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From: "John and Ruth Beasley" <beasley@internetnorth.com.au>
Subject: LS ls dynamic and static
Date: Sun, 02 May 99 06:44:24 PDT
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Dear Squad
As a one time school teacher and headmaster, I intend to ignore the dead,
dead, deadness
of our self inflicted assignment for this month "With reference to the
examples given in Lila,
explain dynamic and static quality and the relationship between them", in
the hope that
something dynamic will emerge. I don't want to "explain" dynamic and static
- Pirsig did that.
Critique, yes. Debate, yes. Challenge, fine. But explain ... words fail me.
We're not in school
now. Are we? (Pirsig has his own little aside on passing on the torch in Ch
21, p267 my
edition, and he ridicules it! "His cause was the quality of his life." p287
) Mine too.
"Explain" is static. "Reference to" is static. Both assume the truth is in
Pirsig's book. Which to
me feels immoral. The MOQ has value inasmuch as it illuminates my
experience. But it is
that experience which is fundamental. So to come right to the point of what
I take to be our
topic, how do I discern the dynamic in my experience? Pirsig faces this
issue in a slightly
diferent context "The problem is that you can't really say whether a
specific change is
evolutionary at the time it occurs. It is only with a century or so of
hindsight that it appears
evolutionary." "How do you tell the saviors from the degenerates?" he asks.
(Ch 17).
To rephrase, the terms dynamic quality and static quality are only of
practical importance if
they provide me with a better way of discerning what is of value in my
experience. Since all
experience is ultimately value laden, the issue is how to discriminate
between higher and
lower levels of value within that experience. Pirsig is quite clear that
dynamic quality is to be
chosen ahead of static quality, while agonising over possible consequences
such as
degeneracy and the break down of society. The only productive reason for
'explaining'
dynamic and static quality is that in doing so I might learn to discern
them better in my
experience - yet this is clearly a problem. If it takes a hundred years for
a society to decide
which changes are dynamic, how long do I have to sort out the quality in my
life?
Pirsig identifies part of the problem in his parable of the tune on the
record. Clearly the
dynamic quality is not in the tune, otherwise it would not fade to static
quality with repetition.
It is the interaction of the tune with my background of musical experience
that makes
possible my appreciation of the structured novelty of the tune, and this
interaction is
experienced in an event. Without the static patterns developed through
previous musical
experiences, the tune would be unlikely to have impact. It would be noise.
The vitality comes
through a stretching of existing patterns, built up through previous
experience. That is why
Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime - people were not yet ready
to experience the
vitality in his painting. It just looked crude. Now even business tycoons
spend a fortune to
own one of his works. Poor Vincent, though, struggled. Eventually he shot
himself in the
stomach and died a day or so later. The quality in his paintings, largely
unrecognised by his
peers, was unable to compensate for some pretty major deficiencies in the
quality of his life.
Pirsig attempts a global statement of theory when he says "All life is a
migration of static
patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality." I happen to think this is a
most unfortunate
phrasing. The word "toward" implies a teleology, that there is a purpose in
nature, which he
explicitly rejects a few pages later. And just how do static patterns
"migrate"? They are static.
The word "All" is either patently false or imposes a perhaps unintended
restriction upon the
meaning of the word life. All very grand and all very messy.
My rewording of his theory would go something like this. 'Life evolves
through the impact of
dynamic quality upon patterns of static quality.' This places the emphasis
upon the dynamic
event, with consequences for the static patterns. It leaves open the
possibility that "life is
heading away from mechanistic patterns", which seems to me a stimulating
but unprovable
assumption. It picks up on Whitehead's rather difficult concepts that all
nature consists of
events rather than matter or energy. It picks up on the mystic
understanding of intelligence
as something encountered in experience, as develped by Krishnamurti and the
physicist
David Bohm. And it puts dynamic quality before static patterns, which in my
understanding is
the way it is.
The fundamental problem with Pirsig's MOQ seems to me to be in his
assumption that there
is a hierarchy of quality, which leads to such statements as "in fact there
are two levels of
reality beyond these mirrors [of celebrity]: an intellectual reality and
beyond that, a Dynamic
reality. And the Metaphysics of Quality says that movement upwards from the
social mirrors
of celebrity is a moral movement from a lower form of evolution to a higher
one. People
should go that way if they can." (Ch 20 ) It seems to me that this central
tenet of his thinking
is more asserted than demonstrated, and some of the uncertainty about how
higher quality
might be discriminated from lower quality emerges in the words "if they
can". There are some
very big issues lurking here that will have to wait for another day.
John B
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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