The past exists only in our memories,
the future only in our plans.
The present is our only reality.
--Robert Pirsig, *ZMM*, Ch.20
The present is our only reality. I think this restatement of radical
empiricism (*Lila*, Ch.29) is key to keep in mind when trying to make sense
of Pirsig's dialectic. Our only secure source of knowledge is our
experience of the present *instant*. Anything prior to the present instant
has reality only as a memory and anything after the present instant is only
a projection in our mind. What we have *access* to is the eternal NOW. This
is the essential Zen/mystic insight.
I was reawakened to Pirsig's theory of knowledge and perception as
presented in *ZMM* by the quote from Pirsig's letter to Anthony that Roger
provided at the beginning of the month:
> "In the MOQ, experience is pure Quality which gives rise to the creation
> of intellectual patterns which in turn produce a division between
> subjects and objects. Among these patterns is the intellectual pattern
> that says 'there is an external world of things out there which are
> independent of intellectual patterns'. That is one of the highest
> quality intellectual patterns there is. And in this highest quality
> intellectual pattern, external objects appear historically before
> intellectual patterns... But this highest quality intellectual pattern
> itself comes before the external world, not after, as is commonly
> presumed by the materialist." (Pirsig in letter to Anthony McWatt)
David Buchanan commented that he couldn't quite make sense of the 'subtle
distinctions' Pirsig was making and the seemingly contradictory position he
takes in the first and last parts of the paragraph. I, too, struggled with
what Pirsig was trying to say here and couldn't quite wrap my mind around
it even with Roger's follow-ups. The intervening discussion and Kevin's
offerings on mysticism did lead me back to contemplation of NOW and brought
me to Pirsig's theory of knowledge as presented in *ZMM*:
"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The
present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually,
because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is
always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past
and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the
intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This
preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as
Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this
preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects
and objects." (*ZMM*, Ch.20)
As an empiricist, Pirsig argues that our only reliable source of knowledge
is provided through experience. But he goes further than standard
empiricists (Locke?) and argues that experience is limited to the present
*instant*. When Pirsig says experience, he means NOW, right now, not as in
"my experiences over my lifetime" but as in my experience at this
particular moment. Not my experience a day ago, a minute ago, a microsecond
ago, but right NOW. We are only in touch with reality at this *instant*.
That's what he means by the "cutting edge of reality" (*ZMM*, Ch.20,
*Lila*, Ch.9,11). Those other things we call 'experiences' are more
accurately described as memories of experience we're having in the present
moment. That's how the past only exists as a memory. I think he's conceding
to Hume and the other great skeptics all of rationalism and all of
empiricism except for this present instant. From this one instant he
rebuilds the foundations for all knowledge.
First, though, Pirsig is forced to recognize that reality as manifest to us
in the present instant is fundamentally mystic, that is, beyond words. We
really can't say anything *for certain* about reality because (for one) all
we have is this one instant. We have our memory of past experience to be
sure, but what of all of those hundreds of pages of skeptical arguments
destroying the rational foundation for trust in our memories? As a
practical matter, we can probably trust our memories but the point is
there's no logical necessity for us to have real recollections. Our
memories could, ala Descartes' demon, be fabrications presented to our
present awareness by a malevolent being!
Further, Pirsig argues that what we say we perceive in any given moment is
really an intellectual construct. We abstract from the sense datum we
receive the 'objects' of everyday experience like tables and chairs, or in
Pirsig's *ZMM* quote, trees. As soon as we 'recognize' a 'tree' we've
already made a whole series of dialectic slices of reality. Most of these
slices are so fine and so automatic that we struggle to see the incision
afterward. But our perceptual apparatus makes these slices and we take them
for granted. Certainly 'something' must be there in our perception for us
to slice up. But as soon as we name/recognize it as a 'thing' we've created
a second 'thing' -- our idea of the thing. But already the 'thing itself'
is lost to us in the previous instant of perception. It's no longer
available to us in immediate experience but instead we're experiencing it
through our concept of it. This is the sense in which thinking carries us
away from reality (*Lila*, Ch.5). Pirsig presents a startling example of
this concept/reality split with the "Cleveland Harbor Effect" (*Lila*,
Ch.26) but this sort of filtering is happening at every moment of conscious
discernment. It never stops so long as our mind is spinning its story of
the world as we experience it, slicing it up into our universe of everyday
objects. Only during those rare mystic moments when the mind stops its
everpresent narrative do we get at the reality of NOW that is the source,
the wellspring, the only certain reality.
Now with this theory of perception in mind I believe we can begin to make
sense of Pirsig's paragraph to Anthony. The sense in which "this highest
quality intellectual pattern itself comes before the external world" is, I
believe, this. The whole concept of an 'external world' comes from our
intellectual/perceptual slicing of our experience of NOW. We infer from our
experience that 'I' exist (see Descartes' cogito) and so do some 'external'
'objects' that 'I' am perceiving. But, of course these are deductions made
after our primary experience of the world because all we have available to
us as certain grounds of knowledge is the *instant* of perception. "The
very existence of subject and object ... is deduced from the Quality
event." (*ZMM*, Ch.19) The idea that there's an historical, ontological,
objective, reality preceding our idea of it is merely that: an idea,
deduced after the fact from a primary experience which is unavoidably
mystic and therefore cannot be said to be ANYTHING AT ALL much less
'historical, ontological, objective'.
At this point, one might argue that given this perceptual model, there must
be *something* to be perceived and so therefore that historical,
ontological, objective reality must exist. That's true enough as far as it
goes. But if we return to the realization that what we have access to is
only that experience we're having right NOW, and that an
intellectualization such as this requires an element of memory which may or
may not be reliable, we must come to the conclusion that we can't SAY
ANYTHING WITH CERTAINTY about that historical reality. Once we start to
speak about the experience of the present moment, we're already relying on
the concepts and divisions we've made after the fact of experience and
incorporating our memories of previous experiences (as experiences in the
present moment!) and have therefore lost our empirical certainty. The
mystic reality rears its beautiful head and says "mu"!
Of course it says mu not just to such complex assertions as this, but even
to the simplest ones. Pirsig intends that even such basic building blocks
as space and time are intellectual constructs used to explain the instant
of experience we have contact with right now. These are probably the
fundamental divisions we perceive in our experience, but as soon as we name
them they become part of the dialectic and no longer certainties of the
reality we have in the instant. This is why I continue to take issue with
Ken's interpretation of MOQ, as he seems to cling to belief in an
objective reality with Quality as some synonym for information or quantum
energy. I wholeheartedly agree with the scientific description of the
universe, but only as a body of ideas. Of the universe itself, of reality
itself, we can say nothing, for our only grounds for knowledge is in the
moment. The universe exists, yes, and operates independently of our
thought, yes. But it exists as the Conceptually Unknown (*SODV*). It is
fundamentally and forever outside of our certain knowledge, which is only
properly grounded our experience of the present instant. Scientific
theories are our highest quality explanation of experience, but we can
never know if they are true in the sense of corresponding to reality.
Rather, we must adopt the pragmatic interpetation of truth. We don't search
for what corresponds to reality because that search is hopeless. We search
for what is useful, what works. My last post was entitled 'whatever works'
because I intended to reinforce the point that the static/dynamic split is
in some sense arbitrary, just as Pirsig showed subject/object was, so we
should just look for the division that 'works' the best, that explains and
predicts the most with the least contradiction and the greatest flexibility
and the most economy. I don't think I ever really got around to saying that
because I got hung up on applying subject/object distinctions like
"epistemological" and "ontological" to quality, an easy trap to slide into
with these subject/object glasses I wear every day.
So what of this static/Dynamic split? I suppose I should talk a little bit
about it so this post is topical. I've just spent 11 kilobytes leading up
to the topic, I guess!
Well, the first thing I'd say is that the division is arbitrary. If I've
made one point so far, I hope it's that reality is fundamentally mystic,
since our foundation for knowledge is only in the instant, so anything we
say about it is, to that extent, arbitrary. We could pick any starting
point we wanted, though not all would explain as well.
Second, I'd say that everything we call static quality is intellectually
mediated. The moment we open our mouths to say something about the world,
we've created an intellectual construction of the world (for that matter,
the moment we perceive the world as distinct objects, we've created that
construction). Now, this is not to say that the objects of the world are
composed of 'mind' or that the universe is conscious or any other new age
gobbedlygook. It's merely to say that the objects we talk about are
themselves ideas only, since they are *abstractions* from the primary sense
datum at each instant of experience. This is a simple consequence of the
radical empiricist viewpoint that all of our knowledge is properly grounded
in the present instant alone. It means that everything we put a name to,
from time and space, quarks and leptons, stars and galaxies, frogs and
birds, apple pie and the Metaphysics of Quality, are ideas--intellectual
constructs abstracted from our experience of the present instant. What's
*really* out there, you ask? Mu! It's the Conceptually Unknown!
Which leads me to Dynamic Quality, the real bugaboo in this mix. What the
heck is it? Is it identical to Quality/Reality/Experience? If so, why have
it hanging around? Wouldn't Occam's razor or Phaedrus' laser (*ZMM*, Ch.7)
have lopped it off? Hmmm...
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that what we're doing in
metaphysics is dividing the world dialectically. Now when you divide
something into two, you're supposed to have two parts. The trouble is,
we're trying to divide an indivisible/mystic entity into two. When you do
that you end up with what? That to which you can put a name (static
quality) and that to which you can't put a name (Dynamic Quality)? I don't
know, I'm offering that as a possibility. Lao Tzu said "The name that can
be named is not the eternal name" (Tao te Ching, Ch.1) I would improvise:
Static Quality is that which can be named.
Dynamic Quality is that which cannot be named.
Quality is that which can and cannot be named!
When we discussed the static/Dynamic split in the previous incarnation of
the Lila Squad, I called Dynamic Quality a "metaphysical zero" and a
"placeholder". I think that's perhaps the best understanding of what it is.
It's a reminder to us that our concepts and explanations (static quality)
cannot be said to represent some objective reality. We can divide this
mystic unity we call Quality into as many static concepts as we want to
achieve conventional understanding, but we must always come back to the
fact that the basis of this conventional knowledge is in the instant of
experience, which is fundamentally beyond words. That's how our ideas of
the how the universe 'is' can evolve from crystalline spheres to quarks and
superstrings--through the reformulation of static ideas based on our
experience of NOW (and reflection on that experience at a later NOW). This
is the type of thing Pirsig identifies as the so-called 'operation' of
Dynamic Quality. But I think that is misleading to an extent, for it
implies that Dynamic Quality is some 'thing', some 'energy' or 'movement'.
But these are static concepts. Rather, I think, Dynamic Quality is just a
name for Quality from *within* the dialectic, while Quality 'itself'
remains outside the dialectic. Dynamic Quality is a placeholder, a zero, a
reminder that our static conceptions of reality never capture it fully.
Thanks to all for your fine posts this month. I have enjoyed them as I
would a fine gift and I offer this post back to you as a present in the
same spirit.
Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
And today? Today is a gift.
That's why we call it The Present.
--Babatunde Olatunji
Cheers,
Keith
______________________________________________________________________
Keith A. Gillette <http://detling.dorm.org/gillette/>
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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