Platt Holden (pholden@worldnet.att.net)
Fri, 11 Sep 1998 13:34:54 +0100
Hi Diana and LS:
On Sep. 7 Diana wrote:
>The very notion of free will is inseparable from the notion of
>subjects and objects. To even speak of it is to show that you’ve
>swallowed the subject-object metaphysics whole. It is the subject
>that has free will after all. You cannot be Dynamic and have a fully
>fledged subject concept at the same time. “Man makes choices” is
>pure SOM. Who makes choices? The little ghostly “me”s that live
>inside our heads apparently. Lose the idea of subjects, on the
>other hand, and the question evaporates; there's nothing left to
>have a will.
Looks to me like Diana has fallen into the same trap I fell into not
long ago when I posed the question, “Who is the I that knows me?”
In a similar construction, Diana asks. “Who has will if not I the
subject?”
The trap occurs regularly in the SOM world by assuming a
separation where none exists. You can't divorce "self" from choice
and free will any more than you can isolate subjects from objects.
To illustrate this, consider that those who claim all is determined
make a choice between free will and determinism, thus contradicting
their own assertion.
Anyway, Diana's argument could just as well apply to experience
which, Pirsig says, is Quality. Substitute the word “experience” for
“free will” in Diana’s passage above and the argument shows that
experience is subjective and inseparable from the notion of subjects
and objects. Who has experiences? The little ghostly “me”s that live
inside our heads. Thus, the whole idea of Quality is merely
subjective.
In contrast to this point of view, it seems to me (and I believe to
Pirsig) that we as individual human beings have Quality, are
possessed by it and are in every way the totality of it. As such we
are simultaneously both static and Dynamic, subject and object,
determined and of free will. For the sake of thinking and doing
metaphysics (and survival), we make distinctions, and thus Pirsig
makes a distinction between a side of us that is static and the side
that is Dynamic. With such metaphysically-driven distinctions in
mind, Pirsig is able to say without becoming a dedicated SOMist,
“To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of
quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows
Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior is free.” The
“one” of which Pirisg speaks is Quality itself.
Since we Quality beings are simultaneously both static and
Dynamic, free and not free, A and not A, subject and object, the
question Diana poses dissolves. The intellectual notion of free will is
inseparable from the notion of subjects and objects because ALL
notions are inseparable from subjects and objects. (Refer to Bo’s
SOTAQI.) But, Quality rises above intellectual notions. It contains
intellectual notions. It contains all there is. It is us, undefinable.
Platt
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