Re: MD Quality privileged

From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jan 11 2003 - 20:28:03 GMT

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    Scott:

    > [Platt:]> Binary language is secondary to pure experience which creates
    > reality. > The "creative force" is better thought of as Dynamic Quality in
    > the MoQ.
    >
    > Here we disagree, but I haven't given my reasons for my position as yet
    > (actually, I did once, in a long post that got lost). Roughly, as I mention
    > in my post to Matt, I consider that it is better to think of all experience
    > is word-like, rather than thing-like or process-like.

    Along the same line, I think of experience as Quality-like which is both
    a process (DQ) and a thing (SQ).

    > I come to this from
    > two sources, one is Barfield, who points out that in pre-intellectual
    > societies (in the state he calls "original participation") that which we
    > consider just "out there" was experienced as being in some sense alive, to
    > have a spirit "behind" it, and that the "it" (the sense-perceptible) was
    > the expression of that spirit. This is to say that we are now in a stage
    > intermediate between that stage and that of "final participation", wherein
    > (I'm sort of guessing) we can recover that expressivity with full
    > intellect.

    Perhaps the MoQ has recovered that "expressivity." Quality can be
    considered "spirit like" and all patterns in the MoQ levels are in some
    sense "aware" i.e., "alive."

    > The linguistic turn is the claim made by a bunch of people like
    > Wittgenstein, and including Benjamin Whorf, whom Pirsig speaks approvingly
    > of, if I remember right, that what we know and how we act is largely
    > structured (how much is controversial) by our language. Analytic philosophy
    > is that which accepts this, and so turned to studying how we use words.
    > Post-modernism takes it further, by denying that there is anything to know
    > "outside the text" (an exaggeration, perhaps, but I'm only trying to stay
    > in the ballpark), while the analytic philosophers, by and large, still
    > believed in an independent, objective, reality towhich our verbiage can
    > asymptotically approach.
     
    Thanks for explaining what is meant by "linguistic turn." In plain English
    it would be expressed as "emphasize language."

    >>Again, contexts are derivative, a step down for the the Quality of
    pure, prime experience.

    > Again, I disagree. Without a context, there is nothing. Pure experience
    > does not exist. DQ cannot be separated from SQ. Nirvana is samsara. God
    > cannot not create.
     
    DQ and SQ come into existence with the "first cut'' required to do philosophy
    or create a vocabulary. Prior to that, Quality=the emptiness of pure
    experience. Recall Pirsig's observation that nothing is something.

    > > >There is no truth
    > > > outside of a language game because everything is a play/player in a
    > > > language game (not restricted to human players). "In the beginning was
    > > > the Logos" turns out to be a simple metaphysical fact.
    > >
    > > Two more absolute truths are asserted.
    >
    > As I said long ago, and as Kevin has recently remarked similarly, because
    > there is no way to verify or deny a metaphysical statement by "checking out
    > the facts", then any metaphysical statement that I make should be
    > considered to be prefaced by some phrase like "I invite you to think
    > that...". They are not "statements of truth", absolute or not. They are
    > proposals for a restructuring of one's vocabulary.

    Seems you are saying, "I invite you to think it is true that . . ." thus
    invoking a universal, foundational acceptance of truth as a guiding
    concept. In any case, "vocabulary" is invoked so frequently by followers
    of Rorty (among others) that it begins to take on the status of an
    absolute all by itself. :-).

    Platt

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