[MD] DQ and SQ interrelationship

[david buchanan]

John McConnell said:
...If you view the relationship of DQ to SQ in this way, and if you view cosmic evolution as the history of the advance of Dynamic Quality, the levels of MOQ emerge naturally as sort of the critical points at which phase changes have occurred.  The only place where the levels don't seem completely natural and obvious to me in this view is the social level and then the intellectual level.  To me the obvious phase change is from the biological level to a "mental" level which subsumes both the social and the intellectual levels of MOQ.  Social evolution and intellectual evolution both seem to me to be ways in which DQ continues to push forward and develop stable patterns of SQ, with intellectual being the more promising and fruitful avenue of advance.



dmb says:
I think it's pretty clear that Pirsig's four levels are all part of an evolutionary picture and the first two levels are going to map onto physics (Big Bang) and biology (Darwinism) quite neatly. This part is easier understand than the social and intellectual levels but the third and fourth levels are far more interesting and important. That's where all the action is, so to speak. Pirsig's aim is a root expansion of rationality and his main enemy in this respect is "value-free science" and the attitudes of objectivity that it engenders. The whole value system of the culture is effected by this scientific objectivity, wherein morals and values are JUST subjective, just mental, and therefore not quite real. And so we see in the subtitles of his books that the quest is all about morals and values and where our forms of thinking have gone wrong with respect to morals and values. 

As David Granger puts it, in his book about John Dewey and Robert Pirsig, "their respective metaphysics function as instruments of cultural criticism". (p.70) Granger says "their metaphysics can do things for us and can be 'put to work' where values are concerned". (p.70) In both cases, their metaphysics also function as a direct attack on the fact/value distinction, an attack on subject-object metaphysics. 

"Value-free science has got to go," Pirsig says. Or, in the words of his eccentric friend Dusenberry,...

     "There's this pseudo-science myth that when you're 'objective' you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that's rubbish. When a person's objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.      The Indians see that. They see it better than we do. And when they see it they don't like it." (p.32 of Lila)

"Dewey's main point," Granger says, "is that the common belief in the separation of the domains of science and value is ultimately parasitic on a false separation of our cognitive and affective lives, the 'objective' and 'subjective' modes of our relations with the world." (p.77)

The critique of our attitudes and assumptions is one of the main themes in their attack on objectivity but it also includes a rejection of what Pirsig calls "the metaphysics of substance" or what we might call ontological realism, scientific naturalism or simply physicalism. Despite the fact that the first two static levels of the MOQ fit neatly with the scientific explanations for the physical and the biological, the MOQ is built upon a radically different metaphysical premise wherein everything begins with experience, not physical phenomena. In ZAMM, when Pirsig says that "Quality is the source and substance of everything", he's talking about Quality as the continuing stimulus which causes us to create reality as we understand it, as the stimulus which causes us to create analogy upon analogy. "Man is a participant in the creation of all things", he says. In Lila, we get the same idea in slightly different terms and we see how it functions as a direct assault on subject-object metaphysics. Along with William James, Pirsig says...

"[S]ubjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'." (p.364-5) 

In both books DQ is not anything like the physical ground of reality. All the various ways of referring to DQ will indicate that we're talking about experience itself rather than the underlying causes and conditions of experience. On top of James's terms for it (pure experience, the immediate flux of life), there is Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic experience", Pirsig's "primary empirical reality", "direct everyday experience", "continuing stimulus", "cutting edge of experience" and many others. In a nutshell, all these concepts say the same thing, reality is experience and all concepts are derived from that, including the idea that physical reality comes first and concepts have arrived on the evolutionary stage only recently.

This can seem like a very perplexing paradox and it's where the metaphysical shift from SOM to the MOQ can just end up with a lot of gear-grinding noise. Pirsig wants to frame the whole thing in terms of evolutionary growth of static patterns with DQ as the generative force behind that evolution but it's very important, I think, to make sure we don't simply posit DQ as some kind of ontological substance or God-like intelligence. DQ is not some mysterious and invisible stuff behind the scenes; it's only unknowable in the verbal, conceptual, intellectual sense. DQ is just experience that's so simple, immediate and direct that it's what you know even before you have a chance to think about it or reflect on it or otherwise sort it into conceptual categories. That's what makes it dynamic rather that static; it's pure experience rather than the conceptualized or verbalized abstractions we add to experience.

This evolutionary picture is used to paint each of us as "a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality". "The words Lila uses, the thoughts she things, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years of the history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary patterns of value. She doesn't know how they all got there any more than any jungle knows how it came to be". (Lila p.138)

It might be tempting to simply plug this claim into the standard scientific worldview or otherwise assume Pirisg is only saying that people evolved on earth over time. But actually he's already challenging the subject/object distinction in a very big way. As other philosophers have said, Pirsig is painting a picture wherein the subjective self is NOT ontologically distinct from objective reality but rather we are always embodied and already culturally situated by the time we can ever begin to think about "reality". 

"In traditional, substance-centered metaphysics, life isn't evolving toward anything. Life's just an extension of the properties of atoms, nothing more. It has to be that because atoms and varying forms of energy are all there is. But in the MOQ what is evolving isn't patterns of atoms. What's evolving is static patterns of value, and while that doesn't change the data of evolution it completely up-ends the interpretation that can be given to evolution." (Lila p. 139)

Please notice that Pirsig is not trying to outdo the cosmologists by developing a better version of the big bang theory and he's not trying to be the biggest, strongest evolutionary biologist either. He's using these evolutionary perspectives to frame a moral hierarchy for actual living people in the present. He uses Lila (the character) as a kind of test case by which we can examine and explore this moral hierarchy. Through this framework we learn along the way how and why "she does and does not have quality" at the same time. If she only had inorganic quality, she'd be dead. Biologically speaking, she's past her prime but hell yea, baby, she had lots of hot, slippery quality - and she had it all night long. Especially if you're wearing those beer-goggles. But socially she's pretty far down the scale, quite contemptible in fact, and intellectually she is nowhere. Zip, zero, nada. 

The rivalry between social level Rigel and the intellectual author helps to show the difference between social and intellectual values, but the historical and political examples (especially in chapters 22 and 24 of Lila) are much more helpful and detailed. And it also helps that this explanation is not just illustrated by way of fictional characters but rather based on knowable, checkable and public realities. This is not just a way to explain the levels, however, because, as I pointed out at the very start, for both Pirsig and Dewey, "their respective metaphysics function as instruments of cultural criticism".