Hi Platt, Scott, Bo, John and all,
In 1799 at "Rosetta" [Rashid] Egypt a stone stella was found that contained
three passages carved on that stone. The passages were in Egyptian
Hieroglyphics, a later style of Egyptian writing called Demotic and Greek.
It was only in 1821 that J. F. Champollion was able to unlock the
relationships between the three languages and thus able to translate
Egyptian Hieroglyphics, which were prior to his work indecipherable to the
modern western culture. I feel like Champollion. Platt's post of Friday
August 23 on this thread is my Rosetta stone. Using it I hope to articulate
in a way that can be understood by you all, hence to explain and make clear
what I have been babbling on about.
Platt pointed out Pirsig's restaurant metaphor: "Metaphysics is not reality.
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they
give you a thirty thousand page menu and no food." [Lila, chapter 5, pg.63
in the Bantam 1991 trade paper back edition]. I have been fascinated with
the menu and not the food. Why bother with the menu, you may well ask. The
importance of the menu lies in the fact that there are so many different
menus! Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Russian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist,
Scientific Materialism, Roman Catholic Christianity, Mormonism, etc. Each
human culture has written its own menu. Human's have written hundred's of
theological and philosophic menus. People have been killed because they did
not believe in the majority culture's menu! Hitler's Holocaust, Russia's
pogrom's, Roman Catholics Inquisition and it's Crusades, Islamic Jihads,
Stalin's purges, McCarthy's spawned Red Scare, etc, all of these are
examples of some group imposing its menu on the fate of disbelievers.
Menu's are very important. People's life and liberties are at stake.
So, why are there so many menus? This is another way to phrase the question
that is behind my writings. I believe that if we could uncover how and why
we come to believe in the menus that we do, this knowledge can used as a
tool and a weapon. A way to free us from the destructive use of those
menus. It can be used as a means to destroy the certainty that gives rise
to the fanatical use of those menus. I hope that I can eliminate the
belief in the certainty of an individual menu. Out of this newly forced
uncertainty upon the True Believer their will result in humility and
tolerance.
A fool's errand? A misguided perception? Perhaps. A biographical aside:
When I came upon the play "The Man of Lamancha" by Dale Wasserman, Joe
Darion and Mitch Leigh, it was a relgious moment. Don Quixote became one of
my patron saints hence forth. In that play are these lines spoken by
Cervantes: "I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle...or
die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at
the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died
despairing. No glory, no gallant last words, only their eyes filled with
confussion, whimpering the question: "Why?" I do not think they asked why
they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To
surrender dreams--this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only
trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as
it is and not as it should be!" I have taken up Quixote's sword and have
become a dreamer, a fellow knight errant of LaMancha.
That is my quest. To be able to find and make a meta-metaphysics that will
explain how a person comes to acquire knowledge, belief and value. To make
such a system that is understandable to any and all cultures is an enormous
task. To big for any one person. So, to start on that task I want to make
a system that can handle the Western world views. I do not know enough to
tackle non-Western cultures and beliefs. Though in principle the system
should be able to be applied to non-Western cultures.
Those my positing so long ago in one of my essay's that the Universe was
fundamentally ''matter/energy". It seemed an important starting point for a
Western perspective. I was trying to describe a meta-menu and not to
describe the food. Trying to build a means to explain in Western world view
terms how menu's were made and how and why we come to believe in their
certainty.
Okay, I have not directly responded to anyone's prior posts. But I think
that this post will have made my position more understandable and hence
brought some clarity.
All these long series of posts and the challenges raised against what I have
been writing about have helped me to see clearly what I have been doing and
what I need to do. I think in the end I will be still be re-shuffling
Pirsig's MOQ map. Not because I disagree with how it describes the food but
because it feel [based upon my sense of Quality] that it doesn't describe
the process of how those menus came into being! I am not sure at this
moment what will be the outcome.
Bo raised a point in some prior post complaining about how so many of us,
after reading some author come back and try to re-work Pirsig based on that
author's ideas. I believe it has something to do with the fact that we are
map makers and map users. We perhaps have a Will to Meaning, similar to
Nietzsche's concept of a Will to Power. Meaning is another synonym for
Quality. Which is how and why I came to Pirsig. Our Will towards Quality
drives us on to figure things out. To make sense of things in accordance
with our menus/our beliefs. The pull and push of the Dynamic and the Static
within us motivates us to Dynamically seek out the new and Statically take
that in an use it. So long as we are open to the Dynamic we will keep on
seeking out new life and new civilizations, to keep boldly going where we
have not been before.
Amongst my many "personality disorders", I am a Star Trek fan,
Gary
----- Original Message -----
From: Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2002 5:03 AM
Subject: Re: MD Consciousness
> Hi Gary:
>
> > What you have articulated is exactly what I have
> > been trying to say. I thought it was what I had been
> > saying ever since I got on this web site. I have
> > obviously been using the wrong key phrases because so
> > many people have misconstrued what I intended. I
> > agree 100% with what you wrote.
> >
> > I have been, to use Pirsig's restaurant metaphor,
> > writing about the menu. My focus was on how people
> > perceive reality and not on how the "food" actually
> > is, not on the primary experience. When I say that
> > there is a physical reality I was trying to affirm the
> > existence of an independent reality that is beyond or
> > before human language. Which is of course Quality.
> > You refer to it as primary experience, to
> > differentiate it from all our words which is secondary
> > experience.
>
> Glad we're "on the same page" as the saying goes. Welcome to the
> real world not of subjects/objects, mind/matter, mental/material,
> spiritual/substance but of right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse, gain/loss.
> As an entrepreneur, that last category should be especially meaningful
> to you. Now, if we can get the bureaucrats out of our way and the
> freeloaders off our backs . . . (-:
>
> Platt
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