Sweet Spot:

Dynamic/Static coherence in

The Metaphysics of Quality.

By Squonk

June 2003

Introduction.

This essay wishes to explore the Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). Motivation arose after discovering an idiom used in Tennis: Commenting for the BBC during Wimbledon 2000, John MacEnroe stated players must use the sweet spot of their racquet otherwise balls could end up anywhere in the stadium.

Research made me suspect that the relationship an excellent Tennis player maintains with the racquet is similar to that maintained by a Zen master archer with the bow. I began to experience associations with Robert Pirsig’s insight into Quality in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (ZMM): The sweet spot appears to indicate that moment when subject and object are in a particularly high Quality relationship.

However, the MoQ says that subjects and objects are not the best way of describing experience. The MoQ replaces subjects and objects with Static patterns of Quality emerging from a stream of Quality events called Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is similar to Northrop’s Aesthetic continuum, and the ‘It’ of Eugen Herrigal’s Zen in the Art of Archery.

Over the next three years I found more examples of sweet spots using Internet search engines and discovered they all described high Quality relationships. I considered the examples and thought about them using the MoQ. It began to occur to me that the relationships were special states between Dynamic Quality (DQ) and Static Quality (SQ). I also began to see from the details of the examples themselves that harmony between DQ and SQ was precisely what the term sweet spot was attempting to convey.

These considerations lead me to the realisation that the harmonic relationship between DQ and SQ is essential to understanding the MoQ. The more I thought about it the better it looked. The more I applied it the more it explained. This had been there all along but had not sufficiently impressed itself upon me. If I found thinking about sweet spots helpful, perhaps others would find them helpful too?

Intuitively, I felt the MoQ would describe the sweet spot as an event displaying coherence or coalescing of patterns within and across value levels.

Although all patterns of Quality emerge from DQ, I felt old patterns share a relationship with DQ also. If this is the case, then there exists the potential for the relationship between SQ and DQ to vary between extremes of Dynamic disruption and Static latching. Somewhere in between may be found a sweet spot - a relationship that is exceptionally rare. Here, at the sweet spot, I intuitively felt patterns became less differentiated while at the same time retaining their structure. The aesthetic is one of beauty.

If the MoQ as DQ/SQ relationship is being thought about appropriately here, it seems clear there is a counterpart to the emergence of patterns from DQ – there is also a returning towards DQ. The return is towards the sweet spot. Therefore sweet spots are an appropriate way to explore the MoQ through concrete examples found in everyday life. I shall use the examples I found to hopefully illustrate this.

Additional questions explored in this essay will be:

Is the MoQ an intellectual sweet spot?

Do sweet spots provide evidence for non-anthropic Quality?

Is enlightenment a sweet spot?