Keith A. Gillette (gillette@tahc.state.tx.us)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 14:19:38 +0100
Diana,
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post on the Static/Dynamic
split. You brought up some excellent points that I've tried to address
below. Be forewarned: I feel like I'm talking in circles for the most
part, because I'm trying to communicate in words a nonverbal
understanding of reality ... and I don't think I've succeeded. ;-)
At 9:31 PM +0000 7/27/98, diana@asiantravel.com wrote:
>Regarding the multiple explanations of any situation, yes, I would agree
>that any moment affords an infinite number of explanations, and that
>none of these explanations can be taken as the correct picture of the
>world. But I don't understand what you mean by saying that dynamic
>quality is a placeholder. It seems that you are suggesting that it
>doesn't exist. Or perhaps that Dynamic Quality is the true experience
>which we can never put into words. Or, going by your definitions above,
>perhaps that Dynamic Quality is all the static patterns plus something
>else - the 'real' experience or the as yet undiscovered static patterns.
>You also say that Dynamic Quality is the whole of reality, but Pirsig
>says that Quality is the whole of reality. Why depart from that?
Why indeed. I don't think I am departing from what Pirsig says, but I
agree that it appears so on the surface. I may be mistaken in my
understanding of what Pirsig's trying to get across with the
Static/Dynamic split, but I'll try to explain why I identified Dynamic
Quality simultaneously as a metaphysical placeholder, a nothing, and
with the whole of reality,
everything.
In Chapter 5 of *Lila*, Pirsig takes his first stab at elaborating on
the undefined Quality he presented in *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance*. He's feeling trapped between two camps rejecting his
metaphysics: the mystics and the scientists. Science says that
understanding requires that things be identified, classified, measured.
Mystics claim that this analytic process leads you *away* from
understanding:
*****
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The
more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or
"zero," or "space" for that matter. Today these terms have almost
nothing to do with "nothing." "Zero" and "space" are complex
relationships of "somethingness." If he said anything about the
scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the
actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really
wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.
*****
But Pirsig pushes ahead and begins his dissection of Quality anyway.
Finally, he arrives at the Static/Dynamic split as the best first
division in his metaphysics. My reading of this division is that Static
Quality is Pirsig's nod to the scientists: We can identify, classify,
and measure Static Quality. Dynamic Quality is his nod to the mystics:
The true nature of reality remains beyond words.
In Chapter 9, Pirsig writes:
*****
Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the
source of all things, completely simple and always new.
*****
So after we lay down a division in Quality, we are to understand Dynamic
Quality (metaphorically) as the eternal fountain, as the source of all
"things". *It takes on the role that undefined Quality had prior to the
division.*
*****
Static quality ... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality.
*****
Static Quality then is an emergent property of the operation of Dynamic
Quality. It includes all that we can put a name to. Is it a totally
separate from Dynamic Quality? I would say both yes and no. To
understand this, we need to look at the problem from two levels.
At the level of the dialectic, of rational, scientific, understanding,
Static and Dynamic Quality are separate and distinct. Static Quality is
the patterns we identify and name as "things". Static Quality is in
time, nameable, divisible, etc. Dynamic Quality is none of those things.
Gotta be different then, right?
But at an ontological level, prior to analysis, pre-intellectually,
we've already admitted that there's a single source of all things:
Dynamic Quality. We're dealing with a monism. Only after we get to the
intellectual phase, after the direct experience, do we begin the
dialectic division that makes Quality appear as two.
This is the essential contradiction that must be held in mind.
Pre-intellectually, we've got a monism of Dynamic Quality. At the level
of intellectual analysis, we've got the pluralism of Static Quality,
elements for which we already have names and then this other name,
"Dynamic Quality". To what does "Dynamic Quality" refer at this second
level? I think that we use to point out that for which we don't yet have
a name. Perhaps I should reserve "Dynamic Quality" exclusively for that
new experience for which we have no Static understanding. But as soon as
we say something more specific about that new experience of Dynamic
Quality, doesn't it "become" an instance of Static Quality? We
'thingify' it and it's Static. But then to what is this "Dynamic
Quality" referring? Nothing. As soon as we try to explain our new
Dynamic insight, we start understanding it through these Static Forms
and there's no Dynamic Quality left. It's a placeholder.
That's why I said in my first post:
====
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.
====
The key word here is "phrase" ... we're dealing with words here, with
intellectual understanding. When we're using Dynamic Quality at the
level of the dialectic, then it's not really anything more than a
placeholder, a metaphysical zero, because you're going to come out with
all of these Static concepts to explain it. That's one level of
understanding Dynamic Quality. But Pirsig says that it's "the source of
all things", basically identifying it with his original "undefined
Quality". At this pre-intellectual, experiential level, Dynamic Quality
is the whole of reality.
In my posts, I've jumped between these two levels of explanation when
talking about Dynamic Quality and that's no doubt led to confusion. I
think Pirsig does this in *Lila* as well, though. Sometimes he refers to
Dynamic Quality as if it's something separate and apart from Static
Quality, other times, as the undefined Quality itself, the groundstuff
of Static Quality.
For example, look at the theory of cognitive development he presents in
Chapter 9:
*****
One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple
distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more
complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions
are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the
baby doesn't. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify
them as that. From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not
what, compels attention. This generalized "something," Whitehead's "dim
apprehension," is Dynamic Quality.
*****
So the baby experiences Dynamic Quality because it does not have the
concepts of light and warmth and hunger to analyze and understand
experience. But to the adults, are these not examples of Static Quality?
Yep, good old Static reality, light and warmth and hunger. That's
because the adult has the Static concepts through which s/he filters and
understands the input that Quality presents us.
Pirsig gives several other examples where the same "thing" is seen as
both Static and Dynamic Quality. Just the previous paragraph in Chapter
9:
*****
Why is it that if such a man suffers a heart attack and, taken off the
train at New Rochelle, regains consciousness and finds himself in a
strange place, he then comes to himself for the first time in years,
perhaps in his life, and begins to gaze at his own hand with a sense of
wonder and delight?
*****
This man's Static concepts have been obliterated by the trauma of the
heart attack and so he sees his hand not as "hand" but as something
beyond words, a direct primal experience, unmediated by intellectual
understanding. He experiences Dynamic Quality. But we've already said
that he's just looking at his hand! What could be more Static than
that?!? So the same experience is both Static and Dynamic?
I think the apparent contradiction here stems from the two levels of
analysis I mentioned earlier. We're looking both at the primal reality
here: (1) Dynamic Quality in itself without words, and then (2) talking
about it using our Static words and concepts.
>And then in a later post you said:
>> That's why I argued that Dynamic Quality is just a placeholder. I've
>> come to think of it as a metaphysical "zero" to remind us that these
>> static ideas we have about reality are incomplete. This is necessary
>> because we do *so well* naming parts of experience that we forget that
>> there's more to reality than what we think. In the words of Alfred
>> Korzybski, "The map is not the territory."
>
>But there are lots of example in LILA of the direct experience of
>dynamic quality. Listening to a song on the radio, the conviction that
>makes you campaign for change in society, feeling good in a storm. These
>don't sound like anything that could be described as a metaphysical
>zero.
Right. But they could be described in the other science of Dynamic
Quality
as the direct, unmediated experience of reality. That's the Dynamic
Quality
Pirsig was talking about here--the undefined Quality. But then if we
started to list all the things that made this experience Dynamic, we'd
be
naming a whole bunch of Static stuff. So then what does Dynamic Quality
refer to in that context? I think it's a placeholder. Again, two
different
levels collapsed into one word.
>> What does that witticism mean? I understand it like this: We have this
>> thing called Reality that we know through Experience. In our attempt to
>> understand Reality, we analyze and synthesize the data of Experience
>> into intellectual explanations which identify Static Quality. The funny
>> thing is we can come up with an infinite number of explanations of this
>> Static Quality, an infinite number of maps using different coordinate
>> systems, that help us navigate Reality. So the Static Quality itself is
>> something beyond our ideas of it. The map is not the territory.
>>
>> What is that "something else"? Dynamic Quality. But it's not really
>> something else, or else we'd have a Static name and explanation for it
>> already. Since each pattern of Static Quality, each thing, is really
>> beyond our limited understanding of it (see my bit on every experience
>> being nonrational in my last post), then each "thing" is really Dynamic
>> Quality.
>
>Again here it sounds like you are trying to say that Dynamic Quality is
>the correct picture of the world, even though we can never explain it.
>But it isn't. DQ is no more the real objective reality than static is.
Objective? Who, me? Nope. :-) Dynamic Quality *is* the world, not a
picture
of it, much less a correct picture of it. What I mean by "each 'thing'
is
really Dynamic Quality" is what Pirsig was getting at with the baby: We
can
identify the stimuli affecting the baby as Static Quality, but the baby
doesn't know any of that ... it experiences it as pure Dynamic Quality.
And
if we go back before our intellectual deductions, like the man with the
heart attack, we would, too, because *that's all there is*. This stuff
we
call Static Quality is really Dynamic Quality to which we've given
names.
So this is where my head starts to hurt, how about yours? I think what
I've
done is to latch onto and emphasize the idea of Dynamic Quality as the
"Conceptually Unkown" that Pirsig presented in "Subjects, Objects, Data,
Values". I'll leave this point now before my head explodes and move on
to
something slightly different ...
>> I don't know that this necessarily implies that Dynamic Quality is
>> "better" than Static Quality. I agree with much of Sojourner's reply on
>> this matter. I think that our *sense* of "betterness" comes from our
>> Experience of Dynamic Quality (Reality). Since we have no previously
>> existing understanding (Static understanding of Quality) of this
>> betterness, we can only identify it as Dynamic Quality. Just as easily,
>> however, I think we could experience undefined "worseness" that's just
>> as much an experience of Dynamic Quality as undefined "betterness". (See
>> the canonical hot stove example in *Lila* on this situation.
>
>Well Pirsig says Dynamic quality is experienced as a sense of
>betterness. He says it is the highest moral value of all. It's what the
>Indians call "manito": manifestations of skill, fortune, belssing, luck
>or any wondrous occurence. And as for the hot stove example, the 'dim
>perception of you know not what' *gets you off* the stove, it's not the
>experience of sitting on it. From the position of sitting on a hot
>stove, getting off is definitely better!
True, true, getting off is better. But if "worseness" exists (and in the
hot stove example, if getting off the stove is better, then staying on
the stove must be worse, right?), where does it exist? Our choices are:
Static Quality, Dynamic Quality. If it's Static Quality, then anything
new and Dynamic is always better. Maybe that's the case. I don't know.
But then why is Static Quality necessary? Pirsig says it's to latch the
advances made by Dynamic Quality to prevent degeneration (end of Chapter
9, Chapter11). What would lead to degeneration if everything new and
Dynamic isn't always better?
>I'm also muddled and I'm sorry if I've misinterpreted you again and that
>I've ignored large chunks of what you've said, but I feel I have to
>respond somehow to keep the conversation moving. If I wait until I'm
>sure of what I'm saying it could be months not just a week between
>posts.
Don't feel that way at all. This post went directly to the heart of what
I had to say concerning naming and Dynamic/Static split and made me
evaluate it even more. I'm afraid I haven't succeeded in communicating
myself well enough so that this perspective can be criticized the way
I'd like to see it done. Thanks for the opportunity to explain it
further, though.
Cheers,
Keith
______________________________________________________________________
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