Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 17:57:53 +0100
Hi Hugo and squad
> >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 "possibilities".
> >
> >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.
> >
> 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.
Well perhaps that is where we differ, because I don't agree that we are
living in the big NOW. The whole idea of "now" implies that everything
takes place within "time". This is completely alien to my idea of
Dynamic Quality. Time is a static pattern, so it follows that "now" is a
static pattern. In Dynamic Quality there is no "now" nor any past nor
future, everything just is. If there is no such thing as time in Dynamic
Quality then it doesn't make any sense to talk of "beforehand"
As for "experiencing something which is not actualized", all I said was
that we can and do experience Dynamic Quality. If experience is
actualization then Dynamic Quality is actualized.
Diana
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