[MD] The hard question.

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:

The fundamental nature of static (patterned) value is Dynamic Quality, and it is Dynamic Quality that is primary and real.  Static quality, even intellectual static patterns of value, are secondary; they are useful fictions.  The idea is to experience static quality and Dynamic Quality simultaneously.  I don't know what the accusation of conflation represents.  I am merely stressing that the fundamental nature of static (patterned) quality is Dynamic Quality.

dmb says:
When you say that static value is Dynamic Quality, as you just did twice, then you are conflating those two terms. (conflate |kənˈflāt| verb [ trans. ] combine (two or more texts, ideas, etc.) into one.) 

There is a quote that you're basically paraphrasing but that comment is about 360 degree enlightenment. It's about the relations between sq and DQ from the perspective of an enlightened person, as opposed to 180 degree enlightenment wherein static patterns are rejected as illusions. First there were mountains (conventional reality), then there were no mountains (180 degrees), then there were mountains again (full circle enlightenment wherein one sees conventional reality as a divine manifestation, so to speak). But you are inappropriately using this insight to undermine the intellectual structure of Pirsig's philosophy. 

This error is on top of the other errors. I should probably name or number these mistakes so as to make a flow chart of this hot mess. On top of defining sq as if it were DQ (ever-changing) and on top of confusing the patient (intellect) with the disease (subject object dualism) and on top of treating all concepts as illusory (inevitable reification), you are also confusing philosophy with mysticism. As far as I can tell, you misunderstand every part of the MOQ. For example...


Marsha said to dmb:
I asked in yesterday's post to clarify what you mean by direct experience?  Do you mean direct experience without any patterns, or do you mean direct perceptual experience without any words or language?  I wonder how you understand this term 'direct experience'?  Do you think static patterns are merely words and language?  Because I understand static (patterned) value to be events/processes that may include names and language.


dmb says:
This is just another way to conflate sq and DQ. AND it shows that you don't understand the core concepts. You ask, for example if I think of direct experience (DQ) as "without any patterns" OR "without any words or language"? But in the MOQ words are static patterns, so the question makes no sense. Static patterns including anything that can be conceptualized. Concepts ARE static patterns, even when they are concepts like "dirt" or "fish". 

And so, yes, direct experience is "direct" in the sense that it has not yet been conceptualized. That's why Pirsig calls it "preintellectual experience". To call it pre-static experience would mean the same thing. He also calls it the immediate flux of life and, again, it is "immediate" in the sense that it is not mediated by static concepts. He calls it "the primary empirical reality" for the same reason. It is "primary" in the sense that it is the first and most basic and not a "secondary" concept. We use all these various terms to talk about one distinction and that is always the MOQ's first and most important distinction. If you go wrong at this point - and you really go way wrong here - then the whole rest of the structure will be one big mess. 

There is experience (DQ) and then there are the ideas we add (sq). That's it. It's so simple. Reality and words. The food and the menu. It's so supposed to be so simple that a child can understand it. So what's the deal with you, Marsha? How can you fail to grasp the difference? You know what they call it when a person can't distinguish reality from concepts about reality? Reification. How's that for irony?

Look, this distinction should be clear to anyone who can read Pirsig's books. Just LOOOOO00000ooooooOOK!!!!!

"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. In this basic flux of experience [DQ] the distinctions of reflective thought [sq], such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter have not yet emerged in the forms [sq] which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction."



"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics."



"In the past Pheadrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since that which does not change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life cannot exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality is to cling to chaos. He saw that much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying what it is not rather that futilely trying to define what it is... Slowly at first, and then with increasing awareness that he was going in a right direction, Phaedrus' central attention turned away from any further explanation of Dynamic Quality and turned to the static patterns themselves" (Robert Pirsig in Lila).

  
"Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other."



"When A.N.Whitehead wrote that 'mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language' he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. it was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. Itcontains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself - any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life."