From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Oct 25 2002 - 20:50:51 BST
Hi Peter,
> Yes, that's wonderful. I had been playing around with substituting other
> synonyms also.
>
> 'Art is the electric soil in which DQ lives, thinks and invents.'
>
> I love music, and i think the Beethoven quote may have popped into my
> 'mind' when it did because i feel, as you point to yourself in your post,
> that relationships between those highlighted
> entities/categories/particulars, whether quarks today or DNA tomorrow,
> individual people next week, is where DQ strikes? As for beauty as fifth
> level? Interesting. Although, i tend to think along the lines of beauty
> being a harmonious balance between static patterns - a kind of teetering on
> the edge of the Dynamic? I am sure quarks find being with other quarks in a
> harmonious relationship, (a Proton for example) beautiful? I am sure
> Protons find other sub atomic particles in a harmonious relationship to be
> beautiful - up and up in an evolving structure of potential for more DQ?
> There's something musical about that don't you find?
Indeed yes. In fact, the entire MoQ structure can be considered
metaphorically as a great, continuous ballet of harmonizing and
clashing forces, represented by painters such Turner, poets such as
Tennyson, composers such as Tchaikovsky and dozens of other great
artists. Of all the arts, music (ballet, symphony and opera) perhaps
capture the monumental aspect of the MoQ best, while jazz
improvisation represents DQ in action.
As for beauty, what attracts me to it, besides the fact that it makes me
value myself more when I'm actively pursuing it or in its presence, is
that it can be simultaneously static (as in the Sistine Chapel) and
dynamic (as in one's experience on first being in the Sistine Chapel).
One thing that keeps me from going whole hog in proposing beauty
(aesthetics) as an MoQ fifth level is the use to which it was put by
National Socialist Germany and Communist Russia in support of
unmitigated evil. Another thing casting doubt on beauty as a level by
itself is its appeal to mankind long before the rise of intellect, indicating
at the least that it had evolutionary influence early on and at the most
from the very beginning, as you provocatively suggest.
Be that as it may, the experience of DQ and the experience of beauty
are so close as to indistinguishable, transcending all our efforts to
rationally, historically or metaphysically categorize them. That's where
art comes in don't you think? Good art, to borrow your beautiful phrase,
"teeters on the edge of the Dynamic." Great art presents it.
Platt
P.S. I'm an amateur dabbler in watercolor painting. Are you an artist?
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