Platt, Rich, Roger, Walter and Y'all:
"THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST" Rod Stewart
>From LILA PAGE 107 "Sooner or later he was going to have to come up
with a way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and
objects...Even by using the tern "Quality" he had already violated the
nothingness of mystic reality." Robert Pirsig
I think we all agree that the DQ/sQ split is the primary division of the
MOQ.
Roger has laid out his definitions of DQ and sQ and now I can see that
we have different ideas about this most basic starting point. If we can'
t agree on the meaning of the first "split", then we're bound to be
confused from that point onward. It might seem too elementary to bother
with, but I think we have some major differences of opinion at the
starting gate.
ROGER SPELLED IT OUT SUCCINCTLY.
1) DQ is everyday Direct Experience, by which we mean pre-subject and
pre-object and pre-conceptual.
2) sQ is subjectified and objectified patterns. These are conceptual
models that are our best representations of pre-conceptual experience.
DAVID B REPLIES
1) DQ is Direct Experience, I agree, but by adding the word "everyday"
you've completely changed the meaning. Pirsig never described as
"everyday" direct experience. That's why the hurricane, the heart attack
and the new song can open us up to DQ, becasue they are uncommon,
unusual and not "everyday" kinds of experiences. Pirsig describes what
he thinks is happening in such "dynamic" circumstances on PAGE 374,
where he says,
"The value of shock treatment (according to the MOQ) is that it destroys
all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient
temporarily in a Dynamic state."
And please notice that it isn't hurricanes, hearth attacks of electro
shock therapy that is itself Dynamic, it is that this extra-ordinary
events can leave us "temorarily in a Dynamic state."
PAGE 373 "The MOQ identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic
Quality...The mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of DQ."
See? Direct experience of DQ, the mystical experience, is free of
static patterns. You know, be a dead man and all that.
2) Your understanding of static patterns as "conceptual models" is only
partially true. Inorganic, biological and social static patterns of
value are not conceptual models. They are levels of reality that are
quite distinct from the intellectal level, which certainly has
conceptual models of all these levels. This error is the main source of
the quasi-Solipsistic postion you've taken on these matters. Static
patterns aren't just concepts, they are the world.
PAGE 149 "...static patterns of value are divided into four systems:
inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social paterns and intellectual
patterns. They are exhaustive. That's all there are. If you construct an
encyclopedia of four topics - Inorganic, Biological, Social and
Intellectual - nothing is left out. No "things" that is. Only Dynamic
Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent."
Here Pirsig is saying that there is nothing in the entire universe that
can't be put into one of these categories. Every "thing" belongs to one
or more of the levels. Static patterns are memories of real experience,
like the difference between "live" music and memorex audio tape. Instead
static patterns of value are the "subjects" and "objects" we've always
known, they are just reimagined to solve all kinds of SOM problems.
Static patterns of value at the intellecual level certainly include
conceptual models, like the MOQ itself or any other philosophy, but that
is only one fourth of the world.
PAGE 155 "The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting
links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded.
Two terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not
originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which
originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And,
as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by
social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns
and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is
no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic
physicist, Niels Bohr said, "We are suspended in language." Our
intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived."
So we are not only suspended in language, but that language is suspended
in biology and that biology is supended in the inorganic nature. This is
precisely what I mean when I say the intellect is MEDIATED through all
the previous levels. And the trouble with SOM is that it fails to see
the levels between mind and matter. In the MOQ Descatres would have to
say "The French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am."
Renee may be able to form conceptual models of his culture, his body and
the matter that makes up his body, but all those levels evolved and
existed before the intellectual level came along to conceptualize them.
Just like Lila herself, the froggy philosopher is "a cohesion of
changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn't any more to her
than that. The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she
holds are the end product of three and a half billion years of the
history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary
patterns of value. She doesn't know how they all got there any nore than
any jungle knows how it got there." (From PAGE 138)
1) DQ is the mystical reality, the source of all creation, the
undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, and direct immediate experience.
DQ is creator.
2) Static patterns of value are the the world we can know and define.
They are differentiated facets or aspects of quality that can be
indirectly percieved through our heavily mediated intellect. SQ is that
which has been created.
David B.
P.S. Ken, I thought I heard a news story about new evidence that
indicates that life began about one billion years earlier that
perviously believed. But that was the same day the teaching of evolution
was banned in Kansas state schools, so the story got lost. Can you say
irony? I thought you could.
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:09 BST