[MD] Mountains of Textual Evidence

[david buchanan]

I've been repeating one complaint more than any other, namely that people like David Morey and Marsha V are constantly dismissing the textual evidence. To illustrate the degree to which this occurs I've extracted most of the quotes that were posted as answers over the past month. I keep asking David Morey if he is ever going to deal honestly with the evidence I've already provided, so here it is all in one place - most of it, anyway. The words that follow are not my words. This is what Pirsig says, what McWatt say, what William James says, etc.. These quotes should serve as the basis of an honest and sincere inquiry into the MOQ but they have been distorted, disregarded, shrugged off and otherwise ignored. If these quotes don't add up to a clear, consistent and coherent picture for you, then I think you cannot rightly claim to understand the MOQ. All these quotes, from all the various sources, describe the relations between concepts and reality, between static quality and DQ. C'mon, if you don't get DQ and sq, the MOQ's central terms, then you don't know what Pirsig is saying. And that's the whole point of this discussion group, right? 

If nothing else, please notice the sheer volume of evidence. It takes a lot of weaving and dodging and dishonesty to ignore this MUCH evidence. Don't you think? Just look at the sheer size of it. This is a mountain of evidence and all of it explains why "pre-conceptual patterns" is a ridiculous contradiction in terms. It explains how pre-conceptual experience is NOTHING BUT CONTENT!


"He thought about how once this integration occurs and DQ is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this relgious mysticism is just low-grade "yelping about God" of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don't take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up."  
"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it,..." (LILA, ch 5) 
 "Whatever nuance the language of union is given, if there is to be talk of mysticism, some sort of deep union must be involved. It perhaps cannot be emphasized enough that to speak of mysticism is to speak of an EXPERIENCE of union and not merely speculations about union." (Guidebook to ZAMM P27) 

"Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived. One’s rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more Quality. One doesn’t cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn’t static anymore. It’s not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It’s made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change." (ZAMM)

"Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The MOQ says pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the braisn. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession." (Lila, p 365)

"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, wooly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience." (LILA)

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."

"Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself." 

"I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words "All of it. Every last bit of it." Madness there. I think he saw it. But he couldn't see any logical reason to strike these words out and it was too late now for faintheartedness. He ignored his warning and let the words stand."

"Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it." (ZAMM)

"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues." (ZAMM)

"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." (Lila)

"The MOQ starts with the source of undifferentiated perception itself as the ultimate reality." (letter from PIRSIG to McWatt, February 23rd, 1998)

"There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is DYNAMIC AND FLOWING." (Pirsig in Lila)

"Bergmann’s ..principal claim is that the fact/value distinction is bogus, or more precisely rooted in a bogus epistemology which imagines that we perceive only objective properties like shapes and sizes and maybe colors and then impose judgments that those same things are “dangerous” or “merry” or “dreadful” or whatnot. So, like Pirsig and Heidegger and others, he’s trying to get rid of the subjective/objective distinction. His account is driven by phenomenology, i.e. our experience of valuing: Bergmann says...

"What we notice is the stark and unqualified “givenness” of these qualities. They present themselves and they confront us. If we set aside all explanatory frameworks and assumptions, even those that are only hazy shadows and habits, and make the effort to see clearly nothing but the actual brute experience of them (and that is at least a part of what Husserl meant by his “return to the facts”) then we are struck by the simple “thereness” of them. We look and we see that this gesture is clumsy while that one is graceful. We listen and we hear the sadness of a little tune. In all of this we are spectators and the qualities do not act on us, do not even offer themselves to us, but they simply are in a solid and assertive independence."

For example, Bergmann says (from p. 7):

"Take a situation that is very that is very threatening. Imagine a tree falling down in your direction. Does it really make sense to believe that we do not perceive the danger directly but that the “neutral” tree causes a sensation in us and that the whole response of our body is produced by it? But if not, then why should the experience of being charmed or tempted be metaphysically so different from that of terror? For that matter, what of other organisms? Are we to suppose that they too respond largely to their own sensations? If so, would this assumption not conflict with everything we know about awareness in the lower forms of life? Moreover, is this not in any case an inherently strange view of organisms? Is it not a needlessly complex theory of how organisms interact with their environment? Still further, what of Gestalt Psychology, or of Piaget’s contention that infants perceive (in his terminology) “affective qualities” before they have either a concept of self, or of their own body?"


"[I]t is from experience that concepts such as subjects and objects arise; such concepts do not create experience or perceptions. It is worth emphasising here that subjects and objects are solely intellectual concepts derived from reality as a whole. The problem with the terms "subjects" and "objects" is that they have been ingrained into us from an early age so, without question, we accept their literal existence. They don't. Subjects and objects are just concepts and no concept exists outside the mind." (McWatt)

"Dynamic Quality is the term given by Pirsig to the continually changing flux of immediate reality while static quality refers to any concept abstracted from this flux." (McWatt)

"Experience (or Quality as Pirsig terms it) is an awareness of the changing flux of reality before any conceptual distinctions such as subjects and objects are made." (McWatt)   

"By static Pirsig doesn't refer to something that lacks movement in the Newtonian sense of the word but is referring to any repeated arrangement...  i.e. any pattern that appears long enough to be noticed within the flux of immediate experience." (McWatt)


"In order to understand what is being said here, one should try and imagine all things, objects of experience and oneself, the one who is experiencing, as just a flow of perceptions. We do not know that there is something "out there". We have only experiences of colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on. We also don't know that we ourselves are anything than a further series of experiences. Taken together, there is only an ever-changing flow of perceptions (vijnaptimatra)... Due to our beginningless ignorance we construct these perceptions into enduring subjects and objects confronting each other. This is irrational, things are not really like that, and it leads to suffering and frustration. The constructed objects are the conceptualised aspect. The flow of perceptions which forms the basis for our mistaken constructions is the dependent aspect." (Paul Williams, "Mahayana Buddhism", Routledge, 1989, p.83/84).

"Dynamic Quality cannot be defined. It can only be understood intellectually through the use of analogy. It can be described as the force of change in the universe; when an aspect of Quality becomes habitual or customary, it becomes static." (Wikipedia)

"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about does." (Pirsig)

"The MOQ is just a “working postulation” and I think this what the Two Contexts is designed to help illustrate." (McWatt)

Or, as Pirsig said in ZAMM,  "Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that.".

"Immediate experience is experience where there is no distinction between what is experienced and the act of experiencing itself. Only after the experience do concepts such as perceiver and perceived arise. It is illogical to put them otherwise. Experience (or Quality as Pirsig terms it) is an awareness of the changing flux of reality before any conceptual distinctions such as subjects and objects are made. Pirsig equates 'Quality' with F.S.C. Northrop's "aesthetic continuum" which Northrop defines as 'what is IMMEDIATELY perceived in an all embracing (emotion producing) field'." (McWatt)

"Dynamic Quality is defined constantly by everyone. Consciousness can be described is a process of defining Dynamic Quality. But once the definitions emerge, they are static patterns and no longer apply to Dynamic Quality. So one can say correctly that Dynamic Quality is both infinitely definable and undefinable because definition never exhausts it." [Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD]

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." (Lila, 5)

"Dynamic Quality is the term given by Pirsig to the CONTINUALLY CHANGING FLUX of immediate reality while static quality refers to any concept abstracted from this flux." (McWatt)

"Unfortunately 'static' and 'Dynamic' have a meaning in physics that refers to space and time and motion and this can be confused with the static and Dynamic of the MOQ" - Lila's Child.

"Once you start to define Quality as a basic substance you are off on a completely different path from the MOQ." -- Pirsig's introduction to the MOQ

"In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms.  "ideas," "thought," and "intellection" are synonymous with "concept," Instead of "percept" I shall often speak of "sensation," "feeling," "intuition,"and sometimes of "sensible experience" or of the "immediate flow" of conscious life. Since Hegel's time, what is simply perceived has been called the "immediate,"while the "mediated" is synonymous with what is conceived." -- William James, Some Problems in Philosophy (1911)

"The great difference between percepts and concepts is that percepts are continuous and concepts are discrete. Not discrete in their being, for conception as an act is part of the flux of feeling, but discrete from each other in their several meanings. Each concept means just what it singly means, and nothing else; and if the conceiver does not know whether he means this or means that, it shows that his concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual flux as such, on the contrary, means nothing, and is but what it immediately is. No matter how small a tract of it be taken, it is always a much-at-once, and contains innumerable aspects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend. It shows duration, intensity, complexity or simplicity, interestingness, excitingness, pleasantness or their opposites. Data from all our senses enter into it, merged in a general extensiveness of which each occupies a big or little share. Yet all these parts leave its unity unbroken. Its boundaries are no more distinct than are those of the field of vision." -- William James, Percept and Concept and Their Practical uses

"Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or ofidentity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies." - William James - Essays in Radical Empiricism.


“If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality [the flux of experience] it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience. Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an OBJECT and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were a single jump…in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn’t even think about it….only when an “OBJECT” turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process” …In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as “before” and “after” and between “like” and “unlike” grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live.”  (Lila p.119)


“The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, ...but it says that this reality is ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the culture in which the infant grows up.” (Pirsig in SODV) 

“Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.  The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes….When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process.  Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together.” -- William James

“If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions…..The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us, and the tendency of raw experience [a.k.a. “pure experience”] to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together…Had pure experience, the naturalist says, always been perfectly healthy, there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms.  We should just have experienced inarticulately and un-intellectually enjoyed.” -- William James

"What is “sciousness”? Bricklin explains in his introduction to the book that “James labeled consciousness-without-self ‘sciousness,’ and consciousness-with-self ‘con-sciousness.’” For those up to speed on their Eastern philosophy, “consciousness-without-self” (sciousness) is, of course, precisely how the Buddha defined nirvana, the traditional goal of spiritual seeking. Bricklin defines it as a “nondual” state of enlightened immediacy and wholeness in which the usual distinction between self and other, knower and known, is dissolved. Ordinary “con-sciousness,” on the contrary, would be considered dualistic, erroneously split down the middle between a perceiving subject and the world of objects being perceived.

“Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity,” writes James in one of his many essays reprinted in Bricklin’s book. “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that.”

While James never claimed to be enlightened—in fact, he claimed the opposite, believing that his own “constitution” precluded him from such an exalted mystical realization—he did taste a variety of religious experiences through the use of nitrous oxide, ether, peyote, and other drugs. Describing one of his trips on ether, James said that he experienced “a vague, limitless, infinite feeling—a sense of existence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and the not-me.” To Bricklin, such personal glimpses of nonduality provided James with a solid foundation for his theoretical talks and writings on sciousness—writings that did not go unnoticed by one of the early ambassadors of Zen Buddhism to the West, D. T. Suzuki. One of Suzuki’s teachers, Kitaro Nishida, allegedly even appropriated James’s explanation of sciousness to help convey the Zen concept of “tathata,” the primary “suchness” of existence, to the Japanese themselves. “For Zen’s ‘suchness’ or ‘this-as-it-is-ness,’” Bricklin notes, “is James’s pure experience sciousness.”

"Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are (Subjective) and everything you think you perceive (Objective) are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is to become enlightened."


Quoted from The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2003, Vol. 35, No. 2
"Suzuki, for his part, immediately saw the connection between James’s pure ex- perience and Zen, and introduced James’s writings to his teacher Kitaro Nishida. Nishida not only directly appropriated James’s analysis, but also his expression ‘‘pure experience’’ in seeking to translate the direct-experience satori upon which Zen is based. Suzuki, too, appropriated the phrase ‘‘pure experience’’ to define ‘‘this most fundamental experience . . . beyond differentiation’’ (Loy, 1998, p. 136).

"Non-dualism was well established in the two strands that wove into Zen: Buddhism and Taoism. Buddhists distinguished between dualistic knowledge—(‘‘bifurcated knowing’’)—and non-dual knowledge (‘‘springing-up knowing’’). So, too, dualistic perception— (‘‘with bifurcated thought construction’’)—was contrasted with non-dual perception—(‘‘without bifurcated thought construction’’). And as for Taoism, Chuang Tzu claimed nondualism—‘‘when ‘self’ and ‘other’ lose their contrareity,’’—to be ‘‘the very essence of Tao’’ (Loy, 1998, p. 34).

James’s Koan
"Common sense says that mind and matter are distinct. Common sense says that exterior material objects interact with interior consciousness, and that such objects can survive the extinction not only of the subjects who behold them, but of consciousness itself. But if the experience of sciousness is the ‘‘always ‘truth’’’ prime reality that James, in agreement with Zen, claims it to be (1904a, p. 1151), then consciousness is not of something (internalized), but as something (neither internalized nor externalized). Echoing the great Koan traditions of Zen, James delivers this world shattering wisdom in the form of a question:

How, if ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘object’’ were separated ‘‘by the whole diameter of being,’’ and had no attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in through the sense-organs and what part comes ‘‘out of one’s own head’’? (1904a, p. 1154)

There is a useful distinction to be drawn between an object and a mere thought of an object. As James put it, ‘‘Mental knives may be sharp, but they won’t cut real wood’’ (1904a, p. 1155). Mere thoughts of objects are intangible, internal, and inconsequential. ‘‘Real’’ (by-contrast-to-merely-mental) objects are tangible, external, and consequential. Kicking a rock is one way to make the distinction between a mental and a ‘‘real’’ object. It is not, however, as Samuel Johnson believed, a way to establish the independent existence of objects themselves. For the touch of his foot on the rock, as James’s koan could have helped him understand, did not confirm a realm beyond perception. What part of the touch came in from the rock? What part came out of his own head?"

"If full attention, unimpeded by expectation and uninterrupted by emotional reaction, is given to the contact of foot-touching-rock, its external hard ‘‘objectness’’ is clearly realized to be an aspect of consciousness. There is no prime reality of matter. ‘‘‘Matter,’ as something behind physical phenomena,’’ is merely a ‘‘postulate’’ of thought." (James, 1890, p. 291).