LS whatever works

From: Keith A. Gillette (kgillette@austin.rr.com)
Date: Fri May 07 1999 - 06:11:04 BST


Great topic and great posts! I especially liked David, and Roger's initial
contributions.

I love/hate this topic because it's one that swims around in my head a lot
but never seems to make it the dry land of certainty. I think Roger put his
finger on my difficulty when he talked about the feedback loop between
Static and Dynamic. The particular manifestation of this loop I always get
hung up on is the question of whether static quality is ontologically real
or only epistemic. (Are those patterns really out there for me to
perceive?) Then I realize I've first divided the world into Knower and
Known and am trying to fit Static and Dynamic into those categories. It
doesn't work very well and the whole thing ends up a wet, drippy mess.

Here's how it starts out. I dive in with this supposition: We have this
thing we call experience. We want to understand it. We want to explain it.
What is it?

The answer Pirsig gives us is that experience is Quality. "Quality is a
direct experience prior to intellectual abstractions." (*Lila*, chapter 5)
Well, I'd talk about that, but it's not our topic this month.

At some points, Pirsig seems to suggest that what we really experience is
Dynamic Quality. "Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the
pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always simple and always new"
(*Lila*, chapter 11). He describes perception in an infant: "We could call
them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify them as that. From the baby's
point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This
generalized "something," Whitehead's "dim apprehension," is Dynamic
Quality." (*Lila*, chapter 9) Only later do we make the static distinctions
necessary to talk about our experience and name its parts, finding those
'things' in the 'flux' of experience. When we do that, we're talking about
static quality. This certainly makes it sounds like static quality is an
epistemic construct. That's the position I've taken in the past and it also
seems to be what Roger argues when he says "But since reality is experience
prior to these divisions, sq is a misleading, though useful, map." (Sat, 1
May 1999 12:16:20)

But if static quality is purely epistemic, then where are these
'distinctions' and 'things' coming from? Surely there must be 'something'
to perceive? But we've just said that at base, we experience a
(Heraclitian?) 'flux'. In fact, Pirsig equates Dynamic Quality with
"unpatterned reality" (*Lila*, chapter 30). But if everything were in flux,
always changing in every way all the time, then there would be no pattern
to perceive. Forget that, there would be nothing stable to perceive a
pattern ... no perceiver, much less percipient. Heraclitus is washed away
in his ever-changing river.

So there must be *some* dry land to stand on. Static quality must exist
outside our perception of it and therefore must be more than our idea of
it. Ideas may be a form of static quality, but not the whole of static
quality itself. This is clear when one looks at Pirsig's examples of static
quality. He's not talking about our *idea* of something, he's talking about
the pattern that we perceive. This point is clear (as mud?) when he
continues with his discussion of perception in babies: "If the baby ignores
this force of Dynamic Quality 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" (*Lila*,
chapter 9). So there are static patterns in Dynamic Quality? Static quality
within Dynamic Quality? How can something be dynamic and static, changing
and unchanging, in flux and fixed at the same time? I smell a mucky
contradiction here.

I'm thinking more and more that this contradiction is inevitable, perhaps
intentional. In *ZMM* Pirsig's project was to effect an "expansion of
reason" (*ZMM*, chapter 14). He did this by introducing undefined Quality
as the base term of his metaphysics. By putting Quality (aka reality)
outside the "dialectic chess board" (*Lila*, chapter 9) he was able to
allow reality to hold opposites without contradiction. In *Lila*, he
outlines a metaphysics built on this undefined term. In fact, he introduces
a second undefined term, Dynamic Quality. How is this different from
undivided Quality? Is it? Is this conflation, to co-opt Roger's point, the
fundamental flaw in *Lila*? Or is it the foundation that allows the whole
metaphysics to work?

Pirsig tells us that "Trying to create a perfect Metaphysics is like trying
to create a perfect chess strategy ... you can't do it." (*Lila*, chapter
9) OK, you can't do it. Why not? Because Reality (Quality) is ultimately
outside of language (Axiom 1). In the words of *SODV*, it's the
Conceptually Unknown. Why is reality outside of language? Because reality
admits of many explanations? Because reality is "dynamic"? Because language
is only "part of" reality and inherently can't "capture" all of reality?
Because for any formal axiomatic system, there is always a statement about
natural numbers which is true, but which cannot be proven in the system?
(Godel's thereom as presented in *Godel, Escher, Bach* by Douglas
Hofstadter.) I don't know.

But given that principle, we find that any further linguistic explanation,
any dialectic division in reality, is provisional only. Rational thought
can never penetrate the ultimate truth. Pirsig writes very eloquently on
the consequences of this first principle:

"Unlike subject-object metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not
insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be
the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of
things-that which corresponds to the "objective" world-and all other
constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the
ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths
to exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth." One seeks instead the
highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that
if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken
provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then
examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art
gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the "real" painting,
but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets
of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more
quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of our
history and current patterns of values. Or, using another analogy, saying
that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is
true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar
coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing
at first, but it's every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Arctic
it's the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for
interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances
rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation." (*Lila*,
chapter 8)

So the static-dynamic split is only one possible division. Classic-romantic
is another. Subject-object is a third. Each has its own particular
strengths (and weaknesses) as a starting point. Static-Dynamic happens to
be a very good first move for a number of reasons. One is that that dualism
wraps-in the fundamental perceptual context of space and time. Experience
seems to occur in this space-time matrix. We have experiences of things
(static spatial patterns) that change (have dynamics) over time. It seems
to make good sense that having some 'thing' that stays the same and
something that changes is a prerequisite for experience. I've already
discussed the case where everything changed all the time--there would be no
stable 'subject' to have an experience. On the other hand, if everything
stayed the same, there would be no 'experience' for a subject to have. Both
change and order are required. On this basis, the static-dynamic split is
more fundamental than the subject-object division. But I'm getting off on a
whole different topic here. Perhaps I'll find time to elaborate on a
static-dynamic model of perception in a later post.

My main points were to explore whether the static-dynamic split was
functionally equivalent to a knower-known split, a murky trap I've fallen
into before. I no longer believe that's the case. I also wanted to discover
something of the relationship between static and dynamic. I'm afraid I
didn't make much progress on that front, except to point out that it's a
slippery topic. I also raised the possibility that this slipperyness might
arise a (necessary?) contradiction in Pirsig's system created by the
introduction of an undefined central term and allowing for multiple,
complementary explanations of phenomenon in place of a single exclusive
Truth. This is another topic I'd like to explore later, but my thinking is
too muddy and the hour is too late to delve into any more now.

Cheers,
Keith

______________________________________________________________________
Keith A. Gillette <http://detling.dorm.org/gillette/>

MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org



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