From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 07:22:01 GMT
Dear Patrick,
I don't want to be a spoilsport, so I'll provide you all with a quote for
round four, but I don't know if I will be able to participate much myself.
(I still have postings from two weeks ago to answer.) It is a quote that
more or less founds my understanding of 'patterns of values'.
I'll try to answer your question 'What ARE we to do then? I don't know, do
you?' in due course in a separate thread. (It was your reply to my 'Just
retaliating, going to war, "ending a regime" won't do. We must be aware
of our own "clinging to static patterns", too and strive to dynamise our
reactions.' You agreed that 'that's in one sentence what we ought to do',
but added 'only it remains abstract, not concrete'.)
From 'Lila' chapter 9:
'Phaedrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a
baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the
child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective
science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly.
When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot
can be explained about that baby's growth that is not well explained
otherwise.
One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple
distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more
complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are
pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby
doesn't. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify them as
that. From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels
attention. This generalized "something," White-head's "dim apprehension," is
Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a
rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder
and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the
previous examples.
If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that
he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic
Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations
between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations.
But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to
really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of
sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach
for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex
pattern of static values derived from primary experience.
Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and
found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at
jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were
a single jump. This is similar to the way one drives a car. The first time
there is a very slow trial-and-error process of seeing what causes what. But
in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn't even think about it.
The same is true of objects. One uses these complex patterns the same way
one shifts a car, without thinking about them. Only when the shift doesn't
work or an "object" turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become
aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of subjects and objects
as primary. We can't remember that period of our lives when they were
anything else.
In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable
things. Elementary static distinctions, between such entities as "before"
and "after" and between "like" and "unlike" grow into enormously complex
patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as
the mythos, the culture in which we live.'
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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