The final installment ...
There's one thing that has to be made very clear. When I say these is no
separation between my mind and the drawing and the model during a drawing
class, I don't mean metaphorically, I mean really. Empirically that can't be
denied: the experience feels like that, so the experience is like that.
However the subject-object metaphysics has a near fatal objection. It
accepts the experience alright, but it says that though this seems real to
you, it is in fact only inside your head.
That's a killer argument because there's no way to prove what goes on inside
your head to anyone else. The only way to get round it is to turn tables on
the subject-object metaphysics and say that there is no such thing as
"_only_ inside your head".
And so the Dynamic-static split starts out really easy, but once you insist
that value has a reality you're scraping at the foundations of our entire
twentieth century mentality. If such ideas take hold then causation, the
self, dualism, space-time, substance, free will, consciousness are all going
to have to be turned upside down. Not only is that scary, it's stupid.
Causation is a useful theory. Understanding it and using it to make tractors
and microscopes and houses seems a very good thing to do. And it works - we
have improved our food supplies, health and shelters as a result of
understanding causation. To turn around and say, events don't have causes
and effects, the world just migrates backwards and forwards from
"something-like-auspiciousness", doesn't look very constructive.
So, this Dynamic Quality, which is of me and not of me at the same time,
meets with scorn when it turns to Western metaphysics and Pirsig would
probably have ditched it altogether if it wasn't for the fabulous coherence
his ideas have with the East. Eastern philosophers, it turns out, have not
only recognized Dynamic Quality, they have built their entire metaphysics
around it. The issues that we thought were the twentieth century's alone
turn out to be precisely the same as those the Brahmin scrutinized,
struggled with and finally solved thousands of years ago.
Any project conducted with care and attention will be more successful than
one that isn't. Any research in which the student simply "has fun" with the
subject will be more powerful than one that seems a drag and is done without
any flair. The Brahmin noticed that as we have. But instead of disregarding
it they studied it.
Dynamic Quality, they discovered, is what takes us forward. It gives us
energy. Seeing what it is and grasping it in small doses is easy enough. But
when you take this beyond a single artistic pursuit and apply it to a
person's life or a community, the problems start to unfold.
True, we all agree that Dynamic Quality exists, but we do not agree on the
objects in which it inheres. For a society to pursue Dynamic Quality is far
more difficult than an individual. No wonder the history of human society is
a bloody battlefield of death and destruction. Periodically a new idea takes
hold in a group who then rise up and overthrow the establishment. The new
establishment is more dynamic initially, but it soon becomes static and
eventually something new emerges and overthrows that too.
Even at the individual level, with so many choices it is hard to see what is
really better. Going to the movies, or to watch the local players in the
town square (depending on your millennium) may be preferable to cleaning the
house (some things never change) so it seems more Dynamic. However the fact
that you haven't cleaned the house may make you feel guilty and spoil your
enjoyment of the entertainment. The show may be better than the work but it
might be even better still to do the work first and then enjoy your leisure.
Or maybe it would be better, in the long run, to stay in and study for more
qualifications instead of going out at all. Our social patterns guide us as
to how much time you should spend working, socialising and sleeping, You
spend as much time and effort as the people around you, on the whole. But
once you start rationalizing everything you realize that actually you could
do anything at all with your time. The question "what do I do next?" is one
that a superficial understanding of Dynamic Quality cannot answer. The
truest, purest Dynamic Quality has to be understood as something more than
simple hedonism. In chapter 30 of Lila Pirsig finds the answer and he
describes it as "one of the profound achievements of the human mind."
The challenge is to achieve Dynamic and static at the same time. Let your
life flow by staying close to Dynamic Quality, whilst at the same time
maintaining the static patterns that support the Dynamic and to do that
without conflict. These are some of the oldest questions ever asked.
In Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel spends six long years engaged in a
single pursuit - firing an arrow. There were many things he could have done
in Japan during that time. He could have explored new sports, learned about
the theatre, the food, the lifestyle - there are a thousand fascinating
things in that country to discover. But instead his focus was on his bow and
arrow. All he had to do was pull the bow until it was taught and then wait
for the arrow to release itself, over and over and over again.
There's a saying in the East: " If it isn't boring it isn't Buddhism". It's
not hard to see the truth of that when you read Herrigel's book or look at a
buddhist monk's lifestyle. It is nothing but routine all day, every day.
Even during prayer sessions the monk may do nothing but sit for hours
concentrating on the task of thinking about nothing, or he may repeat a
mantra over and over. And it's the same thing for years. If you go to your
new age shop they may try to sell you a crystal for meditation but in fact
the most effective tool for teaching the art is the large stick that
teachers carry around for whacking their students on the back with when they
fall asleep during meditation. (A baseball bat would probably suffice.)
If you see Dynamic Quality as simple hedonism then this method has shut out
all pleasure entirely. But when you understand Dynamic Quality as betterness
itself you see that it is in fact impossible to shut out. The method
actually shuts out everything that could possibly distract the student so
that the only thing available is Dynamic Quality. Thus the surest way to
reconcile Dynamic and static is to reduce one's life to a rigid routine and
to dedicate oneself to perfecting it. The society that dedicates itself to
the pursuit of perfection moves effortlessly from what is good to what is
better without conflict. The static patterns dominate but eventually the
Dynamic emerges in their midst. You don't transcend the routine, you are
transcended by the routine. The arrow is released with such precision that
it hits the target without any effort from you at all.
It's a tremendously powerful metaphysics, but this is really as far as the
MOQ has gone so far.
For those of us who aren't prepared to spend the next fifty years kneeling
on a wooden pew in Osaka, the only possible next step is to turn back from
the East again and look once again at the Dynamic-static split in terms of
our Western culture.
Lila is over four hundred pages long, but still Pirsig only has time to
sketch out the implications of this division.
The subject, or rather the self is the first thing that has to go. The
ghostly little editors of reality that sit inside our head that we believe
are us. We see ourselves as the subjects interacting with an objective
reality. We believe that the external world is separate from us. We peer at
it but we can't really interact with it directly. That's how things are at
their most fundamental level, or so it seems. When you deny the reality of
the subject object split, you deny yourself. You say that you don't exist.
It's not easy to accept at all. The Dynamic-static split insists that there
is a reality that exists in between the subject and the object. The subject
(ie YOU) is only an intellectual construct.
Then, having kicked out the self, the question of consciousness has to be
reexamined too. In my example my consciousness is not limited to "inside my
head", that's empirically verifiable but it's a massively outrageous thing
to say scientifically. It changes absolutely everything. Consciousness is
therefore not just something that happens inside me. It's more like
something we collectively dip into. Most of the time we may only see our
little portions of it. But it's possible to get outside ot that. The
implications for artificial intelligence/consciousness are obvious.
Causation is perhaps the most deeply ingrained belief about reality we have.
When we ask "why did this happen?" what we're really asking is "what was the
case?" Causation seems so obvious. Questioning it is like questioning the
existence of trees and houses. It is incredibly difficult for us to imagine
there might be something unreal about them.
Even more than causation seems real, space and time seem so obviously out
there we can hardly doubt them. We live inside them We move around inside
space and our lives are a journey through time. But the Dynamic-static split
takes place outside of space-time. It's not just difficult it's near
impossible to think about that. Our brains have evolved to help us hunt and
forage in a space-time limited world. We conceive objects in three
dimensions. We conceive time in terms of years or decades. Using our brains
to think about things outside of these scales is like trying to cross the
Pacific on a mountain bike. It may be a finely balanced. Efficient piece of
equipment, but it isn't designed for the job.
Substance is perhaps not so difficult to disprove because our physicists
have already shown that at the subatomic level substance is not the billiard
ball lumps of solid "stuff" that it seems. Photons and electrons simply
appear and disappear without individual predictability and without
individual cause. Yet, although the evidence is there, substance still seems
so real, we struggle to think beyond it. We have seen a few attempts here on
the LS to make the Dynamic-static split "explain" quantum physics in real
language thus solving the biggest scientific question of this century and
winning a Nobel prize in all probability. Well I'm up
for that as much as anyone else, though I haven't seen anyone come close yet.
... or something like that.
I think I'm done. Now all I have to do is go back and delete all
unnecessary adjectives and add in a whole heap of footnotes for instant
credibility.
Diana
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jan 17 2002 - 13:08:43 GMT