On Jan 18, 2012, at 3:12 PM, david buchanan wrote:

>
> David Harding said to Marsha:
> ...I still think that you are inadvertently destroying DQ by trying to include 'change' as part of your definition of static quality.  Yes, the concept of change is static quality, just along with everything else. But static quality itself is more static than change. Hence the name.
>
> dmb says:
> Right. Marsha uses oxymoronic phrases like "ever-changing static patterns". I tried to explain the obvious several times. If static patterns were ever-changing, I tried to tell her, we couldn't rightly call them "static" or "patterned". Thus Marsha's idea is simply contradictory nonsense, like "liquid ice" or "rigid flux". It is not clear to everyone that static and dynamic are approximately opposite terms? This is the first and foremost distinction that Pirsig makes in constructing the MOQ. Is it possible to understand the MOQ pretty well and still get this part wrong? It seems very unlikely to me, if not impossible.
>
> Marsha replied to D.Harding:
> OMG, here you go again, "more static than change"?  Change 'more' or 'less' relative to what?  And what does naming mean to you?  What does a name represent?  Are you like dmb who equates patterns with dictionary definitions?   Hahahahaha.
>
> dmb says:
> If something changes, then the change is simply in relation to its former state. Watch the rain turn to snow, watch the child grow and see how the old idea gets replaced, or whatever. These sorts of relations have nothing to do with "relativism". And don't blame it my relatives, either. (Poor uncle George would have stroke.)
> Also, it's not quite right to way I equate patterns with definitions. Definitions are just one example of static patterns. Metaphysics has to be full of concepts and definitions or there isn't any metaphysics, as Pirsig tells us:
>
> RMP:  "The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.   Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity."
>
>
> dmb resumes:
> See, this quote comes fairly early in LILA and Quality with a capital "Q", as it was in ZAMM, is just about to get reformulated as "Dynamic Quality" and in fact the focus of LILA is static quality.
>
>
> RMP:
> "With the identification of static and Dynamic Quality as the fundamental division of the world, Phaedrus felt that some kind of goal had been reached. This first division of the Metaphysics of Quality now covered the spectrum of experience from primitive mysticism to quantum mechanics. ...In the past Phaedrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since that which does not change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos."
>
>
> "Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. 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."
>
>
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