[MD] Quality forklift performance

[david buchanan]

Khoo Hock Aun said to Jan-Anders Andersson: 

If DQ cannot be described, how can there be "low DQ" ? Are you saying DQ can be described  and categorised ? [And earlier] Is there such a thing a "low dynamic quality" ?


dmb says:
It is a strange phrase. I can see why you would object to it, Khoo Hock Aun. 
In the hot stove example, where the immediate pre-conceputal experience is described as a "low quality situation" (66) and the as a "low-Quality situation" (116) when he takes up the same example again 50 pages later. As I understand it, Dynamic Quality is immediate experience prior to conceptualization but the whole undivided situation is aesthetically charged, so to speak. Even prior to reflection, the unanalyzed situation still has an overall feel to it, either negative or positive. In the hot stove example, you know it's bad and you even act upon that empirical reality before you have time to think about who, what or why. You know what I mean? 

"The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. ...A 'dim apprehension of he knows not what' gets him off the stove Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation. A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself."

I guess Jan-Anders was using "low DQ" to rate a video or something. If a thing is on YouTube, it's not Dynamic in the Pirsigian sense. A recording of any kind is going to be static, although a person hearing it for the first time might be having a Dynamic experience. I don't know if the phrase is illogical or contradictory, exactly, but it is odd and awkward. Maybe terms like high and low are best used in connection with the levels of static patterns because they are arranged from bottom to top. Likewise, positive and negative are good terms to talk about the overall aesthetic charge of immediate experience precisely because they are so vague and general. You know what I mean.

Both of you deserve extra credit for doing philosophy in a language other than your own native tongue. Wish I could do that.