From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Sep 13 2004 - 01:33:57 BST
Arlo, Platt and all:
Arlo said:
...Language allows us to build, and statically latch ideas. Thus, language
both constrains and affords possibility. ...So, DQ on the pre-semiotic or
pre-intellectual awareness level "points" us toward certain possibilities.
But our intellectualization of that, our orientation and response occurs
through the social semiotic, and so is both constrained (limited) and given
affordances to representation and action.
dmb says:
I'd like to expand on this, especially the idea that DQ "'points' us toward
certain possibilities. There is a tendency among postmoderns to get extreme
and insist ALL meaning is socially constructed and that contruction process
is more or less arbitrary. Its a kind of nihilism that prevents us from
saying Quakers are no better or worse than NAZIs except as a matter of
taste. But the idea that constructs within the culture's intersubjective
space are, in some sense, bound or constrained by DQ is a very important
antidote to this nihilism. There are other constraints too, but this one
strikes me as essential in the MOQ, where everything is quality. Here's Ken
Wilber on the topic. If you substitute Quality where he uses "currents of
the Kosmos" and "the Tao", you can see that he's putting the same breaks on
this nihilistic brand of postmodernism...
"Everything is 'socially constructed' - this is the mantra of the extremist
wing of postmodenism. They think that different cultural worldviews are
entirely arbitrary, anchored in nothing but power or prejudice or some 'ism'
or other - sexism, racism, speciesism... Worldviews just aren't that
arbitrary; they are actually CONSTRAINED by the currents of the Kosmos, and
those currents LIMIT how much a culture can arbitrarily 'construct". We
won't find a consensus worldview, for example, where men give birth or
apples fall upward. ...A diamond will cut glass no matter what words we use
for 'diamond', 'cut', and 'glass', and no matter what culture we find them
in. It is not necessary to go overboard and deny the pre-existence of the
sensorimotor world altogether! And that sensorimotor world - the cosmos and
the bios constrains the worldviews 'from below', so to speak. ...So in these
and many other ways, the real currents in the Kosmos constrain worldviews
and prevent them from being merely collective hallucinations."
"It's not that there is a map on the one hand and the territory on the other
- that's the nasty Cartesian dualism - but rather that the map is itself a
performance of the territory it is trying to map. This don-dualistic
approach doesn't deny the representational paradigm altogether; but it does
say that at a much deeper level, thought itself CANNOT deviate from the
currents of the Kosmos, because thought is a product and a performance of
those very currents. And the task of philosophy, as it were, is not simply
to clarify the maps and CORRECT their deviations from reality, but to
ELUCIDATE these deeper currents from which thought couln't deviate even if
it wanted to! In simpler terms? In Zen there is a saying, 'That which one
can deviate from is not the true Tao'. In other words, in some ways our
knowledge is indeed a matter of correcting our inaccurate maps; but also,
and at a much deeper level, there is a Tao, a Way, a Current of the Kosmos,
from which we have not, and could never, deviate. And part of our job is to
find this deeper Current, this Tao, and express it, elucidate it, celebrate
it."
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