Keith A. Gillette (gillette@tahc.state.tx.us)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 20:38:30 +0100
Lila Squad,
I've not participated in, but tried to keep up with, the structured
dialogs of late. Seeing so many interesting ideas flow past, I've
finally made time to contribute again. For what it's worth, here's my
addition to the
conversation:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
-Chapter 1, *Tao Te Ching*, Lao Tzu
Stephen Mitchell translation
Static Quality is that which can be named,
Dynamic Quality that which cannot.
Lao Tzu claims that "naming is the origin of all particular things". I
think this assertion sheds light on our current explication of the
Dynamic/Static split.
In *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, Pirsig's breakthrough is
to give us a single ontological assertion: Reality is Value. In this
proto-Metaphysics of Quality, we start with the undefined primitive
term, Quality, synonymous with Reality, and known to us through
Experience. Pirsig struggles to keep it undefined, but realizes that he
must give us a bit more to go on since our hyperrational culture is
unlikely to allow us to become a bunch of mystics in order to understand
this primary quality reality for ourselves.
In *Lila*, Pirsig starts knifing up Quality to provide a better
alternative to our substance metaphysics, but one that still respects
the transcendent nature of reality. To this end, he gives us Static and
Dynamic Quality, two arbitrary but useful intellectual distinctions we
assign to aspects of our experience. I contend (somewhat in agreement,
if I'm reading them correctly, with Martin Stritz and Jonathan B.
Marder) that Static Quality is that which can be named, that to which we
can give a description in words, Dynamic Quality is that which goes
beyond words.
FIRST, 1500 WORDS ON MYSTICISM
I know that among the Squad there are those members who wince at talking
about things that go "beyond words" or can't stand "mystical"
mumbo-jumbo about the "transcendent nature" of reality. I can understand
that impulse completely, since it seems to put Pirsig adherents (us!) in
the same camp as New Age crystal worshippers, religious nuts, and other
crackpots. There's a negative connotation to the word "mystic", and I
believe that's part of the bad response people have to this talk.
However, I really think that belief in and experience of this
transcendent quality of reality is central to Pirsig's philosophy. I
also believe that it's totally compatible with hard-nosed, rational,
scientific understanding.
Pirsig uses "mystic" in the philosophical sense only: some "thing"
outside intellectual understanding. Some "thing" that words do not fully
convey, that cannot be understood rationally. That doesn't mean that
mysticism is *irrational*, only that it is *nonrational*. I'd hazard to
define irrational as belief or behavior that flies in the face of
experience. Carefully arranging crystals around your house to produce
maximal positive energy flow is irrational if crystals are inert, if
pretty, mineral formations that have no effect on energy and give none
of the desired positive effects to the New Ager.
Nonrational behavior or belief is something like being irrational, but
being right about it ;-). Nonrational is almost impossible to define,
since it is that which is outside of rational discourse--outside of
language. I hope that will become clearer a bit later but try this
example for now. If the hypothetical New Ager I've been making fun of
actually did get some amazing benefit from crystal-coordinating the
house, say he or she could now levitate at will in presence of the
crystals and can have conversations with Nostradamus every time the moon
is full, then the behavior wouldn't be irrational in my sense of the
word--the New Ager's behavior no longer flies in the face of experience,
as it's brought some verifiable new changes for which we have no
rational explanation. A nonrational event! (These happen all the time,
as I hope to demonstrate, but we've just gotten good at ignoring them.)
What saves Pirsig's system from irrationality is that it looks to
experience to adjudicate our beliefs and actions. Our hypothetical New
Ager may claim to be in touch with mystic reality in defending the large
crystal collection, but unless we see some floating yuppies, we can
safely dismiss that claim, as experience does not bear out the belief.
The Metaphysics of Quality, however, requires that every idea be tested
against experience. This insistence on hard empirical data keeps us from
straying into irrational belief (that which is not borne out by
experience), while still respecting the transcendent, nonrational
quality of the universe.
I can tell that the skeptics among us are still not convinced that we
need to let mysticism in the door, even without the irrational New Age,
religious, or other claptrap. Well, let's try to start the argument for
it by starting at the source: experience. As I type this message, I'm
seeing my hands tickle the keys on my PowerComputing keyboard. What am I
experiencing? I've already given you one *snapshot* description of that
experience, but that's but a single interpretation. What's really going
on here? My sense data are seemingly infinite. How do I encapsulate the
essence of that experience in language? Is there an essence to
encapsulate?
I would argue no. I can sit here and describe the patterns I see: the
mottled, bland, white and contrasting grey shadows of the painted and
plastered drywall of my apartment, the matrix of white, black, and grey
dots glowing on my Macintosh monitor, the peach-tan flesh tones of my
hands and fine black lines of the hair growing there, the deep burgandy
fading to brown of my Bugle Boy shirt cuffs, the feeling of warmth in
this Texas heat barely cut by air conditioning, the sound of Austin City
Limits simulcast on the stereo, the anxiousness of trying to express
myself clearly and argue a point I care about so that others will
understand. Those fragments give you a hint of the *sense impressions*
washing over me as I write this paragraph. Take them as a second stab at
articulating this moment of experience. But I'm not even down to the
basics yet: Lockean *secondary qualities*, pure uninterpreted sense
data. How would I do that? Lay out a high resolution grid of my field of
vision, assigning each fixed point a color and intensity value? Record a
microsecond sample of audio frequency and amplitude values for what I'm
hearing? Plot temperature and pressure values along a 3D representation
of my body for what I'm feeling? Of what value would this third laundry
list be? And where are all of these data come from, anyway? From the
interaction of matter and energy in this locality of space, of course.
Photons bounce off of or are absorbed by the body at the atomic level,
producing vision. A fourth, *atomic* description of my experience
emerges. But what of these atoms and photons, what are they? Why little
bundles of energy packaged in quanta, vibrating at a characteristic
frequency. You can even get atoms to split into elementary particles,
which really aren't so elementary, you see, as they are composed of
quarks ... a fifth *quantum* explanation of my experience. And what of
this feeling pressure as my fingertips touch the keys? Why electrical
signals passed to the brain through the nerves, triggering the
electrochemical reactions in the synapses. A sixth *biological*
perspective. And why am I typing this? Some seventh *psychological*
theory can no doubt be cooked up for that (with appropriate variations
for Freudian psychotherapy, transactional analysis, evolutionary
psychology, etc.). And then there's eighth one that brings in some kind
of a *literary* interpretation. And on. And on. And these are just the
orthodox descriptions! The non-contradictory descriptions! This single
moment of experience seems to have an infinite number of
interpretations! I won't belabor the point by listing them all, but I
hope the point is clear. ;-)
This same problem of infinite descriptions was encountered by Pirsig
while he was doing chemistry in college. As described in *Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, he found that he could come up with an
arbitrary number of hypotheses to explain a given phenomenon. This
troubled him greatly, and rightly so, as it pointed to the fact that
there's no single correct picture of the world (to borrow a phrase from
Donny). All we have are multiple (sometimes competing) explanations.
What's going on here? It seems that experience can never fully be
captured by language. It seems that it's a fundamentally nonrational
"thing" that we can describe and describe and yet never run out of new
descriptions.
Now I can hear Ken Clark (apologies for putting words in your mouth,
Ken) saying that these seeming infinite explanations can be reduced in
the end to a Super Grand Unified Theory of Everything, which will
mathematically define the evolution of the universe from Planck time to
the present moment, with allowances for quantum effects and other
nonlinearities. While it may very well true that we'll someday be able
to unify the partial physical theories we have now into a single
all-encompassing theory of the evolution of the universe, what does that
tell me about my experience just now? How does that capture the feeling
of intellectual turmoil as I struggle with these issues? Heck, how does
even capture what the keyboard feels like against my fingers or the
harmonica on the radio sounds like or what my Perrier water burps taste
like? Such a theory informs those aspects of my experience not at all.
Further, such an explanation would be so abstract and far removed from
everyday experience as to be of little use in understanding this moment.
Further still, just what would the primitive entities of such as system
be? Can we really grasp what a superstring is in itself? How do the
equations of quantum mechanics tell us what photons are in themselves?
In what sense do such physical theories really *explain* my experience?
I think we still need an infinitude of explanations to fully capture
this moment. All these categories of explanations, some oriented
hierarchically relative to each other, like the progression from quantum
to atomic to biological, some running orthogonal, like the snapshot,
literary, and psychological explanations, are irreducible to one
another. They each carry their own meaning and appropriate context that
does not transfer completely between categories.
But if that's true, if reductionism doesn't work, then reality is
something beyond the concepts we use to describe it. Something "else" is
in it if we can't somewhere stop coming up with consistent explanations
of what we're experiencing. That something else (Dynamic Quality) is
nothing special, it's just reality being reality. It is mystic, however,
since it's beyond the reach of language. What's this? Every moment is a
nonrational experience?! By my accounting, yes. Every moment accomodates
an infinite number of consistent explanations and so is in some sense
beyond any given explanation and therefore mystic.
If we looked hard enough and long enough, we'd probably find a rational
explanation for our New Ager's levitation. A new form of energy or
anti-gravity particle, perhaps. But we would still have a fundamentally
a non-rational reality, since that moment of experience could afford an
infinitude of explanations, as well ...
Well, I'm not sure how far that explanation of mysticism goes, but it
mostly works for me, and I wrote it primarily to satisfy my own
understanding. Donny talked about Kantian mysticism last Tuesday (wish I
could get through Kant's prose myself) and that approach probably leads
to the same sort of distinctions. Either path leads to a mystic reality
and lays the groundwork for talking about:
STATIC AND DYNAMIC
Reality is not totally beyond language, of course, otherwise I wouldn't
have been able to bore you so effectively with those multitudinous
explanations of me sitting here typing this. Language touches the forms
of reality. We call those forms and patterns Static Quality.
Dynamic Quality is an empty placeholder to remind us that any static
explanation is fundamentally limited and incomplete, and always subject
to the test of experience.
Now we can slice Dynamic Quality into many static forms. Some of these
forms correspond better or capture more of our experience than others.
These explanations are of higher quality than others and go by the name
of truth. The highest quality explanations we have currently go by the
name of scientific truth. Other explanations explain experience to a
greater or lesser degree, give more or less predictive power, and can be
rank-ordered as to their quality by how well they explain experience.
Therefore The Good (Dynamic Quality) is the test of the True, ala
William James.
By this understanding we see exactly why scientific understanding is a
higher quality understanding of reality than, say, folk conceptions. The
folk saying is "what goes up must come down". True enough. Experience
bears that out--I throw a ball up in the air and it goes up for a while
then comes down. Newton's law of gravity, however, tells me exactly how
far it will go up based on the mass of the ball and the force I put
behind it, how long it will take for its trip, and how fast it will be
going when it comes down. And it tells me that there are cases where
"what goes up must come down" doesn't apply--boundaries to the
applicability of a particular truth. In the absence of a gravitational
field, say, space, what goes up (which way is that?) just keeps going
up! Which conception accords best with experience? I'd pick Newton's law
for precision and breadth in explaining and predicting my experience. It
is this call to empiricism which keeps the Metaphysics of Quality from
being merely an idealism. It constantly refers to something outside of
our ideas of reality to test their veracity.
What else can we say about the Dynamic/Static split? Diana and Bodvar
have argued for Static Quality as permanence and others have argued
that, some wishing to call it stability. I think a that the notions of
permanance and stability have something to do with Static Quality, but I
would argue against an outright identification. We can talk about Static
Quality because it is in some sense unchanging. But we can also talk
about change because it is in some sense unchanging. (Not everything is
changing, only *some* things, otherwise we would have unrecognizable
chaos, not ordered, understandable change.) I think both change and
permanence are examples of Static Quality. To my mind, the key to
understanding Static Quality lies with the word Pirsig uses himself:
pattern. Both change and permanence are patterns of reality. Anything
that is patterned allows naming and identification, and constitutes
Static Quality. Dynamic Quality is "merely" a recognition that the
description we give to that pattern is not the pattern itself. An
infinite number of other descriptions are available, and science
promises that new and better ones await our discovery.
Merely a placeholder? As a *phrase*, yes, Dynamic Quality is merely a
placeholder to remind us that the static intellectual patterns (ideas)
we use to describe the world are not the world itself. As a "thing" in
itself, Dynamic Quality is the whole of reality--what we describe as
static patterns and all. Every last bit of it.
Of course, when understood fully, that which can be named and that which
cannot be named are one and the same, and so the distinction seems
self-contradictory. Perhaps this is what Horse means by A AND NOT A?
If you've gotten this far through my poor prose, I commend you. If you
have the patience left after slogging throught all this, let me know if
this interpretation makes any sense.
Best to all,
Keith
______________________________________________________________________
gillette@tahc.state.tx.us -- <URL:http://www.detling.ml.org/gillette/>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:43:28 CEST