Hi Roger, Glove, Walter, Ken, Mary and Group:
The discussion in this thread has covered so much important territory
that it’s hard to know where to jump in. Roger has raised perhaps the
most difficult issue in saying he has a big problem with Pirsig's statement
that:
“Societies and thoughts and principles themselves are no more that sets
of static patterns. These patterns can't by themselves perceive or adjust
to Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that.” (Lila, Chp. 13)
Pirsig implicitly reiterates this concept in several other places in Lila. For
instance, in talking about free will in Chapter 12 he says:
“But to the extent one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable,
one's behavior is free.”
In Chapter 13 he writes about Lila:
“Biologically she’s fine, socially she's pretty far down the scale,
intellectually she's nowhere. But Dynamically . . . Ah! That's the one to
watch. There's something ferociously Dynamic going on with her.”
In Chapter 29 Pirsig elaborates on the influence of DQ on an individual
being:
“Lila then becomes a complete ecology of patterns moving toward
Dynamic Qualitv. Lila individually, herself, is an evolutionary battle against
the static patterns of her own life.”
As I see it, DQ, the conceptually unknown, is similar to and as mysterious
as the quantum--neither inside nor outside anything, capable of being
everywhere at once, having no definitive motion or place in space. Pirsig
says, "DQ is not structured, but is not chaotic," a "value that cannot be
contained by static patterns," indeterminate, open-ended, impossible to
predict.
Just as a living-being observer in quantum mechanics is necessary to
collapse the elusive quantum and create reality, so a living-being
perceiver in the MoQ is necessary to respond to DQ and change the path
of evolution.
I conclude that the "perceive" in Roger's problematical statement is
simply the recognition of DQ by DQ through a living being because a
living being's static patterns, which include biological, social, and possibly
intellectual, are not as rigid nor powerful as those standing alone at the
inorganic level. It is not an intellectual pattern that perceives and
responds to DQ as Roger appears to suggest. It is DQ itself displaying
itself to itself IN SPITE OF static patterns.
Pirsig says: “Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the
record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such
a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through.“ (Lila,
Chp. 9)
I would only add: “ . . . that the Dynamic Quality all around AND WITHIN
you shone though.
Platt
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