many analogies to describe DQ in order to see its many sides, and 
we generally don't ask how, e.g., the tracks the train runs on is the 
source of the train or how the world on the other side of the glasses 
is the substance of the glasses.  One has to modulate to different 
analogies to explain what seems absurd from the inside of the 
(wrong) analogy.  This doesn't mean that analogy comparison and 
contrasting can't highlight interesting conceptual valences, but I do 
think that this particular objection finds no solace in my elaborated 
analogy itself.  One would have to, rather, assume previously that I 
do not or cannot hold that Quality/DQ is the source and substance 
of everything.

However, as I have conceded several times recently, the perpetual 
difficulty for me, and the third of the objections, is the hot stove 
analogy.  At present, however, I'm not sure I can't take it into account, 
only that I haven't yet done so though also expressed a dislike for it.  
I'm not trying to be cagey, only precise.  For on the one hand, it is my 
responsibility, if I want to claim to have supplied a full and complete 
interpretation of how Pirsig's philosophy fits together, to take the hot 
stove analogy into account somehow.  But on the other side from this, 
it isn't clear to me that I _cannot_ do this.  I.e., I haven't a sense of 
_how_ you've leveled the hot stove analogy _as_ an objection.  It 
looks to me, rather, that you were taking advantage of known facts 
about my distaste for it (or simply not revealing what precisely the 
shape of its problem is for me).  Your objection there seems to have 
been that I _haven't_ accounted of it, rather than that I _can't_.  And, 
I confess again, I don't have that account yet, but it's only a damning 
objection in the "can't" form.  (In the "haven't" form it is rather an 
ongoing suspicion.)  It's not your responsibility to tell me what my 
problems are, but you can't take advantage either of things I've 
sensed as potential problems, but not given any definition to.  It 
would be a boon to me if you did help give that definition, but I 
haven't yet a sense of what that shape is.