Hullo Matt,
I have been lurking here a few weeks while I completed an essay which seemed
to bring some closure to my issues with the MOQ, planning to move on without
responding to anything in the various strands of debate, when I read your
posts. I was so impressed with the clarity with which you expressed the
issue that you have since redefined in the quote that follows, that I have
felt challenged to respond.
"What/Who says that Dynamic Quality has the moral high ground over static
patterns of value? Argue and defend." [Matt]
"Who says" is the key to this conundrum. "Argue and defend" only deepens it.
Already these terms imply our use of language, a static latch in Pirsig's
terminology, and logic, an intellectual tool, to define value and the
dynamic, which Pirsig claims are undefinable. I have recently submitted an
essay (Understanding Quality) which hopefully will be published soon on the
MOQ Forum where I explore much of this at some depth, so I won't try to
repeat that here.
However I would say that language can be used to define, an intellectual
activity that has some obvious value in certain situations, but very little
in this one, or to create understanding, a "finger pointing to the moon"
thing, which depends ultimately on some commonality of shared experience if
communication is to occur.
So to explore the primacy of the dynamic, my appeal cannot be to arguments,
which are inherently static tools unfitted to 'defining' the dynamic. I can
only talk about my experience, hoping it meshes with yours to the extent
that we 'understand' each other.
I have been looking for a suitable illustration that will draw together a
number of subtle threads, and hopefully it can be found in looking at
childhood experience. Watching children at play is as near as we as adults
are likely to get to the immediacy of experience, since for most of us that
immediacy has been lost in our development into adult selves. Pirsig quotes
the story of the man who suffers a heart attack on the way to work who comes
to in a hospital bed and who re-experiences something of this immediacy as
he observes his hand with wonder and delight. But it has taken a near death
experience to re-awaken this childlike immediacy.
If you can observe children at play and not see the dynamic in operation,
then no verbal argument will convince you of its primacy.
In my essay I argue that quality (or value) co-emerges with life (viewed in
an evolutionary context). In other words, living things can be defined as
those things for which the environment has quality, or value. What happens
to living things matters, in that the environment can either help or harm
the organism. A stone weathering to soil has no value dimension. It is just
part of the ongoing change of natural systems. But bring in life and it
makes sense to talk of value. A stone has value to a hunter looking for a
weapon. Soil has value to a gardener.
I think much of Pirsig's metaphysics is (as he acknowledges) degenerate. His
attempt to define the indefinable is doomed, and causes much fruitless
bickering on this forum. But in his role as novelist, as a story teller, he
does manage to communicate his understanding of the role of quality in our
experience, and to that I respond.
My existential dilemma, as an adult who feels increasingly my enmeshment in
unsatisfying static modes of being, is how best to once again encounter the
wonder and delight of childlike immediacy, without losing those aspects of
adulthood which I value. Childhood for me was not a pleasant experience in
many ways. I have in the past argued against a mystic perspective as being
regressive in just this sense, that it was a rejection of the cerebral
aspects of humanity for the 'primitive' delights and terrors of the child
(or the animal). Having read Ken Wilber in recent months, I am re-examining
that assumption.
But reading Wilber, however stimulating, is not enough. All I do is find
another 'translation' (Wilber's term) for my intellect to seize on, when
what I am searching for is 'transformation'. And despite Krishnamurti, who
declares that transformation cannot be sought, it seems for most of us it
never occurs unless as an unexpected epiphany perhaps resulting from a near
death experience (such as John Wren-Lewis reports in his articles on the
internet), or, and this is the interesting bit, as an outcome of an
educational process that involves relearning how to access the immediacy of
here and now experience. This, according to the mystic, is only achieved by
a radical destructuring of the adult ego which I feel to be me.
Pirsig points in this direction from time to time, but loses the potential
for transformation by choosing to remain within an intellectual game of
definition and logic. It doesn't work.
So, to return to your question, I cannot argue or defend the primacy of the
dynamic, or quality, or value. Such a course is simply ill conceived.
However I can choose to reopen my education in a radical manner to regain
immediacy in my access to the dynamic. This is an existential choice, and
will prove costly in both predictable and unpredictable ways. The mystics
themselves disagree profoundly over what is involved. It may be a wild goose
chase. But what can be said is that it is a potential path to immediacy, to
quality, to the dynamic, and that ultimately none of these are found through
intellectual debate, however stimulating.
Regards,
John B
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