Dear Platt,
>Thanks for the thanks.
You are gracious. I thought after, I could have done a much better
job of thanking you. - because sincerely, I'd be very interested to
read your whole set of principles if you would re-post or direct me
to them on the site. (and I'd meant to ask you)
>The best he could do was to say that "Quality" could not be defined. In
>other words, whatever it is, it is beyond intellect's ability to describe it.
>Before it, we are struck dumb, speechless. Love is like that. So is
>beauty. In fact, experience itself -- the taste of chocolate, the smell of
>rose, the sight of an airplane crashing into a building -- is beyond the
>power of intellect to reproduce other than in symbolic form, a pale
>substitute. That's why Pirsig makes no distinction between direct
>experience and Quality. Both are indescribable. . . . So I wouldn't
>blame Pirsig too much for not
>naming it anything other than Quality.
Hmmm. . . . it's not that i was 'blaming' him, but I felt he
'stopped short' (and that it was a challenge to pursue). But frankly,
the more I read, the more I see similar challenges offered up by
other thinkers, although Pirsig's framework made his appeal somewhat
more conversational. I felt he presented an absence - and begging for
an answer.
>Those who have never
>experienced love cannot know what love is, no matter how many books
by Erich Fromm they read.
I gotta smile at that Platt! (if you read one - might as well be 'the
Art of Loving')(but it's the only one of his I've read)
But yes. You're suggesting an angle I hadn't thought much about. Plus
today's reading of Diane Ackerman took me there too - People who are
'unable' to love. (although the examples she uses have been 'stunted'
either biologically (as in brain damage) or socially, from an
otherwise assumed 'human' propensity to love. This section has been
sadly bleak reading. But she does pose an interesting notion :
"if the ability to love ... can be so destroyed, then it has a
physical reality..." (she's using it as a segue to her next chapter
on neurophysiology)
I don't know if I'm satisfied that "love" is an entirely 'physical'
reality, - but I'm prepared to accept it as a 'reality' of some sort.
. . .etching pathways. . .
>. . . the New Testament which is not
>philosophy, of course, but revelation.
and some, notably the geneology, possibly recording of ancient verbal
tradition?
>Maybe this is the place to develop
>such a philosophy.
Oh Yes! Please! The Philosophy of Love!
I've been chirping around it - I think that's what Pirsig would have
us explore.
>The first step is to define the term. That in itself
>could take many weeks before agreement is reached.
Indeed! - that in itself would be the whole exercise, wouldn't it?
Isn't that the absolute toughest copy-writing assignment? to take the
huge stack of ramble-thinking-reading and consolidate it into a
'headline'?
. . . it IS huge I figure . . .
(and agreement need not be required!)
>But it sure would
>be fun.
Oh golly - I think so!
much love,
Tanya
. . . I have some reading to do. But I did hug my mom tonight, and
even in my imperfection, she hugged me back.
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