From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Mon Nov 11 2002 - 02:37:15 GMT
Matt,
From: "Matt the Enraged Endorphin" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
> The question we are led to is how to interpret "absolute." Its impossible
> to not identify with Quality because everything's Quality, so, in that
> sense, Quality's absolute. But that answer makes absolute Quality too
> innocuous and ubiquitous for it to do any real philosophical work for us,
> let alone practical work. The spin on absolute that would make it do work
> would be that "there is an absolute, ahistorically true conception of
> Quality."
There is another way for taking Quality as absolute that also allows for
work, but without falling back into the sorts of traps that you are trying
to avoid (like seeking a correspondence, or assuming essences). This is from
Masao Abe (Zen and Comparative Studies, p. 108):
"If emptiness, however, is simply distinguished from 'being/non-being', it
is not true emptiness because it stands against being/non-being and thus
turns into something merely called 'emptiness'. To be true emptiness,
emptiness should not attach itself and must empty itself. Only when
emptiness empties itself and takes forms of being and non-being freely can
it be called true emptiness.
"Accordingly, 'emptiness' (sunyata), although expressed in terms of a noun,
should be understood in terms of a verb. In other words, true emptiness is
*pure activity of emptying* which empties everything including itself."
One would have to modify this to apply it to Quality, but the general idea
is the same. By postulating an absolute that *cannot* be conceptualized, one
gets oneself directed away from the nihilism that is the end point of a
materialist outlook, but at the same time one is constantly reminded that
there is work to be done, namely emptying oneself of attachments, in
particular to any lingering concepts one wants to associate with the
absolute.
- Scott
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