Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 16:51:06 +0100
Diana and squad
Diana (20-01-98) wrote:
>Hugo Fjelsted Alroe wrote:
>> I am thinking in terms of possible and actual being, as an old
>> philosophical counterpart of the dynamic and static quality of Pirsig. I
>> wrote a couple of mails to the list on 29.oct.97 where I tried to explain
>> my view on this. Let me have another try.
>> First, I equate dynamic quality with the possible and not yet actualized,
>> and static quality with the actualized. I will give a simple dice example
>> first.
>
><<snipped "simple dice example">>
>
>This sounds very much like quantum mechanics' "world of possibilities"
>(or whatever they call it), where things neither exist nor don't exist
>but are just "possiblities".
>
>It's very tempting to latch onto an explanation like this because we can
>back it up very neatly with physics. But from my reading of Lila that
>isn't exactly what Pirsig means. Dynamic Quality is something that we
>*can* experience. At the end of chp 11 he describes it as "pure fun".
>It's what babies experience and mystics and what American Indians try to
>hold onto. It's not something that's totally beyond experience which is
>what your dice example seems to suggest. If it was never actualized then
>it we would never experience it, but we do. Pirsig calls it the "cutting
>edge" and the "front edge" of experience. I don't recall that he
>actually says it's "beyond" experience.
>
>Sorry if that doesn't exactly answer your question, but I thought I
>would just say it anyway;-)
No, I am fully aware that a die example can only capture some smal part of
what quality is about, and I have no quarrel with the term 'cutting edge'.
I completely agree that we are living in the big NOW, that the world IS
now, and that all our intellectual efforts are striving to move beyond this
now, - forgetting for now the fact that even intellectual efforts ARE now.
Hence I would not agree with the way you put it, that we are experiencing
something (dynamic quality) which is not actualized; the point is that
experiencing IS actualization, and that we cannot beforehand see exactly
what is to happen.
This is for me the truth of Zen and the art of archery - someone (Bateson?)
described the difference between shooting with a shotgun and with a rifle;
the shotgunshooter shoots at the cutting edge of experience, there is no
deliberate aiming, only a flow of movement based on bodily habits, the
rifleshooter aims in a conscious way, sometimes too conscious (da:
bukkefeber). A more 'american' analogy might be shooting from the hip as
opposed to laser aimed rifleshooting. Anyway, I always thought the
zen-archery thing was about moving towards the shotgunshooting way, towards
the 'from the hip' immediacy, in a non-hasty form. A thorough study of
westerns might provide more insight on this ;-) Seriously, I would
appreciate any corrections on this admittedly naive view of zen.
I don't think my view is opposed to Pirsig in the way you say, Diana, but
there is something worth following up on in the connection between
experiencing and dynamic quality.
Regards
Hugo
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