Greetings,
Kev,
You misread me in a number of ways.
1)I can assure you that my position is not confused. Wrong perhaps, but not confused.
2)You accuse me of making the same error that you make, namely the equation of 'truth' with 'good.'
I do not do this and put it to you that if you seek the 'truth' you will not find it in the MoQ,
which is, in fact, a search for 'the good'
3) (and most important) You still insist upon reducing the intellectual level to mere reason. This
is not what is meant by the intellectual level otherwise we would have to create a love level an
anger level etc etc as these emotions clearly do not fit under the umbrella of reason. The mystical
emotion is similar. If you want to subdivide the intellectual level into emotion and reason then
feel free, but it is a subdivision and nothing more.
4) This misses the point:
"Simply because a mystic uses logical argumentation doesn't mean he or she values logic as higher
than mysticism. Otherwise, since I assume you eat food Struan, I would have just gotten you to also
admit that the biological level trumphs the intellectual level."
I don't use food to show how intelligent I am. You do use reason to show how mystical you are. I
don't give food to people in order to make a logical point. You attempt to use logic to make a
mystical point. By doing so you implicitly admit the higher status of reason.
5) Your last paragraph (in addition to committing the 'reduction fallacy' set out in point 3) tells
me that I am "way off" for two reasons.
KEV:
"First, I would hesitate before making analogies about child development when no human knows that
much about the way a child thinks."
A child knows the way it thinks - but more seriously we do actually know a great deal about how a
child thinks.
KEV:
"I can think of a biological lifeform without a society yet using reason. I can think of an
non-living atom forming a community of atoms. I can think of a biological baby, without reason,
having greater unity with Dynamic Quality."
a) give me an example because I don't think you can (in MoQ terms all levels are dependant upon
lower levels)
b) explain what you mean by 'non-living'
c) which is what I said!
I'm not going to disagree with you much on this point as I do think the hierarchy of the levels is
deeply suspect and so I do agree that the levels oversimplify.
I suggest that all you are doing is advocating the use of intuition as a means to dynamic quality.
Intuition is part of the intellectual level, indeed it is fundamental to the intellectual level for
without it intellect is nothing. Without intuition reason would never have evolved!! I would suggest
that reason becomes more developed up the evolutionary scale finding its peak in mankind. Intuition
(and, in man, its intellectualisation, mysticism) is common to most life forms. This being the case
the answer is clearly reason. But this is a moot point anyway since both are aspects of the
intellectual level.
Struan
------------------------------------------
Struan Hellier
< mailto:struan@shellier.freeserve.co.uk>
"All our best activities involve desires which are disciplined and
purified in the process."
(Iris Murdoch)
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