Re: MD Migration towards Dynamic Quality

[Wim Nusselder]

Dear Matt,   Yesterday afternoon I seemed to be falling ill. My static patterns all seemed to be migrating in the wrong direction. Or would mr. no-man-Oakeshott hold that it is the right direction...?   Biological and social patterns no longer conspiring to keep me from intellectual and dynamic pursuits, I'm afraid I'm gonna chill your heart by several degrees.   That was an easy win you granted me! "Real-man-Oakeshott might have succumbed to [my argument]" you wrote 6/6 18:45 -0500 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg04942.html). I only accepted a challenge to persuade mr. real-man-Oakeshott. I am not really interested in air-tightening MOQ against mr. no-man-Oakeshott or any other logical intellectual robot of your devising that holds conceivable but -according to me- for flesh-and-blood-people untenable opinions. (I would also appreciate arguing with 21 year old Matt P. Kundert studying for teacher at some Wisconsin academic facility rather than with a "Technicolor Dream Coat".) THAT really would be "a game that cannot be won" (your words 2/6 11:31:03 -0700 in [EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg04907.html) and I'm not sure that it is "a game we must all like to play, else we wouldn't read the posts or even take any part in moq.org". According to me not "all arguments are at the intellectual level" (6/6 18:45 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg04942.html), or at least not completely. I am sometimes tempted to drag opponents-in-argument over the counter by the social patterns they cling to (like I did with mr. Oakeshott). Totalitarian regimes even drag their subjects by their biological patterns: "agree or we torture you to death". In higher quality argument one can appeal to opponents' experiences of Dynamic Quality, as I try implicitly in the first paragraph of this e-mail. "Metaphysics is the 'meta-level'" indeed (6/6 18:45 -0500) and therefore it is immoral (in a MOQ-sense) to restrict it to the intellectual level with the rules of scientific debate. In the absence of higher static levels than intellect, we can't do completely without intellect when communicating about metaphysics, but we can and must appeal to each others' experiences of Dynamic Quality to produce a pattern on the meta-level, a pattern that can qualify as "metaphysics". And ... only flesh-and-blood opponents experience Dynamic Quality. And flesh-and-blood opponents all have an identity, which implies that they experience some static patterns as the greatest things ever (only future crystallizing of Dynamic Quality being able to produce better things. Subjecting a MOQ to the rules we subject intellectual patterns to is like the famous Baron von Münchhausen pulling himself from the swamp by his own hair: a MOQ is the rules we subject intellectual patterns to. I'd rather not see a MOQ as a static pattern of value therefore. Unless we find static latches on a higher-than-intellectual level, it must remain dynamic. A MOQ which is only a static intellectual pattern is a hoax. You can't take an intellectual pattern serious which refuses to define its central concept, can you? That makes the whole rest of it unfalsifyable; you can say anything with the word "quality" in without anybody being able to contradict you, because nobody can always say that "quality" is really something else than they took it for. And an intellectual pattern that alternatively describes DQ as "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality", the goal of migrating patterns and the background of all static patterns (last one from Pirsig's SODV-paper, www.moq.org/forum/emmpaper.html p.13) is outright ridiculous from a narrow intellectual point of view.   The game still tempts me though: how would mr. no-man-Oakeshott (alias Matt P. Kundert) counter the argument that "saying that the Victorian patterns aren't any better than .. Elizabethan patterns" amounts to Victorian patterns being indistinguishable from Elizabethan ones to him? "Not better [or worse] ... just different" is only possible in SOM and no-man-Oakeshott is not supposed to refute MOQ and return to SOM, but only to turn MOQ on its head. To turn MOQ on its head he would have to hold Elizabethan patterns to be better than Victorian ones, actively seek to burn his buttocks on Pirsig's hot stove and then expose himself to the sun on a rock until he is reduced to simple chemical compounds like Pirsig's chemistry professor.   I am not gonna follow your suggestion to keep God out of metaphysics either. The main competitor of a MOQ on the meta-level is not SOM but religion. Being a former scientist, Pirsig failed to see that. (Although "former" ...? Does an addict to Ratio ever escape feeling the attraction of the game?) Metaphysicists are a minuscule group of people compared to religious professionals and the same is true of their followers (scientists versus religious people). Religion (with its Latin root re-ligare, to reconnect) can be defined as the essentially human pursuit of re-experiencing DQ. Some of it crystallizes in social and intellectual patterns of course, and those with a vested interest in the output of former prophets will deny the possibility of new DQ. Religion as a whole however has a good claim to being the field of human activity that is most open to incorporating DQ when it turns up. As such it has a longer standing than science, and -after Kuhn showed the interdependence of science and social patterns- it is in my opinion in no way inferior. Religion needs a God-concept to communicate about religious experience. (Buddhists tried to do without, but their Boddhisatva's quack suspiciously like God-ducks.) For me too DQ quacks like a God-duck. In fact I happen to be a Quaker (member of the Religious Society of Friends) and most of my fellow-Quakers would immediately recognize "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality", "the goal of everything" and "the background of everything" as metaphores for God when I would use these in meeting for worship. But I concede Quakers are an odd bunch. The only dogma we have is that we don't have any dogma, the nearest thing to it begin "there is something of God in every person" (with every Quaker being free to rephrase it to his/her own liking; my favourite is: everyone can directly experience God). You can of course substitute "DQ" for "God" without any Quaker taking offence. Some try to avoid the word "God" anyway.   With friendly greetings hoping your heart and/or ego didn't catch a cold by now,   Wim Nusselder