Doug Renselle (renselle@on-net.net)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 09:58:52 +0100
Keith,
This treatise of yours is simply Excellent!
One comment on your parenthetical:
(I'm still too much caught up in intellectual understanding to fully
appreciate what Pirsig means by 'direct experience' of reality.)
Have you read Eugen Herrigel's 'Zen in the Art of Archery?' It will
help you with being "...caught up..." and Pirsig's 'direct experience.'
Thanks for this superb contribution to TLS.
Mtty,
Doug Renselle.
Keith A. Gillette wrote:
>
> At 1:18 PM +0000 2/11/98, Diana McPartlin wrote:
> >It sounds to me like your understanding of Dynamic and static is
> similar
> >to the understanding that I'm becoming more and more convinced of.
> The
> >more I try to figure out what it is, the more I think that Dynamic
> >Quality is just whatever seems better to us. Dynamic Quality is
> whatever
> >is high quality and static is whatever is low quality. As you said,
> it's
> >a circle we're all bound to. We all keep moving towards what seems
> >dynamic. The Dynamic Quality acts upon our static patterns and pulls
> us
> >forward to a higher level of understanding. And then the whole thing
> >repeats.
>
> I would take issue with your assertion that "Dynamic Quality is just
> whatever seems better to us." I find this statement misleading. For
> example, I have a friend for whom eating cheeseburgers "seems better"
> than
> excercising regularly. Occasionally, I agree with her. However, I
> don't
> think that either of those activities qualify as Dynamic Quality.
>
> A synomym for Dynamic Quality that Pirsig introduced in "Subjects,
> Objects,
> Data, Values" (page 17) that may be of use here. In "SODV", Pirsig
> calls
> Dynamic Quality the "Conceptually Unknown". I like this term. It loses
> some
> of the meanings of Dynamic (changing; patternless) Quality (good;
> valuable), but it cuts to another of its significant characteristics:
> that
> of being unknown to our intellect. To me, this is the essence of
> Pirsig's
> Dynamic Quality.
>
> The key to understanding Dynamic Quality as the Conceptually Unkown
> lies
> with the realization that reality can not be fully captured by
> language
> (i.e. understood intellectually). The reason for this is merely that
> language is part of the whole of reality, and by definition a part of
> something cannot be greater than the whole. So the process of
> intellectual
> abstraction necessarily leaves out aspects of that which it describes.
> I
> believe this is what Platt Holden means in his "Catch 32", beautifully
> stated in his metaphor "Our eyes cannot completely see reality because
> the
> eyes we use to see reality are part of the reality we're trying to
> see."
>
> These left-out parts are, therefore, Conceptually Unknown, Pirsig's
> Dynamic
> Quality. Now in one sense, the Conceptually Unknown Pirsig talks about
> in
> "SODV" is merely the *currently* Conceptually Unknown. That is, after
> the
> experiment, it will be known through some static scientific formula or
> another and become Static Quality in his terminology. But in a larger
> sense, for the reasons laid out in the previous paragraph, there will
> always be parts of reality left out of our intellectual constructions
> of it
> and those parts will be what we call Dynamic Quality. Those parts that
> do
> fit in our intellectual constructions of things, that can/have been be
> captured in static patterns, are called Static Quality.
>
> (As an aside: It seems that in an even larger sense, *everything* can
> be
> considered Dynamic Quality before we have 'sliced it up' into
> intellectual
> categories. In *ZMM* chapter 19, Pirsig talks about "the Quality
> event", an
> early notion, later formalized in *Lila* as Dynamic Quality, as being
> "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" [chapter 9].)
>
> With this understanding of Dynamic Quality, we see that it becomes
> synonymous with the Sophist's idea of aretê, the Good. As Pirsig says
> in
> *ZMM*, Chapter 29, "The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality
> itself, ever changing, ultimately *unknowable* in any kind of fixed,
> rigid
> way. (Italics added.) Pirsig makes the same connection between Dynamic
> Quality and the *Tao* of Eastern thought in Chapter 20 of *ZMM*, where
> he
> substitutes his term 'Quality' for 'Tao' in the *Tao te Ching*. As
> Alan
> Watts writes on page 15 of *The Way of Zen*, the Tao (Dynamic Quality)
> is
> "the *indefinable*, concrete 'process' of the world." (Italics added.)
>
> So what you can *say* about Dynamic Quality is really very limited,
> since
> it is, by "definition" that which cannot be expressed intellectually,
> that
> which is left out of our models of the world. It is reality in its
> totality, not reality as we conceptualize it. To my thinking, the
> notion of
> Dynamic Quality is an epistemological distinction--an assertion about
> the
> limits of intellectual understanding. Perhaps it is also the same as
> "Die
> Ding an sich"--the "thing in itself" in Kant's terminology.
>
> An important corollary to the the proposition that language cannot
> fully
> capture reality is that there is no single correct intellectual
> construction of the world--no single right answer (which is not the
> same as
> there being no wrong answer ;-). Since there's no way for intellect to
> abstract the process of the world in a way that expresses its
> totality,
> there will always be multiple competing truths. We select among these
> truths by noting how well they correspond to our experience of reality
> (empiricism).
>
> But back to the original issue of Dynamic Quality itself--the
> description
> I've given above leaves out one important aspect, of course. One way
> in
> which Pirsig's Dynamic Quality *differs* from "Die Ding an sich" and
> the
> Tao is that it, as the name suggests, is *quality*, value, goodness,
> that
> is, morality. Pirsig arrives at this conclusion during his famous
> "between
> the horns" response to the dilemma of whether quality is subjective or
> objective, as described in chapter 19 of *ZMM*. I believe this is an
> ontological assertion--a statement about the nature of reality itself.
>
> It's probably this aspect of Dynamic Quality that you're responding to
> when
> you say "Dynamic Quality is just betterness", Diana. That's true
> enough as
> far as it goes. Dynamic Quality *is* betterness in Pirsig's
> system--it's
> "the good", but not in a conventional sense. It's not "Good" as in
> "Good
> vs. Bad" or "Good vs. Evil" because Dynamic Quality encompasses all
> the
> 'things' that might qualify to wear those distinctions. It's Good in a
> mystic sense--one that goes beyond our conceptual categories. What
> that
> might mean, I don't know, because I've not had an "enlightenment"
> experience that would open me up to the sort of non-intellectual
> understanding or apprehension of reality that seems to be required to
> intuit the Good in this fashion. (I'm still too much caught up in
> intellectual understanding to fully appreciate what Pirsig means by
> 'direct
> experience' of reality.) I believe, however, that this is what Pirsig
> is
> talking about when he uses the term Dynamic Quality.
>
> Well, I hope I haven't confused the issue any more by engaging in this
> "degenerate" (chapter 5, *Lila*) activity of trying to box in Dynamic
> Quality epistemologically and ontologically. I wrote this post
> primarily
> for my own understanding, after reading Diana's statement of her
> conception
> of Dynamic Quality and really being challenged by coming up with a
> personally satisfying understanding of it (which I have yet to do).
> Thanks
> to all who participate in this forum--the reading and thinking I've
> done
> since joining has been very rewarding ...
>
> Cheers,
> Keith
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> gillette@tahc.state.tx.us -- <URL:http://www.detling.ml.org/gillette/>
>
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>
>
-- "Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable."By Henri Poincaré, in 'Science and Hypothesis,' p. xxiv, translated from French in 1905 by J. Larmor, published 1952 by Dover Publications.
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