From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 21:56:22 BST
Matt:
I hesitate to associate DQ with awareness because I'm not sure what you'd be
aware of. I don't think there is an ineffable thing out there waiting for
us to be aware of. I think that is a left over from SOM. However, I do
think that our unconscious is a huge set of static patterns, along with our
conscious selves. The problem of becoming static in behavior I think is a
matter of staying self-conscious, conscious of your own behavior and its
repeated patterns. But, again, I'm not sure why we should call this Dynamic
Quality. I reserve that moniker for good breaks in static patterns, not in
simply awareness (of course, I say "simply" because I don't think there is
anything "out there" to be aware of, so I've already deflated, evaded, and
begged the mystic answer).
David M: this is what interests me. DQ is associated with awareness of SQ,
sounds a bit SOM, but the point is
also that DQ creates SQ. And how does awareness work? Well awareness kicks
in when patterns break down.
Being and Time: a man is hammering a nail, in SQ bliss, then the hammer
breaks and he is suddenly in a puzzled
DQ situation, Heidegger puts it better -sort of. There is no out there just
Being/Language/Man all stuck with each other.
Although, if you squeeze language out as far as possible (meditation) you
get more Being/Man or even just Being
than in everyday experience. The ineffable is not out there, its under your
nose, close to a zero distance (that's
one of mine), how else do you imagine that human beings can particip[ate in
something like DQ, DQ is clearly
a broader concept than Man, hence the cosmos is. Also amazing that being an
individual human being seems to
be the most dynamic sort of being ever existing. Able to respond to
individual circumstances -the most finite of
all creatures, aware even of the great negative of DQ, i.e. death (this is
why death is so important to Heidegger it tells
us what being a human being is all about -super contact with DQ). And how
does SQ emerge from DQ?
DQ has choices, it is not determined, is in infinite? Is it transcendent?
What is SQ? It repeats. It has given up
choice. It is finite (particle). It is being where before there was only
Becoming (openness/possibility/field-wave).
SQ is DQ in a state of bondage (this is one of mine). Is SQ a sort of
sacrifice? God made flesh? An act of
love? Hello theology. Goodbye...
David Morey
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: MD The Not-So-Simpleminds at play
> David,
>
> Yeah, I don't think Sartre's psychology was as good as Freud's. Sartre
gave a heavy critique of the Freudian unconscious, but I think it misses the
point we should take out of Freud. Sartre didn't think we should treat our
unconscious as other individual people, on a social model. But Freud meant
it as an analogy (at least that's the way we should take him), not as a
scientific excavation of the way things really are. People like Dennett and
Rorty pick up his point and say that we can make anything we want have
"narrative gravity". This narrative gravity is what it means to be human,
it means we can tell little stories about the way something is and what it
does, with whatever it is as the protagonist. Giving rocks narrative
gravity has been considered bad by the scientific community for a long time
because it was considered anthropomorphic. Dennett and Rorty and Freud
reverse this trend. They say sometimes it is easier for us to cope with
things if we give it narrat
> ive gravity, if we anthropomorphize it. (Take my example of slavery from
another recent post. We didn't used to consider black people human, so it
made it easy to enslave them and treat them like animals. But when people
began to anthropomorphize them, began to think that they had the same
feelings and thoughts as we did, it because easier to include them in our
moral ranks, to expand the word "human" to include blacks.)
>
> I'm not sure if Pirsig would agree so much with this point. Part of
Dennett and Rorty's point is that nothing naturally has narrative gravity.
They de-center narrative gravity as the sole possession of humans and say
that it can be applied to anything. Well, I'm not completely sure Pirsig
follows this de-centering move. At times it would appear that Pirsig thinks
that humans are the only thing that can be Dynamic. On the other hand, part
of the move from "things" to "static patterns" is a de-centering action: our
designations of "things" are ad hoc distinctions between static patterns.
The universe can easily be seen as one big static pattern, completely
seamless. But that wouldn't help us cope, so we put seams in, like
differentiating tigers from the landscape.
>
> So, I'm not completely sure about Pirsig, but I think the spirit of
Quality is that our designations of "things" be they rocks, tigers, or
individuals are ad hoc and that DQ can arise from any of them. I think to
say otherwise would be to say that evolution has halted outside of humanity,
and for humanity, its only cultural evolution that is continuing. I don't
think Pirsig wants to say this, and I'm not so sure he means this. This is,
however, what Sartre can be seen to be saying with his radical freedom, that
an individual is the only locus for DQ. On this count, I think we could
give a Sartrean or Freudian reading of Pirsig. I think the Freudian reading
is better, so we should think of DQ as being able to arise in any direction
from any particular static pattern (whatever we ad hocly call a "particular
static pattern"). This means that with Freud's picture of the unconscious,
we can see our personality as seamless or as conflicting, whatever suits our
purpose. In t
> he case of Dynamic Quality arising, I think it can be seen as arising out
of some of our static patterns and not out of others.
>
> This actually goes along with my "Allegory of Pirsig" post. If we take
Pirsig as our example and use my allegory as a starting point, we can see
two parts of Pirsig's psyche in dialogue with each other (ignore the third,
the author, Pirsig for the moment). Phaedrus can be seen as the part of
Pirsig's personality where Dynamic Quality arose out of and the narrator as
that conflicting part that disagrees with Phaedrus (how much disagreement
there really is is a separate, though probably more interesting, textual
question). The movement from ZMM to Lila is the defeat of the narrator's
half of Pirsig's personality. It means that the Dynamic Quality that arose
in Phaedrus' half defeated the degenerate static patterns of the narrator
half, and the Phaedrus of Lila is the collection of static patterns post-DQ,
post Quality insight.
>
> (Ya' know, that's what I mean about play. What I did right there was
playing around with Pirsig's text. I was at play and it was a lot of fun
for me because I had never thought about it like that.)
>
> At any rate, in my original allegory there were three Pirsigs: two
impulses and one judge. This is how Freud analgoized the mind, but Rorty I
think rightly gets rid of this image. In the place of there being a locus
of judgement (which re-centers the ego, the self), Rorty (and I would argue
Pirsig) places competing patterns of judgement. The patterns, which we can
analogize and differentiate as different people, each have their own pattern
of judgement. So, Phaedrus would choose one thing and the narrator another.
This is why we can anthropomorphize the patterns of judgement so well. If
we can differentiate competing patterns, it is easy to see them as
internally coherent, and an internally coherent set of beliefs and desires
is what an ego is. In terms of my allegory, the author-Pirsig, as separate
from the narrator-Pirsig and Phaedrus-Pirsig, is simply the future Pirsig
who has already almost been completely won over by the Phaedrus patterns and
the author-Pirsig do
> esn't so much sit in judgement over the two of them, as he does write the
history of their struggle. As I've been saying, the winner writes the
history, the winner gets to tell you who was good and bad, who was right and
who was wrong. I say "almost completely won over" because I think ZMM was
another step for the Phaedrus patterns to gain dominance, like rehearsing an
argument continues to ingrain it.
>
> So, returing to your thoughts on Sartre, I think we shouldn't associate
the lesson from Freud as "the unconscious can exhibit purpose is that human
beings do appear to have multiple identities, some of which are not in
contact with the articulating self" because that re-centers the self, which
I think we should shy away from. Better to say "just different selves" as
your disjunct ends.
>
> I hesitate to associate DQ with awareness because I'm not sure what you'd
be aware of. I don't think there is an ineffable thing out there waiting
for us to be aware of. I think that is a left over from SOM. However, I do
think that our unconscious is a huge set of static patterns, along with our
conscious selves. The problem of becoming static in behavior I think is a
matter of staying self-conscious, conscious of your own behavior and its
repeated patterns. But, again, I'm not sure why we should call this Dynamic
Quality. I reserve that moniker for good breaks in static patterns, not in
simply awareness (of course, I say "simply" because I don't think there is
anything "out there" to be aware of, so I've already deflated, evaded, and
begged the mystic answer).
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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