ELEPHANT TO MARCO AND ALL:
>>> MARCO WROTE: I think I'm stating that the static entities are unreal... as
>>> well as dynamic entities are unreal... all entities are simultaneously
>>> dynamic and static.
>>>
>>> ELEPHANT: I don't think that this is possible - but whether it is or not
>>> really depends on what you understand 'dynamic' as meaning, and what it
>>> means to say that static/dynamic is a primary cut in reality. But the point
>>> about evolution seems to cut nearer this bone so I'll hold fire till then.
>>>
>>
>> "Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power". (Lila,
>> ch 9)
>>
>> "Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive" (Lila, ch 9)
>>
>> "Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in
>> which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order,
>> preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without
>> the other". (Lila, ch 9)
>>
>> "What the dynamic force had to invent in order to move up the molecular level
>> and stay there was a carbon molecule that would preserve its limited dynamic
>> freedom from inorganic laws and at the same time resist deterioration back to
>> simple compounds of carbon again. A study of nature shows the dynamic force
>> was not able to do this but got around the problem by inventing two
>> molecules: a static molecule able to resist abrasion, heat, chemical attack
>> and the like; and a dynamic one, able to preserve the subatomic indeterminacy
>> at a molecular level and "try everything" in the ways of chemical
>> combination" (Lila ch 11)
>>
>> "The division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a dynamic function
>> and a static function continues on up through higher level of evolutions"
>> (Lila ch 11)
>>
>> "The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The increase
>> in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static quality. Without
>> Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism
>> cannot last. Both are needed." (Lila ch 11)
>>
>> "That's the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously.
>> If you don't have the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon
>> you're back with the cave man. But if you don't have the freedom to change
>> those patterns you're blocked from any further growth."
>>
>>
>> Well, It seems that Pirsig clearly states that it is possible (more, it is
>> THE WHOLE THING!) to be static and dynamic simultaneously. That is, in an
>> harmonic way. In my opinion, dynamic means versatile; able to evolve as
>> containing possibilities and differences. Of course, the amount of staticity
>> and dynamism in entities is variable: but a pure staticity is a limit, just
>> like a pure dynamism.
>>
ELEPHANT: Sorry to state this baldly, but I think you seriously misread
every last one of the above passages if you think that they show Pirsig
arguing that it is possible to *be* both static and dynamic at once. He
thinks that it is possible for us to *obtain* and *pursue* and *have* both
DQ and SQ symultaneously, but that is not the same thing as anything *being*
both dynamic and static symultaneously. This is a purely logical point, but
it is of the upmost importance and value, because it is the distinction
between static entities and dynamic quality. It's a point I often repeat
and will continue to.
>>> MARCO: I'm not an expert of physics, but, for what I know of it, I think
>>> it's not very different from the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. It's
>>> impossible to know both the dynamic and the static nature of reality. The
>>> more you investigate the static nature of reality, the more you lose its
>>> dynamic nature. And vice versa. Intellect, like the observer of the quantum
>>> physics, is involved in reality, and contributes to its nature. Talking
>>> about reality modifies reality.
>>>
>>> ELEPHANT: Still not sure I'm understanding. As a natural phenomenon,
>>> language is changed by our discussion of it: sure. But were not just
>>> talking about language as a natural phenomenon, atleast I'm not. I'm
>>> talking about the *essence* of language, supposing there to be one
>>> (something Wittgenstein denies). I think there are esential facts about
>>> what language does, if it is to count as a language, that no description of
>>> it as a natural phenomenon could ever overwrite. Such as that language is
>>> our way of accessing (inventing) static entitites in a dynamic world.
>>>
> MARCO: Let me try to explain. In a broader sense, IMO the *essence* of
> language is that it's the tool we use to share concepts. I'm just saying that
> it's hard to state that these concepts are completely static, in a world
> completely dynamic. As said, IMO a pure staticity is a limit. Actually, these
> concepts we create will be shared (that is, they will interact dynamically in
> the public opinion) and probably everyone will understand what I say in a
> different way. This will cause the necessity of further investigations, new
> concepts, again and again.
>
> But the problem is not strictly in language. IMO it's firstly in the concepts.
> The more you want to formulate undeniable concepts [that is, the more you
> formulate a *truth*], the more you are talking of the static nature of your
> observations. At the contrary, the more you try to talk of the (mystic?)
> dynamic aspects of your experience, the more you will necessarily formulate a
> disputable concept. The first one is the case of science, but, more than
> science, of fundamentalism. The latter is the case of art, that is IMO
> (remember?) another language. As Platt writes in his essay on the forum "Art
> is man's effort to present me [the NOW] in a form that allows you to see and
> feel my true nature more fully".
>
> The purpose of art is not truth, rather it's beauty. Truth and Beauty are both
> types of Good. Yes... Truth and Beauty are two kinds of intellectual Good....
> I'd say that an absolute Truth is an absolutely static intellectual pattern of
> value.... while an absolute (ecstatic) Beauty is the absolute dissolution of
> every static intellectual concept.
>
ELEPHANT: I do not agree that truth and beauty can be distinguished in
exactly the way you suggest, but that is by the by. My real problem with
the above is that it does nothing to illuminate my original uncertainty
about what you mean to do with the thought that language is part of the
natural world (and I see you have snipped some material that might have
helped us remember what provoked my remarks above). As a final point,
diesel oil can be appreciated as the absolute disolution of every static
intellectual concept, if you approach it with the right frame of mind. Does
that make it beautiful? Or are you confusing the beautiful and the sublime?
Compare Kant. Compare Sartre on the viscous. What is the important
difference between Helen Blaxendale and diesel oil?
>>
>>> ELEPHANT WROTE: Evolving entities are ones that change over time. But
>>> change is antithetical to the dynamic, because the dynamic is just that
>>> which does not have a static identity for long enough for there to be any
>>> 'that' which changes. Therefore if evolving entities change, this must be
>>> because they count as static at any given time, and a static series of
>>> static identities looked at over time. Just as there is a static concept
>>> that is meant by 'seagull' right now, even though we know that seagulls are
>>> evolving.
>>>
>>> MARCO: Here I don't understand. It seems we are using the term "dynamic" for
>>> diverse concepts. IMO evolution is a dynamic process. My static nature is
>>> in opposition to evolution....
>>>
>>>> Static does not mean fixed. Static means stable. The concept of seagull has
>>>> a stable nature and a dynamic nature simultaneously. I think the concept of
>>>> seagull changes, not diversely from the biologic seagull. The evolution of
>>>> scientific beliefs is a fact. If you say that evolution is a series of
>>>> static *snapshots* I could agree (at least I'd say it's a good
>>>> intellectual trick), but every snapshot (every single seagull, or every
>>>> single concept of seagull) interacts dynamically with Quality, so it is
>>>> static and dynamic simultaneously.
>>>>
>>> ELEPHANT: OK, I think we've come to the heart of it. My point is that there
>>> really isn't anything to evolution beyond this 'good intellectal trick' you
>>> speak of. Your idea is that there are intellectual tricks, and then there
>>> are real particular realities out there. Well no, there aren't.
>>>
> MARCO: More... I say that even intellectual tricks are out there!
>
ELEPHANT: Neat quip. Doesn't really address the point. Even if
intellectual tricks are 'out there' (which is a claim I don't for a minute
accept or even really think intelligable), this does nothing to address my
point that as an intellectual trick formed in the attempt to get something
graspable out of the fluid situation, any object (including the evolutionary
history of seagulls) is static, not dynamic. Have you anything to say about
that?
> ELEPHANT: There is intellectual trickery, and then there is Dynamic Quality -
> that's my understanding of the static/dynamic split.
>
> MARCO: So you have a dualism. All static patterns are intellectual, all
> dynamic Quality is there outside. Mind and Matter. Sorry, I don't buy this
> sort of things.....
>
ELEPHANT: You won't even inspect the goods. I offer you a pear and you say
"sorry, I don't want apples". The mere mention of mind and matter is not an
argument, it is a way of continuing to see apples when I hold up a pear for
inspection. Do please open your eyes (and forgive my exasperation)! Apples
are not the only fruit, and mind/matter is not the only dualism.
> ELEPHANT: You now say 'static does not mean fixed, it means stable', and my
> response to this is to ask: what exactly is the difference between 'stable'
> and 'fixed' in this context?
>
> MARCO: Well, stability is a property... the tendency to defend a given
> configuration of values from every possible modification.
>
> ELEPHANT: Sure, I never said that the nature of seaguls is something fixed
> for all eternity, but, for all that it is fixed *now*: if it wasn't something
> fixed that we can refer to now it wouldn't be a 'nature'. To know the natural
> state of something is to know it as static.
>
> MARCO: What is fixed *now* in the nature of seagulls is their staticity. But
> as we well know that they will evolve, clearly there's a range of dynamic
> possibilities. Unpredictable. Partly inherent their nature (a seagull will not
> evolve into a starship), partly inherent their biologic environment. Those
> possibilities depend on the variations the seagulls will allow to their
> *fixed* nature.
>
ELEPHANT: Ok, well here, with the seagul's possibilities, we're into
questions about necessary and contingent properties that have interested
Leibniz and Kripke et all. The line I'd take resemble's Leibniz's more than
Kripke's, and more than I've time to discuss. But it's also the Sartrean
point that, in the case of a Seagull, like the case of a pen-knife and
unlike the case of consciousness, essence precedes existence. 'Seagull' is
a conceptual tool for interpreting the world. Like a penknife, a seagull
is a functional, practical reality. Just as a pen knife is a way of acting
in the world and also a set of instructions for creating pen-knifes, so a
seagull is really nothing more than the accumulated instructions (literary,
folk and scientific) for recognising and than dealling with this thing we
call a seagull, and the danger to bald heads stately facades and newly
laundered washing that it represents. So there's an essence of seagull that
is a functional reality, and as a conception held in a mans head, a static
entity in a net of language. That's the essence. Then along flies a birdy
thing fitting the description. Wallop: existence. Essence precedes
existence.
That said, it seems that if a white bird came from the sea and started to
carefully clean laundry and bury all the rubbish it can find neatly in the
selected tip, covering it with an appropriate layer of soil, and singing
sweetly of its pleasure in service, we'd be in a quandry as to whether to
call this a seagull or not. We'd face a choice. This bird doesn't seem to
fit the essence of seaguls, but that gives us the live option of either
giving it some new name ('sea angel?'), or amending the essence of 'seagul'
to include this newly evolved bird, outwardly the same, but altered in the
soul. Which might we choose? Well it doesn't really matter, and one
solution or the other will eventually gain currency and get adopted by the
poets and dictionaries. But what this shows is that it is not clear whether
we should say that as phenomena alter dynamically the static essences change
or evolve. We might just as well say that the seagul always stayed the
same, but that one day there came no more seaguls from the sea, and that sea
angels came instead, and that these sea angels have been with us unchanging
ever since.
I've been saying that the choice here is one we might make arbitrarily or
for a wide range of reasons external to the birds themselves, and this
supports the point that, so far as our current conception of seagul is
concerned, all the qualities are fixed. The possibility that we might use
the word 'seagul' to describe sea-angels is not really a result of some
contingent property in the seagul, but rather of a contingency in the way we
happen to use language. If we called the sea angels 'seagulls' it would be
the language which would have changed as a result of a practical choice, not
as some contingent property of a dynamically evolving bird. So: essence
precedes existence, and all essence is essential to that preceeding essence.
Therefore, the idea of a range of dynamic possibilities attaching to the
fixed essence 'seagull' is really false. There is dynamism, and there us
possibilty, but the dynamism operates beyond language, and the possibility
is the possibility of the change of language in response to that dynamic
continuum, not the possibilty of dynamic change in an existent object: viz,
a seagul.
>>> MARCO WROTE: Any reality/language division is a door opened to the
>>> subject/object division. [you make a big snip here marco, if I remember]
>>> Well, I could be wrong, but I see an analogy. I (subject) use a language to
>>> define reality (object). If I consider my language as a separated entity
>>> from its target, IMO I'm trying to be objective.
>>>
>>> ELEPHANT: O.K. That makes me think. Two points. (1) It cannot be a subject
>>> ('I') for which language is a tool, since subject and object are grammatical
>>> (that is to say linguistic) concepts,
>>>
> MARCO: I did not say that the language/reality division IS the subject/object
> division. It is a first step in that direction...
>
ELEPHANT: I dispute that about what you said, but you cut the evidence. In
any case I don't see what you mean by 'step in the direction...' if you
don't think that this is what it amounts to. Otherwise 'step in the
direction' sounds like a careful and considered warning, and a polite
deprication, without saying anything much at all. *How* is it a 'step in
the direction'?
> MARCO: However I don't know how many people consider their "self" merely a
> grammatical concept.
>
ELEPHANT: 'Merely'? What do you mean 'merely'? To be a grammatical concept
is to be about the most vortex like gripping and attachment inducing kind of
concept there is. "Merely a grammatical concept" - what does that mean? Do
you know some more important kinds of concept or what?
> ELEPHANT (Continuing from (1) above): (2) This does not exclude talking of
> language as a tool of consciousness (consciousness is not a subject), (3) Your
> argument here identifies language with it's existence for us as a natural
> phenomena, rather than with it's existence for us as the way we arrive at the
> conception of a natural phenomenon.
>
> MARCO: I think I'm considering both. While we try to arrive at the conception,
> we produce a natural phenomenon. However, I've never denied that the value of
> language is that it can be used in order to investigate reality.
>
ELEPHANT: Hm. That wasn't what you were accused of doing. What I was
worried about was your thought that language is *just* a natural phenomenon.
You can use natural phenomenon (such as eyes for instance) to investigate
reality - sure. But what I'm interested in is language's role in getting
that reality set up as a world of objects in the first place. The 'I'm
using my eyes to look at .... so as to investigate reality' comes after the
'...' has been born in language, not before. That means language comes
before all natural phenomenon, and that its appearance as a natural
phenomenon is really a kind of illusion, like the idea that you can catch
yourself seeing by looking in the mirror.
>
>>> ELEPHANT WROTE: I think when Pirsig is talking about the static he talking
>>> about the discrete and conceptualised (the linguistic) and that talking
>>> about the dynamic he is talking about the continuous and preconceptual (the
>>> prelinguistic).
>>>
>>> MARCO: Pirsig: << [In Lila] The quality that was referred to in Zen and the
>>> Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be subdivided into Dynamic Quality and
>>> static quality. Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and
>>> on forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of
>>> this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories, customs
>>> and patterns of nature.>> (SODaV paper).
>>>
>>> ELEPHANT: I cannot deny that the quote seems to back up the idea of the
>>> Dynamic as simply this series of quality events, but I would point to the
>>> numerous passages where the idea of Dynamic Quality is expressly contrasted
>>> with this idea of a series of distinct *events*: in the reference to
>>> Northrop's aesthetic *continuum* in ZAMM, in the discussion of the mystic
>>> objection to metaphysics in LILA, and indeed at frequent intervals
>>> throughout both of Pirsigs books and in the paper on Quantum Mechanics and
>>> so on. *IMO* it would be a big mistake to take this passage as meaning that
>>> the dynamism in Dynamic Quality simply consists in the rapid fire succession
>>> of changing events. It cannot be denied that the idea of being composed of
>>> a series of distinct events is contradictory to the idea of being a
>>> continuum.
>>>
>>> I think that if we want to avoid saying that Pirsig is contradicting himself
>>> (which I do) then we need to find some way of interpreting the above passage
>>> which does not give it the meaning you give it.
>>>
>>> What Pirsig is saying here, in my veiw of the matter, is that the Dynamic
>>> *looks like* a series of quality events, as soon as we try to picture it.
>>> But the reference to a 'stream' in preference to 'series' in the quoted
>>> passage rather gives the game away, in the dual connotations it has, both
>>> for James's 'stream of consciousness' and for the watery 'flux' of
>>> Heraclitus and Plato. One way to look at the question is to ask whether
>>> Pirsig thinks that quality essentially comes in quanta. I think the answer
>>> to this has to be 'no': for otherwise it is hard to see what the
>>> dynamic/static distinction adds. If Dynamic quality comes in quanta, then
>>> dynamic quality is just static quality. Here endeth the whole Metaphysics
>>> of Quality, consigned to the file marked 'gibberish'. But I don't think
>>> Pirsig is talking gibberish. It makes perfect sense to distinguish the
>>> dynamic from the static, and this distinction is not one of degree or a
>>> question of how long a quality event hangs around, but a categorical
>>> distinction: the primary cut from which all else follows. Your idea of what
>>> 'Dynamic' means, Marco, would seem to make objective time measurement prior
>>> to the distinction between dynamic and static, and practice the whole SOM
>>> apparatus of objectivising the world. For there is no doubt: Unlike Dynamic
>>> Quality, the quality event is an object. An 'event' is just that we give
>>> the name 'event' to. A quality event must be *specified*, it's limits and
>>> relations *described*: it has thus a linguistic existence, unlike the truly
>>> dynamic Quality, which preceeds and exceeds all language.
>>>
>>>
> MARCO: Actually this is you, not me:
>
>> "Sure, I never said that the nature of seaguls is something fixed for all
>> eternity, but, for all that it is fixed *now*: if it wasn't something fixed
>> that we can refer to now it wouldn't be a 'nature'. To know the natural
>> state of something is to know it as static".
>>
ELEPHANT: I'm accused of self-contradiction, but I don't have the first idea
about how I'm supposed to have contradicted myself here. Please explain how
I can be accused of what I lay at your door, namely (I repeat):
"Your idea of what 'Dynamic' means, Marco, would seem to make objective time
measurement prior to the distinction between dynamic and static, and
practice the whole SOM apparatus of objectivising the world. For there is
no doubt: Unlike Dynamic Quality, the quality event is an object. An
'event' is just that we give the name 'event' to. A quality event must be
*specified*, it's limits and relations *described*: it has thus a linguistic
existence, unlike the truly dynamic Quality, which preceeds and exceeds all
language."
Being fixed now is a kind of definition of a quality event, and this means
that a quality event is an Object of a kind (a kind unlike the SOM objects
which are separated from value). In giving this definition of a a quality
event, Marco, I do nothing to compromise the Dynamism of Dynamic Quality,
because the kind of quality that quality events have is static quality:
that's what makes them an 'event' rather than a 'continuum' (should I insert
an exclamation mark?). So, that's what I've been saying all along - no
contradiction here.
In contrast you, Marco, in defining the dynamic quality attributable to a
seagull in terms of it's evolution and thus in terms of a series of static
essences to which we give the name 'seagul', you have been defining dynamic
quality as a series of quality events. Indeed on occasion you have said as
much (but again you seem to have snipped that bit). If you define dynamic
quality in such a fashion, you can expect (a) that there will be no proper
categorical distinction between dynamic and static quality but only a
difference of duration and degree, such that an unspecifiably large enough
set of static quality events somehow consitutes evidence of dynamic quality,
(b) that this difference of degree will be measured out in temporal
categories which thus will be made the first cut of reality in preference to
DQ/SQ, and (c) that I will point out to you how unpirsigian this picture is.
>
>
>> MARCO: You are talking of FIXED NOW... and I answered it could be an
>> intellectual trick (that is exactly like your "look like")! My mistake is
>> that I forgot you consider "static" as "intellectual".
>>
>> However, I offered the quotation with a completely different purpose. It was
>> to answer to your (IMO mistaken) concept that static means intellectual,
>> while dynamic is what's outside. Here Pirsig says that patterns of nature are
>> static. Not because they are intellectual constructs: they are static as
>> every*thing* is static.... with dynamic possibilities. But not DQ: DQ is not
>> a series of static events. I hope it is clear that when I say that entities
>> are simultaneously static and dynamic, I'm not meaning that DQ is inherent
>> those entities. In these your last lines you write:
ELEPHANT:
>>> *IMO* it would be a big mistake to take this passage as meaning that the
>>> dynamism in Dynamic Quality simply consists in the rapid fire succession of
>>> changing events.
MARCO:
>> Dynamism of Dynamic Quality?????? DQ is DQ and stop. No property. Dynamism
>> is in static entities the property to allow the power of DQ to come in!
ELEPHANT:
You call that addressing my point???????? DQ is Dynamic and stop. No
property even got mentioned. Dynamism is how well I can allow the power of
this kind of argument to come in!
Sorry 'bout the parody. We'll get back to your remark on the dynamism of
the dynamic, but I want to STOP! and note that you have dismissed me without
dealling with what seems to be my only way of understanding of your
argument. You say:
"I hope it is clear that when I say that entities are simultaneously static
and dynamic, I'm not meaning that DQ is inherent those entities."
Is it clear? Hell no. How can you possibly think that a horse is grey if
the greyness isn't "inherent in" the horse? How can you possibly think that
I'm english if englishness isn't "inherent in" me? Suppose the horse was
painted, and I was just angling for US citezenship, why then a *temporary*
greyness and a *temporary* englishness would "inhere in" the horse and
myself respectively. Likewise if an entity is supposed to be both dynamic
and static, this can *only* be because both DQ and SQ "inhere in" that
object, and this, I state again, is a contradiction in terms.
It is not that the *static entity* is dynamic, but that the *portion of the
aesthetic continuum* over which the linguistic net is statically laid is
dynamic. But the static entity isn't that portion of the continuum: it's
just the net. There's all the difference in the world between this
situation and the claim that entities can be both static and dynamic, which
I, for one, cannot begin to make sense of.
Getting back to the line about Dynamic Quality being Dynamic: well, what
else could it be for dog's sake? Of course DQ isn't a property, I never
said that it was (although I have argued that it is nearest to being a
property of all the things that grammar will allow it to be). But the way
we happen to point at this DQ that isn't a property or anything else
grammatical just so happens to have to use grammar (how could it not), and
the way we do this trick is to think of value, and to think of a complete
lack of discrete data, and to remind ourselves always to take both into the
account. The language is a finger pointing at the moon and we have to drop
the finger and look at the moon. It makes absolutely no sense to rush up to
someone pointing at the moon and say "ha! that's just a finger!". Likewise,
it makes little sense to attack me for saying that DQ is dynamic. Of course
it is. Enough!
As you will gather, I am now more than a little puzzled as to what exactly
it is that you are saying, and what of my account of Pirsig you want to
alter, and why. It seemed plain to me that you were saying that the the
dynamic is the static because dynamic quality is the changes in static
entities, such that a series of static quality events displays dynamic
quality (the evolution of the seagull). You now deny this. So what are you
saying (apart from disagreeing with me?)
Elephant in China (prologue to: The revenge of the tapes)
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