Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Sun, 21 Sep 1997 03:54:09 +0100
Platt Holden:
1.
>Peirce's "habits'" sound much like
>Pirsig's "static latches." To point out that Dynamic Quality is itself a
>static latch due to its duree or endurance is logically correct although
>Pirsig says that DQ perceives static quality as evil and is itself "always
>new."
I am not sure I quite understand you here. There are many ways to picture
Dynamic quality, depending on the level in focus. From the Zen kind of
immediate and non-selfconscious acting to the seeming dynamics of the
quantum world.
I have tried to look at the relation between Pirsig's distinction between
dynamic and static and Peirce's three modes of being, and I am still working
on this.
To make it short I picture the first kind of being as, in its origin, a
limitless potency which springs into actual being (spontaneously - this is
what is meant by the term potency); and this would be the dynamic quality of
Pirsig. Now some actual being has a staying power, an internal stability
that prevents it from immediately disappearing back into the limitless
potency; like the whirl which arises out of the limitless (not having a
preferred direction at first) potency (gravity, water and hole) in your
bathtub when you pull the plug. Having sprung into actual existence the
whirl has quite a lot of endurance, as my son loves to investigate; and this
we might take to be Pirsigs static quality or static patterns of value. Now
this actual being, the whirl, is the ground of new possible being (on a
second level), and because of its actual endurance, this possible being is
habitual. One example is the behaviour of some small corks in the bathtub;
if we look at how they move in the tub, the whirl will form the ground of
new possible behaviour - the corks can now go down the drain. And the way
they go down the drain is quite habitual. The basis of habit is the actual;
this means for instance that we should not seek the source of natural laws
and other habits outside of their world.
2.
>Does Peirce deal with mystic experience in his philosophy?
Peirce has indeed written of a (single) mystic experience, although only in
the form of a letter to a priest of the church his family used to attend,
where he wrote that the experience had moved him to come to Mass. Peice was
evidently not religious in any conventional way, and it seems like he did
not follow up on the letter (probably never send it), but there has been
quite a lot of discussion on the Peirce-l on whether this mystic experience
had any influence on his philosophy from then on. He never wrote on the
subject again, as far as I know.
Peirce did stress the importance of a third form of reasoning in scientific
reasoning, apart from induction and deduction, namely abduction (not to be
understood literally, Peirce is also know for an imaginative and rich use of
common as well as self-invented terms). The role of abduction is the origin
of hypothesis, it has similarities with the educated guess, the intuitive or
subconsciously arrived knowledge, and the 'deductions' of Sherlock Holmes, -
and with dynamic quality. No matter our difficulties in pinning it down it
is an essential and art-like part of scientific practice.
I dont know which kind of mystic experience you had in mind, but the very
act of conceiving an idea which may in some way be new to this world - that
is mystic to me.
Hugo
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