[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
"...Classic and romantic refer to different ways of thinking - wherein those with a classic temperament love Aristotelian details and those with a romantic temperament prefer Platonic wholes. Dynamic Quality is neither because it's prior to reflective thought and so cannot be a thought style of any kind. And yet the patient on the table is still analysis itself, reason itself, and Pirsig's expansion of rationality is accomplished by putting DQ at the center of our thinking, even at the center of the scientific process itself. We can see this in both books but in Lila, where we see that gut feelings might just be a biological response, Pirsig is more precise about the difference between gut instincts and pre-intellectual awareness.

In LILA Pirsig wrote: "The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one-is another matter altogether. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." 

Similarly, In ZAMM Pirsig wrote: "I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice."

Krimel's use of "irrational" confuses pre-intellectual awareness (Quality or Dynamic) with instincts and primitive forms of cognition."




Krimel replied:
... Intuition is the mode of thinking preferred by the romantic. It is irrational thinking in that it does not depend on concepts. Concepts can be tools to evaluate our intuitions. But the romantic is more likely to listen to the still small voice than the scratching of chalk on a blackboard.   ...The classic mode is entirely rational. It is static as a machine is static. It is algorithmic. It offers precision in exchange versatility. It works in a classroom but not in a bar room. The dynamic aspect of Quality is entirely irrational BECAUSE it is prior to reflective thought. Reflective thought is EXACTLY what it is not.  It is that other thought, that isn't thinking. The thought that is in doing and acting and engaging with experience. It is implicit, unconscious, abductive, feeling, mystical, emotional, moody, magical, continuous, procedural, flowing heuristic...   I see no connection whatever between the assertion you made and the quotes that follow. I see no distinction being made between a gut instincts and pre-intellectual awareness. ... Pirsig says nothing about where intuition comes nor does he say anything about where it does not come from.



dmb says:
Right. Exactly. You see no distinction being made between gut instincts and pre-intellectual awareness. That's the problem. You're equating the pre-conceptual with with instincts and primitive forms of cognition. "Intuition" means very different things depending on what sort of situation we're in. The intuition that guides the scientific process, as in the quotes above and in the Poincare example, is OBVIOUSLY not the same as one's intuitions about that sexy woman in the halter top or one's intuitions about the honesty of the other guy's lawyer. The MOQ's hierarchy of static levels gives us the tools to distinguish our biological responses to Quality from our intellectual responses to Quality. Obviously, there is a vast distance between them. In the same way we can say that the sexy woman and the felt aesthetic harmony of an elegant mathematical solution are both beautiful but these are different kinds of beauty. It would be okay to describe the biological values in terms of irrational urges or primitive instincts but it make no sense to talk about our philosophic or scientific intuitions in such terms. 

And I did already offer further explanation of this point already, Krimel, so that you could see the distinction between gut-intuitions and scientific intuitions....

"The growth of new ideas and the moments of inspiration we want almost never happen in the absence of static patterns. ...consider all the training and hard work Poincare had under his belt before he could intuit the mathematical solution in a flash of insight. This is what Pirsig says about the Zen monks too, how the Dynamic is found right in the midst or their static rituals   ...The classroom scenes in ZAMM illustrate this point too. After they had become convinced that Quality is real and they could recognize it even if they couldn't define it,  then the standard texts came into their own, he says."

AND

"I think vague notions like intuition, inspiration, grooviness can be clarified by the MOQ as we get it in the second book. The levels of static quality sharpen the distinction between, say, the gut feelings of certainty in a mathematician and the gut feelings of a Nazi. We see how the hippies confused DQ with biological quality, etc.. [Which is similar to your confusion, Krimel, wherein the dark instincts and irrational urges in a quasi-Freudian sense are equated with DQ.]  ...I really am convinced that inspiration and insight are the rewards of effort, come directly out of the work that it takes to get it right, to get it down. I think this is what the MOQ says and I think this holds true with math, motorcycles or just about anything else, including the MOQ itself." 


dmb said previously:
...Irrational does also mean "not rational" but the term is very often used pejoratively to characterize faulty reasoning, magical thinking, mental illness, and the like. In fact, that's how the word is ordinarily used. People say you're being irrational when you're not making any sense or when you're taking some silly superstition seriously. Knock on wood.



Krimel replied:
If this is your agreement I invite your response to  ..my previous discussions with Dan on the subject. "But he (Dan) argued that the term carries negative baggage and I agree. I attempted to explain that my problem with the term Dynamic Quality is exactly that. It is loaded with baggage and in my view baggage whose contents are just as deceptive for being pleasant as irrational's are for seeming harsh. dmb jumped in agreeing on bags Dan and I had packed but suggested that tinkering with the meaning or lack thereof Pirsig's terms, threatens to topple the edifice of the MoQ." It seems a bit hypocritical to dismiss a term for carrying too much of one kind of baggage when you are smothered by baggage of your own.



dmb says:
Well, this is just one more case wherein you presumptuously believe that you're improving a feature of the MOQ when in fact you just don't understand that feature. You see yourself as fixing an idea but I can tell by what you're saying that you do not even comprehend that idea. This combination of arrogance and presumptuousness is very unbecoming for you and very frustrating for me. 

As a matter of fact, when you first announced your quest for the "downside" of DQ, Arlo and I both objected to the notion as nonsense, as a quest predicated on a misconception of DQ and we both asked you to explain what the hell you were talking about. You never did answer that objection and it still stands. Now you're claiming to offer this negative aspect of DQ as a corrective because it is "loaded with baggage" of the positive kind, because I am "smothered in baggage" of my own. Here again I have to ask what the hell you're talking about. What baggage are you talking about? 

Look, as I've been saying all along, you are misusing all of the MOQ's most basic terms and "DQ" is definitely one of them. I tried to showed you, through comparative analysis of the various terms used for "DQ", that we can discern the shape of thing, that we can know what Northrop, James and Pirsig are referring to. Your comments about "DQ" bear no resemblance to the meaning of those terms. At this point, you are no position to critique that term. That comparative analysis, apparently, didn't register, didn't mean anything to you. If you can't grasp the basic meaning of the term, then everything you say about "DQ" will just continue to be nonsensical. 


Krimel said:
...I hope that having corrected your misunderstanding about Nietzsche's use of the term "chaos." Perhaps you could explain why in Nietzsche's sense chaos is not a legitimate term to use in a description of the dynamic aspect of Quality?


dmb says:
Well, that question seems to be predicted on a distortion of something I said about chaos in some other post. The criticism was actually about your use of chaos in the scientific and mathematical sense - as in randomness, probabilities, coin tosses and the like - which is not how Pirsig or Nietzsche or James would use it. I'm saying that the scientific concepts of chaos have a specific meaning that cannot rightly be applied to non-scientific concepts of chaos. The kind of chaos Pirsig is talking about, the kind that resulting from neglecting static patterns, for example, simply has nothing to do with the scientific versions of chaos. Schopenhauer's notion of primordial chaos, which is what Nietzsche is reacting to, has nothing to do with the mathematic of randomness. I'm just saying that you're confused about the various sense of the word and the contexts in which it is used. They're certainly not interchangeable meanings. 

In fact, I recall you protesting my criticism by claiming that chaos does NOT mean a lack of order. As Pirsig used the term in that quote about the dangers of neglecting static patterns, that's EXACTLY what it means. And that is the most ordinary definition of the term, of course, and it's easy to see that Pirsig was using it in that ordinary sense. So bringing in a specialized, scientific version of the term as a way to interpret Pirsig is mixing apples and oranges in a very ham-handed way. It's like bringing a whaling manual in to settle a debate on the meaning of Melville's famous novel. Moby Dick isn't about really about whales and relying on pure mysticism is not about coin tosses. It's just kind of absurd that you think scientific conceptions of chaos are even relevant to understanding that quote from Pirsig.


As I understand it, DQ can have a positive or "negative face", as Pirsig puts it. In two of the main examples, the amoeba moves away from the acid and the student jumps off the hot stove. This undifferentiated aesthetic continuum is not biased toward the rosy or the grim. It's always aesthetically charged but you can't characterize it either way in advance or as a general characteristic because it can be any degree of good or bad. Given the infinite and undefined nature of DQ, your questions and objections just don't make any sense. I can only conclude that you MUST have the wrong idea - in a very fundamental way - about the thing you're trying to fix.