[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt, Ian and y'all:
The criticism I have in mind, however, is definitely based on the assertion that DQ is best understood as the primary empirical reality. The problem is not your [Matt's] failure to mention DQ often enough, of course. The problem is characterizing DQ in such a way that it becomes trivial, inert or a relatively meaningless factor. 

Matt:
... One cannot _choose_ to "freshly see," it is something that just happens. ... I would like to say is that the leading edge of experience (DQ) is at the very edge of those acculturated glasses.  However, we have no independent access to that leading edge except _through_ the glasses: one cannot go around the glasses.*  Further, since I take the leading edge metaphor to be an epistemological description of access, what it has access to is the entire world,...  We are always in contact with it, but it is through the glasses.  So what is a DQ experience on this model?  I would render it as a small hole in the glasses, a crack in them that exposes the non-glassed world to the eye.  It is this fragment of unglassed light in the midst of the rest of the glass that produces the "fresh seeing," a fresh seeing that is both static and Dynamic interpenetrating.

*An extrapoloation of the train analogy of ZMM might help to make plausible my contention that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses. ... the only way to get up to that leading edge [DQ] is by being right behind it, on the train [sq].  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. ...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. 



dmb says:
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.

Please notice that you have to ignore the hot stove analogy and significantly alter the eye glass analogy and the moving train analogy in order to make it work - and even then it doesn't really work. If your interpretations of Pirsig's various analogies for DQ aren't all fitting together harmoniously and coherently, then isn't it pretty clear that something is wrong? I think so.

Pirsig asks the term (Quality or DQ) to do a heck of a lot of work. It is the focal point around which a countless number of concepts get rearranged. All the particulars of the MOQ need to make sense in relation to this focal point. In ZAMM he says Quality is the source and substance of everything and in Lila he says DQ is the primary reality - as opposed to the secondary concepts that are derived from this primary reality. These characterizations not only fail to harmonize with your reading of the glasses, the train and the fresh seeing, they are incongruous in a very striking way. And because this is the center or focal point of his work, this reading is going to quite jarring no matter what particular aspect of the MOQ is being discussed.

Granger's reading is not jarring is this way. As he puts it, we are talking about "the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate, concrete conditions of human life and activity" and "the unanalyzed totality of experience". That characterization is very far from "a fragment of unglassed light".  In Lila, at the point where Pirsig is connecting his MOQ with pragmatism and radical empiricism, he agrees with James in asserting that there must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality. As I see it, your characterizations elevate concepts and denigrate reality. I think this is a very serious mistake, one that effectively eviscerates the MOQ.